Found at: http://publish.ez.no/article/articleprint/48
|
My path through community building continues after a short hiatus. I've led you through starting up, planning your site and content. From now on I'll jump from place to place, just adding my views on stuff which I have something to write about with regards to community building.
I'll start with memberships.
Why Memberships?
Memberships is a way to keep track of who your visitors are. It will also help you keep track of how people navigate your site, valuable data in its own sense. The members are people who have invested some time in your site.
The membership records are also the only records you can rely on with regards to your demographics, so take good care of them.
When to Push for Membership
Ideally everyone visiting your site were known to you. Unfortunately, and thankfully I will personally add, the world doesn't work like this. Thus you need to elicit information from your users without turning them away.
A member has invested something in your site, at least the time and worry of registering. Not everyone has the time nor inclination to do this. Each time you want to turn somebody into a member consider the cost of it - for you. If you've ever been to a site where you just left because you had to register to do something, you've found the cost of membership. You loose customers. In fact you loose the initial sale.
Therefore delay registering people until the last moment. If you're a shop, let people shop without giving you info. Only when the user wants the merchandise sent home do you need name, address, etc.
Try to sneak in registration info during normal use. Say that someone posts to a forum on your site, then you could ask for the person's e-mail address in order to send info about replies to the posting.
Keeping Track of Potential Members
You should send a cookie to everyone visiting your site. Then register how often they return to your site. Then you can on the 10th, 14th or nth time of returning tell the person that we'd like to know who you are. You know they are committed by the number of times they've returned. You might also have collected some info on their interests. Leverage that in some way.
Giving People Incentives to Register
Simple incentives are giving something to registered users which anonymous user's don't get. The possibility to save information, filter information, using parts of the site (forums, articles, etc). The trick is to not hamper people in using your site while not registered, you need to reel them in slowly.
Don't Sell Out
If you've followed media you've noticed that many people get upset when their private data is used for other purposes than the stated. It is a sure method of loosing goodwill and getting bad press to try to profit unduly from the data you've collected.
Always state clearly what information will be used for, and also state what your policy is on private information. You need to build trust.