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This week I put together a detailed breakdown of Apple’s online community.
Here you can learn how Apple develops and manages its online community.
This includes how Apple:
Designs it’s community platforms.
Forces people to ask good questions.
Gets people to register and onboards them.
Encourages users to submit tips.
Uses gamification to attract newcomers to join and participate.
Responds to questions about the community.
There are plenty of ways to make people jump through a hoop, but that doesn’t make a difference if they’ve stopped dancing a few minutes later.
This is the problem with using split tests within a community.
You can increase your conversion rates by amplifying the web copy or offering bonuses to people that register or participate.
But it’s only what happens over the long-term that really matters.
Two ways to launch a new project.
You can set a group of people a hard goal and ask them to work towards it.
You reveal a project you’ve been working on for a long time and ask for people to help.
The problem is only 1% of people tend to help create a project compared with 10% that tend to edit. Almost every successful collective effort requires an individual (or a few individuals) to make a huge number of contributions to get started.
If your objective is growth, 60%+ of your time should be spent on growth.
This means improving SEO, high-profile guest blog posts, traditional PR, direct invitations, partnerships, paid social, getting the community positioned more prominently and featured on the homepage.
If your objective is retention, 60%+ of your time should be spent on retention.
The attention span for traditions is infinite, new traditions are being created right now.
When is yours? What date and time resonate with you? What would you do to commemorate or celebrate the event?
Who was born or died on that day? What industry-defining event happened on that day? When was the community created? There must be a birthday coming up soon…
There is a difference between ‘someone mentioned me, I better respond’ and ‘this improved how I think about the community’.
A lot of people @mention a list of newcomers when they join. It seems to work well. The person gets a notification and is prompted to respond. You get a lot of responses.
But having tried this with several organizations, the long-term impact is pretty minimal. You can install Community-analytics and test this for yourself.
More engagement increases loyalty (or retention), at least that’s the myth.
Community has less influence over retention than almost any other benefit.
Price, product, promotion, people, processes and a dozen other factors have a bigger impact.
You’ve probably read the same case studies as me about the ‘industry that didn’t adapt (or change)’. Trains, the ice trade, tour operators, postmen, music etc…you can take your pick, the pattern was the same.
First, they ignored the trend, then they fought the trend, then they were destroyed by the trend.
Did you ever think reading these stories “that won’t happen to me, I’m too smart!”.
This morning is the time to test that assumption.
I’ve been looking for a format to share thoughts while on the road, I like Instagram for now.
You’re welcome to follow me there.
FeverBee Experts has both a new (collapsible) homepage and plenty of discussions covering some of today’s most important topics.
