A forum for all, that's Reddit for you

It is the biggest social phenomenon most folks just don’t know about. Yet, when the social news and entertainment website Reddit bills itself as “The front page of the Internet”, it isn’t some hyperbolic startup vision statement. Founded in 2005, Reddit really only saw an explosion of traffic in 2011, and that’s been rising ever since. Last year alone, Reddit averaged more than three billion page views a month and in excess of 34 million unique visitors! Heck, it even got US President Obama’s attention, who conducted a ‘Ask Me Anything’ interview on a Reddit forum last year where the Internet populace grilled him on everything from Internet freedom to his favorite basketball player. So, what is Reddit really?

Possibly the best way to answer that question is to tell you what it isn’t. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which focus heavily on who you are and what you have to say, Reddit is all about the content. Simply put, Reddit is the largest aggregator of user submitted content on the Internet. Any Reddit user (a Redditor, for short) can submit text, image, video and link posts, and other users from the community then either ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ the content. This ensures that good content buoys to the top of the page (and the really popular and fast-rising content goes to the coveted front page), and everything else gets pushed down. Comments and responses to the content are allowed, and these too can be upvoted or downvoted. The result is a potpourri of the web’s most interesting, weird and controversial content, a human-voted mosaic of “what’s more interesting on the web right now”, if you will.

To make sense of all this content, Reddit is organized into several tens of thousands of categories or ‘subreddits’, each of which is a community unto itself comprised of folks who share a common interest. Take a walk down subreddit lane, and you’ll be amazed by how different one subreddit is from another, both in terms of tone and quality of content (and conversation). You can subscribe to as many or as few subreddits as you like, and should you not find one for your interest area, creating a new one takes just a matter of minutes. Like other social networks, you can friend other Redditors, and users have publicly visible profiles where all their comments and submitted posts are listed. Best of all, you can use Reddit without leaving a trace of your real life online—Reddit allows for truly anonymous conversations, and no real names or even email addresses are required!

While this undeniably leads to vicious personal diatribe and ad hominem attacks, the Reddit moderator system (the people who maintain each subreddit) and the selfpolicing voting mechanism ensures that meaningless vitriol gets downvoted into obscurity, effectively neutralizing the primary hazards of anonymity. What it does allow for is remarkably candid expression of opinion, where quality conversation thrives and the value of words, rather than who is expressing them, is seen. Think about it—when was the last time you saw quality conversation on real-name networks like Facebook? Many Redditors I’ve spoken to profess to being closest to their real self on Reddit when expressing opinion on anything even remotely controversial, and farthest from that on Facebook where friends from school, family and colleagues all collectively congregate to pass judgment on contrarian opinions. Redditors can speak their mind without fear of offline retribution, and the worst they have to see is a few embarrassing downvotes!

One could surely ask—why should teem- Momma ing masses of anonymous users grouped only by their interests matter to brands and marketers? Conventional wisdom drives marketing and branding investments into communities that can result in lead generation and eventual sales. If history is anything to go by, Redditors are fiercely protective of their subreddits from brands invading their conversations, and are thus notoriously resistant to self-promotion. If anyone tells you that Reddit is an effective way to inexpensively market a product, there’s a high likelihood they’re abandoning your brand’s best interests in favor of a short-lived Reddit engagement that’ll be filled with keywords like vote-buying services, using paid shills and bots – stuff that’s extremely risky to try on Reddit given the punishing nature of its inhabitants! In the worst cases, Redditors have been known to actively attack brands that have been seen as having betrayed them on other platforms such as Amazon and Yelp, damaging the brand’s reputation far beyond just Reddit.

So, what’s a honest marketer to do to leverage the power of Reddit for his/her brand? Rule number one is to be a Redditor first, and a marketer second. Promote less, listen more. Interact with the Reddit community by encouraging discussions around complaints about your current products, future product or feature releases, and service quality. If you run your own brand’s subreddit, encourage user submissions and link the top voted results in your other marketing collateral. Or you could use the subreddit for Redditors to ‘ask me anything’ – and funnel the questions into product development and customer channels for appropriate action. Learn from the collective intelligence of the community—you will be missing a large opportunity by not taking advantage of it.