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The Digital Marketing Podcast
How to Build Online Communities
00:30:42
We speak with Arjun Jolly, COO and co-founder of adQuadrant, about how to go about building communities online. A veteran online community builder and participant, Arjun has many years experience of building active online communities for a...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers and today I'm joined by Arjun Jolly. Arjun, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you are and where you're from.
- [00:26]
B
Sure. Hi everyone, my name is Arjun Jolly. I am the COO and co founder of Ad Quadrant, which is a social media marketing firm based in sunny Southern California here in the United States.
- [00:39]
A
Fantastic. And Arjun, we're going to be talking about a subject it's quite close to my heart actually, building communities. Because I think in the thrust of social media, the whole kind of community side often kind of gets a little bit neglected. And it's something I've been very lucky to spend a bit fair bit of time in my career working on and building communities from scratch. But I got very excited when you and I first hooked up because actually you've got a lot of experience in building communities. Can you just give us a little bit of a rundown of your experience in the area?
- [01:16]
B
Yeah, my experience in building online communities really dates back to, well, when I was a teenager first getting familiar with the forums in the automotive industry. I was a passionate teenager and very enthusiastic about modifying cars. So that's when I first got my exposure to forums, most of which were based on V Bulletin. At that time, throughout my career I was naturally attracted to just the overall kind of online culture, if you will, of people interacting and how they went about speaking about different topics and understanding each other, even though they were all behind a computer screen. Throughout my career I had the ability to build some interesting online communities, both in the online gambling sector, which were forum based primarily, and also in the green sector for eco friendly products. So throughout that we built forums that had thousands of users, tens of thousands of users, and grew those over the years into conference businesses and various other channels where the online community's actually met in person as well.
- [02:23]
A
Fantastic. So you're a bit of a veteran when it comes to building communities, is that safe to say?
- [02:29]
B
I would like to think so, yes.
- [02:32]
A
So is it too late to start an online community? Because surely in this day and age we're in 2018, all the communities have been started, haven't they? Can you still get the ball rolling.
- [02:44]
B
Do you think so? I think you can still get the ball rolling, but it's just more crucial than ever to have a very clear usp, a unique selling proposition or a vision, if you will, for your community. I don't think that starting another Forum or another social network is the best place to start per se. Years back when we had forums really as a center point of online communities. From that point onwards, we evolved into Q and A boards where it was Yahoo Answers and Quora and, and also social networks. Now I think online communities are built around really specific topics, whether it's a clothing brand and an online community there, such as Threadless, where Threadless is a T shirt e commerce company where artists submit their work and the community actually votes on which piece of art gets printed on a T shirt. So communities like that, where they're around a specific topic, or even memes, if you will. Even if you look at the most popular boards like 4chan, there's really specialized ways that you can go about doing it today. But I don't think that just launching another V bulletin forum or another Q and A board is really the best place to start unless you're very, very clear on what that niche you're going after is going to be.
- [04:08]
A
So how do we get started in building an online community from scratch for our business? If anybody out there is kind of inspired to do that, where would you recommend they start?
- [04:19]
B
So I think that the first place to start and be clear is really on focusing on a topic that you're passionate about personally. Because building an online community is a lot of hard work. It takes a lot of time to attract the users. It takes a lot of time to really build the content that's required to create stickiness for those users. So naturally, it's much easier if you have a topic that you're interested in, whether it's, you know, home improvement or home gardening or modifying vehicles like it was for me back when I was a teenager. Having that as your starting point is a very, you know, just helpful angle to take. Now, in addition to that, if you can combine that clear vision of what you want to talk about with some controversy, that creates a certain level of stickiness that can attract users and almost kind of keep give users the topics that they can't help but speak about. I mean, you'd be surprised how you can tie politics into almost anything in today's society. Whether it's home improvement, finance, whatever it is, there's always some controversial topic in pretty much every single niche. So combining those two is really a great point of how you kind of converge the passion behind the topic that you're interested in with the stickiness that can be created from gathering the troops, if you will, and getting people to speak about that specific topic.
- [05:46]
A
Do you think an Online community. Does it help if you've got an offline element to it?
