FreshNetworks Blog

We sometimes analyse things too much. We spend too much time thinking about what we’re going to do and too little time actually doing it. Don’t get me wrong – we are big believers in planning and strategy at FreshNetworks. When we are building an online community for a client we spend a lot of time on planning, more so than some might, but enough to mean that when we do launch and build the site, we know how to make it a success. At this stage the detailed planning is important – you should try to make as many decisions as possible up front, consider all outcomes and plan for what you will do in different circumstances.

But sometimes you can get too wrapped up in planning things to the smallest detail when really your time is better spent just doing it.

In an online community, copy in forums, newsletters, polls and features is important. It is one significant way in which you can engage the community members, highlight what is happening on the site and how they can benefit from and add to this. Newsletters, in particular, can be a very effective way to engage people and draw them back to certain types of online community.

There is a lot of analysis that you can do on the effectiveness of copy – do certain articles attract people more than others? Do some headlines get more click-throughs and greater time spent reading the particular article once people are there? Do some newsletters have lower unsubscribe rates? All of these are valid and really important measures. They help you to monitor the health of what you are doing and identify things that are not working. But the beauty of online communities is that they are changing and organic environments – you can benchmark what you know typically performs best, and you know what works for an individual community. But there are many unpredictable factors in an online community and with community members. Sometimes it’s best to just get things written and see what the impact is.

The benefit of having a strong online community manager is that they get to know the community and its members. They live and breath it day in and day out. They know the key members, the ones who contribute most and those who are starting to become more engaged that they want to nurture. They understand these people and what makes them tick. They take part in discussions with them and they know when these discussions have gone too far.

A good online community manager will develop an innate sense of what works for their community. They will know how to talk to them, what to talk to them about, and how to engage them in a new idea, discussion or piece of functionality. In short they will know what to write to get the impact they want.

This kind of knowledge can be augmented, refined and enhanced by statistics and measurement. But they are not a substitute for the intimate knowledge that an online community manager will have. Sometimes, rather than spend forever planning, writing, testing and rewriting copy it can be best to trust your community manger. They know what works and test and refine this knowledge with the data from what actually happens. Trust them to get it right. And trust them to get it written.

Image by massdistraction via Flickr

Brilliant and thrilling though it is, managing an online community is a strange and unusual job. Community managers will find they often fluff their words when describing what they do. That’s because they do so much.

Sometimes, as a community manager, you will feel like a primary school teacher, despairing at squabbles and laying down the rules. Sometimes you will feel like a grief counsellor, as members lay bare their deepest feelings, and you give them a safe place in which to do it.

Sometimes you will want to join in, but know you need to hold back to retain good, safe boundaries. Community members will enlighten you, amuse you and sometimes drive you a little bit crazy. (Which is why it’s great to be able to meet up with other community managers and ‘talk shop’).

And you will be trying to increase the number of members that you have, and encouraging the right kind of members to get involved and become active.

Maybe they’re the right kind of members because they fit a certain demographic, or have an interest in a set niche.

Sometimes they’re the right kind of members because they want to engage and they get the rules.

Sometimes they’re the right kind of members, because they will use a breadth of features and encourage others to do the same.

In a handful of cases, you will get members that tick all these boxes and more. They’re your community champions, they will spread the word about your community and bring in others like themselves – more about them and their fellow members in upcoming blogs.

Community Champions will back you up and support your work and they will make the community their community.

Who can run a community?

When online community forums first arose – perhaps as the natural follow-up to an email list, or face-to-face meetings or even a paper newsletter – naturally a lot of people ‘fell’ into running them.

The early community managers tended to be the practical organised ones that had always ensured the newsletter went out on time, or the good Samaritans that always listened to griping, or waded in when emails got personal.

We’re several ‘generations’ in now, with some of the newest community managers barely old enough to remember a world without mass access to the internet. But the core skills are essentially unchanged, see: The ten commandments of managing online communities.

