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
gigaom.com
"the new feature ... gives both Gawker authors and readers the ability to filter comments based on the writers and commenters they follow, or whose content they have “liked” or given a star to. So readers can click on Denton’s name and see not only the posts he has written, but also a specific selection of comments that he has chosen to show, from…
www.niemanlab.org
"a new kind of reblogging functionality so that readers can top the articles they share with their own headlines and introductions.... “Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers. And at some point the distinction should become meaningless."