Six Lessons to Start Your Political/Government Online Community
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More and more campaigns and local governments are getting online (they get it!). Running an online community can be quite a challenge, but when done correctly it can be fun and a great way to reach your real community. This blog post is the devoted to the lessons I learned while creating and managing the Canton, New York Facebook community, so you can jump right in on your own online community
1. Avoid automation. Although linking RSS feeds and other tools to your page will save you time, they are a great way to bore your fans. Its similar to calling a company and wanting to speak to a real person and getting an automated system. Its easier for the company, but annoying for the consumer. Example, check out these two screen shots:
City X: Canton, New York:
City X: Online 7 months, 900 fans, population of 44,000
Canton, New York: Online 7 months, 2,956 fans, population of 6,000
2. Make sure the content is engaging, ask lots of questions. Include a question of the day (it was everything from "what is your favorite thing about Canton?" to "should there be a gas station in the historic part of main street?") Don't be afraid to touch the hot button topics, for those are the ones that people want to talk about. The more people talk, the greater your message will spread virally. For a great example, of how to engage your fans and more advice on this please check out "Skiing, Water Parks, Dating and Politics (Three Ways to Engage Your..."
3. Drum-up community pride, share events, comment on local sports team successes, congratulate a local graduating class, promote fundraisers for families in need. All of these things get people excited and engaged on your site.
4. Don't worry about negative comments, they are just part of the dialogue. Only delete comments that would not be allowed on the radio or TV. I learned this the hard way. I deleted a comment that was borderline, and it wound up being more of a problem than had I left it on. When the person reposted it a community member quickly refuted the negative comment. For more check out "To Delete, Or Not to Delete, That is the Question"
5. Encourage local decision makers to get online. I encouraged the mayor of Canton to join Facebook. Having her on the page made it more exciting for people to interact, people could answer the mayor's questions or get feed back from the mayor.
6. Have fun with it. If you enjoy working on the page, then people will come.
Feel free to check out the site for ideas: Canton, New York. I hope you found this helpful, let me know if you have any questions.
Comment
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Comment by Cyd Athens on August 5, 2010 at 6:04pm -
Alex. You're welcome, and my apologies. Your #4, as it's written, doesn't include a component for pride. :-)
I write, and have both made and caught such errors as a computer class that was incorrectly listed as how to manage your Hard Disk, except that in the description for the course, the S in the word "DISK" was the erroneously replaced by the letter C. Entirely different meaning, and the kind of thing that people notice.
The point I was trying to make, which I'll state again here, is that if we want readers to pay attention to our content, rather than our errors, *we* need to pay enough attention to our content to ensure that we're really saying what we want to say. Having been in some of those situations myself, I know it's hard, which is how I learned the lesson of checking my content before I post it.
Since I'm on a roll with it, I'll also note that you probably want to check your link for the "To Delete, Or Not to Delete, That is the Question" article. I'll leave it to you to figure out why it's not working and what needs to be changed.
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Comment by Alex Showerman on August 5, 2010 at 5:11pm -
Steve and Stephen, I am glad that you have had similar experiences and found this to be true!
Krsipijin, that is a fascinating example of leaving a comment up! I am curious as to how the crowd sourcing pilot worked!
Cyd, First thank you for pointing out the two errors. I felt as though your posts could have been pointed out privately, and made me feel a little foolish... A testament to just how hard #4 is to accomplish especially when your pride is on the line. This is an example to how true #4 is, I foolishly deleted your comment, and it brought more attention to the mistake. So for teaching me an important lesson and proving how true #4 is I thank you.
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Comment by Krispijn Beek on August 5, 2010 at 3:14pm
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Great post and good tips. The fourth tip is the most daring, not to delete when someone is very critical can give some people the nerves within the organization. I've been involved in a crowdsourcing pilot at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. One of the first discussion started at the community called for termination of the Ministry of Economic Affairs. We decided to wait untill the weekend before we would react or delete. Fortunately some other members strongly disagreed with the person who started the discussion, so in the end we didn't have to react ourselves.
The link to your facebook page contains a small error:
http://http//www.facebook.com/pages/Canton-New-York/226200548308?ref=ts
should be:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Canton-New-York/226200548308?ref=ts
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Comment by Cyd Athens on August 5, 2010 at 2:43pm
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I will say that the fact that you've made *both* of the corrections I pointed out goes to the crux of the point I was trying to make in my other comments. Verifying your content and checking it for typos and grammar errors is as important as any of the other 6 points you mention.
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Comment by Cyd Athens on August 5, 2010 at 2:40pm
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Fascinating. That's twice now that rule #4 has been broken, "Only delete comments that would not be allowed on the radio or TV." Both of the other comments I've made on this post have disappeared. Makes me wonder what the point of the article really is, and what other comments have been removed. It will be interesting to see whether or not this third comment goes away too.
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Comment by Stephen Peteritas on August 5, 2010 at 11:00am -
Agree with Steve #1 is why blogs and alot of sites die! I can set up my own rss's easily if I want to see that stuff. I need original content!!!
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Comment by GovLoop on August 4, 2010 at 6:51pm -
That's an awesome post.
#1 is so key. It's really hard because it takes work but is essential. I noticed our Facebook page got more active when I stopped auto-RSS in notes but actually shared only a few really good articles a day.
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