Community Manager Insights - 2011
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The document highlights the evolving role of community managers as essential figures in customer engagement and brand loyalty within modern businesses. It discusses their responsibilities, which include building communities, addressing customer needs, and leveraging feedback for organizational improvement. Through insights from various community managers, the report emphasizes the importance of transparent communication and the growing power of customers in shaping company practices.
Community Manager Insights - 2011
- 1. Social Business Series 2011 Community Manager Insights
- 2. We Love Community Managers! Community Managers are the backbone of To be successful in the coming periods, Community As the Community Manager role continues to customer service in today’s modern online market- Managers must prepare for scale. As more grow into a key piece of the customer experience place. In fact, these new media professionals must customers adopt social technologies, Community lifecycle, remember to approach this space with apply traditional client sensibilities to new mediums, Managers must invest in scalable programs such humility and patience to teach internal stakeholders but in real time, 24/7, often connecting to a global as systems, processes, and understand how to let the value of the role. audience. Unlike customer support interactions of the crowd help resolve issues on their behalf. To A salute to this important member of the past, these new professionals must reach to be successful, they should measure true business the workforce... customers where they are— rather than wait for an metrics reduce support costs and increase in incoming support telephone call—and constantly be positive word of mouth about the company and connecting with customers. its products. Jeremiah Owyang Altimeter Group
- 3. So...What is a Community Manager? Com•mu•ni•ty Man•ag•er The role of Community Manager has quickly evolved from a new age social ambassador, The online Community Manager role is a growing and a supporting player, to being conductor of the orchestra. Today more than ever before companies are relying on individual customer engagement to cement brand loyalty developing profession. People in this position are and leverage word of mouth marketing, The Community Manager has the daunting but working to build, grow and manage communities around essential responsibility of keeping the various resources of the organization in sync and a brand or cause. playing to the same sheet music, ensuring that customer needs are met, concerns are addressed, and their product and service ideas and suggestions are brought into the Wikipedia Definition process in order to shorten product lifecycles and better map to needs. If customer service is the new marketing then the Community Manager is the new CMO. Jeremiah Owyang and our friends at Altimeter Group have declared the fourth Monday of every January “Community Manager Appreciation Day.” In support of this year’s event, we surveyed some of the world’s best community managers to better understand their successes, challenges, and what they see on the horizon for 2011. We picked the best answers and included them in this report. Our hope is that you’ll laugh a little, learn a lot, and give a pat on the back to the community manager(s) at your company.
- 4. You Can Call it George. In which internal department does the community management function The Community Manager is a jack of all trades and master of many. While the reside? desire to place them in a box on your org chart may satisfy the needs of Human Resources, it will almost never be accurate. To simply say that community management is part of Support, Marketing, or R&D does not capture the value they bring to the organization. The only way to accurately reflect their contribution would be to understand that they work at the very edge of your organization, the place where the line between company and customer is blurriest and their job is to understand, manage and stimulate the collective passions of your customers in a way that creates value for both company and customer. You can call it customer support, social marketing or you can even call it George, but if you want to accurately reflect it, then you’d call it what it is, a revolution. *28% of participants listed multiple functions
- 5. The Online Community Manager “A Jack of All Trades” Brand Management Platform Management Brand Support Upgrades and Improvements Situation Management Software Know-How Capture Brand Feedback Feature Selection Advertising & Marketing Project Management Listen/Join Conversation Priority & Schedule Marketing Analysis Management Documentation Impact Reporting Ad Rotation Product Management Incorporation of Experience Staff Development Product Selection Recruiting Team Building Staff Training Customer Management Outreach Business Planning Events Incentives Budgeting Issue Management Goal Definition Business Alignment Professional Development Networking Community Management Identification of Best Practices Content Management Control/Management Attend Trade Events Moderation & Rule Enforcement Content Plan Elicit Participation Research & Insight Rewards & Incentives “Community management: The ‘essential’ capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts” - Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet - http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe
- 6. The Five Objectives of a Community Manager 1. Brand awareness 2. Customer retention 3. Customer acquisition 4. Internal culture building 5. Customer service Philipp Postrehovsky Mogo Money Community Manager +
- 7. The Answer is “No”... Sometimes Erin Lariviere of Tungle.me learned that one of the hardest things about hearing customer feedback is not being able to say “yes” to every request. “We sincerely appreciate your suggestion; however...” When you open the door to feedback, you get it in droves. The challenge is that you can’t make everyone happy. You may have 20 customers request- ing a feature and 20 more customers requesting a completely contradic- tory feature. It’s difficult to say no - you want to give everyone what they ask for. For Tungle, it’s important that we respond respectfully, try to be as transparent in our decision making as possible and let our customers know that we are listening, even at times when the answer we give isn’t what they want to hear. Erin Lariviere Tungle.me Community Manager +
