community bricks

i’m currently working on the social strategy for a really fun project. it’s challenging and rewarding. it’s what i enjoy and it’s something that i’ve spent a lot of time developing. as such, i’ve gone through what i consider to be the basic steps of building a successful community:-

1. establishing who the community is that you serve
2. deciding what problem it is that you’re solving and how you plan to solve it
3. working out where your community are having their conversations and how they want to be communicated with
4. finding out what it is that interests the members of the communities, what it is that bonds them, what tools they use etc.
5. what it is about your service/product that is actually going to distinguish you and make them give a damn

the company thang

having done that and established the networks i believed our users have adopted, i created corporate accounts on a number of sites that people who were interesting in what we were doing could connect with us on. for me, the benefit to this was that they’d easily be able to identify the tone and character of the brand and creates something for the company that anyone can use, rather than just myself. that makes sense right?

well why is it then that i still find myself updating content on my own networks as well as the branded networks? you’re guaranteed if i post a link on twitter i’ll get more than ten times the response as if i were to post it on the corporate twitter account. fact.

reputation

the change in our culture of late has meant that people zone out when they’re being marketed to – they rarely listen to ads, hate sales people (especially those of the stripy suit variety) and can see through thinly veiled social media attempts from the old boys trying to be cool.

someone that i barely know can recommend something on twitter or save a link on magnolia and i’m way more likely to check it out than a company persuading me to do so.

do your job

Brian Oberkirch recently wrote a really interesting piece about consumers not wanting to be talked to all of the time and i couldn’t agree more. for me, the perfect combination is having a company that let’s me have a nose (without that annoying person on your back asking if they can help until you have enough and leave) but is still on hand if you get lost and need a little point in the right direction.

the perfect company is one that uses their products and services as much as you, knows it inside out and is part of the conversation because they truly have something interesting to contribute, not because they feel they need to be seen to still be in the loop.

the insider

if the truth be known i think that people want to know who’s behind the scenes, they want to interact with someone that they know or have heard of, they want to know you’ve got flaws as well as sheen (why do you think so many mags sell when there’s pics of celebrities with blemishes – people don’t like perfection).

i realise for corporations that brings with it issues. you can’t rely on your marketing coming from a few individuals, after all what happens when those people leave? i’ve thought about this issue long and hard and i’m still not sure that i know the answer to be honest. it is a risk, but it’s a risk that you need to take, at the beginning anyway. surely it’s better you have people doing a bloody good job and getting your product or service out there into the domain and cross the other bridges when you come to them – after all, the hope would be that the brand would be well recognised by the time that happened?

the solution that i’ve settled for is to use both personal and professional. i converse with community members using the corporate name, encouraging people to recognise that there’s a human voice behind it. however, those same community members are also more than welcome to talk to me using my personal accounts. on twitter for example, my followers know if they follow me, they’ll hear about good days, bad days and the days where my heel snapped on the way to work. if they follow the work twitter account, they’ll hear about website developments, legal issues and exciting launches.

it becomes a different issue again when you throw seeding companies into the mix… but i won’t even get into that here. maybe i’m a small town girl with small town ideas but i’m going to stick with my beliefs. my beliefs that if you’re genuine, you care and you want to make a difference, your community will build. have nothing to hide, don’t be afraid to wear your heart on your sleeve and willing to share (collaboration is much more fulfilling than the feeling of hiding your ideas to keep that competitive advantage!).

onwards and upwards

it’s really not an easy situation to tackle and i think you need to remain open and flexible with your approach. be okay with the fact that you’re learning and developing – you’re on a journey and given time, your community members will be coming along for the ride too. i’d be really interested to hear how others approach this issue…

… being a company that genuinely cares will!

i went to dinner the other night and received some really bad customer service (infact i’m sure she secretly spat in my dinner, but that’s a whole other story!). anyway, as i left the restaurant i mentioned it to the manager and he casually apologised but somehow it wasn’t enough. i knew that i wouldn’t be going back there again and it got me to thinking…. i am the first to admit, that this is probably a bit of a tangent, but nonetheless!

