Inc. Launches ‘Ask Inc.’ Community Platform

Q&A site captures highly engaged users from the brand’s social networking sites.

By Bill Mickey
Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Mansueto Ventures’ Inc. magazine recently launched a community-based question and answer site called Ask Inc. The site is a partnership with Mahalo, a human-powered search engine that connects a searcher with content and links curated by Mahalo community members. While Inc.’s Q&A platform is designed to draw users deeper into the brand, it’s Inc.’s social media presence that acts as a primary draw for its most engaged users.

According to David Grossman, Inc.com’s director of business development, new community-based platforms in the works—like the Mahalo-powered Ask Inc.—that are built around member-generated content are largely made possible by the brand’s social media outreach into channels such as Facebook (15,000 friends) and Twitter (116,000 followers).

The community and content-building strategy is essentially a logical extension of engaging an audience via social media. While publishers have learned that social media is a significant traffic referral source, Inc. is taking the next step and converting that traffic—which is already highly predisposed to brand interaction—into members rather than simple eyeballs.

“We’re using social media to drive people to our property and to meaningfully participate in the Web site,” says Grossman. The strategy moves the game from Twitter and Facebook to the domain of Inc. itself.

“There’s a lot of noise on Twitter and competition for attention,” says Grossman. “What we’re trying to do is get people to participate on our own site. The ultimate goal is to get people to actually tweet on your behalf. Instead of just hitting you, they’re hitting their own following. Those are the kinds of tools we’re looking to develop, beyond simply tweeting out an article. We do plenty of that certainly, but we’re looking to build our own engagement.”

The Conversion Byproduct

Harnessing a highly engaged group of loyalists is certainly one successful step, but the ultimate goal is the conversion. This can take several forms—ad sales, downloads, subscriptions, leads, and so on—but without demographics the conversion is much harder to attain.

Registration is required for users to participate in products such as Ask Inc. Data points including company name, job title, company size, industry and zip code are collected to form a community member profile. “It enhances our ability to push people through the conversion funnel—whether that is registering for the site itself, subscribing to a newsletter or to the print product, or whatever downstream type of product and positioning we want to do,” says Grossman. “And of course registered users are more likely to come back to the site more frequently and we have more demographic data on them as well.”

That’s a key game-changer for a brand’s social media audience. While publishers welcome the interaction from Twitter followers or Facebook friends, actually knowing more about these folks has been a frustrating pursuit. Why not try to harness that engagement within the confines of your own brand? Plus, says Grossman, the real-time activity of the social media audience can be a powerful characteristic for on-the-spot marketing. “They’re in active mode, they’re grazing. They’re looking for content and participation. They have a more open mind at the moment you’re delivering a message to them. They might even be more valuable than a newsletter subscriber in terms of the amount of times we could message them,” he says.