December 2008

I like to use Twitter Feed to tweet out links to my different blogs.  I also use it for promotion for various events as part of job as Community Manager. Now, I don’t spend all my time tweeting links. Most of my Twitter time is spent networking, discussing, and yes, telling everyone what I’m having for lunch. Even though I do like to spend most of my time socializing, I often wonder if I’m spamming my followers with too many links. Is there a proper tweet to link ratio? I tend to stop following folks who only tweet links. I liken it to having drinks with friends with one person only offering sales pitches instead of conversation the whole time. Not too cool.

As a community building and marketing tool, Twitter is amazing. I meet terrific people \ and even landed a job after following the company’s CEO.  Twitter is where I learn breaking news,  get turned on to the most awesome websites and have interesting discussions with some very big names in the biz – except on Twitter they don’t act like they’re all that, if you know what I mean.

Given my addiction to love for Twitter, I really don’t want to ruin things by spamming people with links. So consider this the informal poll.

Tweeting your links: promotion or spam?

Discuss…

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I conduct most of my business online or in person. I find I get results better this way than if I had to navigate around a phone menu to nowhere or die on eternal hold. In the 80′s and 90′s it was all about automation, getting machines to do jobs people could do. Businesses loved it, customers hated it. Now the same businesses are starting to realize it’s all about customer service. Folks don’t want to call a company only to have to press buttons or leave messages. We want to be able to receive immediate answers to our questions and concerns.

This means the return of people skills.

It’s About Enjoying What You Do

Back in the day, way before getting involved in this whole Internet thing, I rocked a couple of corporate gigs. My favorite, by far, was my first “real” job – as receptionist at a busy publishing house. Even though I always considered myself a shy person, I enjoyed directing phone calls and greeting the people who came in to our reception area. My star shined brightly with that job. In fact, there was such major shinage that I was promoted within a year and a half to the company’s circulation department. The first of many promotions, all of which left me completely miserable. I wanted to go back to working with people.

Now I’m not going to get all Up With People on you, but if you want to succeed at community building you have to emit a warm and fuzzy vibe. You have to know how to listen as well as speak. Nothing turns me off more than rudeness and bad manners.

Treat Others as You Would Expect to Be Treated Yourself

The way I see it, I should treat the people in my community the same way I would like to be treated when I visit a business or a community. I want to know folks like me, I want someone to hear my voice and I want to know my concerns or questions will be taken seriously. And yes, I want to have a good time too.

Don’t make your community like the phone menu to nowhere. The best communities are the ones where the team is front and center, participating in community discussions and getting their customer service on. The best communities feel more backyard barbecues than social networks centered around a business. The best communities are the ones folks never want to leave.

How do you treat the people in your community?

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So you dig communities and think you’d make a decent Community Manager. There’s just one problem, you’re not sure where to find the gigs. Community Manager jobs aren’t plentiful at the moment, but there are several places to subscribe to or bookmark to land these types of jobs.

Check it out:

1. Social Networking Jobs – A job board listing various social networking gigs, including community management.
2. Community Guy – Jake McKee’s community building blog also rocks a job board.
3. Craigslist - No, really. I landed on my community management job by accident. I was looking for leads for my Freelance Writing Jobs blog and saw the full time community gig nestled in among the blogging gigs.
4. The Net-Savvy Executive – Has a social media job board.
5. ProBlogger- Darren Rowse has the occasional community management gig listed at the ProBlogger job board.
6. Online job boards – Online job boards such as Monster, Hot Jobs and Career Builder list the occasional community manager gig here and there.
7. Google Alerts – Set up a Google Alert for “Community Manager” to receive updates in the mailbox every time the Google spiders pick up a community manager jobs listing.
8. Social networks – Many community manager gigs aren’t advertised. Instead, The Powers That Be put out word on various social networks. Do a search and see what you come up with
9. Websites – Many of your favorite websites and social networks hire community managers but they don’t announce it in big flashing letters. Instead they quietly post it to their websites under the “Jobs” or “Work for Us” sections. Do a regular patrol of your favorite communities, as you never know when one of the jobs will turn up.
10. You! - That’s right. You. Do you know of a community in need of management? Contact them regardless of whether or not they placed an ad and convince them of why they can benefit from your services.

