An Action Plan for Building Online

CommunitiesApril 19, 2010

Image Copyright Rush “Exit Stage Left”

Who are we?Stephen Dill

Founder, SRD Interactive

Twitter.com/srdill

www.SRDInteractive.com

Matthew Mamet

Head of Customer, EditMe

Twitter.com/msmamet

www.EditMe.com

Step One - Decide Your Goal

What will you offer?

Who will want it?

What message would grab their attention?

How will you define success?

Be Realistic!

Step Two - Define the Challenge Assess your strengths – what do you do

best?

Find others with expertise – what size communities have they built?

Knowing where to build communities and how you are going to do it, build a budget

Tools are important, become practiced in their use

Make it easy for people to participate

Step Three - Quietly Build Momentum Discover the domain experts in your field and become known to them

Build profiles on the platforms being used by all the experts you are going to communicate with

Go through their blogs to find two to four posts to comment on

Set up and execute an editorial calendar to schedule regular content creation

“Expanding too quickly can mean failure.” – Martin Reed, Community Spark

Create Valuable Content!

Step Four - Make Friends

Post links to your comments pages and include their Twitter handle in your post

Givers Gain

Open up – show your personality

Begin commenting on specific posts identified in such a way as to be noticed for your expertise or willingness to engage

Start a dialogue with each domain expert, where ever they are: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.

Step Five – Step Behind the Curtain Your community is about them, not you!

Identify key community members to promote to community moderators

Ask your community experts to create regular content

Make a big deal about everyone who participates.

Drive traffic: bookmark your posts, update FB & LI and tweet, tweet, tweet

Stick to the plan. Community requires daily care and feeding.

What is EditMe? Easiest way to create collaborative websites

Use EditMe for business websites, private intranets, online communities, classroom sites, project team sites - just about any type of web site you need.

What is SRD Interactive? Online Interactive Marketing Services

SRD InterActive provides expertise, experience and creative thought to produce actionable plans: assess the current situation, confirm the business need, and recommend and manage the proper solutions.

Currently featuring social media training for all levels of an organization and the academic community.

Get Started Now

Special Offer for attendees of this Webinar

Two Month Free Trial on any plan that registers with coupon code srdill

There is a limit to the number of times this coupon can be used, so reserve your 2 month’s free at www.EditMe.com/pricing

Ask Us Questions!http://twitter.com/msmamethttp://EditMe.com

http://twitter.com/srdillhttp://srdinteractive.com

Next Week: Users, Groups, Policies . . . Oh MY! Managing community members in EditMeRegister now at: http://bit.ly/EditMeUsers