Posts Tagged: engagement

Published on October 22, 2010 by Scott Gould

Are You Using A Fishing Rod Or A Fishing Net?

This guy has fished the sun out of the ocean

Back in 2003 when we started running Feedback (a youth charity attached to my church), our first event wasn’t the sell out that I had hoped. Serving gourmet coffee, fresh donuts, jazz performances, and me retelling something I’ve heard on a Tony Robbins tape, it wasn’t exactly the definition of “youth”.

In fact, it was the definition of me.

But over the course of a year, we changed as a team and became far more in touch with what the youth needed, resulting in a packed event with 350 people exactly one year later.

Fishing With A Rod

I tell this story because to start it is exemplifies what it is to go fishing with a fishing rod. When we take a fishing rod approach, we can only catch one fish a time and intensely hunt for the single best fish that we can. A good fishing trip bears with it a good story of catching that fish – you know – the one that you hold in the photo and is the length of your body if not more.

The trouble with fishing with a rod is that it’s only ever one at a time, and I’ve found that when we do this, we seek to find what we want as a provider, not what other’s want as an end user. This isn’t always the case, but it tends to be so in my experience.

Fishing With A Net

The alternative, as became as a team after a year, is to fishers who fish with a net. When you take a net, you trall in everything and anything that you can catch, and then sift through it after. It is an undiscriminating way to go about fishing – you don’t pick and choose – you fish. We started to do this when we changed to having coffee to having a bunch of cold drinks and hot drinks. Before it was “you have to the kind of fish that likes gourmet coffee”, but after it was “if you want a drink, we’ve got one for you.” You see the difference?

Sifting through it after means once you’ve pulled up the net, you understand that not everything will stick. This is fundamental to a volume or value based approach – no matter what, people will opt out of certain levels of participation with you, and that’s fine – it’s just where they want to be.

Your Leading Thoughts

We value your inputs – both your experience and your insights. Talking about Fishing Rods and Fishing Nets,

  • Which are you using for your current project? Can you tell us about it and how you’re dong?
  • Neither Rods or Nets are right or wrong. They are just two approaches, the second of which I find is better for community. What is your opinion here?

Photo credit.

Published on October 15, 2010 by Scott Gould

Learning About Event Design From Church

We’re running the He Saved The Day Men’s Conference tonight. I wanted to share some of the thoughts behind how we’ve changed the format to make it more about learning and connecting:

A lot of this comes from what I’ve learned from Jeff Hurt and Dave Lutz at Velvet Chainsaw. It seems like common sense that an event should be about talking and learning rather than just listening, but it’s not that common because of the ego issue.

The reality is that most times speakers (in church and without) like to hear their own voices and get the promotion that comes with speaking more than they want people to learn. Or, they want people to learn but incorrectly think the key to is people listening to their wisdom, more than discuss with them. We discussed this in Let Attendees Be Participants, in which I also reference Edgar Dale’s Cone of Learning.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • How are you running events and using different formats to encourage participation? What works and what doesn’t?
  • Do you find it difficult to confront the norms when it comes to event format? I find it can be hard work as people have quite cemented expectations.
Published on October 5, 2010 by Scott Gould

Scott Gould and Friends: A Whole New World

I’ve been thinking for sometime now about how you make a blog more social. I’ve talked it through a lot with Robin Dickinson, and we think that whilst the “I write and you read” strategy works for well known names like Seth Godin, it does not have the value in richness, application or networking that we believe blogs can have.

On the other side of the ditch, you have community sites where it’s guest post after guest post, and there is a lack of an evolving narrative that guides people over the course of prolonged conversation.

Hence, welcome to what I trust is a middle ground: Scott Gould and Friends.

I’ve rebranded this blog of ours (it’s always been our blog) as Scott Gould and Friends. The name comes from the fact that whilst I write the posts, I do so from the comments that come from the friends who participate here, and thus my role is to guide the conversation that happens here. There’s also conversation that happens on a range of other places – your blogs – where you are the one who guides the conversation.

But to be sure, it’s about the friends.

Not followers, by the way. Friends sums up the fact that we are not only mutually connected with one another, but we’ve entered into friendship with each other, and that is a precious thing.

What Does This Mean?

  1. There’s a beautiful new redesign. It’s not done, but 80% of the way there – we’ll tweak as we go. The idea is to help people find the gold that there is on this blog of ours more easily, hence I’ve arranged things by category menus.
  2. You can introduce yourself on the Friends page – you’re an integral part of the blog!
  3. I’m looking for guest posts from you. You know the content here, and if you have written something that you’d like to contribute here rather than on your own blog (the same way I write posts for elsewhere as they’d fit better elsewhere), then please bring it forward. For the moment, we’ll arrange this through the Contact page.
  4. This is also part of the way I want to introduce a platform to empower people to use the gold that is on our blog.

