How to engage a community

Look for & create opportunites to interact.

In the last couple of days I’ve been working my way through The Trust Agents by Julien Smith and Chris Brogan. This is a great book to get your hands on. It is, essentially, a guide book to the protocols involved in working in online media. How to engage your community is just one of the topics they cover.

Here is a checklist of the dos and don’ts of engaging with a community. It’s a great reminder to those of you out there wondering when you can start seeing the pay-off of your time and/ or money spent on social media managers.

How to engage a community

1. Listen: Where do your potential clients, existing clients and competitors interact online? Go there and do nothing but listen.
2. Evaluate: Is the conversation positive or negative about you and/ or your area of specialty? Are there a lot of comments?
3. Take small steps: Don’t intrude. Let the community know that you’re there and that you’re listening. Look for and create opportunities to interact. Build your own profile as someone who’s around and listening. Learn’s who’s a regular and who makes decisions.
4. Lead a new initiative: At the right time, when you’re better known, make a move to place yourself in the centre of things. In a forum, offer to moderate. If you have specialized knowledge, offer to help people or host a get-together.
5. Get ahead: Being inside the right community can build your business, give you insider knowledge and get an edge in your niche.

A little note here about engaging in forums. In The Australian newspaper today, 24 September 2010, there was a little article titled ‘Fake reviews earn US rebuke’.  It’s an article about some PR people posing as disinterested customers. The PR company faced charges, which they agreed to settle.

Advertisters should not pass themselves off as ordinary consumers touting a product, and endorsers should make it clear when they have financial connections to sellers.

Mary Engle, Director US Federal Trade Commision – as reported in The Australian

If you’d like to avoid these pitfalls, get stuck into Trust Agents. I think you’ll enjoy it. And no, no-one’s paying me to say this – more’s the pity.

Here’s to Truth, Justice and the Social Media Way.

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