smiles

gone are the days where a smiley face at the customer service desk or at the end of a phone are sufficient. customer expectations are higher than ever and rightly so, with ever growing competition in the marketplace. nowadays, your whole company has to be genuinely smiley, from inside out.

whilst this can be scary for many companies to accept, you have to open up, to be receptive to criticism, pro-active with improvements and not afraid to admit you might have some flaws – people will love you more for it.

cool kid culture

so many companies love the idea of “social media”, they want to be seen as one of the “cool kids” leading the way. however (and this is a big however!), unless the culture of your company is adapted to embrace such a change, you may as well be banging your head against a brick wall.

if you’re going to embrace new technologies and communication tools, you’re going to also need to embrace the way that you use them (and… wait for it… even change your processes!! yuck i hate the word ‘process’). for example, if a blog post has to be passed through ten levels of sign-off, it’s no longer genuine and loses it’s meaning. i know how scary that can be for many companies, but it’s true.

wanting to build a community around your product or service is great, but as soon as you’re doing it purely to monetise, all of your hard work is undone and you’re back on that scrap heap again – those good old internets folks will sniff it out a mile off.

trust your team

be okay with the fact that you’ll have to empower your team to become brand ambassadors. no, they probably won’t be a part of the team forever, but that’s life, it happens. one thing that IS guaranteed, is that they’ll be a hundred times more committed and dedicated to helping you succeed whilst they’re there. if you worry the whole time that you don’t want to give them too much power, you’ll end up having someone for a few years giving maybe 80% – unleash their full potential.

open the floor

it’s natural to want to maintain control, no one doubts that. however, by realising the huge opportunity presented to you by opening up the floor to your users/consumers you’ll be putting yourself way ahead of your competitors. the honest feedback that you’ll receive will give you the information you need to adapt your offering to precisely match the demand of the market. this is raw data that companies with a more traditional approach would pay a fortune for. take advantage of that.

the tools are there for you, use them!

the first thing that i would recommend for any company is to set up an account with get satisfaction. i personally believe that this is the future of customer service. tons of companies are now using this service to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. the thing that i love about get satisfaction is that anyone with an opinion or some information to give can contribute to the conversation, plus it’s free!

monitor feedback using tools like summize, tweetscan or google alerts. this allows you to respond immediately to someone who wasn’t 100% satisfied rather than waiting to be contacted by someone who was really displeased. without a shadow of a doubt, they’ll tell your friends about you and what better advocate than your users?

i recently had some difficulties whilst using campaign monitor. i made a flippant comment on twitter to say that i was struggling and before you know it, there’s a response for me asking if i need help. it’s that kind of service that makes me choose them above other email clients and that’s the kind of care and attention that i want from all companies that i interact with.

rambling

i know that you’ll probably think that a lot of what i’ve rambled on about above only applies to web companies, after all, it’s mainly tech-savvy people that use sites like twitter etc. i’d agree with you, this isn’t mainstream practice for companies at the moment. but that in itself is a huge opportunity – it’s a chance to put yourself ahead of the rest and be really good at customer service when mass adoption does take place rather than playing catch-up.

don’t settle for being okay, go be damn fabulous and people will thank you for it.

i sent out a request on twitter asking people @melkirk with their requests for this week’s random video… the responses were, um… interesting!

i should take this opportunity to say that if gromit gets more comments than me, i’m never showcasing him ever again! lol

happy thursday x

i should set the preface that i’m just a normal girl, working in an industry that i love, doing a job that i’m passionate about. i have as much as the next person to learn, but hey i’ve got fire in my belly, so just roll with me on this one…

i spent this afternoon doing my favorite sunday pasttime, reading blogs. yes i know, i really should get out more, but to be frank, it was just damn cold today. anyway, back to my original point, i came across this site where it taught you in 7 convenient steps how to build a community:

Step 1: Develop a networking plan
Step 2: Select a networking “platform”
Step 3: Market to your users
Step 4: Training and technical support
Step 5: Set up and manage a public online information forum
Step 6: Use networks for collaboration and problem solving
Step 7: Creat the spirit of the community

this is the part where i go into a bit of a ramble, so you might want to make yourself comfortable. whilst it’s all good and well to advise on building communities in 7 lovely steps and they make sense, there’s SO much more to it than that.

