Engaging Your Community

Further to my last posting about unleashing the power of the internet to help us reach new audiences and fulfill our goals of creating content that will meet the needs of our various communities, I wanted to discuss interactivity. More specifically, just like we’re taking our web content creation to the next level, it’s time to take our ideas about interactivity to the next level.

With the web, we now have the power and means to engage our audiences to interact more effectively. We’re talking about energizing your community of listeners to contribute – and to begin contributing right now! In this new world order where people view and consume content very differently than they used to, it’s about having these consumers participate in the process. This isn’t a one-way street anymore – people expect to interact with, contribute to and in some cases, control their content. Look at Pandora and Slacker – in those cases listeners control or influence what they hear. They are participants in the end product of what they hear and just as importantly, what others in their community hear.

Of course, we have strived for this interactivity over the years with various methods, including e-mail, skype and other IM’s – but utilization of the web is taking this interactivity to the next level. By making your site “open” the members of your individual communities can now participate in the creation of content for the whole community. This is important to them and therefore this is important to us.

The best websites are the ones that are “open” – look at Facebook. One of the things that make Facebook great is the fact that third parties are allowed to create applications for it and it’s these apps that keep the site interesting, fun, compelling; It’s these apps that keep people engaged and coming back.

If the goal is for our web pages to be the focal points for each of our communities (and it is) then we need to have various members of the community contribute to it. If you’re Flava, for instance, how great would it be to have regular contributors to a Flava “Community Blog” report on the hip-hop scenes and lifestyles in various places around the globe? What’s the hip-hop scene and lifestyle like in India, Middle East, Europe and everywhere else? Not only will this be compelling content for your site, thus helping to make it “the” site for the community, but it provides you with free content! And people will want to do this. They will. People want to be heard, they want to voice their opinion, they want to interact with others in their particular community, and they want to be part of a social network. By creating a site that offers fresh, exciting, constantly updated content that is a focal point for that community, you are providing them with a compelling platform that accomplishes all of the above.

So start the process now – start engaging your listeners to see who’s game. They’re out there. And once they join they’ll be evangelizers for us.