Leveraging the Superfan

Tapping your most committed users to help launch a social network.

By Bill Mickey
Wednesday, December 3, 2008

---

There’s a lot of grunt work involved in getting your social network features and sites off to a busy start: Comment moderation; discussion moderation; sifting through and vetting photo, blog and video posts, to name a few. And in staff-strapped publishing operations, these workflow-intensive tasks can be a drag on resources. Rachel Masters, VP of strategic relationships at Ning, a social networking service now with over 600,000 networks using its platform, suggests letting your most loyal users do some of the heavy lifting. “Superfans,” already frequent visitors and passionate supporters of your market, can be leveraged to help build engagement and populate a fledgling social network.

Identifying the Superfan

“Often you don’t need to identify them, they’ll seek you out and volunteer, which is the true definition of a superfan. Otherwise, monitor who is being very active—who’s contributing lots of discussion in the forums, who’s writing a lot of blog posts, who’s uploading a lot of photos and videos, who’s inviting their friends into the network and so on—and then just reach out to them with an email.”

Dole Out Tasks Slowly

“I would advise that you be very careful and not give them too much power too quickly. Start with something small, like moderating discussion forums or moderating photos and videos, and then see if they really live up to the tasks and become a valuable member of your team. A superfan can end up trying to dictate what you should do or how your brand should be portrayed, or start bossing other members around. So you want to be careful that the person stays on message.”

The Payback

“The relationship works two ways,” adds Jason Rosenthal, Ning’s SVP of business operations. “The benefit for the publisher side is they’re expanding their marketing so it can become a worldwide reach and it makes sure the network is an active, vibrant community for people to participate in. And the benefit back to the superfan is they’re already passionate about the topic of the network. By being given visible, active roles, it helps them feel more connected to your brand. It’s a pretty symbiotic relationship.”

Care and Feeding

“The most important thing is that you give them some recognition,” continues Masters. “You can feature their photograph or one of their blog posts on the main page of the social network. Just that little bit of recognition makes them feel special. But also giving them a free subscription or tickets to your events or any other goodies really goes a long way.”