But other than that, things won’t be too different – still deep and thoughtful pieces, still Sunday videos and ‘Leading Thoughts’ attached to every post – just with more emphasis on our community, because that for me is the real asset.

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. How does this idea sit with you? I haven’t run it by any of you, so now is the time to deliver feedback – ways to do this better, ways this will work well, design comments, etc.
  2. On a futurist note, how do you see the future of blogs with regards to participation? I’ve been trying some things on creating comment driven blog posts, and I’m still of the opinion that a strong sense of guidance is required to make sense of it all.
  3. Finally, how are you? It’s been a while since we spoke last :-)

Cheers,
Scott

Published on August 16, 2010 by Scott Gould

Old Spice: Put All The Kids In The Show, and…

… and all the parents come to see them perform.

Curtain CallIt’s a trick as old as time, and a trick that schools have been using for years. When it comes to getting people to attend the school play, there is no better way than making sure you give every kid a part – because then the whole family comes to watch them.

That’s what Old Spice did with their campaign last month. If you haven’t heard about, to save me writing all about it, you can read this post at ReadWriteWeb. The gist of it is that they created YouTube clips based on what people said on Twitter, in near-realtime fashion. You can see all the videos here. Below is one that they did to celebrity blogger Perez Hilton:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ive3vXv-XRk

According to the guys at We Are Social, the Old Spice videos were watched 11 million times in the space of 48 hours (plus other stats here). I don’t know how much product Old Spice have shipped as a result, but they got more views that Obama’s victory speech in the same span of time, and their PR and awareness goals have no doubt been met and exceeded.

Putting The Kids In The Show

So now everyone asks “How do we do it? What was its success?” John Bell wrote a very good post on the real time nature of the campaign, John Cass wrote on its transparent inauthenticity, and Molly Flatt on the power of brand anthropomorphism. They all agree however that this isn’t something that can be replicated successfully because this is a market that rewards uniqueness just once. A clone won’t get the attention this campaign did.

For me, the takeaway lesson must be in the power of putting all the kids in the show, doing it in a real time fashion that was unique, and targeted key influencers.

Putting the kds in the show is about socialising your content. Consider threadless.com, who are a community who design and rate t-shirts by the community. Each t-shirt is always bound to have at least one customer – the person who designed it. But as their community has grown, and the average level of participation has deepened, more and more of their content has been socially created and incentives of purchasing these items has increased. People buy the t-shirts and support the company because they are emotionally invested in it, because they have co-created it.

This is the same thing I did in 2003 when I started Feedback, a youth organisation that was run by youth, for the youth. When we started out, we found it really hard to fill up our venue. Putting up posters and handing out leaflets was time consuming and largely ineffective. I remember our first event had 35 people, and we slowly increased in numbers until we jumped to 89 in March 2004 when we got a popular band from our college to perform. We jumped then again to 250 when we had our Battle of the Bands later that year.

We quickly learned that the best way to market our event and fill our venue was put people in the show who had existing followings – the same thing that Old Spice did by targeting Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres, Lisa Barone, etc.

Skip to Like Minds in October last year, and it was the same tactic with those who we asked to partner with us on the event. By having local companies as partners, they brought in their clients to see them perform.

This is why Social Media is so powerful. You are invested in it, because you’ve co-created it. And because you are invested in, you bring people to see it and you can’t get away from it.

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. When you look at a group photo, which is the first face you look for?
  2. How have you socialised content to put kids in the show?
  3. Where have you seen this tactic NOT work?

Photo courtesy of Brave Heart

Published on August 11, 2010 by Scott Gould

Using A Community

I’m really enjoying Dan Blank’s blog at the moment. I first caught onto him through my close friend Andrew Davies at idio, and I’ve been following him for a while, but it seems these past few weeks I’ve really caught onto his writing a lot more.

Last week he wrote a post that I knew I’d love the moment I saw the title: “You Don’t Sell To A Community. You Support A Community“. You guys know I love a good strap line, especially when there’s aliteration. The great thing was that the post delivered.

It’s hard to pick a central quote (you can guess what the post was about), as it was one of those almost poetic pieces where each paragraph builds incrementally on the previous one, but perhaps the best part to me is this very accurate description of the latest marketing fad which is “build community”:

A brand should be careful about approaching social media as a sales funnel: to establish connections, build ‘trust,’ encourage a ‘community,’ and then market products and services to them. That’s not a community strategy, that is a marketing plan. And there is a difference.

