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CommunityPlaybook (1)

Lauren Kashuk, profile picture
Lauren Kashuk

The document provides guidance for Googlers who want to plan, launch, run and grow a thriving Google+ community. It outlines the steps needed to launch a G+ community, including justifying the investment, shaping a strategy, building a brand, hiring a team, managing the community, content strategy and style, content production, promotion and acquisition, measurement and optimization, and working with internal and external stakeholders. The playbook includes best practices, tips, and examples from the launch and growth of the Google Small Business Community.

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1 The Community Playbook
2 3 Hello fellow Googler, G+ Communities are a fantastic way to bring together a group of people who can connect with each other to exchange ideas, opinions support and advice about a certain topic area. Based on the learnings from the launch and growth of the Google Small Business Community, this Playbook includes a detailed outline of all the steps you’ll need to take to launch a G+ Community, including hiring a team, moderation processes, content strategy, analytics, and more. Please feel free to reach out to lkashuk@google.com with additional questions. The GSBC Team A guide for Googlers who want to plan, launch, run and grow a thriving G+ community
4 5 1 Pre-Launch Planning 1.1 Justifying the Investment 06 1.2 Shaping a Strategy 12 1.3 Building a Brand 20 1.4 Hiring a Team 24 2 Community Management 2.1 Dealing with Spam 32 2.2 Offering Support 40 2.3 Service Level Agreement 44 2.4 Moderation Documents 46 2.5 Guest Moderators 50 3 Content Strategy & Style 3.1 Editorial Guiding Principles 54 3.2 The Google Voice 62 3.3 Visual Guidelines 66 3.4 The Content Calendar 72 4 Content Production 4.1 Digital Events 76 4.2 Production Checklist 82 4.3 Other Creative Assets 86 5 Promotion & Acquisition 5.1 Cross Promotion 90 5.2 Influencers 94 5.3 House Ads 96 6 Measurement & Optimization 6.1 What We Measure & Why 98 6.2 Tools, Reports & Process 104 6.3 Setting KPIs 112 6.4 What We Chose 116 7 Working Together 7.1 Internal Communications 120 7.2 Cross-Team Collaboration 124 7.3 Partnerships 128 7.4 Stakeholder Management 132 8 Parting Thoughts 134 Table of Contents
6 7 Don’t do it if: You have revenue targets: It’s not impossible to sell something via a G+ community, it’s just not the best place for sales messaging. Because of the focus on meaningful conversation, promotional messages do not perform well on this platform. Additionally, it is not easy to track sales coming from a G+ community at this point. More on analytics here. You are looking for mass awareness: G+ Communities are not built to be a scalable advertising platform for brands. Unlike Facebook or Twit- ter, where brands get millions of Fans or Followers, marketing messages can be broadcast out to those followers, and amplified through their net- works, a brand-managed G+ community is built to foster conversations between members. It’s more like a forum or group than a ‘fan page.’ 1.1 Pre-launch Planning Justifying the investment Best Practice: The KPIs of a G+ community must be primarily about quality of interaction (engagement), not quantity of people (membership). Did You Know? As of June 2014, the biggest G+ communities have around 500k members, while the biggest G+ page has 9 million followers. (And the biggest Facebook brand page has 152 million fans). Best Practice: Allow promotional messages only when you’re offering something free to members with a low barrier to usage. (For us, $20 toward a Helpout is ok. Spend $100 and get $50 off AdWords is not). Did You Know? 43% of customers say “blatantly self- promotional” content is a major turn-off.
8 9 Don’t do it if: Pre-launch Planning 1.1 Justifying the Investment Do it if: You don’t have people, time and money: Technically, it’s free to create a G+ Community. But to make one that truly adds value and grows over time, you’ll need a team of dedicated community managers and moder- ators at a minimum and an ongoing budget for content creation. You’re not prepared to provide technical support: Any public forum that is an official Google channel means that you’ll inevitably get people ask- ing you how to do that one thing on their Gmail that they used to be able to do and can’t find the button for now. They will find you, and you can- not ignore them. Before your launch a G+ community, have a plan (and the time) to answer or route tech support issues on any Google product. More on support here. You have an interested, like-minded audience: G+ Communities are a fantastic way to bring together a group of people who can connect with each other to exchange ideas, opinions, support and advice about a cer- tain topic area. A sign of a healthy G+ Community is when members be- gin to create high quality content that other members are commenting on. People appreciate that Google provides the forum—we don’t have to provide all the activities on it. You want to learn from your users: This is the perfect platform to build relationships directly with individuals, and to hear from the people that use your product or service. While a G+ Community should have an edi- torial calendar with content created by the brand, the content that is the most valuable are the interactions between members. Many Googlers don’t get direct, immediate access to users. Using your community as a place for qualitative research, quotes and beta testers is a great way to make us better at our jobs and involve the members directly in creating a better Google. Best Practice: Proactively head off technical support questions by offering resource roundups, links to help centers, Q+A’s and video trainings on frequently asked questions. Did You Know? The Google Small Business Community gets at least 3 technical support questions per week. Best Practice: Make sure your topics are something people are passionate about. Choose categories that have legs beyond product announcements and how to’s so your members won’t tire of the content and stop participating. Did You Know? Anyone can post and all posts are treated equally on the feed. Anyone can create an event. You may have some content areas in mind, but the democratic nature of the platform means that the members really get to control what is being discussed. Best Practice: Create a system that allows you to share the insights from your audience back with your larger team and cross-functional teams. Did You Know? The nature of interaction on G+ communities is deeper and more meaningful than other social networks. People are there to meet and talk and converse, not just ‘Like.’ Best Practice: A very well run community also involves copywriters, designers, video producers and editors, content marketers, analysts, and social strategists. Did You Know? Depending on whether your community is public or private and how large it will grow, expect to invest a minimum of $100k per quarter on it on an ongoing basis. More on budgeting and building a team here.
