Community Rocks!

I’ve recently bought, and have been working on a forum. I thought the site would be right up my alley, but after purchasing it, I realized that it didn’t have an active community of its own, and so I am trying my best to jump start it. One of the hardest things to do in community management is to try to start, grow and manage a community that doesn’t have a product, service, or company brand to go with it. The community I am trying to build is focused on sharing information, partnering, and growing businesses online.

Unfortunately, this is a hyper-competitive niche, and is very saturated. Add to that, the normal community pitfalls of not having enough people seed discussions, and you have a community that looks like a failure due to lack of activity, and attraction of activity.

Sure, there are ways to make it look like there is an active community that exists, so that people feel more interested in joining and being part of something that already exists, but my original intent was to search for people that don’t just want to join in, but instead they want to lead. Lead discussions, lead actions, and really grow both their own business and the businesses of others.

The difference between the actions taken to build a successful community and a community that is an ineffective flop can be hard to see, but with patience, effort, and persistence, anyone can be the lightning rod that brings brilliant people, ideas and energy to their community.

Wish me luck with my own and let me know, in the comments below, how you got your community started off on the right foot.

*Shameless Plug* In case you are interested in my forum, you can find it over on EarnersTalk.com and I’ve released two free e-books based on my blogging experiences there.

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Warning: This post was written a little before 4:00 a.m. just before I left for the airport home from SXSWi. Crankiness may ensue.

On Friday some of my SXSWi friends and I started a drinking game. Every time someone said the word “conversation” we drank. After the first couple of hours it was pretty clear we’d have to lay off the alcohol for this drinking game. “Conversation” was being talked about at every table in every pub. It was used in every panel and discussion topic. Conversations about conversation were unavoidable. No, we’d have to swig water if we wanted to make it through the weekend. SXSWi barely even started and it was clearly all about having, creating, or participating in a conversation.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind that it’s all about conversation. I’m the first to admit I’m somewhat of a talker. Sure, conversation is important. It’s damn important. Having a dialogue with the members of our community is the best way to learn how they use our service.  I can think of a word that’s even more important than conversation however, and that’s “action”. Talking and listening are indeed important but it’s the folks who take action who are the real rock stars.

Is “Space” Too Limiting?

Another word being bandied about at SXSWi’s every corner was “space”. As in, “it’s how you use the space.” I’m not quite sure where this space is everyone is referring to. Is there a party going on somewhere I haven’t been invited to? Does one buy the space or rent it? Am I in the right space now, or am I just a squatter? I’m obviously not involved in the right conversations. I mean, how do I find out how big my space is and where I can get more?

To me, “space”, and the discussion about how to use one’s space implies a limited area, which is why I’m not so fond of the term. When possibilities are endless, the implication should be the space we’re occupying must be unlimited as well. Like an infinityland or a black hole of community. I agree that we have to figure out ways to use our spaces (wherever they may be) rather than occupy them, but what does space really have to do with finding out what people want.

If I learned anything these past few days is that there aren’t many set rules. There’s no right or wrong. Just because one person uses Twitter as a promotional tool while another uses it to banter, doesn’t mean either is doing it wrong. Every blogger, every community manager and every social media specialist has his or her own set of rules. It’s not only about conversation or space. It’s about keeping an open mind and not using a manual or the phrase of the week to mold your community. Communities are indivdual collectives and what works for one might not be the ticket for another. Just because someone with a famous name does something, doesn’t mean it’s the perfect situation for you. By all means, have conversations but don’t forget to act and think outside your box…er …space.

Tagged as: SXSW, sxswi

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Yesterday I received a tweet from a member of the BlogTalkRadio community. “You know Deb,” it said.  “I’ve been thinking & you have made my BTR experience so much better.” I ask you, for an online community manager is there any better compliment? It’s my pleasure to serve my community (no, really) but a compliment like this is worth way more than a paycheck. It means I’m doing my job right and people are responding.

I was thinking the other day how if community manager jobs were available in the mid 80’s it would have saved me 20 years of trying to find my place. Being a community manager isn’t always Twitter and blogs, however. Most days are good, but we have our not so good days too. If you’re thinking of becoming a community manager, you should know that (like all jobs) there are pros and cons to consider.

