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
www.niemanlab.org
Good case study, concluding with observations on the role of journalists which also apply to government communicators: "An engaged journalist's role in the 21st century is not only to inform but to bring readers directly into the conversation through... real-time coverage, alternative story forms, crowdsourcing, beat blogging, user-generated co…
digiday.com
" online comments can be worth having, if the publisher puts the work in." Excellent case study. Found this stat particularly interesting: "Users who log in, which is required if you want to comment, view seven pages per session on average, while non-registered users make it to only 1.7" I'd suggest that users who both view 4 times as much conte…
gigaom.com
"handing over a key component of your relationship with readers to Twitter and Facebook is a mistake... suggests to readers that their comments and interaction aren’t worth the trouble" [If] "Comments are broken ... that’s not the fault of readers — it’s the fault of publishers for not seeing their relationship with their readers as being of valu…