Posts tagged as:

community

Trust Agents

by Megan M. on November 22, 2011

If you’re interested in community engagement, connection-making and marketing for real people, Trust Agents is a must-read.

I admit it: We were late to the game reading Trust Agents, which is downright shameful because it’s such a useful, insightful book. If you look at Connectors and wonder how the hell they do what they do — and if you want to be successful in online business? Uh, yeah. Pick this one up.

I was discussing it with Bob Poole, because he’s one of my greatest Connectors — and he taught me a lot about human artistry in marketing before I even came across the term. Bob wrote a little book called Listen First – Sell Later, and even he said that Trust Agents reconfirmed for him that trust is the most important human emotion necessary for success in selling. Bob is all about asking questions and actively listening, and this is real trust agent mojo.

What Chris and Julien have put together in Trust Agents is the first thing you should pick up if you want to understand how people connection works on the internet. How do you build an audience? How do you get them paying attention? Networking, business, social media, this is where you should start.

I doubt there’s a better primer on community marketing anywhere.

How to Build Community from Scratch

by Megan M. on October 3, 2011

Since I began to truly recognize the value of community marketing and associated projects, the demand on my time as “community catalyst” — Charlie Gilkey’s term — has managed to completely overrun my schedule. No, you’re not crazy; that specific set of skills isn’t yet represented on Ideaschema’s website, primarily because I was overbooked before I managed to get it written up. Whoops!

One gap has eluded my understanding until very recently, though, and it’s this: How can I help someone who doesn’t already have a community to work with?

What if they’re great at what they do, they’re excellent at communicating with an audience… but they just don’t have an audience yet? Any leverage I have personally requires existing community assets. Where could I send these people?

A few weeks ago, I was offered a gig with Squidoo co-managing its magazines project. Suddenly I had a solution to that problem.

Squidoo Magazines

If you didn’t know already, Squidoo allows users to create pages (called lenses) on whatever subject they desire. The site then leverages advertising across this user-generated content to allow those users to make money from their pages — or donate part or all of that money to charity.

In October of last year Squidoo had 1.5 million hand-built lenses. On their 5-year anniversary, they gave an (additional!) $275,000 to charity. Their site is ranked #73 among all websites in the US. Squidoo gets more traffic than Digg, NBC or Hulu. And it’s recently begun to launch a series of online magazines, which is where I get involved.

Seth posted on his blog today about the Squidoo Magazines project. We’re publishing original articles from remarkable contributors, highlighting great existing content and connecting passionate people via social media.

My title du jour is Talent Scout, and I’m a matchmaker: I look at the magazines we’re launching, and find contributors who will be a great fit for that prospective audience. I seek out talented content creators who need a platform, or who want to expand their current audience with a new one. And then I give them that platform.

If you didn’t know before how to build community around your personal brand, you do now. I just told you how. It’s not instantaneous, it takes personality and determination, but it works.

If you want to promote your own work or act as content editor, fill out this form. We’ll use the resulting list to seek contributors when we need new content for new magazines, and you’ll get regular updates so that you can let us know you’re interested when the perfect request comes up.

Yes, it will be tons of fun. Want to join us?

The Hammer vs. Communication: Exchanging Vengeance for Productive Discussion

by Megan M. on October 1, 2010

If you were hangin’ out on Twitter last night around 2am, you saw me sign on and start spitting flames. (I’m pretty sure they were visible from the space station.) I got to bed at midnight long after I should have been asleep because I was repairing a wayward iPhone — but the hammering on the other side of my bedroom wall, I’m afraid, started around 1:30. In the morning. When it’s dark.

I thought I was having a really vivid nightmare for awhile, but then I really woke up, became indignant, and staggered out into the living room. (I later found out that not only did Marty “sleep through most of it” as I previously suspected, he can’t even remember that it happened. Insert here appropriate vitriol for his ability to sleep through the holocaust.)

