How do you congregate crowds around your website’s content? To congregate means to gather together an assembly for a purpose.
To achieve that, I think you first need a hook and live bait. Something that squirms persistently in the web surfers’ minds and make them crave for more. It could be a burning wish to stake a position across a culturally divisive issue; or pursue narrow but popular interests like how to cope and where to find the best deals during a recession; or search for a multi-use play space that provides current events, cultural criticism, resources and referrals, and conversations around global or local community concerns, much like what websites of major newspapers provide.
The website content’s purpose is to meet the needs of the intended audience. And the site is live because that content is just-in-time, and directly relevant to what people are looking for as those needs evolve.
In our textbook’s terms, this relates to the importance of having a vision statement and preparing a marketing research document that is based on capturing accurately the consumers’ feature requirements.
Meeting those criteria is challenging enough. But does it stop there?
Something that seems to be missing from our textbook is that beyond baiting, there is an ever harder challenge, which is to validate. That means to confirm, to “bless” that one’s entry into the website is justified and worth the effort, and that staying around to ask for more is legitimate.
How do you validate? Through interactivity. By allowing users to contribute a thought, add a dissenting opinion, ask a dumb question, and be connected to everyone else to give, take and interrelate.
In our textbook, this refers to the design stage and technical features of a web-based multimedia project. It is not enough to catch the crowds through a good hook. It is perhaps even more important to sanction their venturing in by designing the website to allow user ownership of its interactive features.
In short, bait them so they come, but also validate their participation so they return in big crowds because they belong.
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I agree that contributing through comments and blog pages is really important. Getting feedback from readers is key in determining content and building a community. But what are the best ways to go about doing that? For my proposed revamp of a government site, I am wondering if this will be a challenge. Rarely do government agencies interact with people in such a public manner. This could be interesting!
ReplyDeleteGreat post. However, I think that validating can/should be much more than being able to post a comment, dissenting opinion or ask a dumb question. I think that in order to validate, a person's interaction with the site must be meaningful. It must provide them with what it it is they are hoping to gain by "joining" this community. I think this involves taking efforts to make sure the site, users, content, etc. aligns and continues to be in alignment with the users expectation. I also think this involves finding ways to ensure the users comments are heard by the online community in meaningful way.
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