- 8. Juggling Brands Brands have feelings too! Or rather, brands can evoke feelings. Sometimes getting a brand’s unique personality across to consumers is a Community Manager’s biggest challenge. My responsibility spans across three separate P&G brands with three distinct online “voices.” I have to make sure that I’m engaging con- sumers in a way that accurately rep- resents the individual brand. Angie Mcauliffe P&G Community Manager +
- 9. Answer Once & Only Once Your community wants to hear from you... Rather than answer each question and concern one at a time, Get Satisfaction allows companies to share answers with a large audience. We’ve learned to leverage our Customer Community to address large-scale issues that may generate a lot of discussion. It helps us contain the conversation in one area, so the whole group can see AMC’s responses, as opposed to having to communicate in a 1:1 manner on common questions. Ryan Noonan AMC Theaters Community Manager +
- 10. Real-Time, Right-Now Why worry yourself with tasks like gathering reports when Get Satisfaction can automatically do it for you. We love making life easier for our clients. Automated real-time dashboards and reports that allow community managers to “set it and forget it” are the future of community. It’s great to be notified automatically in real-time about hot topics, awesome new contributors and trolls (and of course scan manually as well, which we will always have to do). Roland Tanglao Mozilla Community Manager +
- 11. Attention: Mr.Paterson Being a good Community Manager may take hard work, but Get Satisfaction makes it easier to communicate with customers and hear their praise. I had a praise topic with ‘Attention: Mr. Paterson’ in it after we improved performance on one of our games. The user had complained before and wanted to make sure I got credit for fixing it. ;) Noel Paterson Real.com Community Manager +
- 12. Communication is Key Why look to anyone other than your customers for answers? A different perspective on things always shines a clarifying light. Map Road Our customer community helps our product team identify necessary fixes and shape the product roadmap. Having a place for customers to easily share feedback on features and report bugs is helpful, and the ability to easily aggregate and prioritize that data based on popularity makes it more effective than other methods such as focus groups or surveys. David Okner NitroPDF Community Manager +
- 13. Customers Rule! Daniel Kaplan of Mojang predicts the future of Social and Community Management in 2011. What does he see? Customers will rule. In the age of social media, customers have a direct line to companies. This means companies are held accountable for their actions. With communities, customers have even more power because they have power in numbers. As customers gain more power, customer-company transparency will be- come more and more important. Daniel Kaplan Mojang Community Manager +
- 14. It’s a Circus Out There Social media tools are great but let’s face it, it can be difficult to keep track of them all. That’s where we come in. I believe there will be further integration of social media tools in community management. Every company balances a difficult act of meeting community members on their own terms, while attempting to foster a common location for the discussion to reside. For SCVNGR, we see requests through Get Satisfaction, email, Twitter and Facebook. Continuing to sync these avenues of communication can help quell some of the redundant requests. Nick Herbold SCVNGR Community Manager +
- 15. Online Communities Save a City! The internet helps us do all sorts of things. In partnership with online communities, it can solve even the biggest challenge. In the case of NerdOrleans.org, the internet helped save a city. Working on NerdOrleans.org. I asked the internet for help to rebuild houses in New Orleans, and the internet came through – with funds, volunteers, even a stop in from the Zappos’ Delivering Happiness bus and book donations from O’Reilly. It was all promoted via online communities and was a success because of them. Ginevra Kirkland W+K Community Manager +
- 16. See the Bigger Picture A CRM’s ability to play nice with others can make all the difference. More cross-platform integration. I am beginning to ex- pect that my CRM will integrate with my support plat- form which should integrate with my customer commu- nity, which should integrate with our social networks, etc etc. The more complete a picture we can get of our customers, the better able we are to understand their ongoing needs. Jamie Kite Izea Community Manager +
- 17. We Love Satisfied Customers Developing good relationships with your customers is essential. Your customers may not tell you about the crush they have on you, but they will tell their friends. With our customer community, we aim to improve the customer experience and become closer to them by creating more ways to talk with us. This fulfills the PR and Support functions because it helps customers easily solve and report problems. We hope these happy customers go on to become product advocates as a result of their positive experience. Kenji Onozawa Telenav Community Manager +
- 18. We Aim to Help Community Managers help guide online discussions and answer consumer questions. Because of their dedication to online communities, consumers are getting more information than ever before. In 2011, social communities in general Resources will always be an issue. will take on more traditional sup- We have to encourage our employ- port roles in addition to simple mar- ees to monitor and participate in keting and brand awareness. We hope our customer community so our a good portion of our support issues customers find value in their will at least undergo triage through participation. the community. Paul Tracy JusticeTrax Community Manager +
- 19. They Aim to Help Community Managers do an excellent job of answering questions and helping their customers, but now even customers are taking on the job and helping each other out! Since Community Management is part of IT&Support, we use it primarily to support our customer base. The com- munity format is efficient because it prevents reoccurring questions and allows customers to help each other. In the future, we plan to promote more product discussions in our community to help our product team figure out what our customers want. Fred Soneya Kiddicare Community Manager +
- 20. Thanks to our Contributors! Erin Lariviere Noel Paterson Jamie Kite Philipp Postrehovsky David Okner Kenji Onozawa Angie Mcauliffe Daniel Kaplan Fred Soneya Ryan Noonan Nick Herbold Paul Tracy Roland Tanglao Ginevra Kirkland