Day-to-Day Management of Your Community
Throughout this book, I’ve given you a lot to think about in terms of community management strategy and ways to make the most impact with your social media and online listening and discovery. In this chapter, I’ll give you the practical knowledge you need to help facilitate those relationships that you’ve so carefully and effectively established with your customers and supporters.
Here, the goal is to give you some ideas for initiatives that can help you engage with your followers. Additionally, I’ll show you how to make these engagements and relationships scalable, sustainable, and transferable.
Building Relationships: The Golden Rule
When it comes to community relationships, there’s one rule you should never forget: It’s all about the users.
It never fails to amaze me how many companies seem to let this extremely important rule fall to the wayside. If you’re not putting your users at the center of your community, your effort to reach your audience comes across as disingenuous. You see this with companies that excessively self-promote, that send spam or spam-like messages, and that genuinely don’t seem to care about their customers’ issues and complaints. They are too busy talking to the client, rather than talking with the client. These types of companies have little chance of staying around for long.
At a more nuanced level, it’s easy to get carried away thinking you know what your customers want without ever validating that concept, and companies lose millions of dollars each year for this very reason. At a community management level, this translates into bombarding your community members with messages that don’t resonate with them.
At its core, the act of engaging customers and responding to their needs is the practice of customer management. This differs from customer service in that we’re not responding to their complaints, but rather making sure we’re actively involved with the customer throughout every step of the customer life cycle. We can break this idea of customer management into two subcategories:
- User acquisition: This is the process of acquiring new users. Community managers can do this through organic social media, paid social media, and strategically placed links on website content, as well as television and print ads. Nearly everywhere you look these days, people are advertising their Facebook and Twitter pages and aiming to entice you to follow what they have to say.
- Customer retention: Even when your user acquisition efforts lead to a conversion, there’s still plenty left to do. At its heart, much of the goal of community management is to get people to become purchasers (that is, spend money) by increasing the number of customer touch points and enticing them to engage with your brand. However, once they do convert, community managers then have to convince them to stay engaged. This is because many of these customers are the same people who will become repeat customers or brand evangelists.
While there is some overlap between the ways we go about working with each type of strategy, customer acquisition strategies are usually much different from customer retention strategies. Customer acquisition means building awareness. Customer retention means engaging with the people who have already followed your brand on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets, to give them reasons to keep talking about your brand.
In this day and age, the customer life cycle includes a few more stages than just customer acquisition and customer retention. At a minimum, this can be a five-step process. (See Figure 12-1.)
Figure 12-1. Customer relationship life cycle
Let’s look at each stage in a bit more detail.
Acquisition: As noted previously, customer acquisition is the process of getting new people to use your product or service.
Engagement: Once someone has purchased your product or service, the question becomes how to keep that person engaged. The idea here is that focusing exclusively on acquiring new customers prevents you from attracting repeat customers. Therefore, keeping the conversation flowing with existing customers is essential. In an ideal world, not only are the brands engaging with the customer, but also the customers are engaging with each other, creating that sense of community we all desire.
Retention: In an ideal model, engagement leads to retention. This can be true on both the micro scale—for example, as people sign up for a monthly subscription service or select the same paper towel brand over and over again—or on a macro scale—as people are committed to buying only one brand’s products, such as Apple’s fanboys. In each case, the business has successfully retained the customer so long as the customer keeps putting money into that brand’s products or services.
Regulation: Upon retention, you need to consider the facet of regulation. In any community, someone needs to step in and moderate to make sure that users are properly behaving within the group, and that each community member feels comfortable. It’s well known that people can be brutal on social media, so it may be up to the brand running the community to make sure that people are acting appropriately when debates become heated.
Enforcement: In some cases, people will abuse their privileges and go beyond the regulations set in place. The community team then needs to step in and remove or penalize a member of the community. This may anger someone who could be a proponent of the brand, but the enforcement makes the community a much better place for others.
Taken together, each of these elements should ideally lead to reactivation, in the sense that more people will be inspired to become customers, and will be enticed to step in as a result of these efforts, which brings us back to acquisition.
Understanding the Benefits of Community Management on Acquisition
Before the rise of community as influenced by social and digital media, traditional methods to increase awareness of a brand included television spots, networking, cold calls, direct mail, and print advertising. But today’s teams have a breadth of social media tools at their disposal, and the only costs of using these tools is the amount of time it takes to log on and use them (and of course, the compensation of employees hired to do so on a full- or part-time basis).