10 11 Pre-launch Planning 1.1 Justifying the Investment You’re a fierce protector of the Google brand: Unlike most market- ing materials which get edited, fine-tuned, proofread and approved up a chain of 10 people, the content that goes up on a G+ Community is alive and doesn’t have time to be perfected. One careless comment by a mod- erator 17 comments down a thread can become a screenshot that gets plastered all over the internet as something that ‘Google’ officially said. And unfortunately, there are sometimes detractors waiting for a slip up. Make sure your team and leaders have sharp creative instinct and expe- rience with what is ‘Googley.’ You want to build brand love: If your mission is authentic, your mem- bers will truly appreciate the effort. The Google Small Business Com- munity is a place where businesses can get the help they need to suc- ceed on the web by connecting with experts and each other. It’s entirely free and endlessly useful. When we launched, some of our new mem- bers even wondered what the catch was, and then eventually went on to evangelize the community to their networks. You’ll create advocates for Google naturally by simply being there for people. Best Practice: PR and legal training, extensive brand voice practice, and over communication among the internal team are imperative to avoid a trip up. More on escalation and brand voice here. Did You Know? Posts by moderators should go up 2-3x times a day, and comments on member posts can happen every few minutes. Best Practice: Be wary of other teams and senior stakeholders who may be tempted to turn your community into a promotional platform. Set a strong, pure mission upfront, sell it in, and stick to it. Did You Know? It feels good to be loved.  Timing Tip: Developing the rationale for the Small Business G+ community and securing budget took about 2 months. Jeff Bond Yesterday 2:38 PM +Brian Quimby & +Casey Monroe ... just got back home and have only one thing to say ... please give us #moar ;) thank you, i believe THIS is exactly how you build #community p.s. and thank you for the multiple camera tip brian, that works great! Shayna Jung Yesterday 2:38 PM So happy to be a part of the community! I am loving all of the productivty posts here already, what a great encouragement! Dianne P. 5:23 AM Thank you, Casey Monroe I've looked around and I've found some actually good information. You have a great community here. I'll stop by every day to see the updates and hopefully help others with my own experience. Ray Snoke Apr 10, 2014 Fantastic! Thank you for the information. I may have another question or two in a bit. But thank you very much. That's quite helpful. Do it if:
12 13 Insights: Uncover a real, human truth—likely something no one would say out loud—that you can turn into something that changes behavior. It probably shouldn’t be about your product. Instead, focus on cultural context or the consumer’s headspace—their attitudes, experiences or beliefs. Mission/Purpose: Given the insights you’ve pinpointed, what can your project do to improve their lives? Our community was built to help small businesses succeed on the web. What is yours for? KPIs/Goals: Now you can look inside and focus on the internal objec- tives of your new community. What would success look like? Are there acquisition and engagement goals you want to hit? Defining goals early on—even if they are edited—is important to getting senior stakeholders excited about your community. And as you hit them, it gives you ammo to get more investment in your project. More on establishing KPIs here. The Brief: Consolidate your strategy into a clear, inspirational one pager. You can use a template like this. Content Marketing Strategy: Ideally, your community will grow beyond just engagement (questions and answers), including a proper content marketing strategy to ensure that you’re bringing high quality information, inspiration and interaction to your members. Below are examples of some of the pieces of an early content strategy for the Google Small Business Community. The visuals that follow were meant as a guide to get us going—they evolved quickly as we learned from the members daily and adjusted. 1.2 Pre-launch Planning Shaping a Strategy
14 15 Types: Sketch out a plan for the topics and format of content you want, and what desired responses you expect. Service Responses to questions/ Routing to customer support/ Thanks for participation/ Office hours/ Help Outs Gratitude/Relief/Advocacy Snacks Infographics/Tips/Stats/ Quotes/Trivia +1 and share Discussion Thought pieces/Studies/ Reactions to current events/ Methods/Points of view/ Theories Consider and react Monday Snack: Quote from case study and link Training Tuesday Snack: Tip (Google yourself) CM Video Training: How to 1 Wednesday Snack: Infographic Discussion: Q/A Thursday Snack: Trivia Training: Share 1 Magic: Indv. spotlight Friday Recap: Highlights Discussion: Thought piece Ad Hoc Promo (1x) Magic: +1s, shoutouts Snack: Quote Service: GCS Hangout Snack: Tip Training: How to 2 Snack: Infographic Learn 10x Snack: Trivia Training: Share 2 Snack: Tip (GABO) Magic: Biz spotlight Promo (1x) Magic: +1s, shoutouts Snack: Quote from case study and link Training Snack: Tip (Google yourself) CM Video Training: How to 1 Snack: Infographic Discussion: Q/A Snack: Trivia Training: Share 1 Magic: Indv. spotlight Recap: Highlights Discussion: Thought piece Promo (1x) Magic: +1s, shoutouts Training Training/How tos/Education modules/Project show & tells/ Case studies Understand/Try Magic Google watercooler/Rewards and recognition/Surprise + delight Brand love/Advocacy Product Promotions/Links to campaigns/Product pages Click and become a member Cadence: Start to think about balance and flow of your content and devel- op a skeleton content calendar to get a feel for how it plays out day by day. Long-term Goal: 50% of the activity coming from members themselves Pre-launch Planning 1.2 Shaping a Strategy Description Content BalanceContent Types Content Calendar Template Desired response Desired response Description Snacks 50% Service Discussion 20% Magic 5% Training 20% Product 5%