Pros and Cons of Being an Online Community Manager

Pro: You get to talk to awesome, passionate people every single day. The people in your community are there because they believe in your product or service. In fact, they enjoy it so much they want to talk about it all the time with like-minded people. As community manager, you must be passionate about the same, because it’s up to you to lead and direct these conversations.

Con: Someone is always disgruntled. Someone always finds something to nitpick or complain about. You’ll have to be smiley and happy even when that’s not what you’re feeling at all. Someone in need of an anger management class is not cut out to be a community manager.

Pro: Social networking. What other job do you know of where you get to hang out on Twitter or FaceBook for the better part of the day? As community manager you get to talk with your community, and invite others to become part of it.You can also share links and product info and get customer feedback.

Con: Some folks may see you as being too spammy. You’ll need to find the balance between chit chat and promotion. If you do nothing than tweet links, folks probably won’t want to follow.

Pro: Online community never sleeps. When I wake up in the morning, my community is always there to welcome me - and vice versa. On weekends, during episodes of insomnia, and holidays, our community is still going strong. You are never alone if you’re a community manager.

Con: Online community never sleeps. Forums and chatrooms still need moderation. Folks are still looking for assistance. Just because it’s the weekend doesn’t mean the community is out having barbecues. If you’re not prepared to be a 24/7 presence for your community, you may as well find a new calling.

Pro: You get to attend cool conferences and meetups. Community managers are often stars of  community meetups and conferences are a terrific way to interact as well.  This is my favorite part of the job. Working the booth and working the room gives me the opportunity to shake hands, get feedback and convince others to drink our Kool Aid.

Cons: You’re traveling to work. When you attend conferences as a representative of a business, you’re not necessarily there for fun. You’re working a booth and hanging out on the trade floor. You don’t always get to attend learning sessions and many times at the end of the day, you’re just too darned tired for parties.

Pros: You’re a reflection of your community. If you have a happy, lively community, you’ll be hailed as a terrific community manager. If you rock the customer service and put out fires in a timely manner, you’ll be seen as one of the best in the business. Your company will be known for having a great community and this will only put them in a more positive light.

Cons: You represent your company. As community manager you’re front and center. You are the first impression many people get of your business and its community. If you do a poor job, it will not only reflect on your community, but your company as a whole. Make decisions wisely and take your role as community manager seriously.

Online community management doesn’t only mean hanging out on Twitter or updating FaceBook profiles. There’s a lot of responsibility there. You have to be a voice for your community. If someone is disgruntled, it’s your job to put out the fire.  You have to help solve the problem and then follow up to make sure there’s closure. You have to see all issues through to the end even if it means you’re staying up until 2:00 a.m. If your business is receiving bad press or publicity, it’s your job to make sure people see the positive and not the negative and if you see folks in need of help, it’s your job to reach out and make sure there’s no more confustion.

I think I have the perfect job, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. However, so many people see community managers as glorified social networkers and there’s much more to it than that. The positives outweigh the negatives, for sure, but only if you’re up to the true task.

Tagged as: Community Management, community manager, online community manager

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If your community has a forum or other gathering place, you’ll recognize the Chronic Malcontent. This is the person who never posts anything positive. Everything she (or he) writes is negative. She nitpicks the service, nitpicks the web design, nitpicks customer support and anything else she can think of. She knows the private email address of everyone on the support team but would rather take her complaints public because she feels she has a better chance of getting a response, plus she wants people to agree with her.(In most cases they don’t).