- [05:51]
B
I think that's a great question. And I'll cite one specific example where there is an offline community that I'm a part of without an online component, but it is digitally engaged. And that's specifically a gym that I go to. It's called Orange Theory Fitness. Now I've been going to this gym called Orange Theory Fitness for about two years, and since I started, it's really spread like wildfire. And they've opened studios across the United States and Hong Kong, throughout Europe, et cetera. The interesting thing about this gym and why I bring it up is it's another workout. It's a high intensity cardio workout, but it's built this cult like following where people like me talk about it. And the digital engagement that they've kind of built around it is they hook up a heart rate monitor to you so that when you're actually exercising, you can see what your results are and share your results with your friends, whether it be on Facebook, et cetera. So in that example, you know, they've, they've brought in the digital elements that are important from a community standpoint of being able to share the topic or share the value that you're gaining from one specific thing with your friends. Through other online communities. While offline, they have this cult like following where people just rant and rave about the specific topic and the workouts and they can't help but tell their friends about it, like myself right now.
- [07:20]
A
Have you got any kind of recommendations? I think one of the things with online communities, you can get people to join and people can take part, but how do you get them to actually engage? You mentioned maybe involving a bit of controversy, perhaps politics as well, but are there any other kind of strategies you found really work?
- [07:37]
B
Yeah, great question. And one of the focal points there for me is what is the culture of the community? Every community has a culture. And I look at online communities just like one would look at their local neighborhood where there's a certain culture to your local neighborhood. And when you, you know, for example, if you're new to a neighborhood, you'll go and maybe give your neighbor some baked cookies or something like that to make a good impression. With online communities, what I've found is creating value and being focused on going in and really running contests for your audience, running promotions for your audience, creating value that's stemming from what the culture of your audience is looking for. Those are really some strategies that I've seen have really, really work. And as I mentioned, stickiness and controversy are always, always helpful. If you can think about the convergence of the topic matter around what your community is focused on, combined with the controversy that's taking place within that specific sector or specific category, creating content around that and allowing people to chime in and share that specific topic always is a great way to just garner interest and viewership around that specific community.
- [08:51]
A
So where do companies go wrong? You know, where does it all sort of fall flat with community building? Because there's no end of companies attempt to build communities and very often they don't kind of fly and have the kind of success that you really hope, certainly given some of the resources that go into getting these things started.
- [09:11]
B
So I think one of the the biggest places where companies go wrong is by putting monetization first. If you look at Facebook and you look at Snapchat, starting with Facebook specifically, they've been around for many years at this point, but if you think about how many years they spent on building the community and not making money, it's a testament to how large they are. Now, many times when people go out and think, hey, I'm going to build an online community so that I can, you know, make money and live the Internet dream of working from home and running my community, that's not always the best case. I think that really what the focal point needs to be is how are you creating and delivering value to your audience, how are you educating them, how are you training them, how are you helping them at the end of the day? And once you're able to really create that community that's focused on providing value, whatever that end value point is for your user, whether it is the education, training, or simply a place to hang out, once you're focused on that and you're able to create that value for your audience, you can place ads and you can monetize your community at some point. But many companies make the mistake of launching a community, putting their AdSense placements or whatever it is, and thinking that they're basically just going to arbitrage traffic and buy traffic on Facebook or Google, send it to the community and they're going to make money on the ads. That's not necessarily how it works. And I've seen many communities fail by taking that approach.
- [10:41]
A
Like the example of MySpace, which was enormous in its time but got killed. Well, it was strangled within a matter of months by, you know, a company coming in, buying it and trying to over monetize it. It is interesting how quickly that can can crush a community. I guess at the end of the day, there's that community is never about one individual or one particular company. It's the clues in the name, isn't it? It's a community. It's made up of lots and lots of different constituent parts. And I guess if you're starting out by creating a flock of people who group together because things are useful and beneficial to them, the moment that stops, it flies apart, right?
- [11:18]
B
That's right, yeah. And again, I cite the neighborhood community, the actual physical community of the place that you live. When you think about your neighborhood community, it's usually built of diverse people from different backgrounds, from different jobs, etc. But they're all working together to function as a neighborhood, they're working together to function as a local community. And I think that online communities are very similar in that sense, where people are there to support each other and help each other. But the hardest part about an online community is really getting the ball rolling. And getting that ball rolling is where it's so important to have that commitment to the topic and commitment to the overall content that you're producing, so that once that ball does start rolling, it turns into a little bit more of a snowball and you start picking up users as you go, and those users start helping each other along the way. I think it's also important to mention as well, we're talking about Snapchat and Facebook and their communities and the mistakes that some companies make when they're building a community. If you look at Facebook, yes, they've launched ads, but it's public knowledge that their engagement is down from 2017 while the revenue is up. So it's quite interesting to see how, you know, communities can also shift where engagement can go up or down based on certain changes within product or within, you know, a specific setting. So it's kind of interesting to see how that actually looks at the end of the day.
