What about communities beyond the oft talked about majors – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, Friendfeed, StumbleUpon, etc.?  How does one engage is a very common question, and there are general principles that apply across all social communities major or not. In some ways, Brian Solis and I tried to provide guidance to that effect with Now Is Gone with the Seven Principles of Community Engagement.  But there’s more to that (Image: Community Building Competition by absingla).

First, let’s recap the Seven Principles, which are outline in the closing strategy chapter of Now Is Gone, Think Liquid:

1) Do not try to control the message: Command and control is dead. Though must folks out here get it, organizations are still struggling with relinquishing control. Let’s put it in the context of a relationship — which is the core of traditional PR and again, now with social media marketing.

2) Honesty, ethics and transparencies are musts:  This isn’t about baring trade secrets or intellectual property. It’s about basic human relations, and creating a strong foundation for long-term, two-way mutually beneficial relationship. Think about the golden rule here.

3) Participation within the community is marketing (Heuer): Get out there into the stakeholder’s realm. Comment and contribute to larger community groups and social networks. Read customer and related blogs (or vlogs and podcasts), and interact with the writers.

4) Communication to audiences is an out-dated 20th century concept (Rosen):  Audiences receive one-way communications — movies, radio broadcasts, speeches, etc. Thanks to social media the audience talks back, forcing organizations to address them in a conversational, two-way manner.

5) Build value for the community: Building value for a community means a core decision to serve them, either with meaningful conversations, links or number 6, content.

6) Inspire your community with real, exciting content, not corporate propaganda: Understand your community has problems, and you have some answers. Creating content for them does not mean give them a press release. It means give them Great Content, fight for their interest, and deliver content on a schedule so readers’ expectations of regular updates are met.

7) Intelligently manage your media forms (RSS, frequency, etc.) to build a stronger, loyal community: When acting in a community, create calls to action, manage your RSS feeds intelligently, make them obvious and accessible.

Now What?

Well, that was a more than a year and a half ago, and much has changed in social media communities since Now Is Gone (image: MacBraynes Bus by conner395).  I think it’s fair to say that there are some basic tactical best practices that have arisen. Some of these are obvious human behaviors that when engaged in a two-way conversation would obviously turn users off. Some are best practices based on mistakes and actions others have taken.

 

1) Bring People Back to Your Web Site. Be smart, especially if you are building a community within a larger network.  If you want to build relationships with people, give them a way to contact you, and perhaps further engage.  Provide intelligent calls to action.  Post meaningful links and content that your community members may want to see. And then provide calls to action for those who want to develop an even stronger relationship with you.

Many nonprofits do well in branding and awareness on major social networks, but fail to achieve significant relationship development. Getting people to interact with you on your site is the difference maker here. The numbers are less, but the relationships are stronger.

2) Relating versus spamming.  It’s not kosher to auto DM or spam people.  This is basic human relationships, but if you are using your community, either hosted elsewhere or on your own platform as an auto-response and/or pitch mechanism, you will alienate community members.  This should be obvious to people.

I mean who wants to walk into a car deal and snake-oiled?  The same thing goes for online communities.  Talk with – as opposed to at – people.

3)Play within existing communities: It doesn’t make sense most of the time to create your own community. In fact, most organizationally started communities fail. Usually one already exists on Ning, Squidoo, a community board, or yes, one of the majors. See where open APIs, value added content, and groups will let you play withing the larger community.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of this was how HubSpot created Twitter Grader then used the data to produce the State of the Twittersphere report. Oh, by the way they produce inbound marketing software, a natural hit for those who are really into the report data… and how to make a successful app. like Twitter Grader.

4) Don’t dictate to the community. Another somewhat obvious people relations skill, but one that companies like Facebook need to fail before they comprehend that their users are also their partners. On the otherhand, a company like Southwest Airlines has figured out how to use their social community to vet online significant changes.

5) Stay Relevant: Sometimes communities grow stale. Keep updating the technical prowess, features, content and capabilities that are feeding you community. For successes, consider the updates networks like Twitter and Facebook have made over the past year, or lying fallow for too long like Second Life, LinkedIn, Jaiku and MySpace have done over periods of time. Recently, MySpace and LinkedIn made significant progress, but only LinkedIn seems to have benefited from it.

The point is the same though, whether you are on someone else’s platform or your own, the community lives on currentness. Make sure you stay relevant. This in many ways is about the final chapter of Now Is Gone, Think Liquid. Water strategy keeps you moving forward.

Most of these tactical best practices are common sense when you consider them in the context of relationships with other people. You can never go wrong with Golden Rule based actions and principles.

This week’s Georgetown class is being taught by Qui on Now Is Gone.  Students will mercifully miss me pontificating on my own book due to a business trip.

