Create Community Buzz with Fun Content

SELL. SERVICE. MARKET. SUCCEED.
Creating Community Content
With Spark
by John Goodman, CCMC and Peter North, TrueNorth

Table of Contents
Creating Community Content With Spark
Creating Community
Content With Spark
Introduction
Chapter 1
Weave Fun Into Your Content
Chapter 2
What Makes Great Content?
Chapter 3
Creating the Spark that Makes Your Community a Winner
Chapter 4
Keep it Light
Chapter 5
Include Incentives
Conclusion
03
04
05
10
12
13
16

Your objectives should dictate the direction of your
content, both in format and in subject matter. If you are a
support community, customers and those with interest in
your subject will want answers. If the primary objective is
creating a broader buzz and attracting new viewers, you
need to emphasize fun and incentives, which we discuss
in the next section. In all cases you must weave fun into
the content, whether by fun facts that can be used in the
members’conversations or silliness (designed humor) that’s
purely and inherently for members to enjoy.
Content is the primary reason
people come to your community.

Best Practices to Grow Your Business Page 4
Weave Fun Into
Your Content
Caution! As Cecile Hudson, head of digital strategy and community founder at
Starbucks says,“Do not oversaturate your site with content.” Your content should
be very conducive to user-generated reactions and responses or even separate,
stand-alone user-generated content. It must also be and sound genuine. Joy
Montefusco of Discovery advises that you have a real person with a real voice
for your moderator and avoid talking in the“Royal We”. The DC Goodwill
Fashionista, Lisa Rowan, is a real person with personal opinions and quirks. She,
as the Fashionista, finds that self-deprecation is engaging and disarming. She has
published pictures of herself in clothes that she decided were a mistake with the
heading,“What was I thinking?”
If part of your brand is doing social good, facilitating this can be part of the five
possible community objectives discussed in our first paper. You can provide
opportunities to do good and recognize those individuals and groups who follow
though. For instance, Umpqua Bank recognizes social activists on the upper right
hand corner of their home page (not two clicks in). One recent post was,“A big
shout out goes to West Seattle’s Arbor Heights Elementary, which amassed more
than 350 lbs of food during its own‘Random Acts of Kindness’activities last week.”
Every parent in the school will go to the bank’s home page to see it.
Chapter 1

Best Practices to Grow Your Business Page 5
Chapter 2
What Makes
Great Content?
The key to making your actual content valuable is uniqueness – Golden
Nuggets that cannot be found anywhere else, ideally accompanied by fun.
As we stressed flexibility in the moderation function described above, you
also need broad flexibility in what content you accept from members. This
flexibility allows you to support an iterative, experimental evolution that
continually fosters successful content additions and narrows to the most
effective content types.
Content can be grouped into three types: Knowledge, Events, and
Collaboration (Commentary & Discussions):
Knowledge
Golden Nuggets (GN) and high-value content – Content that is
immediately useful for important aspects of the customer life should
be disseminated freely rather than hidden behind a paywall. GNs
demonstrate your value and suggest there will be even more value if
the customer explores further. If customer retention and support is

your objective, these GNs are the value-add that
justifies a premium price and fosters word of
mouth.
Knowledge Base – Knowledge repositories are
popular for good reason. They provide immediate,
detailed answers to customers in need, and
reduce support costs and product misuse for the
company. These can exist before or even without
a large user base. Effective indexing and search
capabilities are essential and can only be provided
via a company-controlled online community.
Apple’s support community knowledge bases,
segmented by type of user, are a great example.
Infographics – Infographics are appealing,
succinct digital takeaways that summarize a
much longer article, study, or presentation. Web
users are already known for“skimming”instead
of reading long-form content, so the popularity
of consolidated“eye candy”content shouldn’t be
a surprise. Infographics take more resources to
produce than traditional writing, but are shared
and viewed much more often.
Videos – These videos must cater to the ever-
shortening attention span via brevity. Some major
companies have even managed to fit meaningful
content into Instagram’s 15-second and Vine’s
6-second video length limit. REI.com has short
videos ranging from“10 tips for successful
camping”to“Getting cactus spines out of the
skin,”which, if you had that problem, would be
invaluable. A search or index function is critical to
success.
Expert guest content – Showcasing your
community as an access point to industry experts