16 17 1 Quiet Launch March 19 Content Pre-populate content into 'Be Found' and 'Advertise and Measure' Aquisition GABO week daily HOAs Capture long tail founding members via GABO week initiatives Operations First week of active moderation and activation of content calendar 2 Test April—June Rub SMB week special Promote growth via internal newsletters and communities Invite Googlers and friends/fam to 'dogfood' Test content to determine best formats, topics and cadence/Run experiments and proactive polling (first HOA, hashtags, behaviors) 3 Loud Launch July Regular programming based on learnings from test Need big activators/ Engagement stunt/ AdWords campaign/ G+ suggestions placement/ Other paid promos Add work together section/Hire additional team member/Plan for growth period 4 Grow August—September Regular programming Begin monthly newsletter (via SMB Hub) Paid aquisition continues and extends to other social channels Take over G+, FB, Twitter/Add LinkedIn/Hire additional team member(s) 5 Campaigns October—December Regular programming Begin monthly newsletter (via SMB Hub) Need holiday activation/ Engagement stunt/ Paid promo and campaign ideas Add 4th Earn category Sources: Who will create your content? You probably don’t want to start from scratch every time. Develop a who’s who of the voices for your community. Phases: Communities can be unwieldy compared to many other types of projects that are fully under your control. You should develop a tenta- tive plan for launching and growing your community over the course of the first year, knowing that as it grows organically, the way forward will becoming more and more clear. Here is a sample of our first stab at 5 phases of the Google Small Business Community. More on our how our content strategy netted out here. Who's who - Content Creators Phases of Growth Pre-launch Planning 1.2 Shaping a Strategy Daily The Pulse (hired teams/customer support/members) Weekly Experts (unknown Googler/Partners/comarketing/etc.) Monthly Thought Leaders (known Googlers/outside influencers) Quarterly Celebs Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
18 19 Best Practice: Your strategy will shift constantly, but having some guidance down on paper helps keep you moving forward. Keep your eyes open for opportunities and embrace change.  Timing Tip: Developing and getting all stakeholders aligned on the strategy took about 2 months. Launch Plan: If you’re starting your community from scratch, a plan to introduce yourself to the world is key. Communities should start small and grow fairly slowly in order to retain their relevance and activity. Because of that, we started with a “quiet launch,” taking advantage of another team’s initiative that generated some founding members and content for us. We ran tests and made hundreds of tweaks to our content strategy over the next two months working up to a “loud launch,” which would involve a much heavier push for new members. We ended up formally launching 6 weeks ahead of time to take advantage of a Small Business related national event. Instead of using paid advertising, we got a home page promotion on Google.com. Pre-launch Planning 1.2 Shaping a Strategy
20 21 Naming your community: We used a combination of keyword research and Google Consumer Surveys to form a recommendation for the name of our community. Because G+ has some great SEO benefits, it is im- portant to choose a name that is search friendly and memorable, vs one that is clever but not straightforward. The Challenge of Creative Excellence: Our SMB Marketing team aspires to create work that is beautiful, helpful and fun. Our team of communi- ty managers and content creators were certainly able to make sure the content of our posts was practical and relevant to our audience and in- teresting and entertaining to engage with. That’s what they do. But we didn’t have the budget for a designer to be at the ready every time we needed to post something (3x/day). A Systematic Solution: Before we launched, we worked with a creative agency to develop our branding: starting with our avatar (the closest thing you’ll get to a logo). Using Google’s Quantum Spec as a guide, we came up with a visual representation of what we wanted our community to be about: businesses interacting with each other. 1.3 Pre-launch Planning Building a Brand
22 23 Once that was approved all the way up through our VP, we used it as a guide to develop a comprehensive set of editable templates that would function as the visuals for our day to day content. There are over 60 templates in our set to account for those with pictures and icons, those without, and for variety in copy lengths and colors. Eventually, this same branding style was rolled out into things like swag giveaways (water bot- tles, etc.), animated end cards for videos, and other marketing assets like emails and paid ads. Best Practice: Hire a community manager who is fairly comfortable in basic Photoshop skills so he/she can use these templates to create the content each week. Best Practice: Try to come up with a system that is flexible enough for different media and applications.  Timing Tip: Developing and getting approval on the branding and templates took about 2 months and cost $150k. Pre-launch Planning 1.3 Building a Brand
24 25 Hire and Agency? Google teams, marketing especially, tend to default to using agencies to staff projects. In taking a look at the landscape and in- terviewing Googlers with previous experience in social, we chose to go a different route because: Boutique digital creative agencies They do more than social, so they ar- en't interested in community management/moderation in the long term. It's something they'll probably do, especially for Google, but not some- thing they work to hire the best talent for. To them, it’s not a sexy cam- paign, it’s an ongoing day job. The main thing this type of agency would be interested in with a G+ community project is the content creation side of things—and more so when it's higher production content that re- quires a lot of design or mini-campaigns/contests, videos, etc. With their own internal approval process, getting daily microcontent from an agen- cy would take too long, and we’d still have to solve the moderation issue. They often outsource the bulk of the moderation and manage that rela- tionship, or they would have to hire moderators for us specifically. 1.4 Pre-launch Planning Hiring a Team
26 27 Big, full service digital agency of record They are machines. They have a department for everything, so they often can manage social content and moderation. However, the plug and play resources and have high turnover, which leads to the possibility of different people on different days. With the nuance of the Google voice, the importance of a personal connection with moderators, and the intricacies of working with Google’s internal systems/processes, it’s tough not having a 100% dedicated team. With these types of agencies, you may also deal with account people trying to upsell you to use their other services. Social agencies. They know all the tricks of each social platform to hit the acquisition and engagement scores that they need to look good. They often even recycle content ideas across a ton of brands (New Year's Resolution post framing for a cracker brand, a B2B brand, a clothing company can look shockingly similar coming out of places like this). The quality of content from these shops can be formulaic, but their moderation is solid. Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team Hire a team: By personally recruiting 3 stellar team members, each with their own strengths, we were able to plug directly into a lean but close- knit team of specialists fully dedicated to our G+ community. We decid- ed to go the route of having the three red-badged TVCs split moderation duties in the beginning, knowing that we could scale that up easily later on by hiring a layer of junior moderators once volume was high enough.