The Chronic Malcontent is probably the most challenging of all the community forum personalities because:

1. As community manager I have to be polite to everyone I come in contact with. Though I want to shake our chronic malcontent and say, “Get over it lady! This is a free service! If this free service is so much trouble find another silimar service that’s more to your liking. The fact that the Chronic Malcontent stays with us despite her daily laundry list of complaints is telling, because she doesn’t choose to go elsewhere.
2. One has to act quickly with the Chronic Malcontent because we don’t want others in the forum taking up the same tone and turning the thread into a complaintfest. Usually I thank Ms.Malcontent for her comments and assure her I’ve passed her information on to the folks who can best handle it, and give her the email for our services team once again so she can contact directly next time. Which she won’t.
3. I also have to be careful it doesn’t turn into a negative situation for the rest of the forum. Folks get sick of seeing constant whining from the same person and it’s only a matter of time before someone turns around and tells the Chronic Malcontent to shut up. Then others agree and before you know it you’re in moderation and delete mode.

Every now and then Chronic Malconent is worthy of an email or forum private message I’ll nicely ask her (or him) to please cool it with the negativity as it turns people off from visiting the forum. I’ll request she contact support directly for a quick response to her problems. She’ll send me a note back apologizing profusely and telling me how much she loves our service and how I’m the best community manager ever and she’s ever so sorry for any inconvenience. She really didn’t mean to be so negative. And then the process will start all over again the next week.

Does your forum have a chronic malcontent? If so, what do you do to diffuse the situation?

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Here’s a work in your jammies gig - can be done from home - and looks like a lot of fun. Salary isn’t bad either - $55 - $65K. This business will be launching in the spring:

Check it out:

Before we begin with the nitty gritty, let’s make no mistake. Just because you spend a lot of time on Twitter and Facebook doesn’t make you a social media expert. It just means you like to spend a lot of time online.And that’s OK, but we want a community manager who truly rocks the social media knowledge. Not just with the social networks but with blogs, community management, forum setup and moderation, newsletters and more. You’ll spend a lot of time online but you’ll also need to take it offline for a good part of the day too.

Your job won’t be just to lead the community but to empower them. To teach them how to use social media to cultivate business relationships and help their businesses grow. The ideal candidates must be able to offer fresh social media tips every single day. Can you truly do that?

Ideal candidates can also rock the following:

*Social media expertise
*Managing forums and online communities for at least 3 years
*Maintaining successful blogs for at least 2 years
* Web 2.0 expertise
* Doesn’t mind traveling to blogging and social media related conferences
* Write and send out weekly social media newsletter
*Strong Organizational Skills
*The ability to work without anyone standing over you
* Trustworthy - If you’re working at home we want to believe you’re really working

To apply, tell us the following:

*What is social media?
*Why is social media important?
*Why you are best qualified for this job?
*What can you do that is different from what everyone else is doing?
*Communities you have managed in the past
*Which social networks you use regularly

Please paste your resume in the body of your cover letter and send to sophiemwatkins@gmail.com. Attachments make us crazy.

Looking forward to hearing from you

Good luck!

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Comment policies are a tricky thing. Once we start moderating blog or forum comments, folks cry “censorship!” and accuse us of not allowing them the freedom to disagree. Because of this, many bloggers or forum moderators allow their commentators to basically say what they want until anarchy ensues and their communities become a verbal free-for-all.

In the last few years I’ve managed a couple of succesful communities and I’ve learned some essential truths:

1. My blogs and forums are not the government, and therefore, censorship doesn’t exist.
2. People should show the same respect in an online community as they do when visiting someone’s home.
3. There’s no shame in asking folks to be respectful and remember their manners.
4. There are ways to disagree without resorting to name calling and abuse.
5. Comment policies rock.

My writing community, Freelance Writing Jobs, is generally a helpful community of writers networking with and assisting other writers. However, when they begin to disagree about things such as rates it can get kind of ugly. So I posted a comment policy. It reads as follows:

We don’t like to have too many rules here at FWJ. Rules and regulations tend to scare people away, and we enjoy a crowded sandbox. Without rules we would have anarchy, and we’re not really into that either. So here it is in a nutshell: Be nice and be respectful. Easy, right?

Here’s the deal. When commenting, be nice and be respectful. Before you start yelling censorship and first amendment, let me clarify that you are more than welcome to disagree. We love spirited discussion and debate. Just be nice and be respectful.

