PR and Social Media: Three Strategies to Make Online Communities Work Better

When it comes to pr and social media are your online communities working as well as they could? Are there some simple things you can do to make them work better? Following are three strategies that I have found over the past fifteen years helping communities like SaraLee, AT&T, and our own Networlding community, grow better and faster:

1. Start with the end in mind. What do you want to happen with your community? Most online community developers would agree that it is very difficult to get people to participate. With the ever-increasing numbers in online communities, it really comes down to the great questions that pull in great answers. For example, in our online community group on LinkedIn for Networlding we ask new community members to share their top three strengths and one goal they want to achieve in the next three months. We have found that many want to share and this creates more active participation.
2. Make a request for group ambassadors. In every group, you will find a couple of people even in the beginning who are more active than others in the community. Reach out to these people. Offer to make them ambassadors. Give them questions to ask the group to get more people participating. One company we worked with used this strategy and ended up with several hundred new participants in half the time it used to take them to acquire new members.  Promoting someone to ambassador status empowers them to lead a group with more passion and purpose benefiting the whole community, including them.
3. Create a series of great questions to continuously “ignite” conversations. What are the good questions? From the book I wrote a number of years ago, 75 Cage Rattling Questions to Change the Way You Work we found that great questions lead to great answers. For example, a question like, “What are some success stories you have had in social media?” might better be presented as “What one story do you have or have heard of around a social media success that you think is the best you have ever heard?”With the second question, you have a much more compelling question that will generate more participation because even if someone does not have a story of their own they should have heard a number of them and believe that one of them is at the top of their list for a “best success story.” When we work with clients we spend a lot of time focusing on their desired outcomes for their communities, tailoring what we suggest to their unique needs  . . . and everyone has unique needs. What top online community success story have you heard . . . or created that you think has had one of the best successes? What horror stories have you heard or just stories of communities that limp along rather than grow?