Typically, community is more powerful in reaching a lot of people at once, and leveraging the many-to-many interactions between its community members. Some may argue that online events are perhaps not as personalized as hosting one-on-one events for real face-time. Fortunately, even though this is what we most often see when it comes to community, this doesn’t have to be the case.
More than ever, community teams are seeking to blur the lines between online and offline connections in an effort to make a digital experience feel more like an in-person one. While no good community manager would ever devalue the experience of in-person meetings, digital media can help improve lives in a number of ways and thereby increase acquisition opportunities. Let’s look at some of these.
As you’ve learned throughout the course of this book, word of mouth is one of the best marketing tools out there. Similarly, when a brand advocate in the digital space gives a genuine and authentic review of your product or service, that review serves as a type of word-of-mouth sharing that can help significantly grow your business.
Increasing Customer Retention and Engagement
Companies that have embraced sharing and providing information online on a regular basis are in the lead, ahead of companies that are struggling to stay relevant and not conversing on social media. Customers who are engaged with a brand are more likely to become repeat customers. These repeat customers are not only adding to the bottom line, but also influencing their personal networks to pursue your brand.
Today you can use more tools than ever to show whether a link you posted on social media is directing people to your site. Just as people will never discover a store if there are no roads to take them there, social media links open pathways for people to discover new websites (including yours). And if you have nailed down your target audience, then it often follows that the more people who come to your site, the more conversions you'll see.
Providing Tech and Customer Support
Deterred by long telephone wait times, people began using Twitter and Facebook to reach out to companies about technical service. This can be a great way to respond to customer concerns and figure out points of friction. The speed at which people can write and send tweets offers feedback in real time, which helps keep businesses motivated to improve user experience when difficulties arise.
Online listening and discovery can provide a wealth of information to help businesses learn more about their customers. Flip back to Chapter 7 for some tips on how to get the most information out of your social media listening efforts.
Crowdsourcing Interests and Feedback
Crowdsourcing, too, came into play in Chapter 7. In engaging with your fans and learning about the interests of your communities and your influencers, you can facilitate more-relevant content for your communities. Additionally, if you are planning to implement a new program or initiative, then getting early feedback can be helpful in gauging interest from your community and vetting your solutions before you spend a lot of money on them.
In many ways, community is marketing. The big difference is, it doesn’t always cost thousands of dollars in the way that traditional advertising methods do. If your goal is to reach a million people, you can pay for an expensive television spot and funnel money into paying networks to play it. Or you can use community to build awareness in targeted audiences by focusing on the interests of your followers.
Listening to Your Customers to Help Sustain Your Community Efforts
Your community strategy won’t get you very far if your content isn’t relevant to your followers. We’ve already done a deep dive into how to tap into these follower interests, but it’s important to also know the real-world applications of this online listening.
Basic Engagement
Basic engagement is the art of posting relevant content and replying to interesting posts. Imagine you’re a small fashion brand. You may have a group of superfans who absolutely love your brand and would love to be affiliated with it. They post pictures wearing your clothes, for example, and regularly reply to your tweets. In many ways, they think of the brand almost as a friend. By not engaging with them, you’re missing numerous opportunities to build those relationships and to inspire people to spend more of their limited attention and financial resources on your business. If those customers don’t come to you, they’ll most certainly be going to competitors instead.
Seeding conversation doesn’t mean shamelessly promoting your products and expecting people to share your content. Rather, it means focusing on the topics of interest to your followers and finding ways to integrate your own brand into that conversation. This takes knowing what people are talking about, and being in touch with these discussions. Often, the art here is suggesting to others that they share your content, without actually instructing them to do so.
When people reach out to you via Twitter or another channel with a problem, it can most often be grouped into one of two buckets: customer service or crisis.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. For instance, a site glitch might build up a lot of fuss online, but if your team has a reputation for being highly reliable otherwise, and you have the issue resolved in an hour, then this is likely not a major crisis (although I can assure you it will seem like one in the moment). On the other hand, if your intern tweets something racially insensitive from a Twitter account for a major brand, that’s a crisis.