- [12:41]
A
Do you think communities can just implode over sheer weight of numbers? You know, it's a fascinating thing for me, actually, today I've been researching an article we're going to put out on which social networks have the largest growth. It's always fascinated me that in the social media sphere, the number of users is always such a driving factor for which platforms we as marketers are going to take seriously. But actually, in reality, if something becomes sort of almost omnipresent, does it still have that community element around it? What are your views on that? Can a community get too big?
- [13:15]
B
Yeah, I think that a community can get too big. And what you find is communities can actually be replaced by other communities. My favorite example here is in the social media space, dating all the way back to Friendster. You went from Friendster was then replaced by MySpace, which MySpace was then replaced by Facebook. You don't hear much about Friendster MySpace today, but back when they were up and running, they had millions and millions of users and were incredibly large. However, when the community itself is not engaged to the standpoint of they have to be there if something else comes along where they can get better value for the same price, if you will. I understand that all these platforms are free, but for the same cost of time or whatever it is, they will shift again. I keep going back to this, this physical presence of community. It's the same way where if you're living in Southern California, let's say if you're living in San Diego and you have a house for a million dollars, if you were able to move to Beverly Hills for $800,000, you might very well consider it. It's really just where are you getting the best feel for the community? Where are you getting the best product? Where are you getting the best value out of? At some point, if communities do get too large and they're not creating that value, or they don't have the appropriate moderation or tactics in place to maintain the community, they very well can implode, in my opinion.
- [14:54]
A
So as a marketer with lots of experience kind of building and managing communities, what are the kind of metrics that you keep a very close eye on to check the community's going in the right direction?
- [15:05]
B
So the key metrics that I look for when I'm monitoring and measuring community are really what the engagement looks like across the board. Depending on the type of community, those metrics will differ whether it's a forum or a Q and A or even a social network. It's really about how much time are your users spending within your specific community, how much time on site are they spending, what's their contributions, Are they making posts? Are they responding to posts? Are they searching? What are their actual actions that are taking place within the community? Now, it's important to note that in communities, there's a lot of people that don't contribute directly, but they are coming to the community to read up on the content. And, you know, in the forum world, they're known as lurkers. They're there to kind of, you know, just kind of see what's going on in the community and check it out. And sometimes they're very hesitant to post or share a specific topic because of, you know, whatever reason it might be. But overall, even if they're lurking on the forum, you'll still be able to see the time on site that they're spending and understand how engaged are they in the actual community, albeit they're not directly posting in the automotive space. Internet Brands is a company I really respect. They've got tons of different forums, some of which are in automotive, specializing on brands like Porsche and Audi. They have just incredible engagement across the board. I mean their properties serve over 100 million monthly visitors. The unique thing that they do to create good engagement is they have form sponsors that actually come on and, and give these kind of one off offers to the community that you can't get anywhere else. So it almost creates like the necessity to be engaged with that forum because you're not really going to be able to get that deal or that information anywhere else. But that's what I look for.
- [16:54]
A
Anee, do you have any sort of. You've mentioned a couple actually, but I'm really interested in any sort of success case studies you could share with us that really demonstrate kind of meaningful growth stats that that can be achieved in building a community and maybe sort of explore a little bit on what those communities enabled for the companies behind them.
