At the recently held TechEd 2011 in India, I was asked the following question by a user group leader, “How can I popularize my user group “. I shared a few ideas which can help drive traffic and raise awareness of the group. Here are a few a of them.
Popularizing your group is no different an activity than popularizing a company. If you look at what most companies do they use traditional and online PR and media to help promote or as is becoming common nowadays, explore social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). However, most user group leaders certainly don’t have these kind of budgets and these kinds of activities are not necessarily conducive to promoting community activities. I’m however, going to focus on very simple activities which are doable by any leader.
Ideas to popularize your user group / community web site
- Consistency - Whatever you do, make sure you do regularly. Whether it’s updated content/articles on your group site, or regular meetings. You don’t have to have a lot going on, but consistency in what you do is extremely important.
- Talk with the Stars - Every one likes to see and know what the rock stars are doing, we naturally look up to the stars and hope to learn more or aspire to be one, eventually. Interview rock stars for your user group website. Most won’t have an issue in responding to a set of 5-6 questions. Keep it short and you’ll be surprised how many would respond. You could simply target each influencer (MVP, RD, speaker) in your country and hey don’t just stop there. Every book author, and influencer across the world. The added benefit of this one activity is that, more than often they will mention about the interview on their blog/twitter post etc. which might help drive some traffic to you.
- Guest Articles – Invite your members, influencers to contribute guest articles, have your members vote for the articles and reward the best ones each month. Even a simple acknowledgement on the website itself is a good start. Invariably each article writer would be self-motivated to mention the article on his blog/twitter post and share with friends. In addition add such posts on to aggregation sites like DIGG. Post on FB, Twitter etc. as well.
- Get listed - Make sure your group is listed on popular search engines, Industry association sites(INETA, GITCA, PASS) and make your group details are correctly mentioned out there. e.g. number of members, group focus, meeting dates etc. Ensure that your group meeting/events are posted on your public Twitter, Facebook, Blog sites as well.
Lastly, share the load. The above four activities though simple can be time consuming. Make sure you enlist the help of volunteers in your group. Assign each one a specific task. For e.g. One person for posting new articles on the group website, FB, Twitter and DIGG. Another person, for posting group meeting details online. One person to send out interviews and publish them on your site. If you’re all alone then pick maximum of two of the above tasks and do them yourself. Don’t try and do all, cause doing all the above consistently can be a challenge.
If you’ve got ideas which have worked for you, please do share via the comments, would love to hear about them.
