Community Management Optimization (Ongoing List)

Before jumping into how to optimize your community management efforts, you need to define exactly what that role means to you and your organization. Many excellent overviews have been provided (such as Jeremiah Owyang's Profile at Web-Strategist.com) but because this role is such a new and quickly growing entity, trying to create a broad definition could prove and dated.

Contents

1. Define Your Goals for Community Management

Understand Brand Sentiment

Be Aware of Hot Topic Trends

Collect Feedback Outside of your Realm

Idea Generation

Customer Service

Find Leads

Test your Products

Competitive Analysis

2. Community Management Optimization

Secure Your Online Presence

Use Search as a Compass

Centralize Social Monitoring

Schedule Your Efforts

You Can't Make Everyone Happy

3. Evolve the Process

Define Your Goals for Community Management

There are countless bundles of data that can be extracted from this practice but to jump in without any direction for your gathering can result in a muddy picture of your brand. Should all the below goals be something to strive for? In an ideal world, yes and then some. But each business is different and each staff has different capabilities. A pizza shop owner will have a different experience with community management than an up-and-coming band promoting its tour. Remember your objectives before jumping into this practice. If your community drives you to accept more goals (or discover more) than you will be the best judge of whether you can do so.

Understand Brand Sentiment: Every company has a theme, a mission statement, a branding effort, but do you really know what the long-term personality of your brand is? Part of it is what you say it is, but a big part of it is what WE say it is. What better example than that of the American car industry. Are Japanese and European auto makers producing particularly better cars? Probably not, but the sentiment very much indicates that as the public believes it and it is the job of that category to dig deep into conversations and understand why that is the case and how to overcome it.

Be Aware of Hot Topic Trends: Understanding your brand's long term sentiment is important for building a relationship with your customers, but there's also a great deal of importance in the day-to-day conversations around your brand. This comes in handy when any fire storms pop up around your business or if there are any quick bursts of opportunity that you can leverage. An example would be the much discussed Coke + Mentos videos. By finding out about the conversation early on, perhaps the brands would have been more likely to promote the viral videos instead of issuing cease and desist orders.

Collect Feedback Outside of your Realm: You've got a "contact us" on your site. You've got a Get Satisfaction Feedback widget on your blog. You may even have various social profiles that people can use to reach you. Nonetheless, these are all conversations happening on YOUR playground. While joining conversations is important, eavesdropping is too. Listening to people's opinion about your brand without bias or influence from that brand is an essential pool for pulling your consumer's opinion of your product.

Idea Generation: There are countless free ideas are out there. Stuart Foster gave me the great advice of "Continually ask for input from not just your community but from anyone that you come across. Some of the best ideas have come from people with no vested interest in the community but can shape it never the less."

Customer Service: Want to WOW your customer? Answer a question that nobody asked. Or more specifically, a question that no one asked you. Comcast Frank a great example of this practice.  He looks for user complaints about Comcast service and he responds to them. Not just by apologizing for bad service but by literally connecting people will Comcast service reps on the streets. He can't help everyone, but anything a company can do to build its positive sentiment to offset the bad is worth the investment of time and money.

Find Leads: Certain categories, especially in the Business-to-Business space have an extremely high cost per lead. There's obviously some value in buying leads lists or using products like Sales Genie but if you can compliment that with free leads based on relationships built within your community you're doing your business a huge service in terms of cost savings and growth. Although more time consuming, finding leads via your community is going to paint a much more positive picture for your company in the beginning of the sales process. In other words, turn a cold-call into a referral.

Test your Products: Before launching national products or campaigns brands love the to use the "test market." While products like food aren't going to be something that can be tested digitally, there will be categories where new concepts and services can be "tested" within a community. If you have a community that generally offers you great feedback, leveraging them to review/revise your new product is a cost effective and more immediate method of refining (or sometimes scrapping) a new product. Obviously caution is required here. A segment of your passionate fans won't always replicate the sentiment of a broader audience.

Competitive Analysis: See who else is in your category. See who is trying to steal your business. For all of the above goals, it's also essential to include your competitors in monitoring and conversation. Your customers certainly are paying attention to them when deciding on a product/service to pay for, you should be doing the exact same thing.

Community Management Optimization

After defining your specific goals from above (or ones that you created to best serve your specific business needs) take steps to focus your efforts. The web is not something you can contain. It would be like walking through Times Square on New Years to ask people if they are having a good time. The below suggestions are tools and strategies for optimizing your efforts in terms of time. After all community management, unlike paid media, is less about a dollar investment and much more reliant on a time commitment.

Secure Your Online Presence: You're not going to be able to dedicate your time to monitoring all social networks. But it does serve your interest to make sure that your name, company, etc has locked up its name across the web so that 1. If you choose to participate in a certain community, you can with your commonly known name and 2. To prevent your competition (or trouble-makers) from hijacking your name and posing as you or your brand. To optimize the experience, various tools such as http://checkusernames.com/ and http://namechk.com/ which will let you check your username across all of the popular networks in one action. This will save you the time of checking your web presence individually by site.

Use Search as a Compass: Google is a window into popular topics on the web (overarching topics but also within niche categories and most importantly industries). Sara Burton suggests using tools such as AdWords to help discover the keywords that are being searched for most in relation to your product or category. By examining these queries, a community manager has the opportunity to focus on specific topics but also gain insight into trends previously overlooked.

Centralize Social Monitoring: There are paid and unpaid to make sure you keep your searches narrow in scope. If you want to scan the majority of the social web for your brand or specific keywords tools such as WhosTalkin can bring everything to you in one window vs. piecemealing. If you do have some extra funds to invest, Radian6 is a low cost option for aggregating up to 30 days of data and having the option to save/export your searches. The key here is to keep your eyes on as few places as possible. You have enough to manage offline for your business without the added strain of stretching your digital presence across the web.

Test and Retest: Not all social platforms are created equal. Just because you CAN engage with your customers via Twitter, Facebook, Ning, (this list will grow faster than I can list them) doesn't mean you should. That being said, you may not know which vehicles work best until you try them. Use the opportunity that these free tools offer to test your customer service efforts in a macro web setting. Based on how effectively each tool helps meet your goals, choose the best one(s) to invest the majority of your time. Also don't walk forever. One platform that may not work now, might be a key tool for your business a year later.

Schedule Your Efforts: There is a common misconception that community management is a 24 hour a day job. While there are many valid points as to the benefits of such behavior (especially for e-commerce businesses) a far more realistic approach is schedule your time. Dedicated X time each day to responding to your feedback and collecting relevant data. Remember, the web is timeless. When people create content it will generally live forever so it's ok if you find it a day later. Just keep your alerts up to date and if any emergencies occur you can always jump in to manage (especially relevant for small business owners). If you are a large enough company you can obviously start hiring people to aid brand monitoring efforts more consistently.

You Can't Make Everyone Happy: In the vain of the above regarding using your time wisely, do not offer a specific person or people too much time. The internet has never made it easier for people to complain (look at the title of this blog!) and as hard as you try, making everyone happy is impossible. Take the constructive feedback you get and use it to help your efforts, but remember that not unlike running a business, there are going to be unreasonably customers out there that you can't sway. Instead of spending X time trying to win that customer, use X time to make sure you keep the "great" customers.

Evolve the Process

In the end, the exact goals and strategies a person or brand chooses will be very specific but hopefully the above can act as a (ongoing) resource for community management optimization. Brands, Small business Owners, Bloggers, etc. will see that as technology evolves, so will their community efforts. If you have found success in a particular strategy/tactic not mentioned above I would humbly ask you to add your suggestions in my comment section so that others can find help in one centralized location.

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