- [17:17]
B
Sure, yeah. So I mean the obvious case studies are obviously Facebook and Snapchat and what they've done over the years. And Internet Brands is the one that I mentioned which I'd like to talk about a little further because I've paid very close attention to them for many, many years. They've been around for well over I think 15, 20 years at this point. And as I mentioned, they serve over 100 monthly visitors with all their different forums. Now Internet Brands has these usually V bulletin based communities that are forum driven and they're focused on a wide variety of topics. I mean they have some of my favorite forums in the automotive space. They have forums in the green sector, they have forums in just so many different categories and they've really mastered the model of being able to balance the user engagement side of things with making sure that the forum and the community is delivering value to all the participants while also monetizing the audience in a non obtrusive way, non intrusive way. I'm sorry, in which again these forum sponsors come on. But it almost feels like they're sponsoring the forum but they're actually part of the community at the same time. So it's not an ad that is in your face, so to say. But more so a sponsor that's able to contribute to the topics within the community and still provide value for the users. And I've seen that across really all their communities. They're a company I really, really respect. The other one that's pretty interesting in my eyes is Quora. Quora has been around for not that long, less than a decade, I believe, and they've raised over 452 million in funding. And Quora is simply a question and answer board where you can go and ask a question about any specific topic and the community will do their best to answer you honestly and truthfully. It's a little bit different than Yahoo Answers that existed. I don't even know if it still exists. But Yahoo Answers didn't necessarily have the culture of focusing on providing value per se in my eyes. I think it was more so when somebody asked a question. There's a lot of viral pieces of content that came out of Yahoo. Answers because the answers would usually come through in a very snarky fashion or sometimes even the questions that were asked were just very off the wall. Whereas Quora, I think Quora's question and answer board is really moderated and guided in a fashion that, you know, from that community culture standpoint, focuses on the end value. And nobody's necessarily shunned for asking a question. Instead, questions are clarified so they can be answered properly.
- [20:07]
A
They're more like conversations, actually. If you've ever followed a Quora thread, it is a community conversation that centers around one particular point and that fascinates me. Yahoo Answers was never that. There sort of was this concept in a way of sort of experts and people not in the know. And once questions were sort of answered, that was kind of it done. End of conversation definitely didn't have the kind of depth and warmth that a lot of Quora answers can can do. And actually quite, quite incredible what some of the Quora contributors put into to answering.
- [20:42]
B
That's right. Yeah. I think they take a certain level of pride in their answers. And you're absolutely right. I mean it definitely is more conversational, which I think really hones in on the amount of value that's provided because it's not just one question and one answer. People are contributing and discussing a topic that was brought up and really just again focusing on that end all, be all value.
- [21:04]
A
So which are the best platforms to build upon or should we even be building our own? What's your thought on that?
- [21:10]
B
So, great question. I think the platforms, I mean, there's so many different ways to build communities nowadays. So it really just depends on what it is that you're looking to build. I mean, vbulletin is still a very strong forum. I know that buddypress was used for quite a while as well, which is a WordPress based forum, but it really just depends on what you're looking to accomplish. I think one of the challenges that we have when building communities is taking off the shelf software and thinking that that's it and you can just run with the off the shelf software and be done with it. A lot of times to build a community the way that you want it, it does require some customization. What I've seen is depending on the type of community you're looking to build, whether it's a forum, a social network Q and a board, or really even just a content site, you need to look at what the platform is that is best suited for that space and what off the shelf software is available. And from there just be prepared to make certain customizations to that software. As your community grows. It's best to find a software that's modular, that has plugins, or that is easy to customize where there's a large developer community around. And from there kind of scale it up on that front.
- [22:31]
A
Okay, what kind of platforms have you used in your time within the industry that you've particularly enjoyed using?
- [22:38]
B
So for forums, VBulletin is the platform that I'm the most familiar with. It's very robust, it has tremendous amounts of functionality. And I know that the company I mentioned previously, Internet brands, a lot of their forums are also v bulletin based on the scale that they've been able to achieve. And also the communities that I've built on vbulletin, it's definitely a platform that I would say is here to stay and has everything that you need to build a forum. As far as, you know, other non forum communities, elite daily.com is an example of a website that's obviously content driven, but they have a community around that specific niche of content. So Even by using WordPress or regular CMS platforms, you can still build a community which is really around users who are commenting on articles. And you'd be surprised to see how many discussions start from simple commenting plugins on articles as well.
- [23:38]
A
What are your thoughts on piggybacking on an existing social network and building a community there? Are there any sort of downsides we need to be aware of from that perspective?