This really rings home because recently I was having a leadership discussion in a venture that I’m involved in, and the painful point came up that whilst I was trying to explain we needed to build community in order to serve the community, the reality was that we were more interested in building the community in order to serve ourselves.

Turning it around is hard – we’re still in the process of doing it – and I’m learning some key lessons as I go.

Dan goes on to say that “building a community” for business is furthermore a hard and an expensive thing to do. It seems a stock answer at the moment to tell publishers in particular that they should “build community”, but I watch the people who say it and often they have never built one themselves. Dan actually argues that you don’t build them anyway – they already exist, and you help it grow.

My Experience with Community

I’ve nurtured many a community in the last 13 years that I’ve been ‘doing this’, but I think my most pertinent example would come from Like Minds.

I’ve said many times that my original intention for Like Minds was to show the local businesses that I was good at marketing, so that they’d hire me as a consultant. I was desperate to be accepted (many of the people who support me now didn’t back then), and I thought that if I could pull off a good event, they’d see.

After the success of the first Like Minds in October 09, a community – a tribe – was born in a day, but I still in mind saw that as a means to an end for getting work. Sure, I supported the community, but I didn’t see it as being a place that would be my main focus and income. I wasn’t selling to them – it’s important to clarify that – but I did see them as a way for me to secure more consulting.

It wasn’t until April this year that I realised how dearly I loved the community that was growing, and that if I focussed on serving that community, that would be far more fulfilling and rewarding. The irony is since I made that decision to not pursue consulting, consulting work has started to come in, and I turn a lot of it down in order to focus more fully on Like Minds because that’s where I’m seeing people really effected, which has always been my aim in the beginning anyway.

When a community really clicks (which I’ve been a part of many times), you know there’s no way that you can sell to them anyway. The things that they need from you, they’ll get without you blowing your horn, and you won’t given them anything but the things they need anyway, even if it’s not your thing that they need.

Your Experience with Community

  1. Have you been on the receiving end of support and/or selling in a community?
  2. Are you aware of any communities that actually grow based on a ‘selling’ mindset? (I don’t)
  3. If supporting is what you do, how have you monetized that if you are nurturing a community?

Photo of Like Minds 2010 courtesy of Paul Clarke

Published on August 2, 2010 by Scott Gould

The End Of The Age Of Content, Part 2

Burned textureThe last time we talked about the end of the age of content was in April this year, for me best summarised by one of my favourite quotes of the year from Jeff Jarvis:

The great stuff is already out there. Why remake it, except for ego?

Content is becoming has become a commodity. As I’ve been saying for over a year now, there’s too much of it. We’re over saturated. Trying to compete with content is a hard, hard game to win.

And the trouble about content is that all the digitalls have in front of their faces on Twitter all day. But for a second consider you are a digicool. How do you even find blogs like mine and yours? I would say relationship, or a very thin long tail.

Our Options

If it’s the end of age of content, then what is next, and what are our options?

1. Fight it. Keep saying that ‘Content Is King’ and tune up your personal brand and affiliate program, while you compete against the thousands upon thousands of others doing the same to promote your blog and product over theirs. If you’re trying to build a big blog or launch a community group, you also can’t start by fighting on this front, because others are doing it better than you already.

Ok, so perhaps that is a bit harsh – but my point is that you can’t fight on this level alone.

2. Relationally push. Every business starts out with friends as customers. If for the digicool it is through referral that blogs, etc, are discovered, then we lean on those relationships. The issue here through is that it doesn’t scale.

3. Go niche. Find focussed interest topics to specialise in. People are more prepared to go with specialist content as opposed to generalist. But writing about a niche subject doesn’t mean people will flock to you, nor trust you. Again, we are back to social authority.

Curation

Where we are going towards is curation. By having a good bit of fight, building relationship, finding niches, and then being a curator of the content and co-creation that is already happening, we find new meaning. The great stuff is already out there. Why remake it, except for ego?

Seth Godin posted an exceptional audio peice on “The New Dynamics Of Book Publishing” last month. I seriously recommend you listen to it.

From all the consulting that I have done with publishers of late, Seth’s insights are right on and encapsulate much of what I’ve been going through with these publishers.

If we take this into the Music Industry, for example, should’ve been curating experiences and communites rather than trying to create and sell music. The creation part is a comodity, the community curation part isn’t.

Your Leading Thoughts

  1. Are you a curator? Where are you curating and how are you doing it?
  2. Curation is a new buzz idea that’s going around at the moment – do you see it as the future?
  3. Content creation has it’s own challenges. What are the challenges of content curation?