28 29 Roles and Responsibilities:Here is what the model looks like: Content/Community Managers Moderators Team Lead Google PMM Google PMM: The Community Lead • Accountable for overall success and evolution of the community • Identify opportunities to improve and add to long term strategy • Manage creative process and approvals of all stakeholders • Liaison with other Google teams and own outside partnerships • Manage budget and hiring • Partner closely with Team/Ops Lead on event production • Concept special initiatives, activations and campaigns Content/Community Managers: • Concept ideas for content topics, formats and series • Research and write short and long form content • Own content calendar • Find, repurpose and curate existing third party content • Collect data and create monthly and quarterly reports • Run experiments analyze results for those, along with campaigns and activations • Daily moderation and/or management of moderators and guest moderators • Develop ideas and strategies for engagement and acquisition • Help execute events and activations Team/Ops Lead: • Responsible for day to day success of the community • Supervise Community Managers and moderators • Work closely with PMM on implementation of special initiatives, activations, campaigns and event production • Project manager of all processes and productions Moderators: • Respond to members • Remove spam • Listening and assistance with reporting • Pattern identification and trend identification • Sending swag and thank you notes  Timing Tip: It took about 1 month to find and hire our first 3 team members and 2 additional weeks to get them the access they needed via the tvc process. Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team
30 31 Best Practice: When you hit 20k members or 20 member posts/day, be ready to hire 1-2 additional team members who spend 100% of the time on moderation and spam removal. Consider hiring an offshore overnight moderator to ensure that each morning, your community has high quality content and conversations. Best Practice: Consider hiring two community managers, each with different strengths in the responsibilities listed above. Best Practice: Find a community management team that is passionate about what they do by recruiting via something like Meetup.com. Find people who are actively involved and interested in the community management industry extra-curricularly. Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team
32 33 2.1 Community Management Dealing with Spam As your community grows, you’ll notice that you’ll be defining and redefining spam. At first you might just think of it as electronic junk, multiple posts or gibberish words written in Arabic but as the community becomes more discoverable and active, so do the kind of spam posts that surface. It’s important to constantly evaluate what you consider spam and to inform your community, both with publicly posted guidelines and individually as people violate that policy.
34 35 Google Small Business Community Henry Akanno Work Together – 10:40 AM watching Italy Vs. Costa Rica world cup games! Best Practice: In general, anyone who only does this once gets a pass. But multiple offenders are quickly banned from the community. We’ve landed on 4 spam categories that might help you get started defining yours: 1. Spam: Electronic junk. No more explanation needed. 2. Irrelevant: This can be a judgment call. Often, posts like this are dis- cussed by the core community management moderation team. While it’s not a spam post, it doesn’t offer any value to the community. He isn’t asking a question or communicating with other members. Community Management 2.1 Dealing with Spam Best Practice: Have a group chat up during the day for quick gut-checks with the moderation team regarding spam. As you notice patterns, document them so you don’t have to have similar time-draining conversations over and over again. What We Do The Google Small Business Community is designed to help busi- ness people make the most of the web. It’s a place for business owners to connect with Googlers, industry experts, and their peers. Our moderators will be in the community to offer guidance and answer questions from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM Pacific Time on weekdays (except for major US holidays). What We Ask From You Be helpful. This is all about bringing people with varied expertise and experiences together to help each other out. Do your best to support your fellow contributors to the community with positive, relevant posts and comments. Be respectful. Other people in the community will have differ- ent perspectives, beliefs, and points of view. That’s okay. Please be polite and compassionate. If you have a disagreement, work it out professionally (and in private). Be specific. When you have a question, idea, or response, the more context and information you can provide, the better. Be constructive. This is your community as much as it is ours, and we know you have a lot to offer. We need your feedback to make sure that the community is the best it can be. Be family-friendly. Anyone with a Google account is able to see the community, so make sure you’re not posting anything you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see. Be open. We encourage you to give advice, offer help, and share your experiences doing business, especially when it comes to the web. Guidelines for the Community Don’t promote. This isn’t the place to post marketing material for your business. To maintain meaningful conversations about suc- ceeding on the web, we do not accept promotional offers, sales pitches via blog posts, or links to a general homepage (with the exception of introducing yourself or asking for feedback on a web site). Don’t post classified ads. This isn’t the place to job search. We want to remain focused on creating and fostering an environ- ment for business people to share their advice and experience. Don't post links without context. We encourage you to share links with our community as long as they're business-related. We ask that you include a short writeup in your post that tells mem- bers something you learned from the article you're sharing. Links without summaries will be removed by our moderation team. Don't worry if your link gets removed. We evaluate the content of each link shared to make sure it's up to our quality standards. Our moderators act as editors to make sure that the community feed always has a well-curated set of useful articles, with the best of the best included in our daily #BizLinks roundup. If your link comes down, please try again another time, with a different link. Don’t be mean. Abuse, insults, profanity, personal attacks, bul- lying or hateful comments (including but not limited to com- ments about race, gender, sexual expression or identity) will be removed. Don’t post personal information. Members of the community may share information with you that isn’t intended to be shared with the public. Because the Google Small Business Communi- ty is a public community, we ask that you be careful about what information you share. Please don’t post personal information about other users, like phone numbers, email addresses or cus- tomer ID numbers. Repeatedly breaking any of these rules will result in your being banned from the community. Here's a look at our community guidelines. Google Small Business Community KEIN TRUC NMB Work Together – Jun 1, 2014 http://094983487762724872.blogspot.com/ 094983487762724872 094983487762724872.blogspot.com +1  Add a comment... +1 
