NTEN CONFERENCE
April 2009
Building and Sustaining
Vibrant Online Communities
The Online Ecosystem
Organizations now have the opportunity to interact with their stakeholders beyond one website.
Source: Common Knowledge
Social Media Derives its Power Thru Trust
Source: Faris Yakob http://tinyurl.com/c8c256
Confidential
And Different Rules Apply
Source: Neil Perkin ‘What’s Next in Media’ (Slide 9)
Confidential
Start with a Purpose in Mind
Scan the environment Get together with top contributors,
advisors, community manager Define the ‘What’ ‘Who’ ‘How’ and ‘Why’ Personalize the pitch to members Test drive and improve
Can you devote enough Capacity, if not rethink!
Confidential
Slowly build your audience / collaborators
The first 10 members set the tone Recruit people who set the standards for
participation and achievement. Look for complementary skill sets,
geographic representation, and cross-membership
Build from your existing offline community
Engage external communities to listen, learn, get involved, and reach out
Experiment & Get Tool Mix Right
Adapted from: Christian Renaud, Technology Intelligence Group
Understand and nurture your communitySource: Edelman
Segment Your Community
Any communities have various types of users:
Empower your super users
Make it easy for people
to find, join and act
Know your community's ecology and who to give attention to.
Community Management
Are you empowering your super users? WiserEarth has Editors, Group Admins, Admins
Make it easy for people to find, join and act: welcome your community members
Engage with your community
You need to be relevant to your community
Lesson learned with WiserEarth
The purpose of what you do is more important than the tool you choose
Barriers of entry are very low on the online media: Experiment, Measure, Adjust
Participation online is different: reward your power users
Set up modest goals at first for your community building
Some Resources
Beth’s blog: Beth Kanterhttp://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/
Ben Rigby’s Book ‘Mobilizing Generation 2.0′ http://www.mobilevoter.org/book.html
WiserEarth blog http://blog.wiserearth.org/
The Social Pulpit from Edelman “Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit” http://tinyurl.com/ax2b6b
And of course NTEN Workshops and Webinars
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