customer-development, target-market, networking, user-acquisition, user-engagementI know this is might be a few questions bundled into one, but please bear with me, it revolves around the main question above.
Our service relies mostly on user-generated content such as something resembling short travel blogs to identify good places to see. Of course, this requires the effort of users that have experienced traveling. How can we get people willing to generate this content?
Quora
While looking at the story of Quora, we read that in the starting days that the founders asked friends & family to use the website, and those people invited their friends & family to use it and so on…
Quora is a question and answer website. It’s fairly easy for someone to ask questions. The effort is in the process of answering the question. I think most people find answering enjoyable, as it adds to their ego while being satisfied of being of great help to whoever posted the question, which is why they go through the trouble of answering the questions. (Please don’t go bonkers, that’s only my opinion here. Correct me if I am wrong.)
I think Quora’s approach (with the family and friends) is very interesting and I would very much like to try it. Though in our case however, we do not have many friends and family that travel, and so not many we know fit our ideal candidate. We wonder if this would still be a good strategy to pursue.
Bonus question: If we did take an approach similar to Quora’s, we are also not sure if our family & friends would keep producing content. Quora is a QA platform. Asking a question is easy. (and asking a good question is harder) Our user-generated content requires a bit more effort from our users. How can we incentivize users to keep on generating quality content when it requires effort for them to create it?
Since your family and friends are not big travelers, the quora technique might not work so very much as you’ve mentioned (though you should still introduce them to your platform, ask for feedback, etc. If they like it, they might know people that might be interested in contributing posts, etc. Anyway, you’ll likely get some useful feedback on how to improve the site to also welcome ‘medium-passionate’ travelers).
Another effective way is to find your ideal candidates via social media (google+, facebook, twitter, etc.) and introduce your site to them. Again, ask for feedback and contributions, etc.
The first step would to ask yourself what your value proposition happens to be. Who currently writes travel blogs? What are those people missing when having their travel blog on tumblr or whatever solution they currently use? You need to be able to tell them why they should use your product over their existing solution.
That means you have to find those people. You might search for travel blogs and write to their authors. In addition to online contact it might also be very worthwhile to go to meetups where your target audience hangs out. That might be Couchsurfing meetups or similar meetups. Talk to those people about what would get them to use your service.
Consider using a Gamification approach, this drives engagement and motivation to be involved in the website. The concept revolves around status and achievement. Read the following to get a high-level understanding - What is Gamification
Some of the additional benefits of using gamification:
Gamification can be implemented in a phased approach, where new concepts, badges and challenges can constantly be added to keep interactions high and relevant.
Incentivize people to contribute in some way. In some cases, the previous suggestion of gamification provide enough incentive, but, in most cases it won’t (although it could be a nice supplement to your primary incentive).
Pay for contributions to seed the site with some initial content. When you’re depending on user-generated content, you have a chicken and egg problem. Without content, no one is coming to your site. With no one coming to your site, there’s no one to create the content. If you never give people a reason to come, you’re finished before you start.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.