Photo courtesy of irisb447

Published on July 22, 2010 by Scott Gould

Case Study: Value-Based Blogging

Today I want to open up the guts of this blog and show you with stats, number and benchmarks the return of a value-based approach to blogging. My hope is that my transparency and openness will inspire you to go away and stop competing for retweets in the volume-based game and grasp what rich relationship and real return awaits you if you can get away from vanity and into community.

The image below is a screen shot of the last 7 posts on this blog in PostRank’s Analytics platform. We’ll discuss this tool a bit more in a moment, but the main features are that it tracks the number of engagements per post – most pertinently, the number of Tweets, Google Buzzes, Delicious Bookmarks and other social networks, in addition to unique visitors, reading time, etc.

Look and see how many comments this post gets, compared to how many tweets:

This isn’t just a trend over the last week. Almost every post I write has more comments than tweets. Also look at the reading times. I’ve highlighted the highest ones. This average time means people are reading the posts and reading the comments.

This means that my RSS subscribers are the real source of engagement for me. According to Feedburner, I have 148 people subscribed in Google Reader, and 48 who have subscribed to this blog in email.

So, time for some analysis:

Value Analysis 1: Keep Your Retweeets

A value based blog doesn’t need lots of retweets to get engagement. I want you and need you to understand right now that whilst more tweets about your posts will get it more coverage, lots of retweets are not necessary for and do not guarantee engagement.

If you were to ask me for my number one metric of success on my blog, I’d tell you instantly it’s comments. It’s the number of the them, and it’s the depth of them – because it means we actually have participation, not just blind retweeting.

Value Analysis 2: Backwards Engagement

According to PostRank, “80% of the conversations about your content happen off-site” (link.) Well, PostRank tels me that for my blog, 60% of the conversations about my content happen on-site. Value-based blogged is totally contradictory to standard volume-based blogging. The engagement is totally the other way around.

I don’t know of any top blog that gets more comments than retweets. In fact that only other blog that I can find that does is Robin Dickinson’s blog.

There are sometimes when admittedly, I wish I had more retweets. Sometimes it annoys me to see how many shallow blogs get so much coverage. But I will tell you this:  no blog post that has received lots of retweets on my blog has ever had lots of comments.

80% engagement off your site is … well … worthless in my opinion.

Value Analysis 3: It Works

It’s one thing talking about a value-based blog if in actual fact it didn’t work. But it does. On an average of 10 tweets per post and 15 comments per post, this blog:

  1. This is the 5th ranked blog on leadership on PostRank (last week I was #3)
  2. This is the 2nd ranked blog on social business on PostRank and 9th ranked for social media marketing.
  3. This is 185th ranked marketing blog on the AdAge Power150 (I would be higher if more people linked here. My InLink score is very low.)

For 10 tweets, this is very good. Most of the blogs on AdAge get a very high number of tweets per post. My AdAge rank is lower, as it takes PostRank (which focusses on engagement), and also considers other measurement platforms that track InLinks, volume of tweets, etc.

But more than these stats, the proof it works is that Like Minds works and engages hundreds of people because of the discussions we have here. It works because someone saw this blog and was so warmly invited when they commented that they saw a link to the Like Minds Club and bought membership right away. It’s also got me a lot of recognition and love.

It works because authors have found the ideas here (that we formed together through the comments), and put them in their books (they tell me so!) It works because the thing that we discuss have changed lives.

Your Leading Thoughts

I know I’ve kind of preached us full here – but there is room for a very important discussion here. Many of you guys are likely discouraged, distracted by wanting to get your content recognised with retweets and such. I’m keen to know

  1. If you’ve been blogging for 6 months and over, what are your statistics on engagement?
  2. Be honest – how much are tweets and ‘attention’ a motivator for you?
  3. Where on the web do you enjoy engaging in value-based blogs?
Published on July 7, 2010 by Scott Gould

How I Profile A Community’s Participation To Inform Next Actions

NOTE: This will take you about 15 minutes to read and look at.

I spent Monday working with a local publishing house carrying out a mix of consultation-via-workshop, in which by teaching my frameworks and case studies, we workshop the content and create a strategy for the company. It’s very much the same as what we did with the Finland Tourist Board at the Like Minds Summit last month.

True to form, the day is full of my hype oneliners. One of the main ones that I drill is “don’t target everyone, target the right ones”, which of course is about correctly understanding your community, and who the influencers within that community are.

What really irritates me is when I ask this question and then have to start from scratch trying to understand my community. That’s why I create models and frameworks: for my own use and my own sanity! However yesterday I realised that I haven’t really shared how useful this model below (The 7 Levels of Participation) has been for me with understanding communities.

