It’s the Content, Stupid
In 1992, James Carville (the Ragin; Cajun) hung a sign in Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign office to remind everyone of the core message of the campaign: “It’s the Economy, Stupid.”
It was a simple but important reminder to the team: stay focused on the issues that matter, don’t get side tracked by all the other things we COULD be talking about.
A similar reminder could be issued today to many media companies developing online communities around their content – stay focused on the content; don’t lose sight that that’s what your audience is coming for.
Chuck Fishman started a thread on this blog about the importance of fresh content, and I wanted to extend that with an anecdote of what can happen when you lose focus on content in a “community of content.”
CMSG was lucky enough to pilot a number of fan communities with various media companies during the field trials of the Cisco Eos software platform. One of those trials involved a smaller brand that a media company was willing to experiment with. The site launched with no publicity, and the community grew relatively quickly to several hundred fans who were coming to the site to interact with and around the content. The life of this experiment went something like this:
Week 1:
Fans – This is great! Now I’ve got a place to talk to other people who love BRAND X. Awesome!
Media Company – This is great! Who knew we had these fans? Where did they come from?Weeks 2-4
Fans – Hmmm, I like this site, but I’m not sure I like the colors. Any one seen anything new on the site recently? Are they expecting we’re just going to sit around and watch the same clips over and over again? How about at least a couple of blog entries here?
Media Company – Huh? What’s going on here? Who do these people think they are?~Week 5
Fans – This site is lame! There’s been nothing new uploaded for weeks. Who’s running this thing? Ok everyone, put your comments here about what they should be doing differently…
Media Company – Whoa! I don’t think I like what’s happening here. Eject! Eject! Take the site down! Put up the old site from Marketing!
Yes, this could be a tale about a media company not being fully prepared to directly engage their fans. But the catalyst for things turning ugly with the audience was the lack of content on the site. In retrospect we (the media company and CMSG) realized that they had been so focused on launching the site, that they hadn’t developed much of a content strategy for keeping the content fresh for fans to keep coming back to.
This was an important lesson to learn. It seems basic, but if you’re going to build an experience around content, you better be prepared to stay focused on the content—or you’ll hear from the community very quickly.
Any one have any content stories they’d like to share?
Posted by Scott Brown at 10:09AM PST
Shruti Bhat Apr 6, 2009
Scott, Thanks for sharing this. I feel this is a particularly interesting post because it highlights one of the core issues faced by companies that wish to engage with their audience. The audience is very demanding and can be extremely vocal in both praise and dislike. It is not sufficient to seed initial content, the endeavor to keep the community going requires significant continuous investment from the company in terms of content refresh and community moderation (to eliminate misappropriate interactions). I have personally seen one such content-centric community (name withheld) die and be run over by spammers but we have recently revamped and relaunched having learned from earlier mistakes.