Today's post was written by Ryan Stephens and myself. Ryan is a young entrepreneur whose vision entails helping others realize the power of relationship marketing that stems from generosity and helping others so that both parties are leveraging the success of the partnership and their own respectful networks.
Stuart’s been kind enough to share his podium with me. He’ll interject and add content where appropriate, and hopefully we’ll intertwine our thoughts to produce some valuable takeaways from two different vantage points. If this experiment doesn’t suck (and please tell us if it does), I suspect it might occur again sometime.
About a week ago Stuart penned a post entitled “Putting the ‘Cult’ in Culture.” It was a fascinating post that explored the difference between cult communities and culture communities, and essentially why you should care.
This triggered me to think about cult communities, and the interaction in the upper echelon of those communities. If you’re familiar with the top guys on Digg or on the Warrior Forum you know what I’m talking about. Hell, chances are if you’re a part of a forum there is an upper tier group (in terms of # of posts, influence, clout, etc.), and often times it’s a circle jerk at the top, one that rarely lets the ‘new guy’ sit that the grown up table. Is social media like this perhaps?
Let me preface this post by saying that those at the top usually got there by:
A.) Working hard and providing valuable content
B.) Being early movers, risk takers and trend setters
C.) Building and growing their network so that they latch onto someone else for momentum
All that said, just because they got there first, doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve to be there as well.
Here are five ways for ascending from total newbie to a prolific member of the inner circle
1. PROVIDE GREAT CONTENT
Was there ever any doubt? If you’re ever going to get the attention of the group at the top it has to start with providing valuable content and value to others. Not only does this entail plenty of comments helping others and sharing your knowledge to answer their questions, but also spending the 3 hours it takes to write a massive evergreen post that’s packs in so much value the members don’t mind that it takes 15 minutes to read and the administrators want to make it a sticky.
Also, the inner circle members all have their top tier reputations to uphold. That’s why they mostly play it safe and promote each other. They trust the content their friends provide. If they’re going to take a chance on you, share your stuff, attach their name to it, speak on your behalf then there has to be substance they can really get behind.
2. Provide risky, different, controversial, comment-worthy content.
Great content alone won’t necessarily work because you’re new. It’s too easy for you to get lost in the shuffle amongst all the big guns. It’s too easy for your posts not to ever get enough eyeballs to matter unless you’re writing things worthy of talking about. Dare to really walk the edge and take some risks because you can always scale it back and put things in perspective once you’ve got people’s attention.
3. Build your network and work up the ladder incrementally.
It doesn’t make sense to try and kiss ass and be-friend the top contributor to Digg. It doesn’t make sense for a blogger with 0 subscribers to ask Guy Kawasaki to promote his content. Target a few people a couple hundred posts ahead of you and start participating in their threads, answering their questions, and providing them with value. Work hard until you reach their status, then work with them, accumulating others as you go until there’s a core group of you slowly targeting, catching, and ascending up the proverbial cult community ladder.
4. Find a Mentor
This approach has been the back-bone of Wikipedia. You get someone to teach you the ropes and through it both parties are rewarded. The community benefits from your new knowledge, you benefit by learning the system, and the mentor is rewarded by community achievements or incentives (digital or monetary). Does this always work? Nope, but it does provide a steady influx of new semi-knowledgeable users. Of which you are now a part of.
I’m actually more surprised that this approach hasn’t been taken with more communities, as it is a direct carry over from the real world. Then again, I don’t think people put as much weight on digital relationships/reputations as they should yet.
5. Pursue Community Incentives
Digg, Mixx, Reddit, or any other successful social bookmarking communities all have this in common. Know what it is? They all reward their users with community praise in the form of digital rewards/rank. This kind of reward was termed “psychological capital” in Groundswell. But all of its tenets hold true today. Granted with extreme popularity this tends to fall off the map (See Digg) but it still is a driving force in most communities.
Win all the awards. Get everything, be an amazing member of the community and don’t sleep. Be the Michael Jordan of your community (Until Lebron gets a ring I’m sticking with Jordan) and try and be everywhere at every time.
Did we leave some stuff out? I’m 100% sure that we did. However, that’s why this is a blog that allows comments, leave your thoughts and Ryan and I would love to engage you in a dialogue about how you can best break into a community. So SHARE and be a member of this community.
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tagged as community building, community management, community managing, content is king, cult culture, newbie community, newbies, noob community, noob culture, penetrate cult culture
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