36 37 3. Self-Promotional: This is also a tricky topic. When our communi- ty first launched, we allowed many self-promotional posts because our standards for member created content was very low, and we wanted to allow people to introduce themselves. Over time we saw fans take ad- vantage of the fact that unlike a G+ brand page, they too could post their own content. This allowed us to evaluate on a case by case basis if the fan was just being self-promotional for their own sake or to genuinely contribute. Oftentimes we would have one off conversations with fans explaining our policy. We’d invite them to return following the policy by asking a question or commenting. 4. Link Dumping: Because we’re a business community, a lot of our members want to share business related links. This is great when they’re encouraging discussion, but you don’t want your community to become just an endless string of links with no discussion. Community Management 2.1 Dealing with Spam Best Practice: Positive encouragement and suggestions go a long way when private messaging someone who inadvertently posted spam. We’ve seen members come back and contribute in meaningful ways. Best Practice: We eventually settled on a policy where we allow links as long as they’re business- related, they include a summary in the post text (to add friction), and the articles themselves are high quality. We tell the community that we think of ourselves as editors of the community’s content, rather than just moderators. Did You Know? It’s better to start strict while moderating and loosen up as you’ve gained respect and control than it is to start relaxed and tighten up. Google Small Business Community Security and Investigations Be Found Online – May 21, 2014 Check out the DMOC Entertainment website like us on facebook.com/DmocEnt or dmoc-ent.com/ Dmoc Entertainment facebook.com/DmocEnt Google Small Business Community Steve Burk MiscBiz – May 12, 2014 Thanks for letting me join this community. I am one of the partners of a small repair shop looking for our chance to go bigger. Come check us out. Any feedback is appreciated. www.PeerlessInkc.com +1 +2   Google Small Business Community Allen Borza MiscBiz – Jun 18, 2014 How to speed up your business website Speed up and organize your website greengroup.com/blog/web/speed +1  Not Allowed Allowed
38 39 When you remove a post, you should to send some kind of message to the person whose post was removed, to let them know why you removed it. Google+ has three ways of doing this, but we recommend doing it via a comment on the removed post. Here’s the list of options, and why we made the selection we did: Escalation Flowchart Community Management 2.1 Dealing with Spam Hangouts. You can send a Hangouts message, but a lot of users don’t sign in to Hangouts or don’t notice the message, and miss it. In addition, it gives strangers in your community the ability to ping you BACK on Hangouts, which you usually don’t want. Finally, there’s a spam quota—if you send too many Hangouts in a short time, your ability to start new Hangouts is temporarily removed. Privately shared posts. Like Hangouts, this also has a spam quota—notify too many people too quickly, and your posts get removed. We also noticed a low response rate here. Comment on the removed post. For this method (and only this method) of messaging, Community Moderators are immune to the spam quota, which is reason alone to use it. It also has the highest rate of acknowledgement by the user being moderated. Two things to bear in mind, though: First, posts should be removed quickly—removed posts in Google+ communities don’t disappear until you refresh the community, but comments appear automatically. So if someone is on the community when you remove the post, the post will appear to remain up, but your moderation comment will be visible. Second, anyone who visits the profile of the person whose post was removed will be able to see the comment. So while your posts won’t be obvious to other people in the community, they still won’t be strictly private—so be careful what you say! Best Practice: Keep a document with a pre-written list of responses you can use to address the different types of posts that need removing.  Timing Tip: Expect to spend 2-3 days writing and revising your guidelines and spam policy. You should also expect to re-evaluate them both at least once a month—more often during the early stages. Is the post within the guidelines? Remove the post No No No No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Does the post ask a question or otherwise request follow up? Engage. Welcome the user and encourage them to feel at home. Is it a question that can only be answered by a Googler? Is it a question that is appropriate for us to answer? (Not related to competing products, etc.) Is it a sensitive question? (for example, online privacy in Google Drive) Escalate. Let the rest of the team know what’s going on, and loop in PR/Legal to get official language for a response. Encourage Advisor response. Loop in the #AskAnAdvisor hashtag and surface to the Advisors as needed. Contribute and call backup. Provide some info to answer the question yourself, but also loop in the Advisors for more detailed info. Offer Support. Redirect them to support resources, offer simple answers where possible.
40 41 2.2 Community Management Offering Support The Google Small Business Community is not meant to be a community to get tech support on Google products. That said, any time you open a channel through which people can talk to a Googler, you will get tech support requests. Because we’re a marketing channel, we have a specific focus on making sure our community members walk away happy, which means that handling tech support requests can be a touchy subject.
42 43 Reactive: Answer the easy ones. Our first tool is to answer the question. If it’s an answer you know or can find easily, go for it. If it’s a complicated question, route away. If you can’t answer the question yourself (or even if you can), you should provide them with a support resource to get more information—usually the Help Center, or official support forum. You can find that list here. Always route somewhere specific. When you route, it’s always better to route someone to a page that directly addresses their ques- tion rather than a help center or forum homepage. Even if you’re just linking someone to the “tech support” category on the forums, that’s better than routing to the forums in general. Follow up. When you route someone, check back in on them afterwards (by PM if necessary) to make sure their issue has been resolved. This goes a long way to have members that feel personally connected to Google. Proactive: Post about support resources. Because posts on G+ aren’t preserved very well, be sensitive to questions that are coming up a lot, and proac- tively post to let people know where the answers can be found. Close any replies with posts directing people to support resources. When you answer a question, whether you get a final answer or not, always include a link to the support resources they would need to answer further questions. Post more heavily about non-product related things. We want to make sure we set the tone that we talk more about advice and strategy than directly about Google products. Keep a list of contacts. You should maintain a list of internal contacts at Google for every Google product you expect to get support questions about—as well as in the PR and Legal departments—in case you need to double-check your messaging. Partner with support teams. We have monthly meetings with the SMB Services team (AdWords support) to fill them in on what kinds of questions our members are asking and to share content back and forth between our community and their support forums. Our relationship with this team has been highly beneficial on both sides. Community Management 2.2 Offering Support Best Practice: Answering questions is good, but having your user base answer them for you is better. Once you get to know your community, you can +tag in another user who knows the answer. If you’ve covered something previously, be sure and call back to your earlier content with a link!
44 45 2.3 Community Management Serivce Level Agreement Hours of operation: We make it clear to our community that we will be online and answering questions during normal working hours (Pacific Time). We clean up spam and bad posts outside those hours, but we don’t engage directly. Having our hours posted helps set expectations. Procedure/time frame for responding: At our launch, our goal was to answer all questions within three hours. As long as it’s within actual working hours, we’ve had no trouble keeping to that schedule, even as our community grows to 25k or more. Follow ups: We keep a spreadsheet that tracks “open loops—” that is, any conversation where we know a user is waiting on us for an answer. Once we’ve responded and the matter is settled, we hide the row so we still have a record, but we know it isn’t pressing.
