Influencing the Influencers: Building a Contributor Network from the Ground Up, by Kim Higdon
The problem: They had great assets, but no stories behind them.
They had food photos, activity photos, lots of proof that people have a good time in AZ (which they were selling).
They evaluated what they had:
- A huge community of Arizona advocates
- An understanding of the gaps – what content they didn’t have
- Knowledge that stories (the missing content) existed, but that they didn’t know how to get it
The solution they came up with was to create a platform that users could use to share these stories.
A few keys to launching:
- Establish a vetting criteria – what’s important? What do we want specifically?
- In this case they needed authors to be able to write well.
- They needed something that could easily be exported to their CMS
- They needed to be able to get this information to the users
- They had an email list to help with that
- They had social media channelse
Within one month they received:
- 55 potential authors
- 24 of them were vetted – some were professional writers, authors, bloggers, news anchors, and photographers
- None of the authors were paid; they do the work because they believe in the platform
The content is often reused, and is very valuable.
Takeaways:
- Listen to what people are saying
- Figure out what’s not working – that’s the greatest area of opportunity
- People want to contribute to brands they care about. Start the conversation and see what happens.
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