Things will go wrong. In some cases, initiatives can go through rounds and rounds of editorial vetting and still go wrong, and if you’re aiming to be agile and responsive (which I would argue is an overall better practice), you should be aware that these things definitely happen. The goal is not to strive for perfection, since that very goal prevents people from being agile. Rather, the challenge is how to react when things do go wrong.
Even if the problem isn’t your company, just one bad apple in your community could be causing trouble for everyone else. This is especially true on the Internet, given that people don’t have the same level of tact that they might have when communicating in person. Tempers flare, and people get angry and irrational; if you’ve never seen this, you’re one of the lucky ones.
Managing Conversations
Part of the point of having a community within a brand is that it has the DNA of the company, while enabling community user autonomy. In most cases, this will work for you, but in some cases it can also work against you. In some cases of conflict, you may not need to get involved. Instead, you can allow the members to articulate their points of view, and feel respected in the sense that they have the freedom to do so. But sometimes conflict will take on a life of its own, and may lead to threats or other behavior that your business doesn’t condone. This section presents some ideas to help mitigate the consequences of these conflicts.
In order to have a fully functional, vibrant brand community, you can establish protocols for use. Typically, if you run your community on your own platform, these can fall under the Terms of Service agreements that a user has to accept before joining the group. Or, if you invite your community to engage on a Facebook group, you can offer information in the header that suggests that bullying and other tactics won’t be tolerated. You can codify these protocols and make it clear that people who do not observe them may be ejected from the community. These rules usually prohibit disparaging language, abusive behavior, and disrespect of other community members’ opinions.
Listening to Suggestions and Complaints
For a big company, monitoring every interaction can be difficult, even with the best social media listening tools in place. When someone calls attention to an area of concern, many companies will reach out to that person to address the cause of concern. This open line of communication enables people to feel as though the company is really hearing their opinions, which in many cases will lead to cooperation in mitigating the situation. In the case of bad customer service or a negative experience with your brand, people are seeking validation. However, sometimes issues are a result of something else related to the brand (regardless of whether the event was blown out of proportion). In these cases, it is important to keep in mind your community goodwill and let people express themselves, while also keeping in mind your community health, as one negative person may ultimately deter people from engaging with your site.
Sometimes community members will act outlandishly in these online forums. Often it’s just a minor act of anger, perhaps arising from frustration, and when this is the case, it is appropriate to solve the problem amicably when you can.
However, in the community space there will always be trolls. A “troll” is a person who likes to cause problems and pick fights with members of the community out of spite or some other reason. As a community manager, your goal is to identify a troll, as opposed to a person with a legitimate gripe. Regardless, in the event that the behavior becomes disruptive, you may need to ban the offending person in order to protect the health of the community.
Trolls may take various shapes and sizes, but typically they’re on a mission to hurt others through their comments. Their words often lack any legitimate basis, and they will often use foul language in trying to seek validation. If left unpoliced, they can become a cancer to your community.
Relying on an Internal Process
In some cases, extremely active members of the community will volunteer to become moderators. If you’ve established a community in which people are so excited to be a part of the conversation that they are willing to help you moderate the content, you’ve done an excellent job.
Usually, a community will carefully vet and select its moderators. Typically, they do not receive compensation for their moderation but do receive substantial recognition within the community. As such, moderators can help mediate issues before they become of concern to the community as a whole. Relying on this internal policing process can help keep the peace within your community, as moderators often have the power to delete others’ comments and to ban people from the site as needed.
Incentivizing Customers: Promotions, Deals, and Referral Programs
If I’ve learned one thing from my time as a community manager, it’s that people love a good deal or an opportunity to win something. These promotions provide a great way to create engagement and keep people excited about what you’re doing (especially if the promotion or deal has a new product tie-in).
The idea here shouldn’t always be to pick someone at random who happened to fill out a form. A better idea is to track down the people who really have helped your brand grow—the early adopters, the brand ambassadors, and the influencers—and seek to reward them for their contributions. These are your most invested customers, and neglecting them represents a missed opportunity. As a group, these are the people who are most likely to let you know when something goes right, as well as when it goes wrong, offering incredible value to your brand. You can engage with these people to show appreciation.
Try running contests that encourage engagement. If, for example, you’re a fashion brand, and you run an Instagram hashtag photo competition, you can select which photos make the final rounds based on engagement or voting (on Facebook, via likes), knowing that each of the people who make that round are likely influential users of your brand. Or you can keep it simple and ask people to photograph themselves using a hashtag special to your brand, and leave it to the company to select a winner based on all the entries.
