I am a car buff, give me 4 wheels and a motor and I am in heaven. So this weekend, when the Barrett-Jackson car auction came to Scottsdale, I was there. Unfortunately, I was not there to buy, just drool. The cars were amazing and people watching was a unique experience. However, as I was walking through the auction and noticed the ‘machine’ they had built to bring together buyers and sellers at the right time on the right cars, it got me thinking that this is not unlike what we are trying to do with online communities.

 

When you have an auction, you need cars (content), you need buyers (consumers of the content) and a medium to bring them together (the auction). With hundreds of cars and thousands of buyers matching the right buyers with the right cars at the right auction is a pretty big task, but it is not unlike what we help clients do when building a successful online community. Here are some points the car auctions know, that can help you in your online community:

• Auctions Know who is Coming- Meaning, they know their audience. Many of the auctions will focus on certain types of cars, classic, exotic, muscle cars. By focusing on specific types of cars, they have a better idea of who will be attracted to that auction and they can better market to that potential audience. When you are creating your online community, you need to know why your members would come to your site. Is it because of the topics your members will discuss, the content you are going to make available? Whatever it is you need to know so you can help sell the value of loging in for your members and potential members.

• Auctions Hunt Down Cars- Auctions know that there are certain cars that will peek people’s interest and will be featured at the auction and in the catalog. This is their premier content that will help get people interested in the auction, take a look at what is offered and even though they may not buy the $1 million dollar Bugatti Veryon, they might see something else they like that they would want to buy. Successful online communities function in the same way with featured content that the site needs to generate to be sure there is information available that will peek your members interest. Maybe it is your weekly executive directors blog, the survey you do of members on important industry topics or the buyers guide you offer of industry vendors. By creating the content you know will peek a members interest to log into the site, they will hopefully look around a bit, find some additional value for them in the site and keep coming back.
  
  
• The Auction is not the only thing going on- At Barrett Jackson, they have a huge tent when the auction is going on, but there are a ton of other things going on outside of the auction-food vendors, test drive areas, exhibitors and more. It is exciting and because it all relates to the auction and is of interest to the audience so it makes for a very unique experience. With your online community, you want those core benefits for your site to offer, but what else can your online community offer that your audience would find intereting? If you are going to focus on providing industry discussions in your forums and listservs, would your memebers also be interested in sharing files, taking a poll, going to an event? If you do your core things very well, you can really add value by adding some features that round out the experience for the user and make the membership dues they pay seem insignificant based on the value they receive.

• Auctions know they need all aspects to go well for the auction to work- A car auction is dependant on 3 major things to all go well. They need to have the right cars available, they need to have the right buyers in the room and they need to have a clean and easy process for the cars to be bought and sold at the event. If any of these aspects of the auction are not 100%, the auction will suffer. Can you imagine if Barrett Jackson held an auction, put up the tents, told people there was an auction but just hoped people would bring their cars to sell? It would be a disaster. As silly as that may seem, I know of many associations that have put up an online community, told people it was available, but didn’t put any content on the site. They just hoped people would come in and start using it. Just like a car auction, your online community needs three very important aspects for it to be successful. You need content, you will probably have to create it at first, but you have to have it from day one when the site goes live. You need to get people online looking at that content and reading and using it. If your cntent is good enough, it will sell itself, but you have to market the community to your members and tell them why they should spend time on your site and the benefits it will offer them. Lastly, you need a good software tool to bring the content and your users together. If you focus on all three of these things you will be on the road to a successful online community and providing an exciting new member benefit.

So as you can see, there are some things that an online community can learn form a car auction. Luckily I was able to get out of there without raising my hand and leaving with a car (my wife told me I better not buy anything). However, if I would have bid on one, this is the one I would have bid on. A 1969 Camaro. If I did wind up bringing this home, the title of this blog would have been “An Online Community can learn a lot from a guy who now lives in a 1969 Camaro”.