How to build trusting relationships between users of an online community?
Tl;dr; The simplest way to build relationships between users is to tell users about other users.
To build deep, trusting relationships, users need to know the others as real people. This requires users knowing some interesting facts about other users in a way that causes positive emotions and sympathy and having a chance to self-disclose about themselves and their interests on the other hand. Such conversations rarely occur naturally, since this topic goes beyond the scope of most online communities.
Your task is to organize activities that introduce users to each other without harming the community itself. Here are some activities that stimulate building relationships:
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Highlighting users’ achievements in the social media. You cover almost any event that somehow shows users’ positive contributions.
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Hosting offline meetups. If possible, attend them in person yourself. If you cannot make it, find some volunteers you trust who are able and willing to organize the events. Have some swag prepared. If the meetup is organized by volunteers, send them swag so that they can give them to the attendees. The meetup can take place anywhere, from the office of some company to a random cafe. There is no need to have any strict theme for a meetup. Providing users a way to get to know each other is the goal in itself. Take photos of the events and share a story about the event afterwards.
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Creating a media channel dedicated to the users themselves where you will post stories about the users. It can be in any popular format like webcast, podcast, text blog or something else. Interview active regular users, giving them an opportunity to talk about everything that worries them, starting from the current problems of the industry up to their pet-projects or their favorite outdoor activities.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.