2. Overview: Understanding the role of a community manager
What is a community manager? In my years in social media I’ve seen
community managers referred to as everything from individuals that lead major
teams to individuals who lead smaller initiatives such as applying a Facebook
status update or drafting a tweet.
I remember once meeting the head of one of the largest social media divisions in
the country, her and I got into a mild dispute over the role of the community
manager. She kept referring to it clearly as a strategist role, I had to keep
reminding her that she was missing the conversational word of mouth triggering
aspect that the community manager plays, in the end we agreed that really- it
was both.
A community manager is a leadership role over a group of individuals directing
them towards an end goal. That directional leadership (strategist) is defined by
the movement of the community (conversationalist) toward an end principal set of
goals(defined by the brand or client). To succeed, Community Managers must
operate under 5 core principals as I’ve defined here.
1. Vision of the end goal
2. Developing a foundation for the journey
3. Building a road map to get there
4. Responsibility for the team
5. Personal Transparency
1. Vision of the end goal: Every community manager must work with the brand
they’re managing to understand “why” they’re in social media to begin with. Why
have a Facebook or Twitter page? What’s the point?
2. Developing a foundation for the journey:Once the goals have been
determined, to reach them with the support of your community you need a
foundation to stand on, a principal that moves the crowd. To find out this
principal you’ll need to dive deep into your analytics to find out more about who
your core consumer is and what makes them “tick &click”.
3. Building a road map to get there:Once you know where you’re going and
how to get the community there, build out a road map to chart your path.
4. Responsibility for the team: You’re responsible for the people in your
community. Should someone ask a tough question, you need to be prepped with
the right tools and ammo to respond back and chart everything back on course.
5. Personal Transparency: Responding back requires “humanizing” of the
brand, every community manager needs to have a voice that their community
responds to, find yours and go with it.
3. 1. Vision of the end goal: Defining what you want to achieve
Successful leadership begins with having an end goal in mind; a specific height
of achievement that you aim to accomplish and community management is no
different.
For example, I had a client years ago who just wanted fans, and so we got them
fans, lots of them. However, once they had them, they had no idea what to do
with them. A half a million fans later, they were still clueless. Avoid this by
understanding the end goal of what you aim to achieve and allow it to define your
social media objectives.
As a community manager, before you jump into the space you should start your
journey by asking your client, or yourself, three key questions:
1) Why: Why do you want likes or followers?
2) What: What do you want to get out of this them?
3) When: When are you expecting to see results?
Why do you want likes or followers?:Very few clients know, that’s why they’re
hiring you. By asking this, you’ll be taking the first step in challenging your client
to broaden their perspective of social media, while opening up an opportunity for
you and your team to provide answers that establish yourselves as relevant
experts and thought leaders.
What do you want to get out of this page?:If their main objectives are to
increase page visits to their website, online sales for the year, and develop their
customer service practice – youcan respond by letting them know you’ll integrate
the Facebook page with the website, set up a sound plan to market product
features that drive to purchase, and create a system for building customer
advocacy that leads to increased retention rates, which sounds much better than
just “getting likes”.
When are you expecting to see results? –Getting results from a community is
tough and takes time; don’t be afraid to tell the client this. If you don’t you’ll enter
into the space by setting some goals that can’t be reached within the first year,
let alone ever, and end up losing the trust of the client. Instead, communicate
the different levels that need to be reached in order to attain the goal at hand,
map them out, set everyone’s expectations, and chart a path forward.
The first principal for successful community management is understanding the
end goal, now that you know where you’rerallying your community towards, you
need to identify the foundation that’s going to drive them along the way.
4. 2. Developing a foundation for the journey: Understanding your community
through analytics
The community you’re leading is a movement, and every movement requires a
foundation- a guiding principal to stand upon that will drive the team to reach
their end goal. This foundation is different within each community and to find it
you have to dive deep into the analytics. How well do you know your analytics
and are you allowing the truth in numbers to re-define who your clients core
consumer is?
