What should we do when our community gets overrun by advertising?

Image by: Simon Helle Nielsen

I’ve always considered sales execs to be among the best people to drive community engagement because they have a vested interest (more sales) to engage other users.

But if they don’t engage in the right way, they can do harm to your community and — more importantly to them — to their chances of getting business from your community.

Your goal isn’t to stop the salesmen from posting, it’s to train them to post in ways that benefit both them and the community.

To do this effectively, you need to exercise a little empathy for the misguided salesman. Here’s how:

What should you do when salesmen attack your online community?

• Instead of simply enforcing the rules, try creating a tip sheet, checklist, or short video for sales execs that describes and demonstrates how they can get more leads from your online community. When someone breaks the rules, direct them to this resource and position your messaging to say you’re trying to help them get more leads. Focus the training on content marketing, relationship selling, and show good and bad examples.
• It might be best to just let Natural Selection weed out the advertising. In any social setting, including an online community, people tend to tune out those who are overly promotional. My experience is that salesmen eventually stop posting advertisements when they find that it doesn’t work very well.
• Linkedin Groups are so frequently overrun with job postings that Groups have their own separate Jobs tab. Users can flag posts as jobs, and a group manager can move the job post into the jobs area. Taking a page out of Linkedin’s book, you might consider creating a separate area of your community just for promotions.
• One successful community only allows advertising on one day of the week. This way, the community members know it’s coming, they contain the advertising to one day out of seven, and the advertising gets more interesting, useful, and engaging because the vendors are competing for the users’ attention.

What have you done to effectively reduce annoying advertising in your community?