FreshNetworks Blog

A few months ago I read a great tip from Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, in which he described the importance of ‘guerrilla customer service’ as a way to grow small businesses. Crowley described how he would actively search for negative sentiment about Foursquare on Twitter in order to help customers solve their problems. I wholeheartedly agreed with his approach, and believe it’s a crucial consideration for online community managers too.

Very often community managers are too wrapped up in the drive to grow their audiences, due to client expectations and the idea that larger audiences yield greater ROI. We also get wrapped up in engaging only with the branded online community that we manage, forgetting that the majority of our customer base may not be aware that the community exists. So what often gets overlooked is the importance of seeking out and retaining existing customers, especially the unhappy ones.

I once came across a client’s customer who had tweeted a photo of a broken shoe (not the fault of the brand), frustrated that it was old season and she wouldn’t be able to replace it. I helped her to source a replacement shoe in her size. Needless to say, she bought the replacement and thanked us publicly on Twitter for helping her. There you have a great example of quantitative and qualitative ROI, and what was nice for her was the unexpected surprise at being assisted without asking for help. Think of all those unhappy customers whose complaints get lost in the noise of the social web.

For me three points are key if you want to execute slick and successful guerrilla customer service:

1. Use social media monitoring tools to keep on top of all the sentiments flying around your brand everyday in an efficient way. Set up RSS feeds and real time alerts so that you never miss an angry tweet or blog post about your brand.
2. Deal with the unhappy customer in the public space online. Yes, you’re making your brand vulnerable to criticism, but at the end of the day the customer will publicly praise you if you’ve helped them solve their problem – driving positive word of mouth for your customer service.
3. Be prompt to respond. Aim for a best practice turnaround time by working closely with customer service and product teams. Use social media to communicate with the customer as close to real time as possible; the icing on the cake is in being able to prove that it is a more effective customer service channel than telephone or email.

Many community manager positions advertised online ask for someone to help supervise and develop a newly launched community. In my opinion this is far too late to look at employing a community manager. They should be involved from an early point in the development cycle, ideally when plans for the community are still being developed.

There are a number of reasons why ensuring the online community manager is onboard from this early planning phase:

1. They can get to know the platform the community is built on
   Knowing your platform, how to add and update content, how to moderate, how to make changes to user profiles is core to the community management job.
2. They can be involved in the user testing
   If your community manager finds something awkward or confusing you can be certain your community members are also likely to.
3. They can prepare engaging content
   Having time to prepare content for your community, be it forum topics, a list of future polls or a schedule of blogs will aid the smooth running of the community in the first few weeks.
4. They can be involved in seeding the community
   Being there to seed the community with content and invite those all important first few members in allows a community manager to identify trends and get an instant feel of how the community is likely to develop.
5. They can develop internal relationships
   Often under-rated, having the time to develop relationships with other employees who may provide content, or be able to help with questions that arise about your brand or services, provides long term benefits to the community.
6. They will have time to develop a library of external resources
   Sourcing resources such as external blogs and relevant news articles allows you to quickly update the community and provide a talking point for community members.

When that “go live” date passes and you offer your community out to the world, having a community manager who has been given a chance to familiarise themselves with the environment and build internal relationships before the traffic arrives will only help with the long term success of the community.

Preparing my keynote presentation for the Dutch Marketing Conference Digitaal willen we allemaal in Utrecht later this month I’ve been considering both the danger of building your social media strategy on tactics (“We need to use Twitter” or “We need to use Facebook”) and also the role of the social media agency. I wrote a post about how long-term success in social media is about more than tactics – the importance of exploring and critically evaluating why you are using social media and how you will measure success rather than jumping straight to tools and tactics. The second part of my presentation will consider the role of the social media agency and how and why they should work with brands.

The best person to represent your brand online is you

It may seem counter-intuitive for us to say this (FreshNetworks is a social media agency after all) but the best person to represent a brand online in the long-term is probably the brand itself and not an external agency. Social media should sit alongside your existing channels of engaging customers and should provide a way for you to have a sustainable relationship with them. You should be having conversations with them, working with them, sharing ideas and learning from them. The power of this engagement being with the brand directly is huge. And the value to any organisation of having a route direct to your customers and stakeholders is great.

However for many organisations this is a daunting prospect. Who should represent your brand? What part of the business do they sit in? How do you engage people online? What do you do if people talk about you? How do you find brand advocates and what do you do with them once you’ve found them? These and many other questions are often raised when brands think about engaging online using social media. And these are jsut some of the reasons a social media agency can help, at least in the short- or medium-term.