46 47 Date Moderator Link to post Reason for removal 1 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/1234 Spam 2 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2455 Spam 3 6/15/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2044 Link 4 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/a034 Self-promo 5 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/232455 Spam/Non-English 6 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/24084 Link 7 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/1234 Spam 8 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2455 Spam 9 6/15/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2044 Link 10 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/a034 Self-promo 11 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/232455 Spam/Non-English 12 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/24084 Link 13 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/1234 Spam 14 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2455 Spam 15 6/15/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2044 Link 16 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/a034 Self-promo 17 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/232455 Spam/Non-English 18 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/24084 Link 19 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/232455 Spam/Non-English 20 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/24084 Link 2.4 Community Management Moderation Documents This document tracks every post we find ourselves needing to remove. For each post, we note: 1. The date 2. The moderator who removed it 3. The name of the poster: This allows us to search by name to see if we have any repeat offenders. 4. A link to the post: This lets us check the actual post to verify how bad it was, and to read the comment that was used to reply to the post. 5. The reason for the removal: This lets us look for trends in different types of spam. 6. Whether or not the person was banned Removed Posts Removed/Flagged Posts from Community 
48 49 Form Responses  Canned Responses Flagged for Follow-Up This doc is where we pre-write our responses to removed posts. We up- date it frequently as we change our Guidelines and we see different types of spam, but the common thread is that each response polite- ly informs the user that the post was removed, explains why, links to the Community Guidelines, and invites them to try again. This document includes a link to every “open loop” thread—everything we need to make sure that no question ever slips through the cracks. In the document we track the following things: Each row is hidden once we resolve the issue, so we retain a record—but our goal is to keep this spreadsheet clean. • Name of the poster • Date of the original post • Link to the post • General question topic • Our next step Community Management 2.4 Moderation Documents Best Practice: If you see the kind of behavior on the community that you want, engage with it. Always acknowledge positive behavior and radiate positivity. It’s contagious. Self Promotion Maxim nonsequid erias voluptatur rero doloratat. Voluptatem estem aut paribus cipsandi iusant venim inciist oreprovitio officiis endemolectur re mode. Link Dump Maxim nonsequid erias voluptatur rero doloratat. Voluptatem estem aut paribus cipsandi iusant venim inciist oreprovitio officiis endemolectur re mod estibeatem fugia sinture ma et voluptis aut eictate ssimodit ulpa quas pos exceribe.. Blogspm Maxim onsequid erias voluptatur rero doloratat. Voluptatem estem aut paribus cipsandi iusant venim inciist oreprovitio officiis endemolectur re mod estibeatem fugia sinture ma et voluptis aut eictate ssimodit ulpa quas pos exceribe.. 9 ABCO 4/30/2014 plus.google.com/128912 AdSense not working! 12 Mihai GRBlog 5/11/2014 plus.google.com/1394 Denied for AdSense 14 Ashish G 5/21/2014 plus.google.com/94939 AdSense Help 17 Tuck Sing Leee 5/27/2014 plus.google.com/2423 Auto-posting blogs from social media Removed/Flagged Posts from Community 
50 51 2.5 Community Management Guest Moderators Our community has a group of dedicated third party volunteers, who we call Advisors. The purpose of the Advisor program is to make sure that every question gets answered. Setting up a volunteer moderator program is great if your internal team doesn’t have the bandwidth to engage with every active member at scale. And sometimes, as Googlers, we get questions that we can’t answer. Some examples of risky topics include: Competing Products. In many cases, it makes sense for a Google cus- tomer to also take advantage of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, or any number of other products that compete with Google. We never want to give our customers bad advice or a limited picture, but advising people on what competing products to use and how can be legally dangerous. Our Advisors can freely give advice on all business tools across the web. SEO. The precise workings of Google’s search engine are a closely guarded secret, and even if you’re only casually brushing the topic, offer- ing information “directly from Google” can always be risky. Instead, we link them to Google’s SEO handbook and then let others do the talking. In cases like these, we depend on our Advisors to make sure that we have a way to get these questions answered, without having to answer them ourselves.
52 53 Working with third party moderators Community Access. We don’t recommend providing third parties with moderator access to your community, as any moderator can make de- cisions (like removing posts) that you don’t necessarily want to leave in the hands of a volunteer. Unfortunately, “moderator” and “owner” are the only levels of access, meaning that you can’t easily make your vetted third party guests stand out. For this purpose we recommend using a doc (like this one) to identify your volunteers and make them stand out. Communication. Always make sure you can reach your volunteers via email. You may be tempted to reach out to them exclusively on Google+, but many people don’t check their G+ notifications the way they check their email. The Pitch. In many cases, you won’t have to sell people on an opportu- nity like this—recognition from Google goes a long way. That said, it’s important to make the benefit statement clear: What you’re offering is an opportunity to connect directly with potential customers, in order to build your brand and identity as an expert. We get their expertise, they get access to our user base and the validation that comes from a Goo- gle seal of approval. What they don’t get, is... ...Self-promotion. Make sure that your volunteers know that they’re not there to promote themselves at the expense of the community. It’s im- portant that they don’t use your community to advertise—but it’s also im- portant that they feel rewarded for their contributions, so be sure to use your own influence to promote them where it makes sense. Check-ins. We encourage you to have regular check-ins with your volun- teers to make sure they’re happy and excited to contribute. As long as they’re helping, it makes everyone look good. Vetting. Make sure that you carefully vet any volunteers before you give them the stamp of approval. The vast majority of the people in our Ad- visors group have already been vetted as Ambassadors for the Google Partners Community, so we know they have training both in how to use our products and in what they can and can’t say. If you don’t have anoth- er group to rely on, you’ll have to do that training yourself. Be careful! Surfacing Issues to Your Guest Moderators. We use two different tech- niques to let our guest mods know when an issue comes up that needs their attention. First, we created a hashtag (#AskAnAdvisor) to flag ques- tions that need their attention—our Advisors regularly check that tag for new posts. For times when we have exceptionally high volume (like Small Business Week), we also created a simple doc that lists links to rel- evant questions, identifies the topic, and then has a field where Advisors can “claim” the question, so they don’t wind up duplicating a lot of work by answering the same question multiple times. This isn’t necessary during normal volume, but it’s good to have ready for special events. Community Management 2.5 Guest Moderators
