Youtube + Facebook + Blog + Community = Talking to everybody according to their need
Communication is a major issue of the web, and quality its graal. Basics of the web is sharing and celebrating which means there is more noise than signal (reshared vs. original content). Companies have to deal with that and a solution is to make more noise than the others, avoiding competitors any opportunity to generate noise and signal. That’s the easy way, but a way than may lead to conflict and decrease of brand image. The other way is to generate a targeted signal to aim at people when they’re ready to listen and take the message as signal and not noise.
As we do when joining the conversation we care about many different items : body language, people with who the person is speaking, topic of the conversation, feelings about the scene, … And any of these items can invite you to jump into the conversation. It’s the same when willing to generate a conversation on the web: you generate a conversation on a platform, the information of the conversation is spread around the Internet and people come to join you. Off the conversation, people are speaking about it, and you should care about those people too, to suggest them to add value to the discussion, to generate side chats and to start sharing related thoughts.
Using community platforms, blogs, Youtube, and any web channels as people interest drivers
That’s why you have to care about blogs, community platforms, Facebook, Youtube and any other channels of web communication (like micro-blogging using Twitter and Identi.ca). But above all you have to create a permanent point of contact that would become the central spot of the conversation, the point where anybody can link to and drive people (meaning traffic and interest here).
Create a blog to share your thoughts, a community platform to invite people to join the conversation (the blog isn’t well structured enough to make the conversation easy), use Youtube as your on-demand content broadcasting and ready to share tool, FlickR to share instant pictures of events while you’re hosting the conversation, and any other web channels to invite and help people get the big picture and join your discussion.
Dell Community platform as an example
Dell is doing great in the way they’re leveraging web channels to distribute on-demand information and content using the Dell Community platform, as well as hiring people to become their web representative through Twitter and during live events. Do as they do, generating an iterative experience and you would definitly move integrate the “web way to do things”. And the best way to turn your noise into signal.
Photo Credit: McAzadi