Humans have always created communities that congregated around a place (such as a school or local pub), around a shared interest (a Bay City Rollers fan club or a football team) or a shared need (new mums, wanting to support each other over coffee and cake or sufferers of the same medical condition).

These communities have either been self-motivated and self-governed (informal but frequent meetings), gently organised and formalised (an unofficial fan club) or rigidly controlled (i.e. school).

The same skill-sets needed to shape, manage and keep-safe these communities (and by keep safe, we mean safe from spats and trouble-makers, just as much as safe from any more serious offences) are displayed by community managers online.

Chris Brogan put together a hard-to-beat list of the essential skills of a community manager.

Lingo and buzzwords

If you’re new to social media and community management, some of the language may seem a bit obscure.

Your community members, especially those who engage in social media a lot, will probably use text speak and standard community abbreviations without blinking. You’ll quickly get the hang of these, but here is just a tiny sample:

• DH – Dear Husband
• DW – Dear Wife
• DP – Dear Partner
• DS – Dear Son
• DD – Dear Daughter
• BBL – Be Back Later
• ROFL – Rolling on the floor laughing

The full list runs to the hundreds, probably thousands, but as with Twitter hashtags and text-speak, it is usually fairly easy to pick apart the meaning.

You’ll find that your community develops its own quirks of language too, for example a pregnancy community will use abbreviations like TTC (trying to conceive) while a niche scientific community will use even more nuanced abbreviations – but as a good community manager, you’ll be soaking up the syntax daily and speaking it like a native.

Next week we’ll be looking in depth at user type and behaviour.

Read all our posts on Promoting Community Management

Some more reading

• How to Demonstrate the Value of Social Media to Your Boss – Chris Brogan (slideshare.net)
• Top Five Skills a Community Manager Must Have (talkitup.typepad.com)

At FreshNetworks we know that good community management is critical to the growth and success of any online community. That’s why this week’s Required Reading looks at some of the principles of community management.

The presentation below comes from Julius Solaris and details ten ‘commandments’ of managing online communities: from consolidating activities to having an offline presence for your online community. This is a great set of activities that I think help to define what a community manager does and what community management is. It is much more than just moderation of forums, also including strategic elements, such as considering how you monitise a community, or how you work with the different groups to grow and shape the conversations and the benefits all parties are getting.

For us, however, the most important part of community management is really to appreciate that as a community manager you can never control a community. You have to be part of it and work with people as an equal rather than trying to establish yourself as superior. These ‘commandments’ are a great starting point for shaping this kind of role and for building successful community management.

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Some more reading

• Your online community should work offline as well (freshnetworks.com)
• Communities vs network of practice (egrommet.net)
• Does Twitter Replace Face-to-Face? (converstations.com)

I came across this video from Scott Drummond from Sports Hydrant in Australia when it was posted in the Online Community Manager LinkedIn group. It was filmed at a Barcamp session in Australia last year, where Scott is presenting about what an online community manager is and how to define community management. This video, Scott’s approach and the discussion in the room fits very really well with our attitude to promoting community management.

The video is worth watching and it’s great to see the discussion that people have when they try to define the role of community manager.

Three points from the discussion really struck a chord with our experiences of managing communities and our theories of what makes good community management:

1. The community manage has an important connector role – sourcing information from people who use the product and bringing it to the brand so that they can improve it. This is not just the role of online research communities, but a real benefit you can get from all communities.
2. You need to advocate the community within the organisation, and also advocate the organisation within the community. You translate what goes on in the community and make it relevant for the organisation and different people within it – you can explain to a CEO why the community is important and show the value they can personally get.
3. You need to be a trusted and transparent source within the community. I see too many communities where the community manager is face-less, has a generic name and never really interacts with members. Honesty and transparency are really important online and your community manager should be a member of the community like any other.

Community from Ben Grubb on Vimeo.

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Some more reading

• Social Networks vs. Online Communities vs. Panels
• When physical and virtual worlds collide
• Another example of good use of video in online communities