I’ve watched as major Fortune 100 brands have completely ignored their analytic
readings and instead stuck to what a decade old survey said about their core
consumer. I’ve also watched as brands have opened up to social media and its
ability to redefine who their consumer is based on real-time conversations.
In the end, as a community manager, you have to find the “heartbeat” that drives
your community, but you won’t get it until you know who your community is, and
while there are several practices for analyzing your community, I’ve found these
three simple performance based measures to work:
1) Real time demographic based analytics
2) Conversation sentiment analysis
Real time demographic based analytics:Take a look, is your community male
or female? What age range? Where do they live? If you don’t think this matters,
you’re wrong. Location based data will not only influence your media buy and
PPC efforts, but also how you relate to your community. If you were to find out a
huge portion of your community was from Brazil or even part of Asia, you’d be
more inclined to build engagement by creating content based on those areas.
We once had a client and found that a large portion of our community was from
Jamaica, really? We were all a little startled. We shifted our messaging and
PPC strategy and before we knew it “likes” doubled and so did the amount of
product our client started shipping there. All that, just from Facebook analytics.
Conversation sentiment analysis: This is the simple practice of learning from
conversation. How much can you tell about a person from looking at them? Not
much (for the most part). However, how much can you tell about a person from a
conversation, by knowing their story and what drives them?From my experience,
the answer is, “a whole lot more”. The reason our clients have a “core
consumer” target is because that individual embodies characteristics of a larger
group. Use conversation to find those characteristics through social media. Dive
into conversation with individuals, ask them about who they are, what they’re
doing that day, what their interest are?
5. For example, I was managing a community a couple years ago and found out
two very important details about the community through analytics and
conversation.
1) They were mostly women
2) They were mostly women entrepreneurs of small business’s and
nonprofits.
We began by creating Facebook page campaigns targeted at supporting local
female entrepreneurs in towns where our target demo lived, we followed that with
charity driven campaigns. Our initiatives doubled and then tripled the fan base,
and then grew it even more- we did all of this without a single media buy or PPC
program.
Analytics couldn’t tell us that, but conversations did. Data such as this helped us
understand who our consumer is and “what” makes them tick & click.
By identifying that, we identified what I call the “heartbeat’ of the community. The
heartbeat is the foundation and is what will drive the conversation forward toward
reaching our goals.
For example, take a look at these two status updates.
Ex 1:
“Like this page if you’re excited about Friday”
Ex 2:
“Like this page if you’re excited about the women in entrepreneurship conference
happening in New York’s Convention Center.
Most likely you’ll get much more engagement from Ex 2 than you would from Ex
1. Although I still see Fortune 100 companies refer to Ex1. Ex2is core consumer
focused and you’ll see a higher ROI using this approach.
6. 3. Building out a road map to get there:Creating a content strategy based
on analytics
Ultimately though, your journey to success is guided by strategic plan. In
community management that plan can be referred to as a content strategy.
In developing the content strategy for any brands community, there are three
things I consider as the baseline for my efforts:
1) Campaign based goals: Going back to the vision for the end goal.
2) Driver items: Remembering the heartbeat that drives the community.
3) Format for distribution: A tactical plan to activate each element.
Campaign based goals: Every content strategy needs to be mapped out to
reach your goals and driven by your community’s heartbeat.
As an example, I’m going to create three goals around a mock brand that sells
kitchen utensils. Here, the goal is to:
1-Increase our like base
2-Increase page engagement (comments, likes)
3-Increase website visits from Facebook
These are simple goals and just an example, your page could also be to make
sure every follower or like turns into a purchase or signs up for a newsletter.
However, for this example, we’re going to keep it simple so that you can
understand the flow of the road map.
Driver items:Driver items are the heartbeat at the center of your content strategy
that’s going to lead your community toward those end goals and accomplishing
your clients business objectives in the process. I’ll use this kitchen utensil
company as an example:
We know our goals, now suppose we’ve been managing the community for a few
months now. After diving into the analytics and engaging the consumers through
conversation, whatwe found out about this specific community is:
They’re mostly female
Most of those females are moms
They use the page to find different cooking recipes
They’re more engaged when the recipe’s come from an authority such as
a spokesperson or celebrity.
