Update: MyCancerHub Launch and What’s Next

Last month on May 20, we launched MyCancerHub to the public and to a test group simultaneously.  We had returned from the Community 2.0 conference In Las Vegas only a few days prior to launch day, so we had a lot of new community management ideas in addition to the strategies we already had in place.  One month later, we have a lot of content, but are facing a few common difficulties and problems.

Our Pre-Launch Plan

The research that we had done prior to launch (in addition to having a bit of common sense) made us aware that there is nothing worse than having a visitor come to a new community, only to see that there is an almost complete lack of interactions, members, and other content.  There are a few solutions to this, both ethical and unethical, but of course, we never considered populating MyCancerHub with “dummy” content – I’ve seen it done before, and it’s really easy to see through it most of the time.

Instead, we decided to work with a group of cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers who were interested in trying out the community and engaging with each other, writing blogs, reading articles, and using other interactive features.  We worked with Leede Research Group here in the Minneapolis area to find and connect with the contributors, and on launch day, they began a three-week trial of the site alongside any public visitors that came to the site (although we were doing no formal marketing at that time).

What Happening in Our First Community?

On the first day of launch, our contributors were already very active on the site, and the interactions and content grew substantially in the following weeks, far surpassing even our highest expectations.  Along the way, other visitors who found their way in through search engines and referring links, and with our numbers today, we have about a 50/50 split between the number of new public members vs. those from contributor group.

The formal contributor period ended over a week ago, and while a few members have stuck around and are fairly active, we’ve seen a big decline in site activity.  In general, we just aren’t getting enough members and unique visitors to the site as we would like.  Although we know there is a growing number of spectators, it’s been difficult to foster content creation. MyCancerHub is definitely a very open community where a lot of personal content has been shared by many members, so we don’t see any problems with a lack of communication.  Overall, there isn’t enough traffic to work with, and with $0 for our marketing & advertising budget, things aren’t getting any easier.

Now What?

With no other marketing support (save for some press releases that our internal interactive marketing and design firm, Carrot, is helping us with), Shannon and I have had to work outside of our roles as product and community managers to really focus on online marketing and networking initiatives, which include Twitter, Facebook, blogging (of course), and a few more.

Today we spent some time looking into some new ideas for YouTube, ICYOU (a new health video site), and Digg.  Of course, it’s easy to just throw your content on those sites, but without a goal and audience in mind, the strategy is bound to sink, so we’re making sure our presence will actually be valuable for us and others on those networks.

We’ll be covering on marketing process and progress next week, but in the meantime, we’d love any advice, criticism, or ideas, so send them our way!

Tags: community activity, Community Management, launch, Leede, Online Marketing, social networks, strategy, update