Building A Community Around A Content Site

An audience responds and interacts with you - not  each other.

A community builds relationships around a strong common interest. 

Most media platforms have an audience, not a community. 

There are some great exceptions. HuffingtonPost, The Guardian, many blogs, and even radio shows have a intelligent (and less intelligent) debates.

Classic magazines like Amiga Power spent as much time writing about games as they did about self-indulgent community material - but it worked. My former employers, PCGamer, did the same. It built a community. It encouraged interaction between readers.

It's readers felt they were part of something. They frequently referred to readers, by name, in articles. That's powerful. 

If you're trying to build a community around a media/content entity, you need to change the entity to faciliate a community. That means turning some pages to member columns, hosting live events/activites (online or offline). Featuring members in different ways. Summarizing the best member contributions. Setting goals/actions for the audience to undertake and reporrting on the progress. 

For simplicity, focus on three things:

1) Featuring members. Interviews, mentions in articles, reviews/reports on member milestones, member contributions/comments.

2) Creating opportunities for members to interact with each other. Live events and activities. Ongoing debates. Letters to each other (not just the magazine) etc...

3) Establish common goals/purpose and culture. Have a personality. Have inside jokes that only some members get. Set common activities/challenges/goals for the audience.

 

Comments

[Ulrich]

Great posting (as always), thanks for the info.

I wonder if 10K Twitter followers is big enough as an audience? I guess it all depends on the interactions.

From reading your blog I learned that without strong common interest there's no community feeling building up. But I struggle to find the strong common interest among my followers.

I guess Jokes and Funny Sayings is not special enough to build up a community.

Could you post more about identifying the strong common interest? Please? Thank you!

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