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• Social Media and Community Manager Jobs for the Week of February 8, 2009
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• Community Manager Job of the Day: Community Analyst for WalMart
• Community Manager Job of the Day: Beer Brands
• Community Manager Job of the Day: Non-Profit Community Manager

Tagged as: Community Manager Jobs, social media jobs

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As Community Manager for BlogTalkRadio, I’m often asked what my job entails. This generally means different things to different people. My job has several layers and some of the things I do aren’t traditionally a Community Manager’s job. However, if you’re being hired to manage a community, you can be sure to take on the following tasks:

• Build a community – Not an easy task! As David mentioned, community can’t be forced. It takes time for people to feel the love and even longer for them to want to participate. Like anything else web, communities don’t happen over night. A slow, steady buildup is best.
• Communicate - As community manager you’re expected to communicate with the members of your team and the members of your community. If your community is unhappy, the Community Manager is to find out why. If a new product or service is launching, the Community Manager can gauge the community’s reaction and report back to the rest of the team.
• Blog - Most community managers are expected to maintain the company blog. This can meaning reporting industry news, community news, new product information and more.
• Marketing – Community Managers are expected to spread the word and get folks interested in their product, service or business.
• Reach out to bloggers, publicists and more - Part of my job as Community Manager is to get other bloggers to write about us.
• Increase memberships and sign ups – Community Managers are expected to encourage others to participate in services.
• Become an active presence in the social networks - Community managers are expected to build relationships on Twitter, FaceBook and other social networks. They’re to use the networks as tools for generating interest in a product or service.
• Community moderation – If there are forums or groups Community Managers are expected to moderate and stimulate discussion.
• Plan and promote community events - If your organization is having a meetup or webinar, it’s generally the Community Manager’s job to organize the event and get folks to attend.
• Have a passion for people – No explanation necessary. if you have it, you know it.

In general, it’s about relationships. Community Managers are expected to foster relationships and ensure growth. Community Managers are expected to build relationships with community members, team members, social networkers,  and others.

What other duties can you think of that a Community Manager can expect to take on?

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I have written about building strong communities before on my own blog Branding David. I wrote a post called “You Can’t Force Community“, where I talked about the issue I have with people and businesses stating that they will build a community around their company, product, or service.

Community is not something you can force or even make plans around. Communities aren’t to be leveraged in ways that you should be trying to put on a balance sheet for a return on investment. Communities are built up of people, and while people can sometimes be sheep-like in that they will follow a strong leader, they still deserved to be treated with respect.

Finding shortcuts and ways to artificially create a community around your product or service will only end up failing. True communities build themselves. You can help shape them, support them, and keep them engaged, but you can’t create them from nothing.

The reason that companies want so desperately to build communities is that they are worth money, and have huge value in many different ways. A self-sustaining community can provide support for new users and become an unpaid marketing arm of your company. Communities are almost like a captive audience, where you can push out your own information and agenda as often as they are willing to receive it, giving you an opportunity to up-sell or otherwise convert your community to money.

Why This is Bad

Communities are built up of people, and as businesses belittle the effort that goes into generating and sustaining a community, they loose sight of that fact.

People deserve to be treated with respect, and not used to generate wealth. What I am asking for is companies to become more transparent and more sincere. If you are building a community just to make money off of the people that are interested in what you are doing, then you’ve built a profit tool out of what I consider trickery. If they are already a fan of you, your company, or your product in some small way, should you really trick them so that you can make a profit? Do right by your community, and they will re-pay you one thousand fold. Trick them, and they will eventually see through your actions and leave you, carrying their negative experience with them wherever they go.

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Tagged as: fake community, leverage community, trick

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I was fortunate enough to be the Community Manager for PicApp for a short period of time, and in that time, I did plenty of research, and had some first hand experiences on what it means to manage a community.

What it Takes to be a Great Community Manager

Managing a community requires a fair bit of understanding regarding the product, service, or company in order to properly manage the related community. It also requires a personality that can be charismatic, and lead by example, as well as someone that can constantly network and organize.

The best community managers are those that can balance the needs of the company to market themselves or their product with the needs of the community, all the while trying to find avenues to improve the company or product and increase the size of the community.

It can be very difficult to balance everything effectively, and it requires constant communication.

Community managers have to be able to express themselves in the medium that the community prefers. For PicApp, this was almost all text based, and so I found it in line with what I was used to, having been a professional blogger before hand.

I was also lucky with PicApp because I believe that the product/service that PicApp offers fills a need, and in doing so, it made my job easier. We were also fortunate to have some great relationships with various people using the service.

Community managers really need to be experts at a variety of communication, marketing, business strategy and technology skills to effectively manage a community.

Difficulties of Being a Community Manager

One of the hardest parts about being a Community Manager is taking what you learn from the community, and distilling it into useful information that the company can use, and then waiting for a response from the bureaucracy. The smaller the company, the faster the turnaround, and the more likely they will be to listen to their Community Manager. There are companies that have Community Managers as a public relations arm, rather than creating a two way communication channel, they hope only to build up a following and push out information to various “fans”. This can be hugely detrimental over the long term, and if the Community Manager is trying to push changes in the company that aren’t happening, this can be exasperating.

I didn’t experience this during my Community Manager stint at PicApp, but I know of some people that used to have this issue, and were unable to be happy with their role in the company.

