MAY 17, 2024

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Welcome to The Tilt, a twice-weekly newsletter for content entrepreneurs.

Get Your Community Guidelines

Audiences are good for business, but communities can be better for a long-term, sustainable content business. Your members become active consumers rather than passive visitors.

As Mark Schaefer writes, a community needs three conditions to sustain itself: communion (people have to care about each other, not just you), purpose (a reason to connect regularly), and relevance (evolving to meet members’ needs).

Hosting a community requires setting conditions under which it will operate and flourish. By establishing thoughtful community guidelines, you can thwart (or at least minimize) irrelevant conversations, personal attacks, spammers, and more.

To establish thoughtful community guidelines to thwart (or at least minimize) irrelevant conversations, personal attacks, spammers, and more, do these five things:

1. Detail the vision: Define the why behind your community. Briefly explain the purpose of gathering your audience in this digital space in a sentence or two. To help, revisit your content mission statement.

2. Set the tone: Your presence initially sets the stage. Show up, pose questions, tell stories, or comment to encourage members to interact with you and others.

3. Write down the possible rules: Detail every rule to cover every possible behavior or action you do or don’t want. Ask your audience for their input to learn what type of community they want to join and how they would want that community to behave.

4. Delete most of the draft rules: Stick with only the most necessary rules. A lengthy list will never be read, let alone followed. Get rid of any rule that would apply to a limited few and have little impact on the overall community. As the community creator, you can deal with those one-off occurrences on a case-by-case basis.

Then, look for commonalities among the remaining potential rules. Use those themes to create several broad rules that cover many on your list. HubSpot calls its community guidelines “house rules” and details them in six points: 1. Be respectful. 2. Be relevant. 3. Share the love. 4. Be responsible. 5. Protect everyone’s privacy. 6. Keep in mind, this is user-generated content. A succinct explanation paragraph follows each rule.

I also think it’s good to detail the penalties for violations. Again, be brief and straightforward.

5. Enforce the guidelines: Unless you ensure they’re followed, your guidelines are worthless. First, address the violation directly with the community member. Depending on the violation and penalty, you may ask them to edit, remove, or apologize for their misstep. You should tell your community you’ve handled a violation without naming the offender. They need to know you enforce the rules.

- Ann Gynn

Helpful Resources:

• ​Should Creators Want an Audience or a Community?
• ​How Creators Can Establish Community Guidelines Before Trouble Hits​
• ​Why and How To Launch a Free Community​
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• You’ve got a lot of notes. How do you act on them? Join the conversation at 12 p.m. EDT Tuesday for Tilt Your Business: A Mastermind for Content Entrepreneurs.
• Joe's quick review (and some proof points) from CEX ... and exactly how he knows that YOUR content is making a difference in people's lives. (Content Inc.)
• It's raining AI. The boys report on a crazy week in AI news. (This Old Marketing)
• Matt and Lauren explore author brands. Listen now to discover the power of your author identity, why it is so important, and how to create and maintain a brand for your long-term marketing and sales success. (Publish & Prosper)
• Our dedicated team at Tilt Publishing is here to take the hassle out of publishing so you can keep creating the content you’re passionate about. Whether you’re a blogger, a podcaster, or a vlogger, we tailor our services to fit your unique needs. Find out more here.