The Auctioneer-the official blog of Auction.ph

In an earlier entry entitled Brand: Website, I hinted on the importance of ‘personality’ in marketing a website. If you notice, our site has been low-key as of late. At the risk of sounding defensive, the lack of visible activity is by no means a sign of resignation. While there is visibly not much activity ‘up front’, there definitely is a whirlwind of planning in the less visible ‘out back.’ Meticulous tinkering has me immersed in prodigious amounts of research, dissecting the web searching for answers and formulas.

And all that research have somewhat rationalized my theory on personality. I’ve been looking at the success of Facebook and Craigslist and I am now more convinced that marketing a website is not just pushing a product in people’s faces, it’s about them finding someone who has a genuine desire to make their online lives more convenient and more engaging.

To jumpstart a website, personality is a non-negotiable. It doesn’t matter if only a handful of people respond to that personality as long as they inherently contain the few that matter—your connectors, your mavens and your salesmen (or whatever label you are more familiar with).

Below is a concise description of the websites’ origins, the parallel they run and how they split off into separate directions.

Facebook starting as a site for Ivy League students is common knowledge. Craigslist starting as a mailing list for Newmark and his ‘nerdy’ bunch is probably common knowledge but only to an emerging demographic. A few years later, what started as online tools for closely-knit communities snowball into giant planets in cyberspace. Facebook goes global and shakes the SNS division of the web. Mark Zuckerberg is hailed as a visionary and becomes one of the youngest billionaires in history. Craigslist maintains its stripped down look but is now getting a lot of heat from conservative sectors of the community. Craig Newmark continues to work as the website’s tireless Customer Service Rep.

Unlike Facebook, Craigslist maintains its esoteric charm and Newmark sticks to his principles and his advocacies. Craigslist is like the indie band that you know will never sell out.

What started with personality attracting and interacting with small communities experience superfluous growth driven by the larger community and the natural multiplier effect. The larger community creates an unstoppable word-of-mouth engine, delivers more compelling content, and keeps Craig Newmark relentlessly working.

At this point, the personality becomes a PR spin. It’s good for exposure and it’s good for maintaining interest.

Another kind of personality exists in the web which is more egotistic rather than altruistic. While the first one is more of a service to others type of thing, the flipside is more self-serving. In the US, a certain Julia Allison is hyped to be a purebred Internet celebrity. She started with hobnobbing, followed it with blogging and until recently, she extended her arsenal to twittering. She gets a lot of followers and then some haters.

We also have local blogosphere celebs. I think the more successful bloggers in the country are skewed towards the Craigslist nerdy demographic. The rest are Julia Allison type followers, interested in lifestyle, entertainment and stalking.

There is still a lot more angles to the personality theory but if you’re marketing a website, you can think of yourself as a celebrity agent. You need to highlight your client’s most appealing characteristics. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg rides a bike to work. Or that Craig Newmark works 8 – 11 as a customer service rep. Or, on the flipside, you can rave about Julia Allison’s new shoes.