Levels of Participation

For me, Social Media is about social, which is about relationship, which is about participation. Relationship is participation with one another. The deeper the relationship, the more participation we have with each other. Therefore I like to understand a community based on their varying levels of participation. If a community has higher levels, my strategy will fundamentally be different than if my community had low levels of participation.

Published on July 1, 2010 by Scott Gould

Lessons from Helsinki: Kill the Speaker / Attendee Divide

Riot Police assault on the Opera HouseThe best bit about Like Minds Conversation Helsinki was when the panel got up and crossed the invisible divide that separates speaker and attendee, and began chatting with the people in the crowd like equals. Because guess what, that’s what they are: equals.

Almost a year ago, when I was forming the ideas for Like Minds, I knew that ‘attendee’ would never be a word in our vocabulary. Everyone at Like Minds is a participant – whether they stand and delivery a keynote, turn to the person next to them and share their experience, or help guide a group a discussion.

The reason for this is quite simple: people are smart. The speakers are smart, and the listeners are smart.

I’m now seeing the word ‘participants’ replace ‘attendees’ all over the web. It certainly seems this participatory form of event is catching on – and I love it. In a people-to-people world, a people-to-people event needs to be participatory in order to ensure people learn. Note this isn’t about the speaker satisfying their ego, or the listener satisfying their lust for criticism – this is about learning.

Inspired by my friends Jeff Hurt and Dave Lutz who write the number 1 event management / event design blog in the world (at least, in my eyes), I’m sharing what we found in our latest event what worked and didn’t work, by experience, in regards to creating a participatory learning environment.

Killing the Divide

Worked: Preparing keynotes and panels. I know it’s obvious, but all too often a keynote is being prepared on the plane, and the panel in the corridor before hand. Preparation means I’ve thought about what the community of people who are present need to hear – not just what I’ve said before. Don’t underestimate speakers – they want you to help them prepare and want your direction on how they should prepare.

Didn’t work: Laptops for keynote speaker notes. The best thing about TED Talks is that they are so focussed and well oiled that they impart exactly what they want to communicate, free from fluff or ‘urms’. This means as a viewer I get to connect with them, free from standing behind a laptop, and connect to their ideas that have been well thought out and are being clearly communicated. This is the way I’m going for the future – no laptop notes.

Worked: Panels with giving people who seek the truth on behalf of the listeners. You need strong people on the panel – but they need to be able to give and take, speak and listen, and act on behalf of the listeners. This means carefully selected panelists based on their facilitation skills, more than their speaking skills.

Didn’t work: Un-facilitated panels. Our panel preparation wasn’t good enough, and we left the panels unmoderated. I actually think we need facilitators more than moderators. A facilitator will help keep the panel focussed, and also draw questions from the floor.

Worked: Having panelists go into the crowd and begin talking with the clusters of groups. A few people said they enjoyed this even more than the keynotes. We called this ‘Crowd Discussion’. What we also did was ask people to sit it different seats each time they came back from the break, which increased discussion the new people that were engaging with one another.

Didn’t work: Adjusting the break length and crowd discussion length when the internet participants were lost because the stream went down. We shouldn’t have adjusted the experience for the people present to cater for the ones who weren’t present. Mistake.

The Future – Your Leading Thoughts

I’m keen to hear your feedback on this. As you know, I have a little event framework for four levels of learning: person-to-people, persons-to-people, people-to-people and person-to-person. So, person-to-people could be a keynote; persons-to-people could be a panel or interview, etc.

  • What is the future of participation in events, in your opinion?
  • What would you like to be done different to increase your learning? (I’ve got a suspicion we could use my 7 Levels of Particpation model here.)
  • How do you increase participation without creating disorder and therefore reducing the potential to learn?

Cool photo courtesy of looking4poetry

Published on May 17, 2010 by Scott Gould

Model: The 7 Levels of Participation

Levels of Participation

The above model is something I’ve been thinking about for a while – and would love to now think through with you – that aims to present some guide and scale for participation, with the goal of helping us know what level of participation to pitch for our communities or projects.

My basic assumption is that as the level of participation increases, the number of people who participate decreases. A lot of the successes, and failures, that I see not only within Social Media but community engagement in general are linked to pitching at the right level of participation:

  • Failure generally happens where the amount of participation is overestimated, and only a high level is provided
  • Successes generally happen where multiple levels of participation are provided, meaning lower and higher levels happen

Whether you’re building a social network, running a blog, doing an online campaign, cultivating a community, and so on, you must consider your levels of participation.

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