A good example of activation is our KIN community where we’re beginning to post bounties and invite contributions, or our Komodo Platform publication on Medium where we’re now allowing submissions from the community.

Visit any major crowdsource effort and you will find only a tiny percentage of ideas are ever implemented. Most contributors don’t have the skill, knowledge of your products, or understand your company’s constraints well enough to develop a fully-formed idea. Worse yet, crowdsourcing efforts are rarely set up to accommodate truly groundbreaking ideas. Browse the 550+ ideas implemented through Dell’s Ideastorm, is there really a game-changer in the bunch? Most ideas tinkered around the edges of old products. There aren’t any new smartphones, social networks, cryptocurrencies, machine learning, or breakthrough products here. Crowdsourced ideas often closely resemble a list of customer complaints (isn’t every complaint also an idea of what to improve?) But the real benefit of crowdsourcing ideas and solutions extends beyond fully-formed ideas. It helps identify amazing talent to hire, new approaches to follow and to confirm or refute your existing thinking. You might not use an idea in its entirety, but you may learn from unique aspects of each idea. Having a hundred, or even a thousand, fresh pair of eyes give their opinion on a problem more than pays for the relatively tiny fee to attract them in the first place.

— Crowdsourced Competitions post on FeverBee

Memorability

We’re wired to love and remember stories. Stories are the best drivers of anything word of mouth or viral. Furnish the community with concise, vivid, everyday words that tell their audience how Komodo is making the world a better place with our tech. Tools are memorable metaphors, short stories, infographics, imagery and analogies that tell a story or trigger one.

The most important thing is not what people hear, it’s what they want to repeat after they’ve heard you. This is big. If you’ve ever been in kindergarten, or sat in a focus group, it will come as no surprise that what you are saying about yourself or your product and what others are saying is not guaranteed to be the same thing. They won’t say anything because you tell them to. They say it only if and because they want to say it, they like saying it, they gain from saying it. And for that, they have to understand it, believe it, like it, feel it’s valuable to them, be moved by it, remember it, and think it reflects their inherent point of view. Then, if they do, they will literally say it in two critical places. First, they’ll say it to themselves, over and over again in the way they frame and order their own thoughts; and second, they’ll say it to their friends, both personal and professional. The words they say to themselves are the words they’ll use. - Bill Schley, The Micro-Script Rules

Habits and Rituals

Blockchain is a very busy space. Keeping on top of what is happening and when, is a full-time job. Even our own community can feel chaotic, fast-moving and esoteric to an outsider… and that may be a barrier. Our activities and content aim to form habits and create rituals, make it easy to stay up-to-date, nurture our relationships, and have a memorable format. Easy to remember. Easy to explain. Does what it says on the tin. Don’t need to check a calendar to know what’s happening. Repetition is the groundwork on which habit forming content is built. Repetition is persuasion.

It seems too simplistic that just repeating a persuasive message should increase its effect, but that’s exactly what psychological research finds (again and again). Repetition is one of the easiest and most widespread methods of persuasion. In fact, it’s so obvious that we sometimes forget how powerful it is. ― Jeremy Bean

A weekly schedule works the same way as muscle memory : it reduces the effort of remembering one-off days and events (i.e. decreases the need for attention and creates maximum efficiency). Therefore, core community content ought to be structured around days of the week. Easy to remember through repetition both in title and in cadence (i.e. AMA Mondays or Five Bullet Fridays… easy to repeat and explain to friends).

: it reduces the effort of remembering one-off days and events (i.e. decreases the need for attention and creates maximum efficiency). Therefore, core community content ought to be structured around days of the week. Easy to remember through repetition both in title and in cadence (i.e. AMA Mondays or Five Bullet Fridays… easy to repeat and explain to friends). Map it out and make it easy to navigate : summaries of QA, news roundups, clear paths to contribute and how to benefit from it are all tactics to reduce the effort it takes to fall in love with Komodo. Start here journeys. Welcome messages. Help newcomes or people who have been away for awhile orientate quickly.

: summaries of QA, news roundups, clear paths to contribute and how to benefit from it are all tactics to reduce the effort it takes to fall in love with Komodo. Start here journeys. Welcome messages. Help newcomes or people who have been away for awhile orientate quickly. How to build credibility and trust: a weekly newsletter or AMA are examples of very small promises. It’s easy to forget, miss or drop the ball and doesn’t feel like a big deal, however, when we keep small promises every week we’re proving that we do what we say we will. Keeping these small promises build trust, credibility and confidence in the bigger promises. Most important with newer community members.

Referrals

Overlooked opportunities lie in referral generation. People spend a huge amount of effort in finding new members, advertising, creating content and pushing messages out. Yet, they don’t leverage the community members that they have.

Because more wealth is created or lost through word of mouth than any other single business action known. — Jay Abrahams

Simple Maths

Anytime we bring a new person into our community we generate a value of one. If we only to talk to that person and build a relationship with them then the total value is one. If that person chooses to refer two friends or colleagues then we may have three people. If these people go onto refer two more each then we may have 1 + 2 + 4 = 7.

This is how referrals can act as an engine for community growth if we ask for them and/or build referral incentives carefully and diligently so that the outputs represent real value for those taking part and for our organisation.

Dropbox and Coinbase.

They grew astronomically from referral systems that diligently aligned incentives for valuable behaviours linked to their organisation’s goals.

Dropbox offered extra space by inviting friends. You can check out their referral system here.

Coinbase offers a $10 reward after the friend initiates a buy or sell over $100. You can check out their referral system here.

Jay Abrahams says referrals are the most cost efficient, people who are referred complain the least, referrals refer the most, and referrals are the most loyal.

Compound Referrals

Higher reward based on the number of referrals.

Rewarding the referrer of a referer.

Applications

Email List

Bounties

Talent for projects, writers, artists and devs. Create a sandbox with bounties

Forums for activity, quality content and filling out their info comprehensively. Gamification is a sister to this topic and looks to reward behaviour until it becomes habit.

What’s Next?

I’ll update this in the future and happy to get feedback. My next steps is to build this out into an actual schedule that I can then report on for Komodo. This will be one of four posts. Next up are tactics, a weekly schedule and then a monthly report that will be ongoing.

Thank you for reading. All feedback is welcome. Please share, comment and clap.