5 Creative Ways to Reach Into Your Online Community

Posted July 1st, 2010 / By Brandon Cox in Social

A community is a place where people connect with each other in personal relationships. An online community can be thought of, not so much as a tightly defined circle, but rather a loose collection of smaller, overlapping circles. A blogger who wants to manage an online community should be finding ways to connect those circles to each other more effectively.

How do you reach into your online community to strengthen the relationships that exist there? Here are five suggestions…

1. Personally contact individual members. When people leave comments or sign up for your mailing list, they’re giving you permission to contact them. In our ultra-spammy age, this requires a great deal of trust. Never abuse this by sending obviously unsolicited pitches, but I think you can feel free to make an initial “thank you” contact.
2. Highlight great comments in a future post. Occasionally someone leaves a comment that is worthy of being its own post. They’ve taken the time to contribute to the community discussion in a way that might need more attention than being buried in a long, threaded discussion.
3. Turn a question back to the community. There are two big advantages of this: 1.) You get to pass the buck temporarily on a tough question, and 2.) People are generally rather opinionated and love weighing in.
4. Connect community members to each other. This is really the power of the social web. Bob asks a question about building widgets. Sandy mentions that James is an awesome widget-maker. A new connection is formed which only serves to strengthen the community.
5. Highlight the accomplishments of community members. In other words, when you notice someone in your community doing something great off your site, report about it on your site.

What else? How do you reach into your community?

In addition to serving as Editor of Fuel Your Blogging, Brandon is also a Pastor at Saddleback Church and Online Community Coordinator for Pastors.com. He’s also a web designer, blogger, and church communications consultant. Catch him on his own blog or on Twitter.