Though they often have some technically-oriented CMS sessions, Web Content Mavens also cover a wide range of social media topics. Last week’s session was a blend of both, entitled, “Why Every Organization Should NOT Focus on Creating Communities.” (Full disclosure: I got to the meeting a little late. Oh, and none of my photos came out very well.)

Now, to someone who’s constantly looking for ways that organizations can (and should) incorporate community to support their goals, this title is practically a dare – it’s like waving red flag in front of a bull. (Though only the most “community Kool-Aid”-soaked social media evangelist would say that community is always the answer.)

As it turns out, the title was something of a misnomer — the primary issue of the evening, as presented by Kevin Novak of the American Institute of Architects, was whether organizations should build try to build their own social media platforms, or instead, engage them where they are on existing social networks.

In other words, the “community” for any organization is out there (and not something that needs to be “created”) — instead, it’s deciding on what tools you should use to bring them in. And the answer, of course, is “it depends”: on where your audience is, and what you want to be able to do.

Kevin’s first example was the AIA, which tried to roll its own community for architects, associated with its existing Web site. After a bunch of money spent, some shifting of requirements, and a general lack of success getting participation from their desired audience, they shifted to a quick, low-cost implementation of a group on LinkedIn, that’s gotten a pretty good response thus far.

By going with an existing third-party community, there are, naturally, some trade-offs: You probably won’t get all the functionality you wanted, and you do give up a measure of integration and control. However, you do get the benefit of using an existing platform, and you’re glomming onto their existing behavior — in the case of LinkedIn, networking and professional affiliation. So, for a professional organization, it’s a case of making your organization relevant to what your members are already doing, instead of trying to get them to join another social network and do something new.

Kevin’s second example was with the Library of Congress’s pilot test on Flickr, which was a way to expose the Library’s extensive collection of public domain photos to an interested audience, for low effort and comparatively low cost ($30 for a Pro account vs. oh, $7 million for building their own system). By all accounts, it’s worked pretty well.

Despite my quibbles with the name of the session, it’d be hard not to agree with the presentation. By engaging with your audience on an existing third-party social network, your barriers to entry and participation are lower; you can leverage their existing user base and behaviors; and you can focus on doing whatever it is your organization does (instead of trying to have to cook up and maintain your own social network).

Still, it might not work for everyone — there may be groups that have to build their own community play — it all depends on where your audience is, and what you want them to do. But even in those cases, you should still find out ways you can reach across to people on other social networks (via APIs, feeds, widgets — whatever), to get the best of both worlds.

Anyway, it was a good event — I’ll be talking more about the DC tech and social media community, and suggestions for ways you can use networking and social media opportunities in your own neck of the woods.

I use Flickr to store and share photos. Since I don’t figure on ever making any money from my photos, I license them with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, which is like a less restrictive form of copyright. Anyone is free to use the photo, as long as they give me attribution, and distribute any resulting works under a similar license (so they can’t take one of my photos and try to copyright it as their own work).

Why do I do this? Like I said, I’m not selling photos, and I figure that if you make it easy for people to use your stuff, they will. They could just as easily “steal” the photo and I would never know, but by saying, “go ahead and use the photo, just give me credit,” that’s a pretty reasonable thing.

Plus, groups like media organizations, respectable bloggers, and companies typically want to stay legal — they can’t just grab a photo off the Web, because someone might call them on it. Free is better than cheap, especially when it’s legal. And easy.

So, anyway, consider this photo of a batch of Brunswick Stew that I made last year:

If you’re not familiar, Brunswick Stew is a thick, tasty stew, usually made with chicken or rabbit (cooked until it falls apart), and lots of vegetables (I use corn, tomato, okra, lima beans and such).

Because it was my first time using a slow cooker, I did a blog entry about about it, and then more or less forgot about it.

Skip ahead to this year. I was looking at my blog statistics (for a personal blogger, it’s vanity — for business bloggers, it’s necessity), when I noticed my Brunswick Stew entry was getting hits from Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons (a repository of public domain and freely-licensed media).