Why a social media agency can help your brand online

So, whilst a brand is the best to represent itself online in the long-term there can be strong, pragmatic reasons for working with a social media agency first. At the conference later this month, I’ll be talking through three main reasons but would love to hear your thoughts:

1. When you start engaging online a different set of skills are required

Building a growing social media engagement is hard work. It takes skills and experience to grow a community of people and manage the conversations and discussions in a way that is of interest to the community and of use to you as a brand. Taking the overall strategy and turning this into a set of tactics that you use to engage customers and other stakeholders needs experience and people who have been there before. Once the engagement is up-and-running a different set of skills are required and this is really where the brand comes to the fore.

2. It can be difficult to know where social media sits in an organisation

For many organisations it is difficult to know where social media, and engagement online, should sit. How you organise yourself is often very different to how customers and stakeholders think of you. One of the real benefits of engaging people online is that you can get real insight into your organisation that helps your brand. People won’t split themselves in the same way that you do and so a PR team may find itself being presented with new product ideas, or an insight team with needing to react and respond to customer complaints. This can be difficult and it takes time for social media, and the benefits it brings to your organisation, to be fully realised. A social media agency can act as the glue between you and the people you are engaging online and also help you to learn and to understand where it can fit into your organisation (or indeed what changes are needed internally to make the most of it).

3. Most organisations would benefit from social media skills transfer

Most brands could benefit from learning and practicing the skills needed to engage customers and stakeholders online. The role of the online community manager is becoming more and more established and is one that businesses can hire. The role of the social media manager (in its broader sense) is still developing and requires a number of skills and experiences. You need to know how to engage people, facilitate discussions online, run campaigns, respond in a crisis and to work with customers to co-create new ideas. You also need internal management skills to make sure you engage the appropriate people across your business and engage them at the appropriate point to contribute to discussions online. Finally you need a range of analytical and reporting tools so that you can analyse and report on the impact the engagement is having. Any good social media agency will use a team of people with different skill sets to help you in all these areas, and then coach and mentor internal to raise skill levels internally and transfer these skills to you.

So the most appropriate solution for many (if not most) brands is to work with a social media agency at first but to plan to transfer skills internally and take more responsibility for representing your brand online as the engagement changes in style and nature and the relationships you are building online grow.

Back in December I was approached by FreshIdeas Events to take part in a rather unique scheme – their Women in Business Mentoring series.

The mentoring scheme offers aspiring female entrepreneurs the chance to be mentored by some of the most high-profile and successful businesswomen in the country, our co-founder Caroline Plumb having been a mentor previously.

However, FreshIdeas’ proposition for me, a young community manager at a social media agency, was slightly different. For the first time, they were introducing a Young Social Media Mentor into the equation; the idea being that someone young and social media savvy could mentor ‘up’ to an experienced businesswoman.

So it came to be that I was matched up with my ‘mentee’, a vivacious, enthusiastic lady who started her business before I was born! We have been meeting once a month since December, and will continue to do so until the end of the six-month scheme. Because of terms agreed between us, I can’t reveal her name or nature of business, but I can say that it has been one of the highlights of my social media career so far. The relationship has been not so much one of teacher and pupil, but one of business collaborators.

If you run a business and are not yet sold on the value of social media, then getting a mentor is a truly great way to get into it. You don’t need to be part of a formal scheme like I am; look around within or outside your company and ask someone who would be willing to give some time to help you – if even for an hour a month.

These are my tips for anyone who wants to get started, whether as a mentor or mentee:

• Set yourselves specific goals – the more specific the better. You are working together on limited time, so decide what business problems you would like to solve. Establish targets for increased online referrals; cut cost per customer by moving conversations online; increase online buzz about your brand by x% and so on.

• Mentees – you may find it hard to fit in your social media ‘homework’ on top of your everyday jobs, but set aside 10 minutes a day to do it – it’s better to do it little and often.

• Use division of labour. If you run a successful business, why don’t you delegate some of your tasks to your staff, according to their strengths and roles? And don’t automatically think this is the intern’s job – giving someone you can’t trust the responsibility of representing your brand online could be potentially disasterous.

• Communicate frequently and often, and be open to suggestions. The best thing about my relationship with my mentee is that I can always check up on her activity. I read her tweets and blogs, and I am able to email her straight away with feedback and suggestions.

• Finally, enjoy learning from one another. In the short space of time that I have been working with my mentee, I have gained some invaluable business insight, while my mentee has started to question and re-evaluate her fundamental marketing and branding strategy now that she has started out in the world of social media.

Look out for an update on my mentoring programme in the next few months.

