Plugins to help you reach out to your community: Part I (#rabpday)

A big thank you to Mark Pollard for suggesting Recycle a Blog Post Day on Twitter (#rabpday). This pre-loved post needed an update anyway, so I’ve revisited it and upcycled it.

I haven’t posted much on this blog over the months I’ve been going but I wanted to dig this post out because I’ve been thinking a great deal recently about technology and how it can enable and disable certain types of interaction and communal behaviour. More on that in a blog post to come.

As and when I find plugins for Wordpress that I think are particularly useful for reaching out to your community, I’ll add more posts in this series. I’ll also give you my opinions on the plugins I’m using, so in time I hope to have reviewed a number of Wordpress plugins that might be useful for community building and management.

For Part I, I’ve come across three great plugins that I think can help to grow your community on your blog. I’ve installed the following:

Comment Relish plugin

Comment Relish does something very simple but I use it to really try and make my commenters feel appreciated and to highlight for them some other ways in which they can interact with me online.

The plugin allows you to specify the text of an email to send out to new commenters on your blog. I have used this email to give some value back to new commenters on my blog and to encourage them to connect with me in other areas across the web.

The benefits?

• Make commenter feel appreciated. Acknowledge the commenter for their thought and interaction.
• Share fascinating content. Share some great links with the commenter to content they may well appreciate
• Develop strong outgoing links. Boost connections with other bloggers in your area
• Deepen relationships. Encourage first-time commenters to engage with you online across other sites

Note: Now I am using DISQUS to manage my comments I have had to move to manually sending the Comment Relish email out, but actually this doesn’t take all that long, and considering the value of the interaction I don’t mind it at all.

DandyID Services plugin/Friendfeed embeddable sidebar widget

If, like me, you have a presence across a number of online services, it can be helpful to let your readers know this. If they read your blog they may also be interested in your Twitter feed, or your Amazon Wish List.

Simply displaying links prominently and clearly to your other accounts online can help to deepen your interactions with existing users and also serves as social proof that you are walking the social media walk too.

The DandyID plugin in a screenshot

The Friendfeed sidebar widget in a screenshot

Benefits?

• Walk the walk. Demonstrate that social networking is an important part of the way you interact with people online
• Broaden your relationships. Encourage visitors to your site to connect with you elsewhere online
• Deepen your relationships. Augment existing blog connections with connections on other online services

Note: As I have taken to using Friendfeed more often now I have stopped using DandyID to display my online presence. It makes more sense for me as I try to interact a bit more frequently through Friendfeed these days.

DISQUS Comment System

Adopting the DISQUS system to manage my comments was a major decision, not least because it invalidates a number of other great plugins that operate through the default Wordpress commenting system (like Comment Relish for example).

But the clean design and robust functionality of the DISQUS platform won out for me in the end. It just adds so much handy functionality to the comments (threaded comments, email reply to comments, editable comments, track comments, OpenID etc logins) and does it in a neatly styled manner.

Benefits?

• Network effect. As more and more sites use DISQUS it becomes easier to navigate around the web and track comments across multiple platforms
• Showcases humans. The platform allows commenters to display their Gravatar and to easily link back to their own site
• Aggregates conversation. DISQUS brings comments, Twitter @replies, and Friendfeed comments all into the same interface in a way which manages the conversations taking place around the social object that is your post in a coherent and contextually clear way.
• Granular conversations. Threaded comments with no limit on the number of nested layers really means that proper conversations can develop in your comments in a way that is clear and easy for commenters and readers to follow.

Don’t mistake tools for solutions

This is the first in a series of posts that look at technology applications (plugins) that may be able to assist you in encouraging a community around the content you produce on your blog.

But the plugins listed here and throughout this series are only tools. In the wrong hands and wielded in clumsy ways these plugins might also hinder the growth of community on your blog.

Before you begin adding plugins indiscriminately to your site, consider first whether the plugin will help you to achieve some of the objectives you’ve laid out for your blog. Here at Come Together I want to encourage people to employ tools strategically and in thoughtful and innovative ways.

How are you using plugins to help build community?

Are you using plugins (or other technologies/widgets) to reach out to the people who read your blog and encourage them to become more like a community? How are you employing technologies on your blog in thoughtful and innovative ways to nurture community interaction?

Share your experiences in the comments below – I look forward to hearing your views.

Other #rabpday pre-loved posts from across the interweb

• How Ikea games you: the real Gruen Transfer, by Mark Pollard
• One sentence diary, by Julian Cole
• A collection of recycled posts, by Age
• Where the hell is the sponsor? by Servant of Chaos

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