Do you have a passionate engaged community? Maybe you meet in person once a month, have incredible get-togethers with powerful energy surrounding something you’re all very interested in.

How do you know when it’s time to move such a community online? For many organizations, the time comes when one or more of the following is true:

• Your members need online tools to communicate more easily and more frequently than they meet in person
• You’re ready to reach out and expand your community
• You want to connect to other communities in other geographic locations
• Your members want an outlet to do something more

Once you have the online tools in place – blogs, Twitter, Facebook – you can’t just sit and hope people will use it.

Blogs

Let’s say you have five people with varying passions. Ask them to each write once a week – and assign a day. Teach them the software, and explain to them how to schedule an entry so that they could churn out two, three or more at a time.

Have them check and respond to their comments regularly, and have them comment on each other’s entries. My new favorite phrase, courtesy of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, is “yes and.” If they don’t know what to say about each others’ posts, have them start with, “yes, and then…” That’s how ideas grow, and next time they see each other (because you’re maintaining the community offline as well), if they forget what they were talking about, there’s a record of it.

Twitter

Follow a few people here and there, in your field. Tweet about what you do, but don’t go overboard. Connect with people, but only after you’ve been reading them long enough to understand what they tweet about and how you can help them. Retweet at will, but only those tweets that are in line with your organization’s focus.

For every reference you make to your own website, make at least three to other people’s or organizations’ websites.

Keep your following to followers ratio low. Try not to let it get to more than 3:2 until you get 150 followers, and once you hit that level, work toward having more followers than people you’re following. You’ll still benefit from others’ wisdom, but your organization appears more professional.

Facebook

Don’t hit your Facebook page more than once or twice a day — probably no more than seven or eight times a week. Monitor comments, respond to them, and pay attention to what your fans are saying.