Integrate Incentives with Growth Strategy
Another way to grow your community is to bake it into your growth tactics. One great example of a company that saw tremendous success from this strategy is Dropbox. In case you’ve never used it, Dropbox is a leading file-sharing tool that made it possible for people to easily share lots of big files, easing the need to use email (which often limits the size of transfers). Before Dropbox, transferring large files was a much more sophisticated task, which was problematic for people who needed to share large files on a regular basis. The tools that did exist were clunky, leading to low adoption rates. Dropbox made this file-sharing process simple, and was one of the first companies to properly execute cloud-based technology for file sharing.
However, early on, Dropbox understood that it needed to build brand awareness in its go-to-market strategy. After all, this was a new tool, one that people hadn’t worked with before and might be reluctant to adopt amid numerous other tools out there. So it decided on an approach that relied on its community to help build its user base.
As part community strategy, part growth hack, Dropbox offered free space to users. If you invited your friends and they joined, Dropbox would offer you additional space (which was great for people who were sharing with more and more friends anyway). The company worked to position its referral program as “get more space” as opposed to “refer a friend,” which inherently tapped into the user’s need to have more space to continue sharing files.
By implementing this referral program, the company grew from 100,000 users to 4 million users in 15 months, with 2.8 million direct referral invites. The company is now worth an estimated $10 billion and reaches 300 million users worldwide. As the Dropbox example shows, the power of your community can amplify your reach as long as you enact the right referral program for your business.
Another way to build growth into your community strategy is to incentivize engagement by offering credits for certain levels of activity. This is a popular tactic with many online video games. For instance, many Facebook games yield significant bonuses in terms of points or incentives for getting new users to sign up for the game.
Other simple tactics include offering 20% off a person’s first purchase, or a discount if someone signs up for your email list. Finally, you can encourage people to submit new product ideas or vote on their favorite names or ideas, but be sure to let them know their top votes will only serve to influence the decision—or else you may end up committing to naming your new ice cream flavor “dirt” based on an engagement strategy gone awry.
Use Tools to Create Contests
A variety of tools are available for making community contests easy and fun. Let’s look at some of these in detail:
- Wildfire: This all-encompassing service provides tools for ads and promotions, as well as offering monitoring and analytics.
- Rafflecopter: This tool makes it easy to set up and launch a giveaway promotion.
- Offerpop: A leading social media promotions tool, Offerpop helps provide platforms to run engaging, viral promotions on Facebook and Twitter, taking only minutes to set up.
- SnapApp: This platform provides integrated Facebook and Twitter sharing, which makes your app easy to share in a single click.
Considering Events and Live Experiences
So much of what we do as community managers is digital that sometimes we lose sight of the personal connections that bring our community members together. For some businesses, events are a key part of an effective community management strategy. When people with shared interests get to meet each other in person for the first time (or third time, or tenth time), it elicits a real satisfaction in creating online relationships that lead to real-world communities. Think of companies like Meetup, which have built entire businesses around the idea of meeting virtually first, and then moving on to real-world friendships. Today, Meetup receives, on average, 100 RSVPs a minute, bringing people who meet in offline communities into real-world activities.
If you are building an events-based strategy, make sure your in-person event is an authentic representation of your voice or brand. If you’re promoting a cupcake brand, it may not make sense to have a major presence at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event (though I suppose it could, if you've concluded it's a niche audience!). Anything that is off-brand can cause brand dilution. If you associate your business with things that are off-brand, the brand itself will become associated with those things, which can have an impact on it and can cause a domino effect against your relationship with customers.
Depending on the nature of your business, events may be a crucial forum for airing your ideas. Events represent an opportunity to enhance your brand and engage with your audience. On any given night, thousands of brands around the country are hosting events to help create and maintain relationships with their customers, or to help facilitate relationships with their target audience. From the largest companies in the world, down to the mom-and-pop restaurant down the street, companies of all sizes build a sense of community through live events that lead to in-person interactions.
