Downtempo LLC: Our Fantastic Blog

This article is written to address the needs of new projects looking to gain traction through user-created viral communities.

Background

Launching successful websites that depend on user-created content (UGC) is hard. It’s a problem that you can’t just solve by applying large amounts of cash to traditional marketing campaigns (although several sites have tried this in the past — CMGI’s iCast is one example from Ye Olden Days of Web 1.0, with their well-produced TV ads featuring DJ Qbert).

So what are the strategies that work to get your UGC community going?

Solve The Problem

You *are* solving a problem, aren’t you? Good.

Now find the users (you should already know who they are) that are feeling the pain from not using your wonderful new product, and strike up a conversation with them. This brings us to:

Recruit Superstar Users from Related Sites

When you’re rolling out your product, you need to find your core audience (especially in terms of content creators — if your product incentives are structured properly, they’ll bring their own audience with them). You’ll want to be recruiting them while you’re finishing your product, to get early product pre-launch feedback, and also to contribute the initial set of content to your product.

When I was launching the website Live365, we were offering a hosted “build your own radio station” service, along with a directory where you could find and listen to radio stations that people had created. Of course the employees all created our own radio stations, but we needed to recruit great broadcasters to our site.

Shoutcast had been released a few months earlier, which provided online audio broadcasting software, and a directory of stations using the software, but didn’t provide a radio hosting service to their users. As an avid early Shoutcaster, I could see the pain in the forums for people trying to find sources of serious bandwidth to use for broadcasting. (And in 1998, that was not an easy task.)

So I contacted the top Shoutcasters, started talking with them about their stations, the music they loved, and their current sources of bandwidth. Once they heard that we were offering the ability for them to reach up to 365 listeners with our service, we had a lot of great users trying out our service. And if they decided they liked it, they started discussing it with each other on their favorite forum sites, and the word spread from there. Rapidly.

Invite Your Friends. All of them. And get them to invite their friends.

I don’t mean “automatically grab all of their contacts from Gmail and send them a spammy be-my-friend-on-this-cool-site email”. I mean invite them. Send them an individual email, explain what you’re doing (you can re-use text describing the service from email to email), and explain why you think they might be interested. Then encourage them to invite their friends, preferably through individualized emails or IMs or whathaveyou. Just don’t spam.

I’d like to introduce a quote from Danah Boyd’s notes on her talk, The Significance of Social Software: (emphasis added by me)

“All marketers know that the stickiness of a product is greatly increased by learning about the product through friends instead of through advertisements.   This is why there is so much scheming around viral marketing.   But organic growth is not just a means of advertising – it is the primary means in which the culture of a site is formed.”

“Consider Flickr.   When Flickr launched, Caterina and Stewart welcomed all users, told them about what was available, and asked them how they could improve the system.   They framed the site as a space for amateur photography, not just as a place to store photos.   As users invited their friends, they helped pass along the message, both explicitly and implicitly through the ways that they used the system.”

This is why you don’t want to have your invites be spam-like. After all, do you want the type of users who buy dubious medical cures via e-mail to be the same users who will define the nature of your site’s new community? Probably not.

Wrapping Up

These are just a few examples of strategies you can use when starting a new UGC community. In a future article I’ll cover how you can target specific user interest niches and other fun topics.