Capulet Communications

A part of what we do at Capulet is create, manage and advise on online communities. I wouldn't necessarily call it a core service, but it's inevitably an important chunk of any social media project.

So, we do a fair bit of reading and blog monitoring on the subject.  Here are three articles which recently crossed over our transom:

• Social Signal writes about how to rage-proof your online community. I don't necessarily agree with all their points--there's no real way to avoid invective, and I think any social group needs a bit--but their advice is very sound. 
• Over at Common Craft, Lee's created a huge master list of what your community can look like beyond a simple discussion forum. It'll make a very useful checklist when deciding what should and shouldn't go in a given project.
• Nancy is sociliting feedback for an update to her excellent article about faciliting online communities. 

Gosh, we've been bad bloggers. Sorry about that, it's been a busy time around Capulet. I've got a couple of blog posts in the hopper, though, so don't give up on us.

In the meantime, please consider signing this petition (and Digging the related blurb) being run by our of clients, DeSmogBlog:

Yesterday we reported that News Corp. CEO and Fox News owner, Rupert Murdoch announced that his company would join the battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The first thing Murdoch and News Corp. can do to show that they are truly committed to fighting global warming is ending its reporting of misinformation about the science behind global warming on the Fox News Channel.

And the best thing you can do to help make this happen is by signing DeSmogBlog's online petition and then send it to all of your friends and have them sign it as well. Ask them to forward it on to their friends.

I actually thought it was quite a remarkable announcement by Murdoch, given the politics of Fox's viewership. The inertia behind the climate change skeptics seems to be melting away like so much, well, ice.

A couple of weeks ago, a new video shot to the top of the 'most viewed' list on YouTube. It was ten seconds in length and was utterly benign. In other words, it was just like the other zillion young talking heads in front of a webcam. Why, then, did this young woman named Kallie (with a YouTube account called GreenTeaGirlie) garner 268,653 views (according to Utility Belt, who otherwise misses the point, the video got about 215,000 views in the first two days)?

View spam. Unethical marketers, presumably with green tea to promote, apparently used auto-refresh software and fake accounts to ratchet up the number of views and subscribers. As always happens, the YouTube community detected this bold and ill-advised deception, and piled in with a schwack of nasty comments. Here's a quick sampling:

Viral marketing sucks. So why make the whole YouTube community go mad over this?

OMG OMG! You are like the Mostest AWESOMENEST ever! I am going to call all the TV stations and newspapers in my area and let them know of this AMAZING discovery!!

i hate you already.

You get the idea. Kallie replied with a pretty vague, denial-free follow-up. If she wasn't, in fact, a marketing shill, I would have expected some moral indignation.

Over at Read/Write Web, Emre Sokullu has written an interesting piece about the different paces at which Web apps should aspire to hit the Web 2.0 homerun:

Aha, you think, the cheapest and shortest path is  viral marketing - via blogs and social news sites. So you turn to your favorite sites like digg, del.icio.us, TechCrunch and (of course) Read/WriteWeb. Somehow your email to Michael Arrington or Richard MacManus gets noticed above the hundreds of others, so your site gets featured and then other blog coverage follows! Yippee, this is the fame you were waiting for! But a few days later....absolute silence.

Emre's advice for most Web startups is to focus on niches and then broaden your user base.

In my experience, web traffic is spikey. When you plot healthy web traffic on a graph, you should get big spikes, occasional troughs and steady, upward growth. If you're lucky enough to get Dugg, and drive that huge chunk of incoming traffic, then probably some subset of those Digg users will hang around. Those folks represent an upward blip in your daily, regular traffic.

The real trick, of course, is in converting those spikes into customers. If you've built your site with the right calls to action (whether that be buy, download, contribute, subscribe and so forth) in the right spots, you can take full advantage when Digg comes a knocking.

Tags: web-20, marketing, traffic, visitors, digg

As our clients know, we're pretty sceptical about online advertising. Contextual keyword ad programs like Google AdWords work great, but we generally discourage most other programs.

Seth Godin announced Squidoo's new variation on the online a--the SquidOffer:

So we invented SquidOffers, which I hope will work for us, and which I fully expect will show up in other places soon. The idea is to combine the voting mechanism of Reddit or Digg or Plexo with the text ad mindset of a Google ad. But instead of an ad, it's an offer.

Make an offer. Pick a category. Pay a small fee ($100 a month). Then, our users vote on the offers. Get a lot of votes and you rank more highly, which means more clicks. And you don't pay for the clicks.

We've signed Capulet up to give it a try (it looks like the program actually goes live on Monday). We assembled a page of our best web marketing articles and then wrote a (hopefully) clever, informal ad for it. We'll see how it goes.

Tags: web marketing, online advertising, cpc, squidoo, AdWords, Web-20