I didn’t fall back to sleep until 4:30, after the child also on the other side of the wall stopped screaming. And he may not have stopped screaming — but I did find a pair of earplugs, thank goodness. And sore ears or not (earplugs and I don’t get along all that well), I fell asleep shortly thereafter. Possibly from sheer exhaustion.

For those of you who swapped violent, half-mad fantasies with me on Twitter, I thank you. I needed someone to commiserate with and you were there for me. That has its place, and I’m glad that there was a resource to help me feel a little less crazy when I was at my very-most-crazy.

So here’s the thing on my mind:

No one ever taught me how to connect with neighbors with difficult behavior patterns. It seems to be a very particular kind of communication case. There’s got to be a reason for all of this. We can decide that they’re rude and incorrigible, but I think that isn’t the answer nearly as often as we would surmise. Children are children; we’ve been living next to nightly screaming contests in this apartment complex for years. (Four and a half, actually, because the folks we neighbored in the previous apartment had a whole different brand of nightly noise.)

At that previous apartment, Marty went next door and made very friendly, very polite requests every now and then. You guys know Marty. He looks like a madman online but he’s a puppy dog in person. On the whole, way more people get pissed at me than have ever gotten pissed at Marty. We’re certainly not loud or demanding renters. But his requests managed to breed quiet resentment with the neighbors anyway, and I thought, wow, okay, maybe there’s another way to do this.

Here, we have mostly stuck it out. I’m not going to create a personal vendetta over a screaming child — no matter how much half the world will argue that it’s the parent’s fault. Children are children. I might get frustrated and tired and try to find the earplugs again (always a very last resort for me) but I really restrict my levels of animosity regarding child-related hollering. I don’t have kids. I don’t know what it’s like, and I’m not going to tell them how they should be doing it.

But 35 minutes of direct hammering in the middle of the night is beyond the pale.

And… this kind of anger and vengeful recrimination is exhausting. It doesn’t feel okay. It feels like poison, actually — like I’m being poisoned by my own reactions. And I think that’s true.

Encouraged by the awesome book I’m reading on Stoic philosophy (brilliant stuff), I began to internally insist that I would think my way around this situation. I didn’t want to respond in automatic, energy-sucking ire. On 4 hours of sleep, ire is just about debilitating. Being angry, inciting violent revenge — just completely draining. And I may be vocally violent on occasion but I’m sure as hell not fundamentally violent. I can’t even bring myself to call the police on them, which many people have (understandably) suggested.

Here’s the thing, though.

If Marty and I can’t bring ourselves to deal directly with a situation like this — if there isn’t any sense of actual physical danger in the equation — it’s unfair to bring in the police. It’s unfair to even go to the apartment complex manager, in fact, because we’re the only neighbors on that side and it would be obvious that a) it was us and b) we didn’t have the balls to confront it ourselves.

I go on and on about isolation, and corporate values overwhelming human and community values (a la Doug Rushkoff) and I can’t bear to sacrifice those ethical standards because it would be easier to sic an authority figure on them. The police and the apartment complex manager have to make up for our lack of neighbor-related communication skills? If I let that default lie, if I decide this is their job and not mine, the disintegration of community and casual communication across the United States hits a lot more close to home. Who the hell am I if I’ll talk about it, but can’t implement my own improvement? Or at least make a basic attempt?

You know, it’s the walk the talk thing.

I’ve got my pride, I guess.

So let’s discuss neighbors, because the internet wilderness at large hasn’t been very helpful in my search for neighborly communication primers. (And link me if you find something, because I’m very, very sleep deprived.) Let’s talk about how to handle situations like this in a way that maximizes the understanding between two parties. Let’s talk about dealing with one another as real people with feelings, instead of as faceless destroyers of sleep (which is where I started).

I now have a strangle-hold on my vexation, and I think it will get easier as the day goes on.

What books should I borrow? What advice can you give? Whose expertise shall we tap? I can think of a few off the top of my head — but I’ll bet you can come up with dozens.

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