Digitalk at IDN Media: Media Companies to Create Content, Collaboration, and Community

On 21 November 2019, MTarget held a discussion about "Community Building 101: Learn from the Best" in Digitalk. The event invited Ruth Christian as the Community Development Manager at IDN Media, Dhimas Lazaro as Head of Event and Community at Daily Social, and Budi Purnomo as the Head of Event and Community at Narasi TV. Held at IDN Media HQ, many wondered what on earth did they learn? How significant?

The first speaker, Ruth, stated that she learned how IDN Media always considered community as a critical part of the sustainability of the company. "IDN Times, specifically, has a writing community that all people across the country can join. Departing from the fact, we create some programs to increase the engagement between the company and the community. There are Community Talk through Instagram Live as well as Podcast, Writing Online Class, and Indonesia Writer Festival." In brief, these programs aimed to provide a place for those being eager on writing to understand more deeply about the basic features of IDN Times and the tips and tricks to write correctly as well as attractively with the guidance from our professional editors. Those having interest surely could join us by opening https://community.idntimes.com/login. 

The two other speakers, Dhimas and Budi, explained about the importance of involvement in the two companies. Dhimas stated, "The point of marketing now is the experience of the people in our community. Once they get a wonderful experience, they will most likely keep on doing a collaboration with us." Practically, Daily Social regularly conducted an event with a mobile phone brand. It required a certain kind of device that not all the members of the community had. To give some customers the best experience, they lent some units of the devices for them so that they could join anyway.

Budi as the representation of Narasi TV let us know that the strongest aspect of Narasi TV was basically the content. Almost like IDN Media, then, Narasi TV also provided a workshop about making content in an effective and efficient way. Inviting some experts on the realm, "We and perhaps almost all companies have come to an understanding that hard-selling will never work. Therefore, this workshop is expected to be another way of approaching our clients. Well collaborators, not clients," he stated.

In terms of building a community, three agreed on "content, collaboration, and community" concept. With content, we could become a pair of eyes seeing various issues happening all around Indonesia and shared them in the form of relevant and inspiring content. Collaborating with our collaborators (instead of clients), we hopefully could take a moment worth remembering and sharing so that many people would be aware of not only our collaborator's brand but also ours. That way, precious moments would result in the strength of our community which would share an everlasting bond.