Monday, April 14, 2008

Rohit Bhargava speaks at Online Community Business Forum

Rohit Bhargava is SVP, Digital Strategy & Marketing at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence (follow him on Twitter at @rohitbhargava)

Thinking Beyond the Community Website

Concerns heard during the intros this morning:

  • selling the value of community
  • getting new users to sign up
  • building up the superusers

These are all marketing challenges, no?

Here are the keys to thinking beyond your website

  1. learn where your customers are
  2. be part of that conversation
  3. focus on Word Of Mouth, not conversion
  4. measure your level of engagement
  5. expand!

Case study: WineLibrary.TV is a community that @santagaryvee has built

Case study: Rohit just launched a book called "Personality Not Included" and has created a new blog about it, a Facebook group to create a community around the book.

It's about getting where people already are. He's the one who invited folks to send him five questions and Rohit would answer each set of questions (no cut and paste) to provide custom interviews for these bloggers. Rohit had 50 bloggers submit questions so on day 1 of the book launch, he had 50 blogs pointing to him.

On top of that, he then had folks vote on which blog had the best interview questions (more traffic spread around), so that keeps the excitement running.

Salient point from an audience member: Don't confuse visitors to your web site with the community of people interested in your work: the community is independent of technology, and they will manifest across many platforms: yours, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.

UPDATE: Is live-blogging (this post) or live-tweeting the better capture? My thoughts posted separately.

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