While sitting on my morning commute to work, re-reading my battered copy of Freakonomics, I came to the chapter dealing with crime rates in New York. It mentioned the broken window theory, a concept I’ve recently looked into a bit more closely as it seems to match my experiences with online communities.

To summarise the theory:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

Source: James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. “BROKEN WINDOWS: The police and neighborhood safety” (PDF)

The relevance of this approach to online communities seems clear. As you become lenient to the minor misdemeanours such as repetitive posts and off topic comments, you find the community taking this as a sign to slowly breach the terms more frequently and to a more serious degree. More time is spent dealing with the inappropriate content and you sit back thinking “if only I’d cleared out the comments that started all this.”

It’s tempting to let some of the smaller things go, especially if you have tight schedules for producing content, are managing multiple communities or find yourself buried deep into your engagement processes. However, this is a really fundamental part of the community manager role.

Making sure you remain consistent and respond quickly are key attributes for a community manager and I think this comparison sums it up nicely. So, in order to prevent the squatters lighting fires in your building, repair those broken windows quickly and keep the place looking tidy.

A lot of people are excited about social media and think it could have a hugely positive impact on their brand, their marketing and communications, the insight they get, the way in which they deal with customer service and many other benefits it can bring to an organisation and to the way it interacts with and engages customers. They are right to be excited, the opportunities are great but brands should not hide from the fact that getting an engaging social media presence takes proper thought, some effort and may take time to embed.

When you are getting started in social media it is important to think carefully about what you as a business are looking to achieve and drive your activities from this, from a business-led social media strategy. Jumping straight to tools and hoping they will work for you often causes problems. Facebook is not always the answer and what works for one brand will not necessarily work for another brand. You need to think about what you want to achieve and choose tools that will help you to achieve this.

A second consideration should be what is possible with different tools and how you can use them in a way that truly benefits you. There is a lot said about social media and there can be a tendency to put up a Facebook Page to ‘do social media’ (or worse ‘to drive traffic and increase sales’). Working with any social media tool, just as with any marketing or communications tool needs proper thought. And with social media people often think you can put things up and wait for consumers to start ‘engaging’ with you. This almost always won’t happen. It is one of the myths of social media. You need to work hard to get engagement going, and have thought carefully first about what you are doing and why.

This great presentation from Bart De Waele of Belgium agency Netlash highlights some of these myths, or as he says the seven “harsh realities” of social media. Its is a great summary of some of the misconceptions people have of social media and some of the education and training that is often needed in a brand when they start thinking about why they should be engaging online and which tools to use. These seven myths are timely for everybody to consider:

1. Nobody reads your blog unless the content is valuable and relevant, you have conversations and you build loyalty over time
2. Your Twitterstream is boring unless you make it interesting with content that is relevant to your target audience and have the right mix of personality and conversation
3. Your Facebook Fan Page will be empty unless you have valuable content, interaction and conversation there
4. Your new social networking site will not be used unless you have valuable and relevant content, give people a reason to engage and build audience diligently with good community management
5. Your great idea will not go viral unless your content is engaging and valuable and people really want to engage with you
6. Users will not generate content unless you make it easy, ensure there is something in it for users who are generating the content and facilitate this with good community management
7. Your employees will not help unless you enthuse, train, encourage and support them

These are harsh realities and the myths that often exist about social media and how it can benefit brands and organisations. Overall they show that tools and technology are not the most important thing when any brand uses social media. Its your content and the people who manage and grow your activity who count. Social media is a social activity and it is having a good and thought-through strategy, and the people to launch and build your engagement online that will make a real difference.

Bart’s presentation is below and is also Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks.

Should people be allowed to leave anonymous comments in online communities and forums? It’s a question that has been debated many times and people have different perspectives on it. Some say that “No, if people don’t say who they are then its easy for discussions to get out of hand”, whereas others say “Yes, if you want people to be honest you need to allow them to be anonymous”.

The issue of anonymity when commenting in online communities is actually more complicated than some arguments would suggest. And the answer is both yes and no.

What do we mean by anonymity?

When talking about anonymous comments we need to consider two types of anonymity:

1. If the commenter should be anonymous to other members of the community
2. If the commenter should be anonymous to the site owner and community manager

These two aspects of anonymity are often confused. As a general principle of online community management, anybody wanting to add to the discussions and debates in the community should share at least a minimum of information with the site owner and community manager about who they are. This is not just so that they can capture the data, but because the social exchange of an online community works on the basis of openness, transparency and honesty.

