Gloerich on New Media and Community Management

When I was a kid in the 80′s, there were only 2 dutch tv-channels. When something cool was on, you were sure to talk about it the next day because most of the people would’ve seen it. You knew your friends watched it too! Maybe you are one of those girls that chatted on the phone with a friend about the show you watched together!
I can’t recall exactly if adding a 3th channel changed the way we talked about television the next day but I’m sure it has changed somewhere along the line up to the point where we are now.
And that is a sad thing. Remember the conversations with friends? “When they guy said xxxyyyzz…” “yeah, but I thought he said zzzyyyqqq and I had to laugh so hard!”. What’s the last time you’ve had one of those conversations?

You’ve seen this happening in your community.

The same thing happened in your community and maybe you didn’t even noticed it. When your community had only 12 members, they knew one another’s names. They read the same blogposts and read every single forum-post. They knew what someones stance was on certain topics. If someone wrote a opinionated forum-post, people were waiting for a certain person to respond. Now your community has several thousand members, very good, but do they know one another? Do they think “ooh, I can’t wait to read what Bob has to say about this”?

Television is getting better.

Maybe you’ve noticed that watching television right now can be a lot more interesting than watching your recorded copy. How come? Twitter! It is really easy to join the conversation about a show that is one right now. It’s a good reminder how big television still is if you see how fast it updates.
The thing that makes it more interesting is the feeling that someone sees the exact same thing and is yelling at the television just like you do. And that you can read this.

How to get this intimacy back?

Don’t worry, you can get some of this magic back in the community. It takes a while, but what doesn’t in community management?  Their are lots of tools out there to enable live conversations. Richard Millington rightly notes chat enables you to easily deepen your communication. That might be why chat-rooms were one of the first things available on the Internet (even before website with pictures).  Check out Chatzy, it is very clean, simple and don’t need you to sign-up or download anything.
You might want to pick a time and day to increase to number of people who are there at the same time.
If you’re not scared of camera’s, I recommend Livestream to interview people and broadcast live. People can comment by chat and can ask questions for example. I’m doing that every wednesday at 4 o’clock with a different guest every week.

There’s still lot to improve

Our ‘TV’ show is not where I want it to be, still the amount of people who watch it and ask questions increases. It’s hard to find a ‘perfect’ time to go live. Getting people to ask questions when you’re in the middle of an interview isn’t easy either. I’m also thinking about the way we can improve the live experience in comparison with watching it afterwards, because I as well as the guests really like a big live audience.
If you’ve got some advice, I really appreciate it!