OH: Every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question "How do we tweet?" the second by the question "Why do we blog?" and the third by the question "Where shall we have the next social campaign?"

 

We are here to see humans move from why to where!

Redefining Communities

Community engagement – a key growth factor for Public Media

Introduction

Indiana Public Media (IPM, but it has other, more popular names) is a non-profit organization based in Bloomington, Indiana. Their growth over the last few years in light of growing pressure faced by the industry has been an interesting story, part of which can be attributed to their So.Me. efforts. We met with Adam Schweigert, new media director at IPM and tried to put our hands around the elusive notion of community engagement.

source: http://indianapublicmedia.org

As a major media outlet in Indiana, IPM has developed great content and knowledge from what Bloomington and Indiana University have to offer, both in terms of specialized local news and generic, globally relevant content. It is important to note that the majority of funding for IPM comes from donations and grants.Online advertising revenue, has shown some growth, but is still quite small compared to costs. :

Growing through social networks

The public media industry, in general, has a great repository of relevant content, both past and current. In order to leverage it, most of the players, including IPM, have embarked on the process of making that content digitally available during the last decade. Search engines have made this content highly accessible, from anywhere across the globe. With the increasing penetration of social networks, content has become a great asset for building inbound traffic. The problem with social networks is the competition for attention, not only among the media outlets themselves but also with the users friends and activities.It boils down to the question of engaging bigger communities across geographies.

There are two approaches that can be taken in building an online community presence. The first one is mimicking the organization’s community presence in the real world and the second is to align and build a presence withing “topical online communities”. The word topical implies communities based on a certain common interest, value or mission. Although the first approach is easy to initiate it has limited growth potential; the nature of the medium (So.Me.) makes the topical communities less bound by real world limitations emerging from geography, political policy or social stigma.The IPM story provides support to the case in point:

Addressing the Local community:

In 2008 IPM’s social media presence began with a local WFIU group on facebook which to date has 175 members! realizing that consumers expect WFIU to be a constant source of information, the organization introduced local fan pages which provided constant updates (WFIU 684 fans, WTIU 212 fans). Similarly, early twitter accounts were geo-targeted. The weekly radio audience in Southern Indiana is abround 42,000. Following the traditional growth path through this geographical alignment (i.e. maximizing reach in the local market), IPM seems to have reached a ceiling around 2007/08.

Reaching Beyond the local audience:

Because of their geo-targeted nature, the local community accounts had a ceiling on the number of people they could engage. This led Adam and his team to explore community building around topical themes. His team experimented with several topic ranging from culture/religion (@Muslim Voices) to gardening (@FocusOnFlowers). These platforms not only provided a means to market content to audience beyond the local population but also an avenue to leverage the treasure trove of past content. Looking at the number of Twitter followers across their  various accounts a few interesting facts come across :

  1. Occasionally the topical accounts become key figures inside passionate communities with a “mission”. In IPMs case they were Earth Eats, Muslim Voices and Kinsey Confidential™. None of the local accounts were able to reach such a scale in audience.  (about: Earth Eats : on local food and sustainable agriculture. It is one of the most followed twitter accounts based in Indiana. Muslim Voices: is a project of Indiana University dedicated to promoting understanding and dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims. Interestingly, despite having no Muslim team member tweeting, they won the Brass Crescent Award for the best tweeter in the Islamosphere. Kinsey Confidential™ is a sexuality information service designed to meet the sexual health information needs of college-age adults.)
  2. The age of the account doesn’t really have an effect on the popularity. This is a broad statement. @SoMeCasestudies would like to pursue it as analysis in latter studies.
  3. Not all topical accounts or communities will grow into mission based groups. Most of them plateau at a certain follower/community size. It then becomes a question of how large a community has to continue to be supported.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Has this transformation and evolution into social endeavors helped the IPM from an ROI perspective? This is a very hard question to answer at this point in time.
There is a greater opportunity to run successful micro-fundraising campaigns driven by the community members, similar to Wikipedia fundraising campaigns. The execution of such campaigns will need efficient use of technology (mobile payments) and good marketing. Increase in viewership outside of Indiana and outside of the US from 2008 to 2009 is a clear indicator of a return from the social media initiatives. The challenge is to convert this increase in traffic into more donations to support and grow IPM’s initiatives which help the community in more than just the ‘social media’ terms.

The single biggest focus in IPM’s SoMe model is Awareness, which increases conversation as well as translates into an increase in brand equity. The second major component is listening, not only to IPM’s current community members, but also for new product ideas (topical ideas). Moreover, keeping an eye on competition can also lead to new product innovation and uses of content. These pieces contribute to the number of of listeners and viewers. These listeners and viewers are the treasured asset of IPM.


The right hand side of the above diagram operates on the assumption that more viewers and listeners would contribute to more donations and grants. The cloud represents the fuzzy and non-quantifiable nature of the state of returns.

Sustainability & Risks

The biggest issue for Indiana Public Media is that all these initiatives are not the primary projects for Adam’s team. Moreover, accounts, like KinseyCon compete for attention with the personal brand owners, like Dr. Debby Herbenick. Any change in personnel could potentially lead to a lag or discontinuity.

  1. How can sustainability be built into the organization?
  2. How to resolve the conflict of interest with personal brand vs. mission based community? (UrbanTurbanGuy vs. SoMeCaseStudies)
  3. What are the incentives for new experts to come on board to help develop a mission?
  4. Do these mission based communities need to have a long-term strategy and execution plan?

This is a similar question that we raised in our first interview with Jim Cahill, because Jim’s personal brand is driving his blog.

Conclusions

  • Pre-existing organizational structure might not be the best one to mimic in online communities
  • Community following is built by aligning with common values and missions (topical)
  • Not all topical initiatives will be successful, but they stand a better chance of success
  • Clear definition of incentive structures and succession planing are important for long term sustainability of communities
Posted: February 23rd, 2010 | Tags: , , | Comments: Comments