{"id":1883,"date":"2010-12-17T14:18:07","date_gmt":"2010-12-17T21:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/?p=1883"},"modified":"2011-02-07T22:38:59","modified_gmt":"2011-02-08T05:38:59","slug":"ning-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/ning-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Building a Community"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ning<\/a>I recently spoke with folks at Ning<\/a> about building customer loyalty with social media. If you aren’t already familiar with Ning, it’s an easy-to-use platform for creating your own social network. We used Ning to create our Dragonfly Community<\/a> as a place for people to\u00a0share their stories, team up to give advice on social good campaigns, and to increase infectious action on causes that need support. If you haven’t already, check it out<\/a> today.<\/p>\n

In the interview<\/a>, I was asked some really interesting questions about engineering virality, building a following, and the future of social media. The highlights are below but you’ll want to visit the Ning Blog to read the whole thing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ning: Can you share some tips with our new Ning Creators who\u2019re trying to build a following?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Andy: I can\u2019t over-emphasize the importance of having single, clear goal. This will remind people why they are at your site and want to belong to your community. Having a great story and telling it well is another often-missed piece of socially-minded efforts. Facts and figures, no matter how shocking, don\u2019t motivate people to act. Stories do. What\u2019s the story behind your site? Why are you creating it? Who is the protagonist? What is their struggle? Stories are easy for people to share because they remember them and because stories are inherently interesting in a way that stats are not.<\/p>\n

Do you think one can engineer virality? If yes, how?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We think time is better spent deeply understanding the viewers than poring over previously successful viral content. Social media effectiveness is the product of exposure times desired action. \u00a0In the social space the people ARE the media buy. Their forwards, ratings and re-postings are the means by which your message is exposed to a broader audience. Having a clear call to action in the item is the other half, because awareness itself does not solve any problem. The one-two-three punch is to first connect the piece to deep meaning, then present a clear and appropriate call to action, and finally make it insanely easy to spread the word.<\/p>\n

Jump to Ning<\/a> and see the rest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently spoke with folks at Ning about building customer loyalty with social media. If you aren’t already familiar with Ning, it’s an easy-to-use platform for creating your own social network. We used Ning to create our Dragonfly Community as a place for people to\u00a0share their stories, team up to give advice on social good … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Building a Community”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[61,5,10],"tags":[102,103,41,101,104,37],"class_list":["post-1883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview","category-buzz","category-storytelling","tag-dragonfly-community","tag-interviews","tag-media","tag-ning","tag-ning-blog","tag-social-media-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2BBCq-un","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1883"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1895,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883\/revisions\/1895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dragonflyeffect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}