- [23:47]
B
Yeah, I think there's pros and cons. I mean, obviously I've done it. And I've succeeded in that realm as well. I've built groups and communities on Facebook and LinkedIn. But the caveat here is it's a low barrier to entry. It's very easy to create a group and it's very easy to create a community on these platforms. The difference here is the commitment that is conveyed towards building that specific community on that network. I mean, you'll see if you look on Facebook and you just search for any specific topic, there's hundreds of groups or communities on that specific topic. But the ones that thrive are really the ones that either had A, a first mover advantage or B, had the commitment and wherewithal to really stick through it and focus on building that specific community. So I think there's pros and cons. There's definitely some massive communities on LinkedIn and on Facebook that are focus on specific topics. But replicating that is not an easy task because there's many people in a high level of competition trying to replicate those groups as well.
- [25:02]
A
Does it help to advertise your community? You know, should we rely purely on organic growth or does it help pay dividends to really promote it through, you know, traditional online advertising?
- [25:17]
B
So I think that there's a benefit to paid advertising, but there's also a negative element to it because if you pay for advertising, it's a great way to get more traffic. And obviously the SEO is incredibly competitive. So the organic growth is difficult to achieve unless you're producing viral content that users who are already in your community are sharing throughout various channels, whether it's Facebook, Snapchat, et cetera. Paying to advertise your community is not a bad thing in the start. I think it's important as a way to get exposure for your community and ensure that you're able to at least build some traction around what you're looking to build. But I think that paying for advertising around your specific community can also be seen as a negative, where people are thinking like, why should I join this? It's an ad, it could have a negative feel to it. At the end of the day, it really comes down to tracking and making sure that if you are paying for advertising, you're making sure that you're tracking your return on ad spend behind how many users it's generating and what the value of each of those users are within your online community. That's really my take on it is it's worth doing, but at the end of the day, you just need to walk that fine line and ensure that you're Measuring it so that if you are going to do it, it's still meeting the needs and, and benefiting your overall community and not actually negatively affecting the user engagement.
- [26:46]
A
It's got to be about them. It's all about them.
- [26:48]
B
That's right.
- [26:50]
A
So how do you manage rapid growth if and when it happens? You know, you've obviously been there and I think, well, it's a nice problem to have. Right. But when you're in the thick of it, I think it'd be great to kind of get your wisdom and guidance on how you do manage it, what some of the problems are when a community really takes off.
- [27:10]
B
Yeah, yeah, sure. So this is a fun topic because I've seen that in communities, people behind computer screens can sometimes get out of control. So I think that moderation is key. I mean, you need to have really a team of moderators involved. And the beauty of moderators is sometimes your strongest community members will be willing to step up and, and moderate the community. It doesn't always have to be a paid moderator by any means. It can be your strongest contributors that are willing to take lead and ownership on that specific community. I think moderation of topics and content is absolutely key. Keeping users within line and guiding the community in the direction of the overall culture that you're going for and the vision that is to be met by the community is important, but also it's crucial that you let the community organically form. Your idea of what the community should be when it's 5,000 users could be vastly different than when it's 100,000 users, because ultimately the community builds itself at one point and you need to just be able to manage the topics and manage the discussion so that it's cohesive and it's still creating value for each other at the end of the day. And people who are contributing to the community are essentially just kind of kept in line and not disrespecting each other. Again, that neighborhood example I give, you don't want to be disrespected by your neighbors. You wouldn't really want to live in that community. So an online community is the same thing. You don't want to be disrespected by your fellow community members because it does leave a bad taste in your mouth. So I think moderation is just so, so crucial when you have a rapidly growing community. But the asterisk there is moderation while also allowing your community to organically form and organically develop itself into what it really should be.
- [29:11]
A
So if we wanted to find out a little bit more about Ad Quadrant and what you guys do. Where do we go? Who do we talk to?
- [29:16]
B
Sure, yeah. So if you'd like to find out more about Ad Quadrant, you can go to adquadrant.com we've got numerous case studies on our website in terms of work that we've done with advertising online and helping advertisers to generate more customers through social media, search, display, native advertising, et cetera. Our focus is really on the SMB sector, so we like to see those kind of smaller and mid sized businesses grow and help them to figure out how to crack the code of online advertising. And e commerce is also just a whole lot of fun to advertise for us and work with. So to get in touch you can email me directly. I'm happy to answer any questions about online communities, Ad Quadrant, you name it. My email address is arjundquadrant.com.
- [30:12]
A
Thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you're investing in your digital marketing skills, take a look at our free Benchmark Skills Test and look at the wealth of online learning we provide. To help marketers get up to speed and stay up to date, just visit targetinternet.combenchmark.