How to build local community around content

Developing community around content is, in many ways, similar to geting people into a group conversation physically. They have to be enticed in, feel comfortable to open up, find listeners, and share. Then as others find the conversation lively and helpful, they join in, even if only as listeners. I have been involved in a number of online communities that were successful in doing this.

I will focus on the work done at the Capital newspaper in Annapolis, where I served as Internet Director. www.hometownannapolis.com

One of our major goals when I started at the paper (March of 2006) was to transform a rather stale, 'shovel-ware' presentation of the exact print copy of the day's paper into a living, breathing local community site.

Here are some of the things we did first:

We built on the community events calendar, which was a web-only thing anyway (ran parallel with the community calendars in print but we had another editor and ours was, frankly, more usable). We expanded it, and,most importantly, databased it so it would be search-able with many filtering possibilities. It was already very comprehensive, because our editor had many contacts and good "stuff" but we made it even more colorful and useful. We also made the database available to other sections of our site, so that subsets of the calendar (like kids events) could be reiterated in a live callout box on the childrens' page etc.).

You can see the present version of it here. Be sure and click the show / hide details to see the real goods. It was wildly popular and remains so today. Since then it has been integrated with the newsroom and feeds the print as well, and has the added resources of the traditional calendar reporters feeding it.

Another thing we did quickly was add commenting to our stories and set up local rules to get the right people into the commenting structure. Once we opened that up we (again through database magic) made it possible for viewers to chase down different subsets of comments made by local people. A good example of that is the global "Your Say" page which shows the most recent comments (a live feed) anywhere on the site. It is also very popular.

Comments per story are, of course, mainly attached to the story they are posted on, but the extra ways to find them allows local people to follow the greater 'conversation' of their fellow citizens about whatever.

It took us a while to get blogging going (a sportswriter and I were the first bloggers) but once it got going, the staff did a great job of getting the community very active in the process. Annapolis has many very passionate and articulate citizen writers and they shine on the site. It also adds a lot of the true Annapolis 'flavor' to the news and features coming over from the paper.

Here is the current blogging home, which shows the different ways to see what is going on in the blogging dialogue.

Part of the process of getting this started was in educating the community that we wanted them in the conversation. Once they heard that, they responded well.

Here are some posts I wrote in my blog at the time to encourage the process:

• The Voices of Annapolis
• Annapolis 2.0

These are just a couple of the several dozen major strategies we implemented between 2006 and 2008 (when I left the paper). They went a long way to help form an entirely new community platform that combines a dynamic physical community with a vibrant and developing online one.