This is Part 2 in a series by Andrew Kraft on the importance of authentications as a corporate-wide strategy. Read Part 1 here.
Ultimately, a well-managed online community can turn casual visitors into return users – and more importantly, logged-in return users. When done right, community is additive to editorially-created content and monetization, and creates data to help drive marketing strategies.
Building a community is more than just enabling a comments section. Real communities bring users together, fostering dialogue and creating shared experiences, and increases the interaction with editorial teams, as well. When publishers get community-building right, it transforms engagement and creates lasting relationships. This requires teams from throughout the company: ad tech, user experience, and editorial. Let’s dive into how to go beyond comments to create a vibrant community.
The pitfalls of community
Building community has been tasked to adtech, or audience development, or even to editorial – but usually just one of these teams, working in a silo, in an effort to streamline who’s working on this and save resources. But this leads to uneven progress and cross-functional opinions being overlooked, and in many cases, editorial opts to avoid involvement with community building altogether.
However, given the importance of authentications to every part of publishers’ organizations, community building needs to be a priority across teams. As part of reinforcing the importance of authentications, publishers also need to shift from thinking of community building as a siloed afterthought, to having multiple teams contribute and turn this into a driving force.
Commenting vs. community
Historically, many have viewed commenting and community as synonymous, and think solving commenting automatically solves community. Community should be integrated throughout publisher pages, and should foster persistent, ongoing dialogue between users.
Here’s keys to driving healthy community:
- Community should require logins. Not only does this help publishers to further their goal of authentications, but it also helps drive healthy, positive conversations.
- Community should be moderated. This helps to ensure that users will have a positive experience when interacting with other users. Moderation can be done through automated tools, as well as through human moderators.
- Community should be structured in a way that helps drive conversations instead of commenting. Commenting tends to lead to users focusing on single articles, and combative one-off posts rather than ongoing engagement. Users should be able to congregate around different levels of content – starting at the topic level, but also series of articles, as well as other hubs for engagement – for persistent conversations that lead to ongoing conversations and interactions between users.
- Editorial is part of the community. You may not realize it, but editorial is in direct conversation with the users that consume what it makes. Having editorial engage with the community, even if in a curated and/or moderated way, helps incentivize engagement from users, driving further meaningful exchange, both between users as well as users helping to share what content they find engaging.
Finally, editorial can also base content on the community. As many sites have shown, there’s compelling content and conversations happening between the users themselves, and generating content that features users, or comes from user interactions, provides further incentives for community participation.
Community drives a growing base of return registered users
The more consumers feel connected, the more likely they are to engage with your content regularly. Every visit offers another opportunity to deepen the relationship and capture more data. This can then feed into editorial teams to help influence editorial direction, ad tech to add first-party data, newsletter signups, offers for subscriptions and other products, ecommerce and more.
Andrew Q. Kraft speaks on issues around identity, privacy, industry evolution, and what all of those mean to the publishing and broadcasting side of the business. Most recently, he served as President & Chief Operating Officer at The Arena Group. Prior to that, he served on the executive team at AppNexus in a variety of roles ranging from head of business and corporate development to the creation of AppNexus’ publisher-direct business to launching their ad sales team to his role as interim Chief Financial officer. Previously, he led the publisher-facing business at Collective after spending several years growing the IAB as head of revenue and member services.