Nicholas Cifuentes

When it comes to growing communities in an online environment, collaboration is the key.

How often do you see people, young and old, carry on multiple conversations on Facebook? Younger people seem to have the instinct to know how to pool their resources – sharing information as easy as pressing ‘enter’. Approaching this concept on a business level, can be a bit different – collaboration is the common goal, and it take all parts involved to create this partnership.

However, if you think you know where I am going with this, I am not going to talk about in-house collaboration; that is for another discussion. I want to talk about external collaboration – aka ‘Wikis’.

Sharing information is what today’s ‘Web 2.0’ world is about. Allowing others to take part in your community, be it a blog, forum, website – a Wiki goes one step further. It allows ‘personalized’ information to take the forefront and become the spoken word for your brand. Creating a Wiki that might allow others to supply information, fill-in-the-blanks, and create viable documentation at the same time – is the best of both worlds.

Now, you may not have a brand that is suited for this, that is fine – but you may be surprised how many brands can build out external wikis and make them successful.

Evaluation

What do you do? Let’s think about what your brand does for you. Who is your demographic? What type of information do they read? – questions like this will open up discussions for the possibilities of creating an external wiki.

What don’t you do? This is even a better question to pose to your team. What about your brand is missing? What do you want to see improve, in terms of ‘collaboration’, amongst your brand?

How will a wiki improve my brand? This could be the end all question, and might make sense for you not to implement such a branding tool into your website(s). Even though the conversation might end here – just re-think for a moment ‘why’ this might be effective for you, and more importantly ‘why not’?

Benefits of a Wiki

Highly Targeted Traffic. A wiki produces this, plain and simple. If you create a wiki that is area-concentrated, and maybe, let’s use this for example only, in the surfing industry; after you produce enough content on the pages – you will begin to see your keyword searches improve for particular events that relate to your industry. Simply put, the web loves content, and because a wiki is 99 percent content, wiki pages end up ranking very high in search engines. NOTE: Pay attention to all SEO devices, don’t expect just by putting information on a wiki page for your websites to go right to the top of search engine results…we all wish that could happen – but it doesn’t. Play it Straight!

Branding. As far as branding and marketing strategy – a wiki can act as an authority for your industry if you develop the concept properly. If you want to be seen as an authority in the ‘surfing’ industry, for example – why not develop a wiki and build out a branding page of surfing, the best spots, wave lengths, daily tides, how to do it, etc, etc…I only use this as an off the cuff example – but you see my point.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the back-to-school season in full swing, a number of retailers have lined up social media tactics to attract new shoppers.

Targeting teens and young adults – social media has emerged as a key component in drawing new targeted users through social networking sites, such as facebook, to deliver their marketing campaigns.

With an already shaky economy scaring buyers away from the stores, shoppers need to realize that retailers will only use these types of marketing efforts more often as consumers continue to pinch pennies.

To promote a new clothing line, J.C. Penny created an online game called “DorkDodge” in which a girl has to navigate through a number of unwanted boyfriends to find her dream date.  The retailer also launched an integrated marketing campaign that gave the teens the opportunity to ‘get that look’, using a clothing theme from the movie “The Breakfast Club.”

And retailers like Victoria’s Secret and Apple are using their valued partnerships with universities and college-aged consumers as a key demographic.  Victoria’s Secret partnered with 33 universities to launch Pink’s Collegiate Collection, a series of shirts, accessories and sports gear cross-branded with colors, names and mascots from participating universities.  And as part of Apples’s back-to-school promotion, students and faculty of an accredited university receive a free iPod with the purchase of a computer.

And it should be said, that retailers will find a stronger influence with social media and Web 2.0 experiences by allowing most of the benefits coming from branding and awareness building, rather than direct sales.