Do you belong to an online group chat room or did you just create yours? Are people in your group responsive or are you frustrated?
If you are a part of an online group chat room or you oversee one, you may be lucky with the tons of response you get from the start but for some others, it’s not that easy and if you are in these shoes, this post is for you.
Hooray!
Online group chats could be a fun and very effective tool to achieving important tasks and for keeping up the bond among family, friends and colleagues. However, it’s only that good until every one goes quiet on you.
You ask questions or seek feed backs within the group but you get no response.
It gets worse when you want to accomplish a very important time-bound task or project and you think you have added to the group, all the human super powers you thought would help you race through it in a jiffy.
Your jive is stifled and you are disappointed by the trickle of response you get each time – if you get any at all. You check in every now and then but all you hear is the sound of c-r-i-c-k-e-t-s.
Believe me, many have shut down or deleted their online group chat rooms for this very reason.
But before you decide to shut down your group, however, read on to see how you could salvage it from going extinct.
You need to realize first, that humans beings are quite complex and you have to know how to relate with them, especially if you have a group you oversee or manage.
To be able to get the best out of them, you need to be tactical. Ask managers, they will tell you the same.
Related: 15 Ways To Improve Your Interpersonal Relationships With Others
Wait. But…things shouldn’t be that difficult because those on your online group chat are your friends and family right? They are a different breed and should be cool like that, right?
Wrong.
Sometimes, the level of non-engagement you receive regardless of the people who make up your online group chat room – family and close friends inclusive, could keep you awake till late at night thinking and trying to figure out what next steps you need to take.
And you are at this point thinking perhaps, making an in-person phone call to everyone on the group, would get you the response you need easier and faster- because you’ve suddenly realized you have become a lone voice in the woods and the echo of your voice is deafening – even to you.
There’s a better way.
How To Make Your Online Group Chats More Responsive
1. You need a human catalyst
This works magic if you have someone within the group who has a drive more than you do.
Get someone as enthusiastic as you are about the project on board with you in the group chat.
Probably the people you have on your group are not as interested or may be they are, but haven’t just made the project or online group a priority.
Though it would have been awesome if you had this unique individual with you from the start, it’s not too late to add them to shake things up.
Adding someone new in a supposed “dead” group, who is pretty active and fun could jolt people up and shift the atmosphere in the “room”.
In some cases also, people can decide to be deliberately silent and choose to be complacent in an online group chat if they are not called out, which leads me to my next point.
2. Call people out by name
If people in your online group aren’t ready to choose or appoint themselves for the task, you do the job of assigning what to do and who is to do what.
Complacency could be very rampant especially in family chat rooms where when you say “everyone” you actually mean “no one” and at the end of the day, the project goes…you guessed it right – undone.
Well, until…you call someone out and put their name on the task so if it fails or flops, they have their name written all over it. .
3. Ask questions and keep asking
If you have just been added as someone new to a “dead”online group chat room, and you find yourself asking questions and the silence bug in the group is about to make you a victim because there’s no response coming from anyone, keep asking those questions in different ways and try to seek opinions from the group on how or what they feel about what you have asked.
Remember, you and the admin are now the driving force of the group.
Actively talk to each other on the group- Others will chime in when they see that the conversation has taken off.
4. Have an action plan ready to share with your group
Take the bull by the horn and be ready to wake people up.
You need to table out your own ideas and let people see the seriousness of the task at hand. Be ready to answer any question that might be posed to you with clarity as well.
5. Give feed backs to the group at intervals
This paints a picture relating to the task in people’s hearts. By doing this, they are able to visualize and run with what you have shared with them.
Be mindful of their personal space though and no spamming the group.
Bonus Tips:
Purge your online group chat room from time to time to keep it fresh.
Don’t play the generic conversation game. If you need a question answered and it’s taking forever to get a response, call out who ever it is you desire to hear from – by name.
Don’t get discouraged by the response you get or lack of it. Do all you can to keep your online group active.
