This post is part of an ongoing series about developing an online community strategy. As a reminder, all posts are being tagged #ocb2b.
In my last post, “Want to Know What Community Members Need? Just Ask” I discussed the importance of asking your members what they need from you as a community host, and what they need from other community members, as part of your extended community.
In this post, I will discuss the methodology for conducting a discovery exercise of the relevant parts of the social web to find out where your community (or potential community) is already working and playing. .
Most community strategies have traditionally focused on the hosted properties of the organization. The reality is that there is an ever expanding universe of online touchpoints that an organization’s community members are participating in off-domain. An ecosystem research exercise should be conducting as part of a strategy development (or strategy course correction) exercise in order to discover where the off domain centers or activity are, and who the most vocal and active participants are. The discovery exercise is essentially an audit of the current community ecosystem, including customer, prospect, partner and competitor touch points. This information will help establish a baseline of market-oriented sites and activity, which will be important to understand the opportunities for new community activity by your (or your client’s) brand.
What Should You Look For?
The purpose of this discovery exercise is to look for existing signs of life for your community “off domain”. Signs of life include conversations about your company, product, or issues related to your particular market or issue area. What should you specifically search for as part of your discovery process? The following list is a jumping off point for starting your discovery process:
- Mentions of company name
- Mentions of brand or product names
- Issues related to you market
- Topics related to your market
- Mentions of key employees
- Advocates or spokespeople
- Mentions of competitors
Where Should You Look?
Using tools like Google Blog Search, Twitter Search, Delicious, and Ice Rocket, conduct searches for brand mentions in news, the mass social media sphere (blogs, twitter) and on smaller niche communities. You will quickly come up a list of the communities hosting conversations about your organization, products or brand, and the members (often time bloggers) engaging in those conversations.
It’s also important to research activity on the “walled garden” communities, and larger social media sites that some times don’t surface in search results. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, Get Satisfaction, etc. In particular, look for ad-hoc groups that have sprung up around your brand, or content tagged with your brand and/or products.
Key Sites:
| Google News Search | Indexes articles from thousands of “traditional” news outlets. |
| Google Blog Search | The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed. Casts a wide net, but will return some irrelevant content depending on the specificity of your search. |
| Technorati | Technorati was the first blog search engine and directory. Though its popularity is waning, it is still a valuable tool for determining a blog’s reach and influence via “Technorati Authority.” |
| Ice Rocket | The new kid on the block in blog search engines. Comparable to Google in simplicity of interface, with the added benefit of keyword trend analysis. |
| Twitter Search | Advanced search allows you to search for Tweets by keyword, people, location, and sentiment (based on usage of emoticons). |
| Backtweets | Allows you to search for links to any URL published on Twitter. Automatically converts URL shorteners like bit.ly and ow.ly. |
| Klout | Assigns a score to Twitter profiles to help you assess the reach, influence, and content of Twitter users. |
| BoardTracker | Best search engine for public discussion forums (e.g. Yahoo Groups). Will return interesting, but sometimes inappropriate content. |
| Digg | Social bookmarking site for News-related content, where users vote for their favorite articles. |
| Delicious | Social bookmarking site for all content. Frequently bookmarking and tagging your content on Delicious will boost your prominence in Google search results. |
| YouTube | The largest video-sharing site. Allows you to create a channel, upload original video, embed videos on your web site, and monitor videos related to your brand. |
| Flickr | A photo sharing site with more than 4 billion images. You can upload and organize sets of photos, and monitor photos related to your brand. |
| Slideshare | The largest presentation-sharing site. |
| Scribd | One of the largest social document sites, with laods of white papers and articles. |
| Quantcast | Provides rough traffic estimates and demographic usage information for most sites of relative prominence on the web. |
Outputs of the Ecosystem Audit
Insights that will likely emerge from your ecosystem audit include:
- Key news sites
- List of most active members (potential community members)
- List of influential users (potential community members)
- Thought leaders (personalities shaping your industry)
- List of active groups (potential partner communities)
- Independent community sites (potential partner communities)
- Key blogs (Niche bloggers and group blogs)
- In-person meetups and events (you might consider participating)
- A list of spaces where your community *isn’t* (helpful in prioritizing where to participate)
One helpful by-product of conducting an ecosystem audit is the set of fundamental elements for an ongoing listening strategy: search terms, topics and relevant online sources. The ecosystem audit process forces a team to experiment with and refine search terms and topics in order to discover content sources. Many of the tools mentioned above support RSS feeds with near real-time results. So, wether you use a simple tool, like google reader for your listening strategy, or something more industrial strength like a Radian6 or Scoutlabs, you have completed a lot of the prerequisite work for ongoing listening and monitoring.
In the next two upcoming posts “Designing an Online Presence Architecture” and “Engagement Planning” I will describe how to take the inputs of goal definition, member research and the ecosystem audit to create an Online Presence Architecture and to develop an engagement plan.
Recommended Reading:
Participating in the Social Media Ecosystem