54 55 Plan ahead. When planning the rough outline of content topics for the community each quarter, the first thing we check is the calendar for big holidays that would be relevant to our members, such as Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Small Business Week, Earth Day, etc. We have at least a daily piece of content for these holidays, if not bigger activations such as interviews or business spotlights we can do in the community. Be flexible and timely. In addition to planning ahead for holidays, your content calendar should also leave room for last minute, unplanned additions or postponements. This can be the launch of another Google product (or community), a policy change in your moderation guidelines that requires an explanation post, or replacing a piece of content you had scheduled. Additionally, we keep a content repository to refer to when we need to plug in a piece of content - such as statistics to use for trivia questions, quotes to inspire conversation, and links to business related we can repurpose for branded content. Steal and share with pride. To capture the interest of your fans and be seen as a thought leader, find ways to produce your own unique content, rather than repost what you can find (even if it’s really awesome.) That said, borrow from other relevant Google content like Think with Google, Life @ Google, etc to see what you can repurpose for your community. Establish points of contact on teams that you share content with regu- larly, and be ready to share back! Create a Content Resource doc so content creators have a starting point that’s not a blank page. 3.1 Content Strategy & Style Editorial Guiding Principles Berrak Sarikaya MODERATOR MiscBiz  Jun 20, 2014 How to Share Your Best #BizLinks Our goal is to make sure that our community mem- bers are getting the help they need to succeed on the web. That can happen through useful content, like the links you share with us every day. But the best connections really happen through conversations. Re- cently, we tested a new way to handle submissions for business-related links to try to encourage interaction around fewer, better resourceds. We've been tracking this experiment closely, and have decided that there is an easier way for you to share the articles that you have found helpful with others. With this in mind, we're making a change.
56 57 About this community Welcome to the Google Small Business Community—a place where businesses can get the help they need to succeed on the web by connecting with experts and each other. In addition to regular Hangouts and Q+As with Googlers, trusted Advisors and industry leaders, you'll also see: #BizBits - Stats, tips, quotes and trivia for a little learning every day #BizBytes - Case studies, infographics, thought pieces, and articles to discuss #Bizdom - Topic-specific training sessions led by web specialists #BizLinks - Roundups of your favorite resources every Monday/Wednesday/Friday #FeedbackFridays -Your chance to have the community weigh in on ideas #AskanAdvisor -If you have a question you want an online pro to answer Invite people Share this community Serialize everything. We’ve established specific formats of content we post on certain days of the week, so that our members expect it and can follow along to the programs they enjoy most. Brand these series with memorable hashtags to encourage repeat visits and interaction. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.1 Editorial Guiding Principles Be consistent. In addition to branded series that occur on a regular schedule, have a consistent posting format, always including a headline, hashtag and CTA. Member spotlights should always be called spotlights, rather than sometimes being snapshots. Same thing goes for recaps, roundups and resources. Using similar language helps train members on how to use the community and offers familiarity. Sort by categories. In addition to hashtags, utilize the G+ Community Categories. We decided that we would have 4 broad categories when we launched the community: Be Found Online, Advertise & Measure, Work Together, and MiscBiz (for anything that didn’t fall into the first three cat- egories). As the community grew, we added a weekly recap to our con- tent on Fridays, which led to the creation of the Week in Review catego- ry, which serves as an Archive of the best content. Welcome MiscBiz Be Found Online Work Together Advertise & Measure Week in Review Events  Search community 6 1 1 1
58 59 Let the members lead the way: Your members are your greatest inspira- tion, you should constantly be on the lookout for content ideas coming straight from their words. Your community should be a creative outlet for them to voice feedback, discussion topics and content series. For ex- ample, Google Small Business Community members posting questions about hiring for their business was the inspiration behind our Hiring for Your Business Hangout. Another example is a member who created an introduction video to re- ply to follow up questions asked by our moderators about his business. This led us to launch a series of SMB created videos. Always have a next step: Each piece of content should include a CTA to encourage engagement, such as a question tied in to your post, RSVPing and submitting questions for an event, or downloading a one-sheeter that we’ve created. When appropriate, we also include links to addition- al resources, as well as calling out any related content that’s been post- ed in the community. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.1 Editorial Guiding Principles Berrak Sarikaya MODERATOR MiscBiz  Jun 20, 2014 #BizBits Share your productivity tips with us The key to productivity is creating a routine and minimizing distractions. In addition to starting your day right with a morning ritual, increase your producitvity by setting limits on meetings, using technology and apps to streamline your business, and creating old-fashioned to-do lists. Want to know how other members being their mornings? Check out this post on with their commesnts on morning rituals: http://goo.gl/mbQOsJ Google Small Business Community Michael Stringfield MiscBiz – Jun 18, 2014 Thank you Casey Monroe for asking me for some thoughts. This is the video that I came up with. I have a ton of thoughts but I didn't want to drag on and on. Thank you again! +1 
60 61 Optimize Frequency and Cadence: • We’ve found that posting content 2-3 times per business day is the best for exposure and engagement. This will also allow your members to go back and comment on posts they may have missed. • This will take trial & error as you get familiar with your members. We’ve found that posting between 8:30 and 10 AM PDT to kick off the day works best for our members. We disperse the rest of the posts throughout the day, usually at 3 hour intervals. • You’ll usually receive a surge of activity after regular work hours, when businesses get online at the end of the day. • Pin & repin posts that are getting a lot of engagement to highlight them and continue the conversation. Let people talk about themselves. While 80% of our content is about doing business online, we break it up with calls for people to share about more personal things. For example, we ask our members about the books they’re reading, their morning routines, what gives them inspira- tion, etc. We try to have one of these a week to encourage more engage- ment and our members interacting with each other. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.1 Editorial Guiding Principles
62 63 Expanding on the already established Google Brand Voice and the User to User Guide, we developed a few best practices for the voice of the Google Small Business Community that applies to both the content we create and how the moderators interact with our members. No exclamation points, emoticons or internet slang of any kind. It’s easy to get carried away with these in social platforms, and it ends up sounding insincere when overused. We stick to straightforward punctua- tion, allowing our humor to come through within the words themselves. Be conversational. Use contractions. Google is friendly. No need to be stuffy or overly formal. 3.2 Content Strategy & Style The Google Voice Before: Give us your best guess! Try not to Google it ;) LOL. After: Take a guess. Try not to Google it. Before: We aim to provide you with information and knowledge so you can take advantage of op- portunities to succeed in online marketing. After: We hope you’ll learn a lot about using the web to better your business.
