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.