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Overview: Online Community Management

Convening a community can be the most powerful communication tactic there is.

Online communities offer enormous opportunities to the right organisation. Community members are far more likely to read your content, think of your organisation, give you feedback, share your content, attend your events, get involved in your programmes, and buy your products.

On the other hand, convening a community is hard: few people have time for more than a couple of online platforms in their lives, so attracting them to yours means you need to be uniquely useful to them.

That generally requires a change of mindset and new internal processes across the organisation, because it’s not your community - it's theirs. And getting their involvement means really listening to what they have to say, and then visibly acting on it.

I built the EU Commission’s first online community in 2002, and have built many more successful ones since. If you’d like to chat, get in touch.

More services: start with Communication strategy.

Relevant resources

Rethink your workday in cycles
blog.bufferapp.com
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Excellent article. Would implement it all if I wasn't so busy ;) "How many hours we work every day is barely important any more in today’s creative economy. Instead, “Manage your energy, not your time ... we have 4 different types of energies to manage every day: - physical energy – how healthy are you? - emotional energy – how happy are you? - …

23/06/2014
Surround Storytelling
www.edelman.com

"steering the storyline between a brand and its consumers must create programs that remember the code, deploy many different types of content at the correct time and inject humanity and purpose into every story..."

23/06/2014
NYT, WaPo & Mozilla building opensource audience engagement platform
www.niemanlab.org

Good example of CMS innovations emerging from newsrooms - wish I'd added to my recent weekly LinkedIn tour: "a multi-faceted piece of newsroom infrastructure, a set of building blocks that will allow organizations to turn on or turn off various engagement features with relative ease ... a bunch of parts that you can assemble and reassemble ... …

22/06/2014
Innovation: management and culture (TumblrHub last week, part 1)
www.linkedin.com

'Innovation' threaded its way through a lot of the resources added to my TumblrHub last week: from innovation-friendly management through to innovative Content Management Systems for tomorrow's newsmedia business models and personal productivity tools.

Marketing, groupthink & blind spots
www.digitaltonto.com
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@digitaltonto on "Cargo Cult Marketers", who - despite the complexity of modern marketing - "offer a false solution ... a simple formula that explains everything." Greg goes into the psychology of this particular breed of marketers with great insight, charting how they come up with and fall in love with their own idea and then, subconsciously, on…

Brand Engagement Plummeting on Facebook
contently.com
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"These numbers are even more striking when you consider engagement is significantly down even though brands are almost certainly spending more money to promote their posts to combat plummeting organic reach. Facebook’s ad revenue reached $2.27 billion in Q1 2014, up 82 percent from Q1 2013" - New Report Reveals Just How Drastically Brand Engageme…

Influencer Marketing Tools
marketingland.com
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"Influencers come in many forms — celebrities, connectors, thought leaders, aggregators, CEOs and journalists — and need to be identified and targeted based on your vertical market. The following tools are avenues to help you define who you should target as an influencer through 2014 and beyond." - Influencer Marketing Tools That Will Power Yo…

How LinkedIn Can Hurt Your Business
www.websearchsocial.com
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How's (y)our LinkedIn strategy? "Bob runs a local business and was fired by a new customer... The customer had decided to review the LinkedIn profiles of Bob and his staff. As it turns out, there were mixed messages being presented and the nature and quality of Bob’s business came into question." - A Story About How LinkedIn Can Hurt Your B…

11/06/2014
Turning future news events into structured data
www.niemanlab.org

One for @richardmedic ... "Smydra ... he wants to find a way to allow the public to benefit from all the knowledge of future news events locked up inside newsrooms.... He'd love your thoughts" - Can you turn future news events into structured data? » Nieman Journalism Lab

Webs of flesh, spun over saleable data
www.zdnet.com
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Apparently we are all now "little more than webs of flesh spun over packages of saleable data", according to a searing indictment of Google's anti-anonymity policy specifically. This is required reading for anyone interested in a balanced view of anonymity, privacy and public discourse: "The Google+ so-called "real name" policy can best be descr…

HuffPo moves to Facebook comments
www.poynter.org

"Huffington Post’s U.S. site and mobile apps will shift to using only Facebook comments, CTO Otto Toth announced. “This is far from an an end to conversation; it’s the start of conversation where you want to have it — and where you’ve been having it already,” he wrote. Readers are having a Facebook conversation under Toth’s post, but many of the…

03/06/2014
... and back to Facebook
techcrunch.com
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"We’ve been on Livefyre comments for a little under a year now, and while we weren’t the biggest fans of Facebook Comments* while we were using them, we’ve since realized that there is no perfect solution for commenting. And Facebook Comments, as troubled as they can be, are actually not that bad. ... until someone invents a perfect solution... w…

Livefyre on...
techcrunch.com
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" a buggy Livefyre launch, with lots of you using it and breaking it, is still better than Facebook Comments." - Commenters, We Want You Back | TechCrunch

Blogging on LinkedIn, or Paying on Facebook? (Updated)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

Since trying and half-rejecting Google+ and Tumblr, I've been accepted as a LinkedIn blogger. At least I never bothered with Facebook.