A little while ago I wrote a post, dubbed “Blog Last.” It examined the strategic process that should proceed blogging in today’s social media environment, in response to the 86 percent failure rate companies are experiencing (image: Blogging and Recording by Jacob Botter). That being said, there’s still tremendous benefit available to those who can successfully blog, including:

Thought leadership

Share experiences and value w/ community, in turn building relationships

SEO

Provide capture point for marketing initiatives

Influence the media

Crisis PR

And much, much more

This Network Solutions Solutions Stars blogging video (disclosure: we helped produce this) gets into greater details about the benefits of blogging.

But we’ve reached a point in the blogging era where marketing blogger rarely talk about best practices anymore. Darren Rowse still does a fantastic job of providing prescient tips. It seems like a good idea to dust off the cobwebs and put together a list of best practices for those who are just starting out. Here are my tips for writing a great blog.

Structuring Content

You need a guidepost to serve your readers. They are the people that matter, the stakeholders you are trying to serve with the blog. An editorial mission serves as a compass, and keeps a blogger from wandering into the inevitable eddies and pools on the social web that while personally interesting, your readers don’t care about. Write out a simple mission that generally determines the topics you’ll discuss.

What to write about on a day-to-day basis (image: Blogging Readiness by cambodia4kidsorg)? Ever have a creative session? Coming up with ideas can be a brainstorm. When stuck, I try to do anything but sit in front of the computer. Often relaxing, going to the gym, reading other blog posts and news sources online can trigger fantastic ideas.

Another source is my actual day-to-day work. If you’re working on it, it’s likely other professionals or stakeholders are interested in it, too. Your offline experiences are valuable & a great platform for a unique idea or perspective. Keep an idea log for future posts.

Do you have commentary to add? Let’s hope so. Because there are plenty of safe blogs out there. Choose a position, have a stance, offer a point of view, and take a risk. I’m more comfortable being wrong then being boring. And I’m not afraid to be criticized for standing up against what my be deemed popular in the echo chamber. That’s distinguished this blog from other social media conversations.

But opinions are not the only way to add value. Your company must have subject matter expertise of some sort that your stakeholders need. Offer it, show it, and let it shine.

Blog content does not need to be perfect like a white paper or a corporate document. Think in brush strokes. That’s blogging. Taking an idea that wouldn’t necessarily make for a full article in a trade publication, but still has value for your readers is a natural. Remember, add some color commentary on pertinent topics.

Usually, except when writing a long position paper or primer like this one, try to limit posts to 3-10 paragraphs in length. Fully researched concepts can be broken into several posts, and later banded together for an ebook.

If you are trying to build readership, you want to post a minimum of two to three times a week. Great posts and events often drive readers into your blog. Consistent on topic discussion and frequency is what creates loyal readers.

Tone

It’s not a formal business document, folks. This kind of over-massaged approach to blogging kills efforts quickly. Minimize your approval processes and get away from fear-based control.

Personality should be included (image: 2000 bloggers by elaine vigneault). You have to be you, right? Let your humor, your attitude come through. It may not be perfect, and you may learn some things about how you affect people, but it needs to be genuine. Personality infused blogging attracts others to your writing, demonstrates transparency and authenticity, and really just returns your company to a human level.

How do you do this? Just write it like you were talking with someone on a Saturday afternoon.

Proof for grammar and typos, not business style. It’s a good idea to proof a couple of times. You won’t catch every typo (or at least I don’t). Remember, it’s a blog, not the Sistine Chapel. Let it go. Another thing is to try and remove unnecessary first person references (I, me) as the post is about them, not you.

Prepping Your Post for Primetime

It’s a good idea to link to a minimum of three other blogs per post. This gets you read by other bloggers, and also demonstrates that you’ve researched your topic, and actually have subject matter expertise to offer. Find an entire discussion on cross-linking here.

An ideal post offers at minimum a photo, and if at all possible additional video, and audio to supplement the post. This breaks up a post and tells a more compelling story. Shel Israel once noted that when he inserted multimedia into his post, he saw dramatic increases in readership. There are plenty of places to research this kind of cross-linking, multimedia and information.

Check out Flickr Creative Commons for Images (Make sure to provide attribution). A wide variety of video channels and hosting sites beyond YouTube can provide video resources. Places to research blog posts for cross-links:

s.technorati.com

blogsearch.google.com

Icerocket.com

When searching use key words and phrases from posts to find links. Reading these posts will also make your content stronger as you will be forcing yourself to take an extra half hour and fact check. In an
ideal world, you or your social media marketing partner is using del.icio.us (or other bookmarking service) to build a reservoir of links to informative posts for later use.

Getting Read

Comment on and link to other blogs as other bloggers will become aware of you and link back. Building relationships with other bloggers and influentials online is essential for your blog to become accepted.

Really, I cannot emphasize this enough. Rarely is content special enough to be discovered on its own. You must be participating, and become an active part of a community if you want your valuable content to be discovered and read. This in its own right could be another primer.

Don’t forget to register the blog with Mahalo, Technorati, Google, and other relevant search engines. Other smart tips include adding the blog’s url as a call to action in your email signature, on your business card, and on your social network profiles. In short, integrate with your other outreach efforts.