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10.18.07
Micro Communities
 By Navneet Kaushal
Pick an interest area, and there’s probably a social media site that’s serving a community around it. These sites might be "micro" in size compared to some of the large, well-known services, but they have passionate members who might also be a more targeted audience that you wish to reach. This session tours some of the many smaller communities out there.
Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Speaker: Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance
Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz
Speaking first is Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz on An Introduction to Micro Communities in Social Media. Apparently, he says he always seems to get to cover "overview"-type presentations.
What exactly are micro communities? These are basically verticals with social networking and media functionality. Eg: Llamaland.com is a community created by a Llama-loving micro community. The unknown thing is that micros communities have the potential to promote your brand. Why Micro? This i all due to traffic versus relevance (the battle between quality and quantity).
Either try to reach a lot of users (Digg). Some of them might like Llamas, else you can boost a more compact Llama-centric community. Micro communities have more accessibility as your voice can be heard easier here. These also boost brand building opportunities. Members of a micro community are also connected to other people of similar interests.
How does one find micro communities? Search engines. Use keywords that are related to your brand. Even though your may not see one community/site not ranking No.1 at all times, its good enough to go with the community that has a consistent ranking as that might be the leading community or site in that field. Social media discovery blogs are another place where you can find micro communities.
How do you know if one community is good for you or not? Check out the membership numbers. Also, go through the community's topical focus, relevance, and "leverage-able" features. If there isn't much you can do with them, you will have to get busy with offline networking. Rand uses care2 to show how many functionalities one micro community can provide.
Next, he talks about WebMD, a community that makes you manage your own blog, take part in message boards, tag items you want to. This is a great micro community for medical personnel.
Next up, Rand brings up Library Things, a micro community for budding authors, publishers and marketers who have published their own books. After which, Rand shifts to Yelp! Which reviews local products and services. Next example is that of real estate community, Trulia which is similar to FaceBook/ Yahoo! Answers and has blog features. Trulia is pretty big within the real estate community. Rand emphasizes that micro communities are not necessarily a place where you can find customers but like-minded people who can spread awareness about your brand. Next up is Peer Trainer, a micro community on fitness where you can guide peers or become either trainer and vice versa. Not necessarily a site for body builders but regular folk like Danny (read: Sullivan). Trainers, gym owners will also like this community. Another one is called DonorChoose where educators and students can blog, review, post comments etc. Another micro community is Minti, specifically for parents.
DeviantArt, a great micro community where artists have online portfolios. Some other micro communities that Rand Fishkin mentioned include RealEstateVoices, Threadless, Corkd, imbee, Virb, Wayfaring, CouchSurfing, Wikihow, Helium, Etsy, Avvo, Urbis, BakeSpace, FoodCandy, and Sphinn. This is also a great place to hire artist. After many other micro community sites Rand is finally done.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Nav is the founder and CEO of PageTraffic, a premier search engine company known for its assured SEO service, web design and development, copywriting and full time SEO professionals.
Navneet has wide experience in natural search engine optimization, internet marketing and PPC campaigns. He is a prolific writer and his articles can be found in the "Best Articles" section of many websites and article banks. As a search engine analyst , he has over 9 years of experience and his knowledge is in application here.
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