Jean Pisani-Ferry wants the EU to work within its current mandate but to have the tools needed to carry it out. - Project Syndicate
www.project-syndicate.org
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"Though the political conversation about Europe has gained in importance everywhere in recent years, the truth is that Europeans are not having the same conversation. That is a serious problem for Europe’s leaders: the electoral earthquake is big enough for them to feel compelled to respond to their citizens’ economic and political discontent; but…

Discourse: Reinventing Online Communities
readwrite.com
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"The only kind of moderation that scales with the community is the community. ... Through the trust system, Discourse communities develop a natural immune system that repels the trolls, spam, and hate that eventually tear apart communities on other forum software. - Stack Overflow Founder's Next Big Thing: Reinventing Online Communities – ReadWri…

30/05/2014
Identifying Influential Bloggers
www.jeffbullas.com
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"Getting the bloggers to review and publish content about you is not going to be a walk in the park. It is not about you, it is about them. So you need to offer something of value to them." - 3 Social Media Tools to Identify Influential Bloggers - Jeffbullas's Blog

Best practices in OCM
www.npr.org

"The experience of talking about race, ethnicity and culture on the Internet is nearly always deeply disenchanting. People don't even talk past each other; they talk right through each other. Prejudices harden. We find ourselves confirming our worst stereotypes of one another. And that's before the slurs fly." Some great lessons for making it wor…

27/05/2014
Dialogue of the deaf: interpreting the election results (updated)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

Over 70% of EU voters did not vote for the EU. Where now?

Why convening Communities beats Social Media
www.jeffbullas.com
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As Michael Silverman puts it, "a brilliant online community has more potential than your current social networking strategy", and he isn't even talking about EU communications. The only downside, not mentioned, is that convening a community requires: - web publishing technologies which do not date from the previous millennium - real online commu…

Explainer journalism: 'right to be forgotten'
www.theguardian.com
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"We explain the European court of justice ruling saying that Google will have to delete some information from its index – and why it has divided opinion" Good example of explainer journalism, and of how answering the comments often looks like more work than writing the thing in the first place (if you don't believe me, scan the comments): - Expl…

LinkedIn Blogs: What Marketers Need to Know
www.socialmediaexaminer.com
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"Stephanie shares how marketers can make the most out of the LinkedIn publishing platform." - LinkedIn Publishing Platform: What Marketers Need to Know | Social Media Examiner

Getting started with LinkedIn blogging
www.linkedin.com

My second post as an accredited LinkedIn blogger covers how to apply to the Platform, and provides a look at the blogging interface

So @LinkedIn blogs are public after all. Shame about the analytics
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

LinkedIn posts are open to the public, even those not in your LinkedIn network, so you end up with a public blog page, over which you have no control.

Some comment without reading, others the reverse
gawker.com

"The real question isn't why we don't read anymore, it's why we comment—passionately and with the utmost confidence—after reading only a headline. " - NPR Pulled a Brilliant April Fools' Prank On People Who Don't Read

12/04/2014
Double subscription rates: keep it simple, ECAS
blog.qz.com
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" If we wanted more email subscribers, we’d have to make it easier for people to subscribe." Quartz's new approach to enewslettre subscription, which has seen daily subscriber rates double since February, is like the 'Quick Subscribe' feature I always propose for online community sites: - some users may create an account to subscribe, but most wo…

Why email pitches are like movie trailers
www.prdaily.com
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"Crafting the perfect pitch: Create a message, tailor it to your audience, and include a call to action. Journalists, bloggers, and other PR pros receive dozens of email pitches a day. To make your pitch stand out, take a page from movie marketers. They’re experts in capturing the audience’s attention in three minutes or less and leaving them on …

Ensuring quality in Social Journalism
pando.com
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There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…

LinkedIn as a blogging platform
help.linkedin.com

"we're expanding LinkedIn's publishing platform and testing a new feature that lets members write longer form posts about their expertise and professional interests. Posts are shared with your network and the LinkedIn community, and become a part of your LinkedIn profile. " - LinkedIn's Publishing Platform - Overview | LinkedIn Help Center A…

29/03/2014
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