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Beyond Cats & Kardashians – 13 Tips on Building Meaningful Online Engagement

Steve Ressler

Today, I gave a talk at Cornell Law & Internet conference on the topic “Beyond Cats & Kardashians – Building Meaningful Online Engagement”

Here’s my 13 of my tips:

-Find the engagement pain point

-Focus on the underlying demand for the service

-Find the existing audience you can leverage

-Embed elsewhere

-Leverage timely events

-Promote in-person

-Make Simple Ask

-Sign ’em up quickly

-Create light-weight engagement opportunities

-Use a human voice

-Create real incentives & show progress

-Create time-constrained & one-time events

-Celebrate community successes
I’ve embedded the full presentation below:

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John Bersentes

Great presentation Steve,

Given our many years of developing employer brands for government as well as branding for agency programs, one of the most critical success factors to consider in building online engagement we have seen speak to the fact that

…your engagement strategy must be integrated.

…each element should complement the other.

…in a cohesive and consistent message.

This is in large part is driving demand in Responsive Web Design or RWD given the proliferation of mobile, tablet and smartphone usage which are outpacing desktops in 2013 – the idea being to allow your audience to engage when and where they want. And ultimately to share your message, and measure and benchmark engagement or conduct the external market validation and metrics necessary to manage to your business objectives.

For more on RWD feel free to download our whitepaper on the topic at http://goo.gl/lHJp4

Best regards
JB

Alissa Gallagher

Hi Steve,

Great post and tips! You have prompted me to step out of the shadow of GovLoop lurkers with this topic. 🙂 I co-lead NCI’s Research to Reality (R2R) community of practice. Our main goal is to connect cancer control researchers and practitioners in a meaningful dialogue around moving evidence-based programs and policies into practice. Since launching R2R in 2011, we’ve found that engaging our audience in a way that spurs action (comments, new discussion posts, events submitted to the calendar) is incredibly challenging! We’ve implemented some of the tips/strategies you’ve mentioned above, but I know there are areas where we can do better, like creating “light-weight” engagement opportunities and using a more human voice to communicate cancer research.

Like you, we have learned a couple things along the way to help bolster engagement and more active participation on our site:

  • You have to give members a reason to return. Interactive learning opportunities should be offered regularly and promoted through to your audience. We host monthly cyber-seminars that have been critical for driving traffic to R2R each month and prompting continuous discussion on a variety of cancer control topics.
  • Content is King. You want to make sure that it’s relevant to your target audience…not just you. Timely content that draws from current events, breaking news, or new publications will keep members coming back from more. Users want to see fresh content, so seeding is critical!
  • Don’t be afraid to take risks! We’ve used an iterative approach to development that has allowed us to test and re-test new features and approaches to see what “sticks” and resonates with our audience.

I would love to hear what others are doing to encourage community engagement on social networking platforms. Also, any chance there is a recorded presentation/webinar of the slides you shared above? It would be nice to watch if there’s one available.

Alissa