obamacycle

While the title of this post sounds like the beginning of a Mastercard commercial, it's actually describing my experiences over the past couple of months launching and running a small social network. First, a little context and then I'll get to the tips. A couple of days after Super Tuesday I noticed on the Obama campaign blog that the posts were getting several thousand comments each.

Curious to see what that was all about, I quickly found out that there was a little "community" in the comments section. People were communicating with each other on various topics, most not related to the original blog post. I also noticed that many people were "recycling" campaign gear--essentially passing gently used materials from states that had already held their primaries to those yet to vote.

It occurred to me that there was a better way to do this than blog comments, so I decided to set up ObamaCycle.com, a site where supporters can recycle used or extra campaign gear. Over the past couple of months, the site has gotten a lot of use and attention (hundreds and hundreds of cases of recycling).

So, here are ten tips I learned from this experience:

10. It is fast, easy and cheap to launch a community site.

9. The community is your best source of product features.

8. The community is your best PR agency.

7. Members fall into three categories: activists, participants, and lurkers

6. Press has a natural progression.

5. Online press coverage is better than offline.

4. Forget about making money off advertising [or donations -peter]

3. The name is important.

2. Features don't really matter.

1. You can get real work out of community members.

Continue reading "10 Web 2.0 Tips: $75" >>