Why Online Communities Fail: The 1 Percent Rule
by Matthew Mamet, President
06/05/2006
The 1 percent rule shows the daunting problem faced by marketing and brand managers responsible for building their corporation's online community. You can reasonably expect that only 1 percent of your web community will create new topics, and only 10 percent of your community will interact (i.e. make online comments) with it at all. The remaining 89 percent will simply read what's there and move on. The good news - if you and your content development team are doing a good job, you can expect 100% of your visitors to at least benefit from the information.
The 1 percent rule simply underscores the importance of driving traffic to your online community. The more visitors, the increased likelihood of interactivity and content creation. In order to drive traffic to your site, first and foremost - you'll need to be the source for on-topic breaking news and information that is relevant to your community.
Even if you achieve that lofty goal, simply building it does not mean "they" will come. Your second step will be to develop mechanisms to pull users toward your site. Optimize the site and its content for Natural Search Engine Listings. Also, consider investments in Paid Search Engine ‘sponsored links.'
While search marketing efforts will put information into the hands of web users on demand, you must also develop inbound lead generation tactics through online banner advertising. Purchase online media on portal publisher and other sites relevant and attractive to your web audience.
Next, a successful online community will have functionality to push engaging and relevant content to its respective audience. Relevant news highlights should display on the front page. Prominently feature important and constantly changing news as a free subscription based RSS format. Users can subscribe to RSS using common portals such as My Yahoo!. Once established, get the feed syndicated at other news sources.
Have a weekly or monthly column written by a "personality" on topic and offer it free to print publications and other websites for a reference link back to your community site. Offer an email subscription service that alerts your community to new information as its added.
A successful online community is much more than just a forum for open discussion on the internet. Traditional marketing concepts such as push and pull marketing need to be applied to the interactive marketing space to create a constant influx of new and repeat visitors.
