5 Ways to Take Your Community to the Next Level

So, you fancy yourself a community manager now? You are listening, interacting and doing everything that Seth Godin has told you to do. Great steps. But guess what? Your community still kind of sucks (sorry, it just does). Not enough discussions are happening, people aren’t engaging with each other and your community is spinning towards irrelevance. Don’t lose hope: I have a grab bag of awesome for you. Hopefully, it will kick you into gear.

Incite. Take a stand. Do something interesting. How much positive attention/street cred did Digg get when it put the HD-DVD Crack back on the site? By being avant garde and edgy Digg established a significant amount of pull within the internet community (which I’d argue they are still coasting on today).
Invite new people to the discussion. (Preferably smart people) To invigorate your community try and bring in new and exciting voices. Add value where there wasn't any before. It will strengthen the quality of your product and it will lend added credibility and perhaps add a new audience that you hadn't had previously.
Take your content to another community. Exposing new people to your voice, product or service is always beneficial in the end. Getting in front of more eyeballs=win. Doesn't matter where you go just ensure that you are establishing valuable content in another arena. The exposure from this isn't bad either.
Inject your personality into the mix. Great, you are friendly, courteous, and listen to everybody. Sweet... If you don't have a distinctive (and REAL) voice you won't succeed. People can sense passion and you should be sweating it out of every pore.
Be everywhere. Hit every damn place you can think of and own it. Digg? There. Reddit? There. Stumbleupon? There. Delicious? There. Mixx? There. Commenting on every RSS feed you can think of? There. You even have to be on Propeller. Is a presence on each enough? Is brand monitoring enough? Hell no. You have to ensure your presence is felt on each network and you are a valued member of that community.

Is this the answer to "Next Leveldom"? Nope. Only you can figure out what is right for your community. I just want to inspire some new thinking that you may not have had previously. So expand your horizons, stop sucking, and go forth and kill the purple cow (or at least make it your bitch).

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tagged as bad mamojammah, community, community ass kicking, community bad ass, community management, community social media, kick your community into high gear, Marketing, people relations, Public Relations

Jamie Favreau

Nice!! I am on most of those sites and I am trying to work on the rest of them!! Thanks for the insight.

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Praz Hari

great piece..

@drewshope

I like it. It gets to be tedious when everyone is afraid to be themselves. For me, all this 'social media' hulabaloo is about being yourself, and THAT is what will attract visitors.

ryanstephens

These are all very good suggestions. I frequently read Rich Millington's "Feverbee" for some of the most insightful and applicable community tips I've found. One of the things I think I would do (depending on the community) is make it relatively exclusive. Invite 8 of the best minds, and let them seed some content --> then add 5 new people a week. If anyone is inactive for over a week's time w/o prior notice/good reason. They're politely removed.

This gets rid of a lot of noise and ensures a solid amount of signal.

Community building isn't an easy thing. Most people try to shove, shove, shove, but guess what? If you're community has lots of intriguing conversations that entice people, they'll find time to participate. It's that simple.

Another solid piece Stuart!

Stuartfoster

The tools do make it easier Adam. But you are definitely right. It still is a bitch.

AdamPieniazek

So basically, be everywhere all the time. Luckily with all the tools we now have being omnipresent is not that difficult anymore, just time and energy consuming. Though anything worth doing should take up energy.

Absolutely Victor. The "be everywhere" theorem definitely applies to SM.

vtbarrera

Changing up the landscape for the social media discussion seems to be key. It seems default that some content just does well on twitter, but it's seeing the same buzz across multiple social networks that seems to be key as well.

Mparachou

Thanks for sharing this article. Liked it!

The passion makes all the difference. If you aren't authentic...then don't bother.

TrendTracker

Nicely done! Great points.

Love the remark: "People can sense passion and you should be sweating it out of every pore." So many people involved in social media are extremely passionate and "sweating it out every pore" - which makes it such a vibrant medium.

Thanks -- and keep "sweating it out!"

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