This of course works both ways – in a successful online community neither party should be anonymous to each other. The brand, organisation or people behind an online community should be honest about who they are and why they are sponsoring or running the site. And people who want to comment on or add to the discussions on the site should be open and honest about who they are. At least privately to the people running the site. You will also find that asking for a minimum of information about people before they add their thoughts or comments will make them more likely to consider what they are saying. Even if other community members don’t know who they are, the site owner and community managers will and will be able to contact them.

So in this respect, no comments should be allowed from members who are anonymous to the online community manager or site owner.

Should people be allowed to be anonymous to other community members?

So, even if we say that users should not be allowed to add to the discussions in our online community without telling us who they are, should they be able to remain anonymous from other community members?

This question has always intrigued me as there is a whole spectrum of ways in which community members can identify themselves depending on the community and on what the individual member chooses to share. And they offer varying degrees of anonymity that could be offered to me as a user

• I could have a generic username, ‘Anonymous’ and no further information about myself – this is perhaps the most anonymous I can be to any other user of the online community
• I could choose a username that reveals nothing about me, ‘Grey2834′ – by allowing users to choose their own username there is an increased risk that they will share information that will allow us to identify them. Perhaps I use the same username on other communities and forums and this will let you understand more about who I might be.
• I could choose a username and have other information on my profile, perhaps by city (London) and age range (30-39). The more information I share the greater the chance people will start to identify me.
• I could use my first name (Matt) and some other information – the more I share the less anonymous I become
• I could share my full name, date of birth, address, email address and mobile telephone number

Different online communities will ask for different levels of information and different users will share different amounts. The only way to allow truly anonymous comments would be to allow users to use a generic username (such as ‘Anonymous’) and share no other information about themselves. Even then they will never be truely anonymous as the subjects they write about, the examples they give or the things they say will share things about who they are and what they do.

As a general principle, the more users share about themselves, the more others in the community will learn about them and identify with them. The more the community will grow. This does not, of course, mean that I need to share with you my name, date of birth and address. You could also identify with me based on my contributions and the things I say without needing to know who I am at all.

However, people do interact better with others if they know something about them. If they have a name to call them, for example, whether or not that’s their real name or a username. If they know where they are or some other things that let us understand more about them and the things they say. For this reason, where possible, community members should be encouraged to share some information about themselves.

Should anonymous comments be allowed in an online community?

So should anonymous comments be allowed in an online community? The simple answer is ‘no’ because the social contract of any successful online community is honesty and at the very least community members should not be anonymous to the community manger or site owner. But does this mean that community members cannot be anonymous to other community members? This question is more complicated. Online communities work best if people share some things about themselves with their fellow community members and it is very difficult to ensure complete anonymity. As part of that same social contract, community members like to know something about the people they are talking to online, even if it is just a username of some description.

Of course, there will always be exceptions to this rule, where the need to encourage contributions and discussions will supersede the benefit of building a community based on members knowing something about each other. Dissidents in China or Iran sharing information and experiences would be one such example. Discussing sexual health issues with teenagers might be another. In these and other cases, anonymous comments are perhaps the only way to encourage honest and open discussions. But in the majority of cases such protection is not needed and completely anonymous comments should not be allowed.

As Mumsnet celebrates it’s 10^th anniversary an article in yesterday’s Sunday Times titled: The bullies hiding behind Mumsnet’s skirts discussed how some members of the Mumsnet community have become “spiteful and cliquey” along with obscene language that now “peppers the website”.

As any parent knows (I certainly do to my cost) that if a parent allows one perhaps questionable aspect of their child’s behaviour to be acceptable that particular behaviour is soon learnt by that child’s sibling(s). This could not be truer when translated to online communities.

An established support community whether run as a not-for-profit or as in Mumsnet case on a commercial basis play a vital role in bringing together isolated people seeking answers to questions. With the wisdom of crowds phenomenon, communities help individuals with the most complex problems and in the process create a valuable asset for the organisation running the community.

Online communities’ need experienced community management from the start if their community is to grow into a vibrant, healthy and nurturing environment. By following a pre-agreed launch and community growth strategy the tone and etiquette of the resulting community activity also reflects the overall culture of the organisation hosting it.

This isn’t just about moderation. In fact moderation is rarely necessary where an effective community manager runs the community. They can recognise the patterns of behavior indicating potential problems in the future. These patterns are largely predictable in the path they take so that path can be shifted or influenced.

In the absence of proactive online community management, two less desirable outcomes are most likely:

1. No one will come and because of that no one else wants to come.
2. The community starts well but then is taken over by a few members selfishly for their own ends. Which if left unchecked can be extremely damaging for the organisation behind the community.

Perhaps some rocky teenage years lie ahead for Mumsnet?