Leaving My Community Manager Position

Why did I move on from being the Community Manager at PicApp? It was a great opportunity, and a great company, but they weren’t really in need a Community Manager. The various people involved in the company were deeply involved with the community, and understood where the shortcomings in their product were. They were all so passionate, and listening intently to feedback that I was nothing more than a reminder of things that they already knew. Also, at the time, I didn’t really understand enough of what makes a good Community Manager and wanted to do too many things outside the scope of my role that stopped me from effectively leading the community that they had created and were already leading in the right direction.

Some companies don’t need Community Managers, despite having the position available, while others don’t have Community Managers, and need to hire someone desperately. Doing due diligence in your research, will help you figure out if the company you are interested in working with actually needs your services as a Community Manager.

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Tagged as: community manager, employment, job, picapp, thoughts

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Something I’m coming across more often is a sense of entitlement towards one’s community.

• “My community isn’t talking enough about my service…”
• “My community isn’t blogging about me enough..”
• “My community doesn’t support my advertisers…”

Let me ask you this then, what have you done for your community lately? It’s not enough to encourage a community to converge and meet. Folks can network anywhere. If you want the members of your community to get a warm, fuzzy vibe and come back often, you’ll have to give them a good reason. Here are a few ways you can build a community that will be happy to show you some love in return, rather than a bunch of people who may blog about you every now and then:

1. Enlist the aid of a Community Manager – Building up a community isn’t easy. It takes years to cultivate and grow a network of people who care about each other – and their meeting place. A community manager is an active and visible presence in the community. He or she will help stimulate discussion, find out a community’s wants and needs, and reach out to community.
2. Offer a gathering place - Forums or a general gathering are a great way to bring a community together. Not only will the discuss “off topic” issues, but they will also talk about the thing that brought them all together in the first place – your product or service. This can lead to a word of mouth campaign. Be forewarned, however, if there are negative aspects to your business these will also be discussed. Discussions lead to debates, so you will need to appoint a moderator.
3. Offer perks - You want people to talk about you? Give them a reason. Offer prizes or perks. Giveaway samples or discounts.
4. Figure out why no one is talking about you - Perhaps folks aren’t talking about you because they have nothing to say, or they don’t know what to say. Poll your community. Ask them if they talk about you and if not, why? Then fix the situation. If you want buzz, you have to get the ball rolling. Give them something to talk about and they will.
5. Offer top-notch customer service – Do you know what a community really appreciates? Good customer service response. If it takes several days to answer a question or if folks have to navigate through the phone menu to nowhere, it’s going to turn them off. Make sure your team offers a quick response time and immediate follow up.
6. Be transparent - Don’t hide things from your community and don’t lie. The easiest way to have folks turn against you is by not being upfront about what it is you do and your goals – even your reason for building a community. Honesty and loyalty will give you the same in return.

Your community aren’t just a bunch of people who comment on blogs. They’re the people who will make and break your product, service or brand. Ask not what your community can do for you, ask yourself what you can do to make your community happy.

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Understanding how to create a community is something that I hear more and more businesses and marketing companies talking about as though it is a simple tactic that they can list on their business spreadsheet. They act as though the building blocks of a community can be quantified and if they take certain steps that they will create a successful and profitable community, but real communities grow naturally and organically from the members that they attract.

To create a real community, your objective should be to fill a void and cater to your own needs. If people are interested in joining your community, make them feel welcome, but if you are forcing a community, it will eventually shut down as the work that needs to go into sustaining any community, especially a “forced” one, grows exponentially as more people are brought into it and if the people involved aren’t passionate, and willing to give of their own time, knowledge and energy, the community will eventually degrade and die off.

Far too many businesses don’t understand this fact, and they assume that communities will eventually become self-sustaining, but I haven’t ever been part of a community that wasn’t lead by one or more strong characters that were passionate about the topic or niche that the community was focused on.

If you want to create a real community, my best advice for you is not to try to build a community, but instead, build a place that you enjoy and share your passion and insights with others that decide to join you. The best communities I have been part of were all started by a group of friends that eventually attracted others to their site.

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Tagged as: forced community, natural community, real community

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In order for a particular neighborhood or area to succeed, community must exist. There must be people willing to support the local businesses, rally around local leaders and spend time as a group to ensure the nabe’s well being.  Without a community, your area is just another place to live. A house on a plot of land and nothing else. The web is no different. In order for any business or website to succeed, it must have a community of readers, influencers, movers and shakers.

Why is community important?

• Because without your community you won’t receive valuable feedback. Your community tells you when something is working – and when something isn’t.
• Because if your community believes in your product, service or message they will tell others.
• Because you want to know the habits of the people who use your product, service or message.
• Because a community works together as a team to offer support.
• Because community rocks!

Why do you think community is important?

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