Personal attacks, rudeness, vulgarity, spam and all around bad manners in comments will find said comment quietly and unceremoniously removed. If you would like to discuss removal of said comment, take it to email. We will no longer have public discussions and arguments about why certain comments are removed.If your comment is removed, it’s safe to say you weren’t nice or respectful. If you post a comment to announce to everyone we’re evil and removed your comment, we’ll remove that one as well. You’re welcome to talk it over with us in private.

Thank you for your understanding and for being nice and respectful.

You know what? It worked.

As a blogger, there’s nothing I enjoy more than a spirited discussion underneath something I wrote. It amazes me however, that certain grownups can’t play nice. In addition to the aforementioned comment policy, I have my blog network set up so that a new visitor’s first comment automatically is held in moderation.  This serves two purposes

1. It allows me to personally welcome a new member to the community.
2. It allows me to remove an offensive comment from a troll.

Two years about FWJ had a reputation for being a writer’s battleground, today it’s the number one online community for freelance writers. Having a clear comment policy, and being firm about enforcing that policy helped to create a thriving, helpful community. It’s not censorship to ask people to behave.

Do you have a comment policy? What does it say?

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It’s terrific so many businesses are starting to realize there are real people out there using their products and services. And while “community” and “social media” are this year’s buzzwords, some folks still aren’t quite getting it. Even though it’s all about “community” nowadays, doesn’t mean a business should treat folks as a collective or demograhic.

Most customer service or marketing teams treat users or consumers as a whole and solve problems based on averages and groups. It’s frustrating to know the people who we’re trusting for support are reading from a script or have a canned response. Though we’re building communities, each member of that community is an individual and should be treated as such. Toss the the script out and go with your gut, people will trust you more.

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I have a confession to make. I’m technically challenged. When it comes to blogging I can handle the writing end and maybe even a little widget and plugin installation, but when it comes to the nitty gritty, I haven’t a clue. I generally hire people to design my blogs and to handle the issues I can’t.

In November,  I was thrilled to be able to announce I was revamping my popular Freelance Writing Jobs blog from a single blog into a network of six blogs. Imagine how it feels watching a small blog grow into the number one online community for freelance writers? This was a thrilling and scary time for me. At the recommendation of my trusted tech guys, I moved over to a more reliable hosting company. It was a company that came highly recommended, received good reviews and they patiently answered all my questions when I called.

A tale of two servers

A couple of weeks after the move and upgrade, I received a notice from the host. My site is too busy, processes are running and it’s affecting the other websites on the server. Could we look into it? Indeed we could. My tech guys looked into it and fixed the problem. Or so we thought.  In mid- December the host sent another notice.  My blog network is too busy for the chosen plan, I had to move to a dedicated server. This must be done within 24 hours or my service would be yanked. Feeling I had no choice, I paid hundreds of dollars (that I couldn’t spare during the holidays) to get this done. Some of that money, by the way, had been earmarked so I could give my bloggers an end of the year bonus. Sorry, guys. [click to continue…]

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Forgive my absence of over a week. This has been a crazy busy time at the day job! I couldn’t sleep tonight, however, so you wake to find a list of community manager and social media jobs. I’m hoping for this to be a regular feature. I’ve been listing daily leads at my Freelance Writing Jobs blog for almost four years and it goes over well. I’m not sure I’ll be doing this daily, but weekly ought to do the trick.

Something that’s bugging me are all the people hiring community managers as unpaid interns. Trust me, you need experience for this gig.

• Internet Media Manager - Monster Cable
• Community Editor - Meredith - Des Moines
• Web Community Site Strategist - SpermCenter - Los Angeles. (Heh. They’re looking for someone who is hands on.)
• SEM Internet Campaign Specialist - Irvine CA
• Internet Marketing Specialist - Concord MA
• Community Manager - Verity Surabaya - Australia
• Community Manager - Groupon - Boston
• Web Community Editor/Moderator - Barnes  & Noble - NYC
• Yelp Community Manager - Toronto
• Social Media Marketing - Disney - NYC
• Social Media Traffic Manager - Inglewood CA
• Social Media Marketing Manager - NYC
• Social Media Contributor

Tagged as: Community Manager Jobs, social media jobs

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