little blurb or much marger
“Enlightened customers need less support
and misuse products far less often.”
builds immediate credibility and fosters fast
membership growth. Joy Montefusco of Discovery
notes that viewers love to interact with Adam
and Ian of MythBusters. Guests can also include
prominent community members.
Educational Content – Customers can certainly
learn from other mentioned types of content, but
content that is purely to educate your customers
(no salesmanship) is uniquely advantageous.
Enlightened customers need less support and
misuse products far less often. These customers
can also be fiercely loyal to a company that
selflessly produced educational materials.
Events
Events should include periodic and even spontaneous
activities. This content type is ideal for providing
customers with access to product designers,
executives, or other key decision makers.
Featured members – Welcome new members
and feature support superstars. Twenty-
somethings love seeing themselves on the
web and similar to the Umpqua Bank shout out
mentioned above, the member will tell all their
friends who will visit the site.

Fun-focused multimedia – These are whimsical
“events”aimed at fun and engagement. They
are our only glimpse into the elusive alchemic
formula for viral content. You would be amazed
how far you can get with only“fun.” While it is
good if there is peripheral linkage to your brand
or product that can add to brand recognition,
silliness and fun is key to engagement. For
example, Old Spice after-shave has garnered over
250 million views of their viral ad campaigns and
countless product conversations. They did not
pay for those quarter billion“ad impressions”;
they straddled a traditional advertising model
by publishing the“fun”content with staggering
results.
Collaboration
Commentary – This content works best if it is
somewhat controversial or open to disagreement.
It can be tethered to other content types. For
example, the aforementioned Vintage Fashionista
provides real-time commentary for online fashion
shows (an event) and where up to one third of the
clothing has sold before the event’s end.
Discussions – These can be one-time or
freestanding discussions associated with
articles, documents, or events. Discussions
have an element of risk because they require
attendance to be successful. Discussions should
only follow strong content campaigns of other
formats. Melody Blumenschein, manager of
social media for General Motors, stresses that
discussion threads can be a key to community
spark, but they must be easily found and updates
prominently noted.
It goes without saying that content, regardless of
its type, must be impeccably organized and easily
accessible. Best practices on curating large amounts
of content, modern mobile-friendly design, and
proper indexing go beyond the scope of this paper.

“When content is presented it will be judged
relevant or not in three to five seconds.”
The key principles of well-organized content are as
follows (Caution - books have been written on each of
these sentences.):
Easily digested – When content is presented
it will be judged relevant or not in three to five
seconds. It must be short - ideally a single line of
text or no more than five bullet points.
Easily found – Both a search function and an
intuitive index must exist, which is not always
obvious to the uninitiated.
Easily associated – If I like content item“A”,
what four other content items will expand my
understanding?
Suffice it to say that web users are not a captive
audience, the attention span online is measured
in milliseconds, and frustrated users will leave your
community with a bad impression, as well as a
blemish on your analytics. Offering content as a
digital download is a cost-effective way to disseminate
content with massive long-term potential. Your
content could get shared among many individuals
and organizations in the targeted market or industry,
promoting your brand and building authority.

Best Practices to Grow Your Business Page 10Creating Community Content With Spark
Regardless of the community objective, there are three things that create the
spark: fun, incentives and content. Fun is the most important for creating
spark. It consists of celebrating the customer, humanizing your brand, and
contextualizing the experience of using your products and services. You will
be amazed how much exposure your brand can get if the community’s focus
is on fun – dry content, even if valuable, will not hold customers for very long.
Trae Harris, senior manager of for social, mobile and digital technologies
for Intuit says,“I do agree that content is really king, but keeping it fun is
important. For our Accountants, the community is also a place they can
interact with their peers on a wide range of topics outside of tax preparation.
We have a private lounge for our Accountant All Stars (super users), where
they can share whatever they want. You will see cartoons, funny stories and a
lot of inside jokes.“
The emphasis across the three factors will shift depending upon the objective
– content, especially for B2B sites is very important but must be accompanied
by fun and recognition. Valuable content fulfills a need and often provides
The Spark that Makes
Your Community a Winner
Chapter 3

“Incentives are a complex mix of tangible
and intangible factors. “
the original motivation to visit - whether quickly
answering a business support question or how best
to get cactus spines out of your hand or a new recipe
for spinach lasagna. Fun is preeminent for consumer
sites. Incentives are the second most important with
content being a close third.
Incentives are a complex mix of tangible and
intangible factors. Communispace has executed
innovative research that suggests three major types
of motivators for participation in online communities.
First there are brand-focused motivations, including
desire to influence, affection and keep up to date.
There are community motivations that include desire
to connect, help connecting with like-minded people,
seeking assistance and validation. Finally there are
personal motivations that including hedonic rewards
like fun and social status, tangible rewards like
incentives and self-expression – this overlaps with fun.

