Scott Wingo Business: What Susan G Komen Doesn't Understand About Communities and You Should

Posted by ericpratum

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Recently, Susan G. Komen pulled some funding for Planned Parenthood, and the internet exploded in disgust. Some people responded maliciously by supposedly hacking their site:

Komen hacked

Others responded with donations:

Global neighborhoods can appear, exist, and disappear overnight.

In Shel Israel's 2009 book Twitterville, he argues that communities and causes now form around issues of the day and not organizations. Because of all of the possibilities to connect, it's no longer necessary to fly to Haiti to see the effect of your donations or advocacy. You can advocate online, see the dollars get racked up, get emailed pictures of people being helped, and then see the YouTube video about all of it tomorrow.

Leveraging pre-existing networks to fight SOPA.

Reddit SOPA Blackout During the recent SOPA blackout, supporters used pre-existing communities (*cough* Reddit) to tip a movement from underground, web-entrepreneurs, and web-folk lurkers being upset to popular media movement. Their success was based by and large on leveraging communities that already existed. Their "global neighborhood," as Shel Israel might have dubbed it, appeared quickly, made use of a network that already existed.

If anti-SOPA protesters had tried to do this all themselves and build a community from scratch, they wouldn't have gotten anywhere. Without the initial mass media attention that something like an earthquake garners, getting a community moving takes months if not years.

SOPA succeeded in part because of using those pre-existing communities.

Building events from communities of passion.

Mark Schaefer was blogging away at {grow} for months and months before he and Social Media Club Knoxville dreamed up the first Social Slam, an event I am happy to have attended and will now be speaking at this year. They debated whether or not the event would be successful in little, old Knoxville or if they needed to move it to Atlanta, my town, to get a proper audience.

Because Social Slam leveraged the high-passion community that Mark had built around his blog, the event sold out in its first year and had to be moved to a larger location. People came in from every corner of the US, seriously, and this year, the speakers list includes people like Mitch Joel, Gini Dietrich, Tom Webster, and Marcus Sheridan. All for an event that costs only $90 to attend and is in Knoxville... not LA, not NYC, not Atlanta... Knoxville.

When a machete to the face moves the world.

On January 23rd, men broke into a Kenyan orphanage, and in a fight that ensued, Anthony Omari was struck in the face with a machete blade. Two days later, Reddit user TheLake posted this photo and asked if users could donate $2,000 to help.

Within 24 hours, Redditors had donated over $65,000 to build a wall, improve the orphanage, and help Omari, and as members of communities often do, TheLake returned with more pictures and words of thanks.

If TheLake had posted his request to Kickstarter or tried to build his own network, he would have been lucky to get $200, not to mention the requested $2,000. Because he leveraged an existing community, where a global neighborhood could pop up and then disappear quickly, he had access to people with the means to help, an immediate way to get his message out, and a way to respond to that community with information that helped them to feel secure in their contributions: photos, comments, etc.

Ego stroking works as long as it's not just ego stroking.

Dan's recent YouMoz post had both a great title and good analysis. If the number of comments and thumbs are any indication, he was smart in choosing to post this here rather than anywhere else.

Several factors played into Dan's success here:

He posted the right topic in the right community.
He stroked a few community mogul egos with his screen shots.
His praise of those people wasn't empty, but rather appropriate.
He didn't try to hammer it out alone, building his own network or community. He went where there was a community ready for his message.

Similar things could be said of other members of the SEOmoz community that, rather than building their own separate communities, have smartly leveraged the people and relationships here to build their businesses, events, brands, and more. This is going where the people are rather than trying to build a more attractive community and then fill it with people.

What you can learn from Susan G Komen and these examples.

Global neighborhoods can pop up anywhere, around anything. If millions of people can feel connected to Haitian earthquake victims, stand together to fight SOPA, or donate 32.5x the asked amount to an orphanage in Kenya and feel good about it, you can leverage a network or two to build your business, spread your message, and maybe even protect you from the blowback associated with breaking bad news.

SEOs often talk about places like Reddit like the community is only there to be seeded and as if previously popular, strong-PR subreddits are gold mines for link building, but while links can be votes of confidence for your site, community members can be bellmen for your causes and missions.

In this move and decision, Susan G Komen caved to pressure, did not fully explain itself to the people most concerned, and never bothered to reach out to a community to engage with or support it.

Don't reinvent the wheel.

Corporate blogging has declined in the last year, and I'd wager it is due to marketers trying to remake their corporate marketing in the model of previously successful ventures only to realize what we all know offline. Copying success often does not lead to success. Instead, plugging into ready and waiting communities and providing something they desperately need and care about does.

And, it doesn't hurt to stroke egos now and then...as long as it's warranted and genuine.

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