Launching a Successful Online Community

I recently participated in an online discussion among higher education web professionals around the topic of launching an internal online community, and while the discussion was focused specifically on online communties for groups like university alumni networks, it’s probably fair to say that at a broad level the same principles apply no matter what your specific community is.

A few themes emerged which generally came down to one question:

How would you roll out a community and encourage participation to see it grow?

Here’s what I offered to the conversation.

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Adding iPhone Apps to the Mix

The New York Times recently profiled a few developers who made it big selling iPhone apps, and while it’s becoming tough to compete in what is quickly become a saturated market, we are still in the very early days and there are still plenty of opportunities to be had in the world of iPhone and mobile development.

If you’re interested in learning more about developing applications for the iPhone, the opportunities are out there if you’re a talented developer with an entrepreneurial bent and some tolerance for the risk that comes with selling iPhone apps in a closed market environment.

For starters, you’ll want to visit the iPhone Dev Center and sign up for the iPhone Developer Program and see if you have the chops on the programming side. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to access the online resource materials such as videos introducing you to iPhone development, as well as documentation, sample code, and a wealth of articles. As you’ll quickly find out, iPhone apps are developed in Objective-C – a superset of C that uses syntax from both C and Smalltalk. Objective-C isn’t for the faint of heart but luckily there seems to be a fair bit of documentation out there such as Apple’s own Introduction to the Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language.

You’ll also want to be sure to check out the process for distributing an iPhone app and then also think of creative ways to market and promote your app – after all, you’re going to be competing with thousands of iPhone apps. In all this, you’ll also want to become very familiar with the concept of micropayments because, contrary to early predictions that micropyament would fail as a business model, micropayments have played an integral role in the revenue model of successful iPhone application businesses.

Favourite iPhone Apps?

For our part, we’re going to start reviewing some of our favourite apps right here in the Midstride blog. If you have any favourite iPhone Apps, we’d love to hear about them – drop us a comment below and let us know which you love, which you hate, which you wish you made, or better yet which iPhone app you wish someone out there would make!

Buncholinks from this Article:

Real-time Web Analytics – The Woopra Advantage

There’s a change happening in the world of web analytics – there’s a new kid on the block that’s changing the game in subtle ways: real-time data. Where the previously predominant model of data tracking came from once-daily reporting of data, a new breed of analytics is emerging thanks in part to the likes of tools like Woopra.

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E-mail Marketing – How many emails is too many?

At work the other day, I was forwarded an email with a co-worker asking for my thoughts to a question. The question went along the lines of: “How many emails in a defined time period should we be sending to our customers? How many emails is too many?” My answer? One!

But really, how many emails is too many?

Here were my thoughts on the matter.

When people sign up for a mail-out, it’s likely because they are:

• curious as to what they’re going to receive
• interested in something they saw from a related communication
• enticed by some sort of incentive, or
• doing a competitive analysis to see what other organizations are doing with their mailouts, or trying to get their hands on an HTML email template they can use as a basis for designing one for themselves

As long as that person gets something valuable out of the mailing, they’ll stay subscribed.

When do they unsubscribe? Anyone read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell? I think people unsubscribe when a series of things happen that tips them over the edge:

1. They receive a message that doesn’t have any content that speaks directly to their interests, and
2. They receive similar messages from other sources (either from you or from completely different lists they’ve signed up for), and
3. They look in their inbox and suddenly see it’s getting full of emails that they don’t need or want or have any useful need for

Once those 3 things happen, they’ll be on the verge of unsubscribing and all it will take to push them over the edge is one more email from you on a day when their inbox is already really full. So to answer, “How many emails is too many?” in this case it really is just one!

The Key to Email is VALUE

Often a company will be sending out regularly scheduled emails – for example a monthly newsletter or a weekly update of recent discussions in their online forums. In general, these will be well-received provided the recipients signed up to receive the mailings.

In many other cases, though, people will still sign up to receive e-newsletters, not know for sure how often or when they’ll receive the email.

In general, when you send an email to someone and they aren’t expecting it (for example, they didn’t sign up to receive a regularly-scheduled mail-out or they didn’t first send you an email expecting a reply), it stands to reason that they’ll be surprised when they receive your message. People like surprises when they get something. People don’t like surprises when they are asked for something.

So following this line of thought, if you’re sending mail-outs that people aren’t expecting, you’ll want to make sure you are giving people something that is of value to them (i.e. something that’s meaningful, relevant, generally interesting to them, or has actual monetary value).

But what about the “should” from a marketer’s standpoint?

On the flip side of all this is the perspective of what you “should” do to help build your business and your brand. And on this side of the communications, you “should” be sending out as many emails as it takes to keep your existence in people’s minds.

You’re competing for their attention and need to do what you can to keep it when you get it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to send a lot of emails – it could just mean you have to send them one or two a month that will grab enough of their attention to get them to visit the website.

Provided you then have something of value on the website, that will be enough to keep them coming back or it will at least be enough to stop them from going away the next time you send them another message.

What about email marketing usability?

As far as usability goes, Jakob Nielsen is talked about a lot in circles of usability. The guy drives me nuts sometimes, but he also often has useful (or at least thought provoking) info on emails, for example check out these links:

What do you think?

There’s no place for unsolicited email, but what about semi-unsolicited email? What kind of emails do you like to receive? What do you value when it comes to email offers or promotions? What drives you up the wall and prompts you to unsubscribe?

What the iPhone, Android, and Chrome Mean For Web Professionals

A quiet shift is happening in the world of web design and development – one that has been in the works for a few years, but is now starting to come to fruition: the mobile world is mobilizing to point a whole lot of eyes onto our websites. Our canvas may be shrinking, but the opportunities will continue to grow. Here’s what’s happening in the mobile world that will affect you as a web professional, and what you can do to prepare for the change.

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