A good friend of mine started a new job for the new year – working in social media for a UK charity. She asked me what reading I could recommend for somebody looking to learn more about online communities and how they can be launched and grown. There are a whole range of great books out there on how social media is used and the impact this is having on society (anything by Gladwell or Shirky would be a great starting point), but she was interested specifically in things that help managing and growing communities online.

Here’s the very short list I shared with her (and a few extra ones added in). There are many great books, articles and blogs out there and we’d love you to share your favourites in the comments below. But this is a good starting point and we would consider them essential reading for online community managers.

Books

• Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities, Amy Jo Kim (Amazon) – a great text explaining the how to grow online communities, and explaining through examples why they grow like this.
• Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards, Patrick O’Keefe (Amazon) – another great textbook of how to set-up and manage online forums and discussion boards.
• 18 Rules of Community Engagement: A Guide for Building Relationships and Connecting With Customers Online, Angela Connor (Amazon) – a pragmatic approach to planning and building online communities, you can read our review of this book here.

Blogs

• FeverBee – a great blog from practical community-builder Rich Millington.
• Community Spark – a community-building blog from Martin Reed.

Articles

• Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities (2005) – a look at how to combat under-contribution to your online community, examining how social psychology impact when and how people will contribute online.
• Understanding Community: A review of networks, ties and contacts’, Working Paper, Real Life Methods (2007) – an interesting perspective on and review of the different ways communities form and bond online

This is purposefully a short list – what would you add to it? Let us know your essential reading in the comments below.

image coutesy of shutterstock

We’ve put the question to leading community managers across the world, and they have outlined the classic community clangers that we should all avoid.

Lack of engagement

Toby Metcalfe, Community Manager and Social Networker, is straight to the point on this: “The big mistake is to not be engaged – to have a forum and not be interacting with those in the community. Not listening to the community: building in features for your product, service, site, or forum. Not being honest.”

Game producer, Frank van Gemeren, agrees: “Having a CM who doesn’t post anything. When I asked the Forum Manager for a reason, it was ‘She’s reading and knows everything, she’s just too busy to post’. My reply was: ‘Why have her name listed as CM then anyway?’”.

Christoph Geissler, Podcast Author and Senior Forum Moderator agrees: “No communication = worst communication possible.

“I always had the impression that a community manager [or] moderator is meant to communicate with the people – I mean it’s probably the most important part of their duty.

“Saying ‘I’m currently busy, but I’ll get back to you later’ is, in my opinion, better than just saying ‘I’m busy so I won’t reply’.”

Lack of discipline and communication

Antonio King, Virtual World Community Manager agrees with Toby and adds “Inconsistency in discipline (can sort of fall under impartiality)” and “obliviousness to subtle community signs”.

By far the most cited error, was a lack of communication. Communication, explains Senior Moderator Christoph Geissler, is absolutely vital.

“As soon as the community get’s the impression that you’re just a press release-posting bot with no personality whatsoever, your reputation (which also means your success in maintaining and expanding your community) is doomed.

“In other words: Communities want to talk with persons, instead of bots.”

Not supporting moderators

Sue John, Online Community Manager at BritishExpats.com cautions that moderators must be supported.

“A community needs to know that its CM is behind the moderators and supports them. On occasion I’ve had a mod make a decision that I didn’t agree with but I’ve supported them publicly and then we’ve discussed the issue behind the scenes.

“I’ve haven’t had one make a really bad error in judgment yet, but as with most things in life we don’t always see eye to eye. However, I always listened to their comments, suggestions and feedback, because they are on the front lines and happy mods help make a happy community.”

Making unexpected changes

Betty Ray, Community Manager at Edutopia – The George Lucas Educational Foundation comes back to the message of communication: “One of the worst ones in my experience is rolling out a giant change in your product without warning the community first. (Nowadays, we don’t just warm people, but get their feedback on the decision in the first place!)”

“Would very much echo what Betty Ray said,” says Chris Deary, Community Manager at Gurgle.com.

“Not communicating upcoming changes is disastrous. There’s a common assumption that communities will love new tools and platforms just because they’re more up to date (which usually means trying to mimic Facebook), but most users are stuck in their ways and hate change. One of the things I’ve learnt is to make sure users have at least some involvement in the process of change, and ideally your most loyal users should be heavily involved. “

Inattention

“Inattention to building the vision/purpose of the community. Inattention to building relationships amongst the members. Inattention to enabling the free flow of information amongst the members and from outside membership.

“Every problem of a community can be traced back to these three simple community management principles,” believes Lisa Belsito from Austin.

Do you agree? What have we missed from our list?