A chat with The Tea Lady about……

Community Profitability

Come on in pally, sit down, this is going to get bumpy.

Now you might ask yourself, “what does a ‘tea lady’ know about a subject as meaty as this?”

Well I don’t just bake cakes and scones or make parsley wine, I know how to barbeque a piece of meat.

How to make money from your online community?

You can charge a membership fee like LinkedIn.com or collect fees for items that are listed and sold in the community mall or you can get advertising.

Let’s talk about advertising, I haven’t clicked on or noticed anything for a long time and you probably haven’t either.

If you want to attract good advertisers then you need something that gets peoples attention without them having to do anything and without it being too big and flashy.

I’m sure advertisers get sick of paying for banner ads that are shown everywhere and never produce great results, especially so in online communities.

I have a computer here in the kitchen and I spend time on it looking for things like recipes etc and when I am in my private social club room with my close friends, we are just there to natter about this and complain about that.

We don’t take too much interest of anything else while we’re all “socializing” you might say so it is understandable why a lot of advertisers shy away from the whole social network platform.

You would all know of the J P Morgan company (I bet they’ve got a bevy of tea ladies working there), well they have an article called “Nothing but Net” from their 2009 investment guide of January 5th, 2009 which doesn’t paint a very good picture for social networks making money.

But what if you could get the members of your online community to participate in what they see, as in what advertisements they see, when they see them and where they see them, you are going to get a more responsive viewer and you will be delivering value to the customer, or member as the case may be.

I’m talking about easy participation too, nothing too “heavy”.

You know getting someone to change a brand, like from Coke to Pepsi, is like getting someone to switch from Lite ‘n Low to sugar, or an ant trying to pull the skin off a rice pudding, very, very difficult.

So why not let the Coke and Lite ‘n Low people stick with what they like but let them know when these things are on sale somewhere along with all of the other marketing paraphernalia.

Oh, and squish the ant.

Now you may be wondering what I have been leading up to here.

What sort of advertising can you do in an online community that doesn’t get up your nose like burnt orange cake?

How do you get people involved in what’s around them, what will it take to get them to participate?

Something subtle, yet inconspicuous,…………ah……………product placement.

Open your pantry and have a look at all the advertising there, tins of this, cans of that and packets of the other thing.

Everything has got labels on that you recognize.

A great example of this is in movie and TV land where as you know they don’t have banner ads because you can’t click on them, so they have products placed everywhere instead.

A Coke can here, a Ford Mustang there etc, its just stuff from everyday life I know but you get reminded of it when you see it don’t you?

Even the people we get the coffee from here provide the cups for free so the sods here know what brand they are drinking, and they are ‘always’ drinking the stuff too, it’s the same thing isn’t it, product placement.

Well this is what I have been leading up to.

The little darlings here have crafted an amazing product placement feature and built it into their Social Network Software.

Isn’t it interesting how they call it software (and hardware), makes you wonder where the ‘soft’ factor comes from.

Hardware I can understand, because when nitwits leave pieces of the stuff laying around in the kitchen when they come in to ‘rescue’ any of my baking, I often walk into them.

I’ve got a couple of good bruises already on my shin and if I ever catch the little sods I will be turning them into decoys.

By the way, I am baking cherry and walnut slice tomorrow afternoon, Mavis gave this recipe to me, you don’t know Mavis but she is married to Norman.

Norman is no relation but Mavis is Ray’s cousin, they had to daughters, Fay and Kay – seriously.

Anyway, so now we have ‘software’, strewth, I suppose you could describe that stuff as being like angel food cake.

And if you’ve got any gaps between your teeth and good suction you can just hoover that stuff up ha ha ha.

Oooops, sorry, back again.

This product placement thing is really something else, when someone types in a particular word, it brings up an advertisement feature that relates to that word.

So you might say to yourself that’s not really amazing when you look at it like that, so listen to this, what the scoundrels here did was they hot rodded it, oh yes, souped it up, dropped in a cam, you know, (the tea lady like cars too I might add and there’s nothing like the sound of a purring flathead).

Bugger, got off track again.

Product placement in the community system is fun because members can select the categories they get advertisements from and therefore they are happy to see the ads of what they like.

And the ads have the ability to appear in a fun and interactive manner.

Now imagine this, you send some friends an email inviting them to your place for a barbeque the following Saturday at 12:00 noon.

So those accepting can receive text messages and or emails reminding them of the event, cute eh.

For the fun part, and this works only in the community, ok pally, when keywords are entered by the member, they can be set up to trigger full a color animated ½ – ¾ inch square icon/brand logo that appears immediately after the word, and in the same line.

Looking just like a little neon sign, or billboard it really gets noticed.

Now, remembering that the member has the option of selecting only the categories they want to see advertised to them, they can have things such as pulsating Coke cans appear whenever they enter the words ‘drink, hot, thirsty or awesome’ etc.

Or a steaming hamburger just oozing with temptation when they type in ‘hungry, food, eat, lunch or going out’ etc and just get a load of this, it can be set to appear only between the hours of 10:00 AM in the morning to 2:00 PM in the afternoon.

Now that is product placement.

In our house, everyone drinks the same brand of soft drink, although my daughters drink the diet version, the boys and their father all drink the regular one.

So you can imagine if some of the kids friends bring over a different brand, it sticks out like dogs thingies.

You know too don’t you, that advertisers pay a whole caboodle more when they can reach the exact people they want to, to get them coming through their doors or landing on their websites.

Something like this will certainly generate revenue and provide the advertisers with something new and fun.

I don’t have any more to say at the moment about community profitability as I really just wanted to get things started and let you know that I can talk meaty subjects just as good as I can talk Wonder Cake.

Now that’s a fancy little cake that “never” makes it through the end of the day.

I tell you, turn around and in less time than it takes to get online with a 2,400 baud rate modem, it’s all gone, kapoof.

My mind seems to be wandering again so drop me a line and we can get into more of this making money stuff.

Every area of the social networking software these little sods have created can function in the same manner.

Just imagine stamps on your email.

Being able to select the brand/logo/icon that you like and attach it to an email so when someone opens the email – poof, there’s a big splashy advertisement, doing its job.

There is so much to talk about with this subject, I don’t have time today but I will keep talking about it a number of times as we get to know each other.

Kindest regards,
The tea lady
Bye bye