Jessica Mah Meets World

It took me a little over an hour and a half to read Citizen Marketers by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. There’s a lot of repeat writing that you’ll see in Seth Godin’s books, but it led me to think a lot about my new business venture.

This book is about a change in marketing. Power to the people. Businesses revolving around evangelists and communities. It’s literally what web 2.0 is all about, and the ideas behind this book make me salivate.

It gave some amazing examples for what drove Youtube’s success from a marketing perspective:

1) Youtube was built around its community. There are user-generated tags, voting, and comments that give it a catch and keep model that all online businesses desperately need. Google, on the other hand, was much more web 1.0 in that it was a directory of videos more so than a community of videos and stars.

2) Youtube made word of mouth marketing super duper easy to do! You can share the video with a friend, add it to myspace, or blog about it in just a single mouse click. Easy. Fast. Awesome.

3) Youtube has statistics for everything. You get to see how many visitors your video got and its ranking among other videos. By doing this, it makes the creator want to market the video. The video is, of course, on youtube. As a result, the content author gets more traffic on his or her video and youtube capitalizes on it. Yay! I’ll admit that this has been the motivating factor for me to market my own blog.

4) Personalization is key. Users are allowed to add a specific keyword or tag to their favorites. They’re encouraged to customize and personalize their public profile pages in the same way that myspace, facebook, and linkedin do. While this usually happens only once or twice, it provides each user with individual attention and caters directly to them.

5) Youtube has a crap-load of videos. Where to start? Google sucks at sorting through them. It’s a good search engine for general content, but it was (and still is) a terrible engine for sorting through the long tail of videos. I wrote about this in my book review for “The Long Tail” – if you have a vertical search engine with many many listings, you need to provide your users with an amazing way to search and sort. While Youtube has not yet perfected this, they do so much better than Google and others.

Treadless, an awesome t-shirt company, makes for another incredible example. College dropouts Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart created a democratized community around t-shirt designs. The community has incredible power, because they’re the ones engaging in online discussions around t-shirts, their designs, colors, what’s cool, what’s not cool, and who the best t-shirt designers are.

Like Youtube, there’s plenty of voting and commenting going on. Every user feels part of the site because he or she is encouraged to participate. Votes matter. The company holds weekly meetings to decide which designs should be sold on the site. Each design gets votes on a 0-5 scale. The top few winning designs are produced in a limited quantity of 1,200 shirts and then sold on Threadless.com. Winning designers not only get $1500 each, but they feel incredibly important having designed a winning t-shirt on threadless. If you designed one of the shirts that made it on Threadless, wouldn’t you be inclined to tell the world about it? Even if you didn’t win, you’d be inclined to tell your friends to vote on your shirt. You’d be active in the community crushing other designers’ dreams and/or helping choose the winning shirts. Yay, you’re important!

The founders were asked what they thought drove their company to success.

“Allow your content to be created by the community. Put your project in their hands. Let your community grow itself, then reward them for making your project possible.”

Citizen Marketing involves the “3 C’s” – Contests, Co-Creation, and Communities.

Contests: You’ll create interaction and participation within your community. They’ll market themselves within your contest, which will then drive you more traffic. Everybody wins. A good example is the “Spread Firefox” campaign, where fans with webcams were encouraged to record brief testimonials for the web browser. Not only did the winners receive a cash prize, but they felt part of the community and went out of their way to evangelize firefox even more.

Co-Creation is at the fundamental core of companies such as Firefox and Salesforce. Companies are supposed to help its customers in a certain way. By creating a product or service WITH the community and customers, a company is more likely to succeed. Not all companies do this right. Facebook, for example, launched its newsfeed without input from the users. My roomate totally flipped out when seeing the newsfeed for the first time. It seemed to be an invasion of privacy and she hadn’t a clue what facebook was thinking. Many of my friends reacted the same way at the dinner table that evening.

Communities are amazing. We all want to feel part of a community. I love being active in the web 2.0 community because I have a sense of belonging. I have a group of friends who share similar interests with me and I have a moral responsibility to help them out. For example – you’re reading my blog! I have a sense of responsibility to write to you guys each and every day.

Every business needs to have this marketing built into it. If you’re not in the service business, you might as well quit now. My co-founder Alex just posted a nice rant on Startupism, mentioning his ideas for building virality into our business venture through the topics discussed in the book.

There are so many amazing ideas that Citizen Marketers preaches. On a 1-10 scale, I would give this an 8.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She’s currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com and Jessicamah.com.

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