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Here’s a scenario some community managers are facing: You’re hired by a business interested in building a web presence. Your superiors consider themselves hip pioneers for jumping on the social media thing, but they reality is they haven’t a clue. As a result, you can’t do your job properly. They question the amount of time you spend on social networks, shuffle you around to different departments, don’t think conferences are necessary, and don’t take any of your ideas for social media promotion seriously, and really, have no idea what to do with you.  Put on a brave face folks, and don’t pull your hair out. You can make it work.

You were hired to create an online presence using forums, blogs, networks and other social media tools. You know you’re good at what you do, and you know there are logical reasons for doing what you do. Now, you have to communicate it to your superiors. This isn’t always easy, and can be very frustrating, but if they didn’t want a heavy Internet campaign they wouldn’t have hired you in the first place, right?

Take a deep breath. Don’t get angry. If you find you’re getting questioned every step of the way or that folks don’t take you seriously, take some time to write up a proposal or outline. List all your social media strategies and why you feel they will benefit the business. Send it to all the players and request a time to discuss follow up.  Now gather data and statistics so you can make your case. You CAN make this work!

It’s hard for many old schoolers to embrace social media but it’s part of a community manager’s job to make sure they get it. Don’t let frustration give in to anger. Use your energy to create a rocking community instead.

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Tagged as: Community Management, community manager, social media

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Mashable has a great article up that I think all Community Managers should read entitled, HOW TO: Survive a Social Media Revolt.

Hulu recently made a mistake in how it removed content from its site, and its community turned on the company rather quickly. Of course they tried to fix the mistake, but some damage was already done.

Muhammad Saleem goes over some things that they could have done that would have stopped this whole mess from hurting their brand.

My favourite section, also the first tip from Muhammad is:

Communicate Even If You Have Nothing to Say
It baffles me to see that most of the people running popular social media sites (and new media sites in general) hardly communicate with their communities. When they do, it’s usually for one of two reasons, either an announcement of new features (which is useful for PR purposes), or to apologize for their mistakes (these apologies usually come after massive uproar, not in the absence of). Write to your community and participate in your community even if you don’t have something ground breaking to say, and definitely communicate with your community if you’re going to be making changes that will effect thousands of loyal users.

Read the other four lessons over on Mashable.

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Tagged as: community management mistakes, handling mistakes, social media

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Last week for homework, my six year old son had to write three facts about Barack Obama for a class discussion.  My son’s report read as follows:

1. Barack Obama is our first African American President.
2. Barack Obama should stop smoking.
3. Barack Obama is the first social media President.

As you can imagine, my pride was evident, clearly The Child is his mother’s boy. His teacher asked him to explain to the class what “social media President meant” and he responded “He talked to people on the Internet and told them to vote for him.” Can’t argue with that too much.

President Obama’s successful social media campaign is proof that for any business or individual to succeed, an online presence is necessary. The President embraced Twitter and other social networks, reaching out to rock the vote and find out what was on our minds. Folks like to know the leader of a nation is in touch. It’s embarrassing to hear the person with the most important job in the world talk about not knowing how to turn on a computer or use email. When I learned Barack Obama had to give up his Blackberry I felt his pain.

But this isn’t about being plugged in. It’s about being in tune with a nation and using every resource possible to campaign and reach the American people. The new President of the United States gets the need for a heavy online presence, shouldn’t you do the same for your business?

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As personal branding becomes more prevalent, so does the need for people to really step up and become their own Community Manager, and over on Deb Works, there is a great post, with the same title about being your own community manager. She approaches it from the small business mind, but I think nearly everyone that has a brand online should be working towards a community manager mindset.

You need to be in your community and letting everyone know what you and your business do. Find ways to help others and help them. Find out what your online community is. Are you in any yahoo groups relevant to what you do? Are you on twitter and facebook and linkedin? This is YOUR community – where you can make a real difference. Are you doing so?

If you are an expert in personal branding online, this might seem like old-hat to you, but community management isn’t about large corporations that need people to facilitate connections. It is a mindset that can be useful for nearly every size of business.

Some of the best businesses in the world became the best thanks to how they managed and served their community, and thus their customers.

For me, one of my favourite stories with regards to community management, and how it helped a business succeed, is a computer store in Kingston, Ontario Canada called Kingston Computer Planet or KCP as it is better known.

Kingston was already filled to the brim with computer stores, but a few guys got together and wanted to create a computer store that was more than just a place to pick up hardware, and in doing so, KCP became one of the best computer and technology communities in Kingston, which has helped their business stay afloat, and even expand in a super-saturated market.

Without their interest in building and managing a community, I doubt they would have been as successful as they are today with a forum community now approaching nearly 100,000 posts and 12,000 members.

Have you thought like a Community Manager today?

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Tagged as: branded community, community mindeset, personal branding, personal community

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I have seen and been part of many discussions about community as currency. With reports that brand names are making huge bags of money from their community management interactions, it is no surprise that other companies are starting to test the waters when it comes to the ROI of community development.

In essence, what these companies are trying to do is convert people into fans and then either use them to expand their marketing efforts through unpaid evangelism or into purchasing the product, service from the company or an advertisement.

It seems simple enough, but is it right? Should companies consider their community as a currency?

I have some fairly strong feelings regarding this from both angles. As a person, I am angry that companies would attempt to do this, as it almost seems like a form of trickery. On the other hand, I see why businesses need to do this, and understand why they are so interested in making it happen.

As a human, living on a twenty-four hour per day clock, we only have so much time each day and everything is competing for it. We reach our saturation point early on, and if a company can’t get their message to you multiple times, you’ll probably forget about them and move on to join a community related to another company, product or service.

Whether we like it or not, community is a form of currency, especially online, and the value of that currency is only growing. If you want to be a community manager, part of your job will be to hide the fact that individuals in the community are really just currency for a company to do better than the competition. If that is something you aren’t interested in doing, then you might want to rethink your aspirations.

While not every company is open about this fact, in the back of their mind, they are all thinking it, or they wouldn’t spend the money on developing a community.

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Tagged as: currency, exchange rate, money, people as currency, value

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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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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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