These insights should lead us to the heartbeat that will drive the conversation
forward. For this specific examples, some heartbeats might be considered:
7. Content around recipes
Initiatives that identify and support mom’s
Highlighting celebrity chefs as spokesperson
Format for distribution:It’s time to pick your community up and drive them
toward the goal;creating and distributing content driven by the heartbeat that
we’ve identified do this.
Content can be distributed initially via three different streams of strategy:
As status updates
Ongoing daily conversation and consumer engagement
Contest, sweepstakes, and giveaways
Status updates: Your heartbeat for conversation should be reflected in your
status updates. Take a look at a few examples based on our heartbeat using the
kitchen utensil brand as an example.
Ex1
What recipe is a family favorite in your household, tell us why?
Notice this status update speaks to family and cooking, which will ultimately
drives a higher engagement and click through rate than a status update that
doesn't.
Ongoing daily conversation: A majority of community management is simple
ongoing conversational feedback and responses. You need to make sure that
the core of your response isn’t driven around generic feedback but real authentic
conversation that either leads to additional insights about the consumer or fulfills
client objective or goal. For example:
Customer:
I received your non-stick frying pan and it’s awful?
You:
What are you cooking in the pan? Have you seen our guidelines for cooking in
nonstick? Visit this URL (ex).
The response engages the consumer deeper into the conversation to drives
feedback, while also driving them to the website, increasing traffic visits.
Contest & sweepstakes: Contests and sweepstakes on a daily, weekly, or even
monthly cadence will give your community the incentive and boost that it needs
to take things to the next level in a format that will drive likes, increase brand
reach, and organic word of mouth. Take a look at the examples below.
8. *Dally contest: To be completely honest, of the entire contest that I’ve
done- the ones that giveaway the lowest amounts of money are usually
the ones that get the most consumer feedback.
Think about it, when was the last time you won $5,000? Exactly, but when
was the last time you came across $20 or $50? Winning $20 over $5,000
is much more likely and within the consumers sphere of possibilities, for
this reason you or the general consumer are more likely to engage in a
contest where the winning prize is $25 over $5,000.
Now, consider what you can do every couple days or so to give away $20
or a small product experiences to someone in your community. You’ll get
customers mentioning your page, sharing it with their friends, and high
levels of consumer engagement and click throughs in the process.
*Monthly Contest:The same format applies for larger monthly contest, with
the problem being that the barrier to entry is usually too high. Consumers
don’t want to create videos, sign a bunch of forms, or anything beyond
that to enter into a contest they most likely won’t win. Instead, follow the
best practice of making the barrier to entry low and easy to participate in.
Consider something simple like uploading a twit-pic with a special hashtag
or just answering a trivia question. There are several ways to crowd
source using a monthly contest format, but whatever the strategy the key
to success will always be to have a “low barrier to entry”.
4. Responsibility for the team: Why it’s more than just acquisition
9. For the last several pages, I’ve explained to you 3 of my 5 core principals for
community management, and yes, most of it revolves around business objectives
and acquisition based goals. However, it’s important to make a point that the
core of community management goes back to leadership and strong leadership
is driven by engaging& responsible conversation.
Why is it consumers tend to lean toward one politician over another, when
realistically speaking we’ll probably end of up with the same “ending” no matter
who is elected? (okay, you now know how I feel about politics). The reason is
that real leaders connect with the people and they do so by:
1) Having a plan for un-easy times
2) Direct interaction and follow up
3) Rewarding the community
Having a plan for catastrophe: Every community can get a little unsettled and
out of control, it’s human nature- we’re never comfortable and always seeking
validation. That validation needs to come from someone in leadership, for your
community that person is you acting on behalf of your brand.
Politicians do a great job of this because they’re always ready for disaster, they
know the community will eventually burst and they’re ready for when it happens.