i’m often asked which sites i choose to build communities – the answer to which is whatever sites your “people” use (for me personally i’d use every site i could – every pocket of community is important no matter the size). I could go ahead and list sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Digg etc, but in honesty, I believe that social strategies should be fluid and always changing.

let me put that statement in context for you. when the likes of Tara Hunt, Kathy Sierra and Gary Vaynerchuk do their fantastic work to show people that communities are the way forward for organisations, i agree. i agree that 2 years, 1 year or heck ever 6 months from now, we’ll see a ton more community manager roles out there and i sincerely believe that’s a positive shift.

but, here’s the thing – i don’t believe that companies or individuals should try and build communities because that’s the cool thing of the moment. do it because you care, because you want that interaction and because you’re genuinely passionate about what you do, the service that you provide or the products that you sell.

i expect that the last thing that you want to hear is me telling you that you can’t just hire anyone to fill that role, but it’s true. you can’t just hope to pay someone enough for them to become passionate about your brand. they have to be your biggest advocate – to love what you do and embrace each and every community member – no matter the size of your community.

when i started work at Carsonified, i was taken on as event manager because of my experience in that field. at that point if i’m honest, i would have made a terrible community manager (even though i had a background of marketing). i didn’t know that much about the web or online communities, but the MOST important factor of all is that i didn’t have the fire in my belly (there’s that fire again ).

within 6 months of doing the role, i had fallen truly and deeply in love with the industry and everyone within it and that’s when things finally clicked for me. i believe now, that i can build communities in any industry and i say that because i “genuinely” love bringing people together, empowering them to communicate and to create their identities. i’d like to think in return that people know that anything i associate myself with is genuine – i really care about what i do and i REALLY care about people.

you need to realise that you have to be able to “listen” as well as speak, there needs to be open dialogue and you won’t always get an ego stroke. the first thing that you should be doing is setting a google alert for your name or brand (including misspellings) and tweetscans. the reason that i say this is because it gives you a chance to reach out to people and put things right as soon as you hear they’ve not had the greatest experience – and trust me, that direct contact, showing that you care, will have a deeper and more meaningful connection than any “customer relations” you could do.

if people are interested, i can of course write a more detailed post about exact steps that i think are worth taking, but i leave you with my final thoughts. love what you do. do it from your heart. be open and transparent. collaborate. remember that every member is important. reach out to as many people as you can. care. be true to yourself.

ok, rant over, i’m off to have a nap – all this community stuff is exhausting. i’d love to hear your thoughts.

m

p.s it would of course be just wrong not to take this opportunity to thank everyone for taking 5 minutes out of their day to read my silly blog. i love you all. really

p.p.s there’s a spot prize for the first person to guess the amount of times i used “communities” in this post!

i’m not a web chick that gets on her high horse and complains that things are unfair. i might be naive but i like to think if you’re good at what you do, you’ll be recognised for it – regardless of your sex. you might hear me on twitter bitching about boys, but it’s all in jest. in other words, i’m not a feminist in any way.

all of the above said, tonight i had an experience that i found both disturbing and upsetting. it’s not the the first time that i had logged on to Ylive and i thought it would be good to log on, chat to some friends and update people about my job given the number of tweets i’d had asking how it was going.

within a couple of minutes, the chat room was being swarmed by “anonymous” users making crude comments about me and what they’d like to do to me. i’m not naive and i can normally handle most of that stuff. but people telling me to strip and offering me money to perform acts is in no way acceptable and makes me hate the web.

i’m enough of a web-o-holic to not let this deter me. i know that the majority of people are good and it’s the minority that ruin it for the rest. but somethings for sure, i won’t be using Ylive again (especially when you find that some of the people making crude comments are also my twitter followers).

sorry for the rant, but the whole situation made me really disappointed. everyday i work to create communities, harmony and open conversations and it can take just a 10 minute experience like that to take so much away again. my final words – if you’re going to be a total scum bag and make horrible rude comments, at least have the balls to show your face!

btw – thanks to @innonate @kastner @jaygreasley @ryancarson @keirwhitaker @grahamgilbert @adamstac @jamfactory @alashcraft for showing up and being nice… x