HHS @ SXSWi Part 3: Engaging Online Communities
Part of using new media to effectively build communities online is understanding how to engage your audience. Engagement can help us to understand our stakeholders, spread the reach of our messages, and even lead to behavior change through peer influence. While some communities need no help engaging their community members, others see engagement as a growing challenge with the increasing number of online communities competing for attention from our audiences.
Effective use of technology to engage was one theme running through SXSWi . I attended a number sessions on engagement and have included a few key points from some of those sessions below:
One panel titled “How Many Rungs?: Social Change & the Engagement Ladder ” discussed how traditional models of community engagement, which tend to include some sort of pyramid or ladder where people successively move up higher levels of engagement, may not necessarily apply in online engagement. Rather, these models may represent more of an audience distribution that ranges from silent observers to highly active participants. People may jump in at any point in the distribution, and varying the level of effort required for engagement opportunities will allow visitors within various levels of the distribution to get involved.
View the slides or read the tweets .
The panelists on “Lurkers: Your Most Important Community Members ” discussed strategies for engaging the silent observers in a community. The passive observes are the largest segment in your audience, but can often be the most difficult to understand because of their lack of engagement. Practice random acts of connection by reaching out to members of the community directly and ask how you can help, what you can do to better serve their needs, and how you can add value to their experience. Depending on the size of your community, you can contact individual members, encourage them to contact you directly, or allow your more passive participants to provide feedback through a poll or survey. Also, offering simple tasks that require less effort than others will make it easy for observers to become more actively engaged.
Read the tweets .
In “Health Communities: Superheroes Who Need a Justice League ,” Jennifer Prokopy talked about some of the ways that online health communities are different from other communities. Government may be a credible resource, but many people are looking for a shared experience where they are able to relate to others in similar situations. Partnering with those communities leaders to empower them to share our credible resources may be more effective than creating our own communities and expecting people to engage just because we are credible.
Read the tweets .
Understanding how to identify influencers and leverage champions in a community to increase engagement continues to evolve. It is just important to reach the people who count as it is to count the people you reach. Credibility and context outrank reach and numbers and it is important to know where influencer’s realm of influence lies.
Browse the sessions below to learn more about the growing discussion on influence and new media:
- The Science of Influence
- Influencers Will Inherit the Earth. Quick, Market Them!
- People Power: Leveraging Personal Stories to Build Influence
- Building Better Influence
- Influencer Throwdown: Proving Influence Once and For All
- Everyone’s Wrong about Influence. Except your Customers
- Online Mom Communities = Hotbed of Local Influencers
What do you do to keep your community engaged? Do you have any tips to share to help others better engage their communities?
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