For example, what if your consumer gets a bad product item, or feels you haven’t
respected them enough? They’re going to go straight to the wall or twitter feed,
and what do you do then?
To be prepared, consider building what is often referred to as a “Risk &
Response” document. A Risk & Response document helps you examine all of
the ways your community might react negatively, and then you can chart a
coarse forward for how you’ll respond to bring them back on track.
Direct interaction and follow up: 100% of the time, this response to negative
sentiment or any sentiment really, has to be done by you. It can be done via a
phone or though a status update, but on behalf of the brand- you need to
respond personally to let the community know you’re still listening and
responding, and that this page isn’t being managed by a robot.
Rewarding the community: Often, a great response doesn’t require anything
negative to happen at all, you simply love your community and so you reward
them. Look at Starbucks for example, they’re constantly offering free stuff for
their community as a way of just saying, “Thank you”. If you want your
community to stay behind you and continue to follow you, give them a little nudge
along the way to say, “Thanks, keep it up, we’re almost there.”
10. 5. Personal Transparency& Disclosure: Humanizing the brand & taking off
the mask
Personal transparency in community management is important. To establish this
transparency you’ll need to humanize your brand in an authentic way that
resonates with consumers.
For example, Starbucks doesn’t have hair, so you can’t necessarily say, “I woke
up with bed head today…” It wouldn’t make much sense, but you can reflect the
feelings of the office as a collective unit. For example, you could say, “We’re all
struggling right now with a cold that’s being going around the office.” Comments
like this drive engagement because you’re speaking to people on a topic
everyone as a collective unit identifies with. The core to developing personal
transparency through your community management can be done by:
1) Creating a voice
2) Establishing authenticity &removing the mask
Creating a voice: What does your brand sound like? This is a strikingly
important question and will have a huge impact on the success that you drive as
a community manager. Every brand on social media has a voice, and that voice
is defined by a personality. The question is, what is your personality? The
answer to this is simpler than most people know, it comes by looking at your core
consumer and who it is they’d most likely have a conversation with, and then
crafting the voice around that.
Yes, for women it’s women and men it’s often men. But let’s take it a step even
further- I was once working on an organic food market brand and I had to try out
a few voices before I found one that worked. It ended up that the voice that
received the most engagement was the straightforward educational one. I found
that while conversation was the baseline, the community became more engaged
when receiving facts around the organic food market.
Establishing authenticity & removing the mask: Authenticity is a very
important part of being a community manager. As the community manager
you’re not only a part of the brand, but you’re also a human being. As part of
your community management you can either be the brand or the person. There
have been many brands that have found success from displaying outright on
their page who exactly the person is behind the scenes speaking to you. Some
PR practices even have this in their code of ethics when managing pages. For
the most part though, being and responding in a transparent manner as oppose
to being a robot will put you and your client into a favorable position with the
community.
11. Putting the 5 core principals into practice
Throughout this document, you’ve read as I’ve laid out the 5 guiding principles
that I’ve followed throughout my career that have led me to successful
community management. It’s important that you understand that these principals
set up merely just the foundation of a much deeper journey into how to effectively
manage a community that yields results.
Time and time again I’ve seen community managers steering pages and the
communities that like or follow them in the wrong direction. My hope for this
document would be that community managers would take a step back before
signing that contract or diving into a season of work to identify what exactly they
or their clients want to accomplish.
I find this important because I believe that social media is a powerful tool and
anytime that you gather millions together behind one central topic or focal point
you open up opportunities to do great things and make a significant impact on or
contribution to society. However, this can’t be done unless you set up a
foundation before you start building.
The Empire State building or any great structure like it, along side great
communities and movements, were built for a purpose. These purposes
embodied a heartbeat that cemented a foundation that has helped them stand
the test of time. Should you or your client be in the business of seeing the same
type of lasting success, consider these principles as the start of your journey-
know your consumer or find out what makes them tick, identify the heartbeat that
moves all progress forward, set up a foundation for the adventure, and lead your
community and client toward the success they so rightly deserve.
