Angela Connor's 18 rules of community engagement (or how to be the the perfect party host)

Angela Connor, social media expert and dedicated community manager at WRAL’s GOLO.com , must be the best-ever party hostess. I’ve just finished reading her slim book ’18 Rules of Community Engagement’ and I now realised that, dress it up how you will, that’s what’s really required of an excellent community manager.

You’ve got to be really, genuinely interested in your guests (even if they are in their thousands). Remember what they do for a living, admire their new dresses and ask after their children by name. Fill any gaps in conversation, start up interesting discussions, listen attentively. Take wallflowers and newcomers under your wing and introduce them to other people on the room. Serve great food & drink (content), make sure everyone knows where the loos are (or how to post messages and blogs), and, very importantly, know how to control anyone who gets loud and obstreperous and annoying to your other guests.

Well OK, maybe I’m over-simplifying it a bit and stretching a point. But I’m truly impressed by Angela’s highly personal and practical guide to community management. Using her considerable experience, she illustrates each point with plenty of concrete examples from the GOLO.com users (I’m put in mind of Garrison Keillor’s characters at times, but that’s the nature of working in her kind of community, and it’s wonderfully real). Angela grew GOLO.com from zero to a membership 11,000 in just 18 months, and it took real dedication and considerable expertise. Here she lets us know how she did it.

I’m not going to list all the ‘18 Rules’ here because they wouldn’t mean much without reading the detail around them, but they include such topics as how you can help to establish a community’s culture, asking questions to generate content, how to deal with criticism and handle trolls, and the importance of praising and rewarding community members. She even gives advice to community users: successful blogging and how to avoid being seen as a spammer: micro-marketing without upsetting other community members.

When considering each topic, as well as giving her own opinion, Angela has practiced what she preaches, and asked questions to her many contacts within the social media community. How do they handle these issues? The result is real gathering of wisdom from the great and good in the community world, all of whom are generously credited, and *not* all of whom always agree with each other about what is the best way to do things. But that’s just fine: as she puts it at the conclusion: “My goal here was not provide a one-size-fits-all solution, because there isn’t one, and it’s important to know that going in. My goal was simply to give you ideas, encourage you to take this work very seriously, and help you understand that it is not a science, but an art.”

You can buy Angela’s book via Amazon, see her at work at GOLO.com, or visit her blog Online Community Strategist ,Twitter @communitygirl. I’m also hoping to persuade her to come on do a guest blog here at eModeration really soon : )