Because I’d licensed my photo under Creative Commons (and also tagged and described it accurately), someone found it in an image search (using Flickr, you can restrict your search to non-copyrighted photos), added it to Wikimedia Commons (with proper attribution — my name, and a link to the original photo) where it was then used in the Wikipedia entry on Brunswick Stew.

Similar things have happened with some of my other photos. So, here’s the part I’m trying to figure out: Outside of the ego boost, am I getting any benefits from people using my photos in these places? Possibly.

I’m getting traffic to my Flickr pics, and there are links that lead back to my blog. Having my name associated with content on Wikimedia is a good thing (though there aren’t any direct links to my blog from Wikipedia, which would be a great thing, in terms of inbound links from high-value pages and SEO.)

How can this help you? Can this help you?

I still haven’t decided on this. I don’t think it would be a huge win, but say you’re a restaurant — you’re probably already taking pictures of dishes for menus and your Web site, so why not make them freely available?

This works best if you’re creating your own content. (Food is content, right?) There are some businesses this won’t work for, of course. For retailers, like book or record stores, you’re dealing with other people’s copyrights. And professional photographers are a completely different problem, so I won’t pretend to speak for them.

(And if you do try the Wikimedia route directly, be sure to follow the contribution guidelines.)

On the one hand, it’s increased traffic to your stuff. On the other hand, most of it is probably random internet people who you’ll never interact with.

I’m curious to hear if anyone thinks this idea has any merit, who it might or won’t work for, and other ways you can give stuff away online to help promote your business.

In the community someone had asked: “I was wondering how likely is it for a site to become the #1 search result on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN)? What are the most important factors for determining the likelihood of your site being #1? Is this something I should worry about now before launching the site or is it something I can do later? If a site ranks as #1, is it hard to maintain that after you have achieved it?”

Let’s take a look at the first question:

I was wondering how likely is it for a site to become the #1 search result on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN)? This depends on many factors. Some that come to mind are:

Content – how often are you updating your content? Are you using consistent keywords that makes the search engines recognize your site as focused on a topic?

Search Engine Optimized – is your site optimized for search engines? Network Solutions offers this service.

Titles & the first paragraph – I think this is more important than tags. (I don’t tag anything on my personal blog). But a strong succinct title with key words is awesome for catching search engines. I have found titles like Twitter 101 and Blogging 101 to be very effective. Think about what people would search for in your niche then use that. Think like your readers. Ask them what you should write about. And you should also focus your first paragraph on keywords.

Images – hosting your photos in Flickr allows you to add tags & then search engines see those tags also.

Inbound links – how many links are you including to other highly influential sites? You can use a search in Technorati to find blog posts that have a high authority on the topic that you’re writing about. Use one link per paragraph. And if you link to influencers then it may catch their attention & cause them to link to you (which is called back linking)

Back links – When others link to you that also increases your presence online.

Competition – how many people are in your niche? One trick I’ve found that works well is to have a weekly post on a set of links to related articles.  I title it ‘community strategy links’. Community strategy was heavily dominated by sites in the UK, but I’ve moved up to the 2nd page on Google search results now.

Common misspellings – My name is commonly misspelled so I did two things. I purchased both domain names: www.conniebensen.com and www.conniebenson.com. But I also had to use Connie Benson in a few blog posts to get the search engines to notice it. (I generally don’t misspell my own name, so for one post I actually blogged about it. But you can blog about something & post it with an earlier date).

Those are my tricks of the trade. So why would anyone want to work so hard? Well if having your business online be successful is important to you, then yes SEO is very important. For me I’ve chosen to have a career of working online. A couple of weeks ago I received an email from a conference organizer that found me thru Google. My blog came up & as a result I have a speaking opportunity.

Additional reading:

Performance Related SEO In An Economic Downturn

and Network Solutions offers ongoing webinars & sessions on SEO

It looks like I need to answer the rest of the questions in future posts What are your SEO tricks? Please share – I gave you my best!