However, hosting events and life experiences are often outside the norm for many businesses. Making them happen breaks a routine, which may be one of the reasons some businesses stay away from them. But while routines can be productive and effective, they can also cause ruts. Events help get your “family” into one room and get them to do what you really want them to do, which is to interact with each other. As much as offline communities can add value to peoples’ lives, live events can help establish camaraderie and connections that create special moments for people who have shared interests. And they can also aid your company’s bottom line in several ways: by collecting event fees, facilitating important business development needs, raising awareness of potential customers, and creating general goodwill with your customers.
Planning Live Events
When planning community events, there may be a lot to consider. Some successful events can cost nearly nothing to the business, while sometimes large, lavish events can also be massive failures. In planning events, it’s important to think carefully about your target audience and the things they enjoy. If you’ve completed the target audience exercises in Chapter 6, you should have a fairly good sense of this by now.
It would be great for your first event to be a massive blowout with thousands of people involved, but in most cases, you’re still building up recognition, and a large event with guest appearances from Katy Perry and Rihanna just aren’t in the budget. The good thing is that you can have a great event even with just a handful of people. In any case, it’s a good idea to get your event-planning chops down before trying to figure out how to accommodate 500 people. Also, keep in mind the outcomes you’re trying to drive. If you’re building a community around professional networking opportunities, it’s probably best to plan an event that won't be so loud that people won’t have a chance to actually connect. The best events focus on quality, not quantity.
Venue
Your venue should match what your brand represents. An event at the wrong establishment will attract the wrong kinds people, and will most definitely discourage your target audience from attending. The same way you wouldn’t host a party for investors in a hard-to-find dive bar, don’t have your small startup party at the Ritz.
Collaborations and Sponsorships
Many of the most successful community events are collaborations between two or more brands. For instance, a great startup party can often benefit from a large beer sponsor, and the beer sponsor can gain traction with its ideal audience by partnering with the startup. Curating good collaborations and sponsorships may take some time and may be contingent upon having solid connections, so be sure you are maintaining the valuable relationships with whomever can help you. Additionally, be sure your sponsorship partners and collaborators are on-brand, as you don’t want to be seen advocating a brand that doesn’t seem to fall in line with the values you purport to represent.
If you are investing in a learning event or an education opportunity, use your connections to find speakers who will bring the most value to your business. These should be people who ideally represent your brand and further your cause. Keep in mind that speakers who are public figures can often help bring people to an event, but they may be expensive, and working with them may not be worth it if they don’t have something valuable to say.
Events can start off extremely cheap but quickly become incredibly expensive, depending on what you want to offer. Be sure to factor in the costs of the venue, food and beverages, materials, rentals (chairs, tables, audio equipment), signage, speaker fees, and event advertising.
A factor to be cognizant of in more recent years is the value of outlets and charging stations, so if you’re planning and all-day event, make sure you have plenty of power strips and means for electricity. And don’t forget the Wi-Fi! Ensure that you have the bandwidth you need to encourage engagement with attendees and those who are following via social media. I can’t tell you how many events screw this up.
Many times in the event-planning process, timeline events are contingent upon one another. For example, you may miss your chance of having your event listed in a major local publication if you don’t send it in at least a month in advance. Up until the day of the event, it is important to keep tabs on the timelines required for various tasks. You don’t want to find yourself in a bind because you decided to wait until the last minute to rent folding chairs, only to find the rental place was out of stock.
Particularly when arranging events, tasks will take much longer than you anticipate. It will always take significant time to gain approvals, address miscommunications, and deal with snafus. Be sure to allocate plenty of time to deal with these problems. In addition, find ways to be agile, such as by keeping the number of additional rental places handy in the event of faulty equipment.
Events can be extremely stressful but can also provide fun and meaningful results. It’s important to keep cool when running an event, because otherwise your audience will see that you’re stressed, which may leave them with a negative impression of the brand. You can mitigate this to at least some degree by remembering not to bite off more than you can chew, and connecting with the right people to make your event happen.
Summary
In this chapter, we discussed considerations surrounding the day-to-day management of your community. As you can see, there are plenty of things to do when it comes to handling the daily execution of a community manager’s job! But with the right processes in place and a strong foundation on which to build, the day-to-day community management efforts of your company can become increasingly seamless over time. Always be on the lookout for opportunities to optimize your processes, and the day-to-day community efforts will begin to fluidly integrate into your larger plan. In the next chapter, we’ll tie these day-to-day efforts into your brand’s broader vision through effective storytelling.