Community Building What NOT to Do – SMPG Community Building Checklist

In our previous post, Converting Visitors to Members, we discussed how to turn a casual visitor into a community member, a part of our community building checklist.

In this post, we continue posting our exclusive checklist that you can use to execute your project for building your community – The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™. We discuss what you shouldn’t do when building community.



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Community Building What NOT to Do

  • Ignore your community
    • You can do more harm than good
    • People expect response, communication, relationship
  • Fail to promote interactions
    • Community may need some help connecting
    • It’s your job to see they get talking
  • Rule with an iron hand
    • Your goal is to be involved no more and no less than required
    • Let the community guide itself as much as possible
  • Betray their trust
    • Obey your own ground rules
    • Enlist community when taking potentially unpopular actions such as banning someone
  • Overextend
    • Don’t take on more communities, or other social computing activities, than you can handle
    • Your community wants your attention
  • Abandon your community manager
    • Ensure leadership’s support for the role and the person
    • Understand the cost of managing the community and budget for it

If you’ve worked you way through this checklist, you’re ready to go. You may not want to take all the advice contained in this checklist or this book, but be sure you’ve considered it so you are making informed choices about social media.

Next up: SMPG Enterprise Social Operating Manual – Complete


Community Building What NOT to Do is the 171st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just about done. If you’d like to see our entire exclusive community building checklist, once we’re done, it will be available on our Website at community.socialmediaperformancegroup.com. Luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

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