Two avenues to infuse fun are through silliness and social good, with the
commonly held third concept that you can have fun by yourself, but more fun
with someone else – as in a group.
Companies such as Old Spice have accomplished all three in their video
advertising, and many big brands are following suit. With carefully crafted,
purpose-driven content, your customers will seek it out for fun, and you
will not need to work or pay for the privilege of providing the content via
traditional advertising methods.
Lisa Rowan, the DC Goodwill Fashionista, stresses the entertaining personality
as key. Think why you watch one TV show vs. another, or stick with a novel
to the end – it is the personalities that you care about and entertain you that
keep you engaged. Your community moderator must have a fun, entertaining
personality. Trae Harris of Intuit encourages both controversy and humor.
Remember, something that is funny and light has a higher probability of being
shared than something that is deep and intellectual.
Keep it Light
Intuit posts accountant
jokes such as:
Chapter 4

The spark starts with fun, and in order for objectives that require any effort by
the member such as answering questions, giving ideas, even posting content,
there must also be incentives. The incentives can be recognition, especially
if gamified. You can do this even when starting out by recognizing two
contributors each day and the top contributor of the week. Recognition as
someone who can get things fixed is a huge incentive. The City of Philadelphia
Philly 311 community liaisons get status in their community via knowing how
to use the service request process to get potholes fixed, which makes them
the“go to”person for city assistance.
Ultimately, you might want to give your top contributors some tangible
rewards, even if not broadcasted to the community as a whole. For instance,
when Starbucks introduced a new coffee machine, they send machines
to a few of their top MyStarbucksIdeas participants. Chick-Fil-A provides
publicity and recognition for those dressing up as cows and, occasionally, free
sandwiches. Boyd Gaming provides recognition and priority for restaurants
and free rooms for top gamers.
Trae Harris of Intuit says,“Building a relationship with our All Star is very
important. One way we have done this is to be willing to make fun of
Include Incentives
Chapter 5

sense of long-term progression that culminates from
daily efforts.
These game elements take the form of discrete
feedback loops. For example, I have even found
myself responding to feedback from my car’s
dashboard. There is an eco-driving screen that tells
me the percentage of the time I am driving in an
environmentally responsible manner. I have caught
myself working to drive more smoothly so that I can
see the percentage rise a few points.
Gamification really does work, and it can be a
powerful propellant for community growth.
Starbucks’s community highlights a leaderboard
of members with consistently good ideas. The
language-learning app Duolingo motivates consistent
learning with“hot streaks”of daily logins, the
unlocking of new content, and competition among
friends. The technology community StackOverflow
ourselves. In August we moved to a new platform for
our community. With any move like this there will be
some hiccups. To show them we understood some
of the pain from the move, I started an impromptu
contest in the Lounge. I asked them to give me the
their best one line description of the launch. Only
rule was the one that made me laugh the most
won. I actually picked two winners and sent them a
Kindle Fire.” Also, the All Star Lounge has a dedicated
support rep for answering questions.
Incentives and gamification provide good feelings and
social status. There is no better way to add fun into
your customer experience than with game elements.
Gamification can create an enjoyable experience for a
vast variety of customer types: competitors who seek
their rank among peers, completionists who derive
satisfaction from fulfilling tasks, social customers who
seek interaction, and status seekers who look for a

“Gamification really does work, and
it can be a powerful propellant for
community growth.“
encourages users to help their fellow colleagues
resolve complex technical programming challenges
and collect points awarded by the colleague in need.
These are all carefully designed techniques to elicit
targeted user behavior, and in most cases, this ends
up being a motivator for frequent and continual use
of the product or service.
Additional gamification incentives can take the form
of intangible public recognition and the receipt
of tangible benefits such as freebies, upgrades, or
publicity – e.g., best video gets posted or included in
an advertisement. Aflac Insurance recently picked a
new voice actor for their beloved mascot by simply
asking customers for auditions, which made for
positive publicity, warm, fuzzy, humor-based feelings
from customers, the filling of a much-needed role, and
lots of enjoyable submissions.

Content must contain Golden Nuggets while being fun. Your moderator must have a quirky
personality that is both fun and smart. Invest in incentives and gamification that provide both
recognition and small tangible benefits for your top contributors.
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