1. Starting Open
Instead of starting with open doors you should look to exploit the ‘scarcity principle’; When people think something is less common and more exclusive they are more likely to want it. By starting your club open you make yourself less appealing than by being a closed member’s only club.
Another reason to start closed is because when you first start the first people to get involved are going to see a pretty empty looking site, by keeping it shut and a private club you cause two things to happen. Firstly visitors don’t see an empty site and leave (lost traffic) they actually sign up, and by the time they’ve realised it’s empty at least you’ve already got them in and can nurture them. Secondly you encourage loyalty by having a smaller closed group. Small closed groups always lead to invites, word of mouth and growth in the long-term. Everybody wants to join the secret club their friends are part of, even if they aren’t entirely sure what it even is.
2. Starting International
It’s a good idea to think globally in the long term, but in the short term it’s an issue; You haven’t got a community yet, so why are you trying to build a community for the world when you haven’t cracked your own city?
All the major sites of today started in a specific area: Face book on a college campus and Yelp in San Francisco. It’s better to start in one area, nurture the people in that area and build up a local community on your site first, then go next door to the next city, do the same there, and the next one, and so on, until the world is yours.
When you start a company, you have limited staff and limited budgets. That means you are limited in what you can do. If you had offices in every country then it would be easy to have people growing your company all over the world at once, but nobody starts off that way with a new business. So focus your resources in one area.
3. Targeting Everybody
Seth Godin once said: “A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.” My number one piece of advice for success in marketing – know your audience. If you don’t have one, get one.
In the long term you may be planning to go mass market and be for everyone (Like Facebook) but you can’t start that way, conquer one audience at the time. Face book started out as ‘the college kids network’, that is a position they seem to have shaken off well, but it’s also why they made it to where they have today – one of the most famous brands in the world.
Instead of trying to be all things to all people be something to some people – Mumsnet is one of the biggest social networks in the UK. Their focus? Mums. Not mums and dads, just mums.
Try reducing the size of your target audience, it’s counter-intuitive to say, but you’ll probably become more famous by having a smaller more focused target audience to start off, than you will by casting your net as far as you can.
4. Following the Leader
As much as I love using examples of successful companies like Facebook and YouTube, the fact is they got there their way, and every business is different. If you copy exactly what Facebook did, it does not necessarily mean you will get the result that Facebook got. The world already has a Facebook, why do we need a Facebook #2?
Watch the leaders carefully, but never copy them. Instead, find ways to do the opposite of them. For example, I’d argue that by losing touch with their original target audience of college students Facebook has left a gap in the market for someone else to come along and start a new social network for that niche (College kids have a problem with being on the same site as their mum and dad).
Don’t copy what they do, look for mistakes they make, and capitalise on it by doing the opposite. Richard Branson makes a lot of his best decisions based on this drive.
Noticed the market leader has a bad reputation for customer service? Start up a new company and focus your marketing campaigns, and business goals on better customer service. Next time they have a problem with the leading brands customer reps being rude to them, it’s your door they’ll come knocking at – and that could be an awful lot of people in some categories.
5. Failing to Create a Culture
When starting out a social network, your goal should be to create a specific culture; when people come to your site, and it isn’t a recognisable leading brand, they need to find something on there that is for them in order to find a reason to stick around and become part of the party – this is the reasoning behind maintaining focus on a specific audience and location when launching.
The risk in starting out is that when you get the word out about the service, people will come, but they will find no one there they know (if you stick to one location, they’re more likely to find someone there they know) and they want to know there’s a group of people with similar interests to them, as we like to hang out in groups of people that like the same kinds of things we do.
By defining a culture and focusing on a location, when people come they will find people on there they know, and so won’t feel alone and frightened to get involved, and they will see that the people out there are similar to them and they can make new friends with all the other people currently on the site who are like them, and therefore ‘likeable’, and that is how strong communities are built.
Daniel Morell is an Internet Marketer specialising in New Media such as Social Media and Mobile, he runs his own Marketing Agency called InSync Marketing and works with Offline and Online specialists to link the functions together in an integrated fashion. His clients include Fortune 500 Companies, British Charities and Government Bodies.
