Developing an Engaged Community via New Media

Veronical Belmont and Tom Merritt handled the first session I attended.  It is about how to give your community a voice but also how to handle trouble-makers (aka trolls).

Tips for building an engaged community

• Let people email you.  Integrate comments from email into the show.
• Encourage your audience to let you know when you are wrong.
• Interact via contests.  Others may talk about it on other podcasts.
• Use chat rooms and live stream to interact.
• Use forums.  They tend to be more thoughtful and good feedback. 
• Don’t underestimate responding.  Be sure to write back in forums.  It goes a long way to build community.  Engage the audience.
• Ask your audience for show ideas.

What about the angry people?  (The Trolls)

• Let the audience police the trolls.  Note that you will need to have a good engaged audience in order for that to work.
• Sometimes you can communicate with them and bring them into the fold.
• Sometimes you can address their concerns calmly.

There are different types of trolls…

• GRUMPY TROLL:  They just are a little grouchy all the time.  Don’t react every time.
• LONELY TROLL:  He just wants to be loved and get attention.  Give him a little attention.
• CRITICAL TROLL:  He feels superior and smarter all the time.  Don’t bother engaging them.  If they are right, give them some slight acknowledgement.  But not all the time.
• HELPFUL TROLL:  He has good suggestions, but wants to help too much.  Be nice to them, but don’t get overwhelmed with them.  Respond a little.  Let it taper off.
• HOPELESS TROLL:  He just will not give up.  They are only there to disrupt.  They will not back off or communicate.  They just want to have fun disrupting what you do.

For HOPELESS TROLLS, you may be able to ban them.  You may need to mention it to the others for the sake of full disclosure. 

For some, you may need to go all the way to law enforcement.  But that is extremely unusual.  Usually, just ignoring them will eventually work.  They will slowly go away.

Q&A:  Veronica mentioned that she spends about 70% of her time working with her community.  That’s interesting because she is a content creator.

Q&A:  Tom mentioned that he does not use Ping.fm to communicate with one service to all areas.  Both of them use each social network in a different way.  However, Tom mentioned that he does use Ping.fm for announcements that a show is started or posted.  (Nice idea!)  Friendfeed is a similar service that will aggregate.

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