64 65 Steer clear of corporate jargon and acronyms. While we may be drown- ing in this at the office, we can’t let them escape into the real world. It makes people feel excluded and insecure. If we absolutely have to use certain terms, we try to define it within the context of the conversation. Always be positive. Try to avoid talking about hot button issues our team can’t solve, like “is Google spying on me?” Instead, we stay proactive and bring attention to the value we can provide. But when uncomfortable or sensitive issues arise, do not ignore them. Answer humbly and positively, thanking members for their feedback. Here’s an example of a positivity-led response to one of our few and far between negative posters: Be specific when suggesting resources. If a member has a very specific product question, do a little bit of research to try to find the answer. Barring that, find the appropriate forum that can help them or ask an expert to respond, instead of directing them to the a Help Center home page or leaving them hanging. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.2 The Google Voice Example Community Question Our Answer Nikolas Bogioglou Mar 20, 2014 I have a question. How can you convince/help us about google/google+ and SMB's when you have barely 4 posts and 100 followers? I am far from sure that you are the right person to even moderate this community. I have deep knowledge/belief on the semantic web and how google+ can kill many birds with one stone for SMB's BUT you seem to never believed this until you were hired as a community manager. If you need any help, no need to post in a community. Just PM me and I will do it unconditionally and ofc free of charge - This applies to everyone. Casey Monroe Mar 20, 2014 +3 We're glad you're doing your homework, +Nikolaos Bogioglou. Lauren, Berrak and I are always learning more about online tools. This is a great chance for us to explain our role as moderators. Our deepest expertise and passion lies in managing communites. Our job here is to facilitate conversation, make sure questions get answered, and connect people to help each other. We also act as our members' ambassadors. As we get to know our members and what they are interested in learned, we'll work to bring the most useful information and experts we can to address those topics. I'm glad you have advice to share freely with this group, and I hope you decide to share it here on our community so we can all benefit. Security and Investigations Be Found Online – May 21, 2014 Hi, do you know how I can secure my sheet in docs with a password? +8  Berrak Sarikaya May 23, 2014 Hi +Marek Dorsz, +Roxanna Daniel is correct. Your documents and spreadsheets in Google Drive are not accessible by anyone until you give them access. You can get more info on sharing documents in Google Drive here: https://support. google.com/drive/answer/2494886 Lee Pettijohn Advertise & Measure – May 16, 2014 Greetings, Thanks for the invite. I received the invitation in an email from Google Analytics that had a snapshot of one of my accounts. I'm hoping that someone in here knows how to create this kind of report for all the websites I watch. Any help is appreciated. Thanks. +8  Casey Monroe May 16, 2014 Hi +Lee Pettijohn—unfortunately, those particular reports are created specially for the email updates, and can't be edited. I've relayed the suggestion back to the Google Analytics team, though. In the meantime, as +Alexey Chesnok says, you can customize your reports in a number of differ- ent ways. More information can be found here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11 51300 We do appreciate you joining us here in the community, though, and we're happy to offer help where we can. What sort of business do you do? Before: Identify your target market to find prospective customers.. After: Find your ideal customers and be clear about why they should pick you over your competition. Weave in go-to phrases: For the Small Business Community, we say “Make the most of the web,” “make the web work for your business,” and “get the help you need to succeed on the web.” This reinforces our mission and the value we strive to provide.
66 67 All creative assets that are posted in your community should be consistent with your visual branding, which can require repurposing of content used from other sources. At a glance, all of the posts in your community created by your team should look uniform. 3.3 Content Strategy & Style Visual Guidelines
68 69 #BizBits Pis mossectibus num ipsunt optas rem eum quossincit anditiis et ex esciaepudi optaspis nit officiasit laborep elitibus, veri ius quia velest officidel moluptatus. Xeratia natibusae coritatum aspidelibus rere porae. Et ut eicit, voluptiniam sim sendit everaeprepe laboribus dolorei ciatque eseque velia pratestiberi     http://goo.gl  Left-aligned. All of our copy in our creative assets is left-aligned according to our Google SMB Marketing brand book. Shortened links. We shorten all of our links using the goo.gl tool, both for analytics purposes and for a clean look. For more formal uses such as a HPP, we use a g.co link that can be created by filing this bug Contnent Strategy & Style 3.3 Visual Guidelines Use hashtags in titles. Even when they aren’t clickable, hashtags in our images help reinforce the branding of our series and encourage people to participate. Always include a branded graphic element. Every post we have in the community is accompanied by either a branded share graphic or a video.
70 71 Photos. Every photo that’s posted in your community should include your branding, so your creative templates should include one for photos. Never use stock images when posting in a Google community. In addition to high-resolution images our creative agency provided for us, we also make use of the GCreative Library to find photos relevant to our content when applicable. When spotlighting a small business or featur- ing an interview, always plug in the photo to your branded template. Use appropriate icons. Our creative agency provided us with a library of icons in the photoshop files for our snacks. When talking about Google Maps, we have the maps pin icon. When discussing search, we use the magnifying glass, and so on. If there’s no appropriate icon, we leave it out. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.3 Visual Guidelines #BizSpotlight Bazaar Curiosities & Oddities
72 73 Find a format that makes sense for you and your team: Your content calendar should include all of the relevant information necessary for every member of your team to post in the absence of the content man- ager. We created a trix that’s broken down by week. Weekly vs. monthly views. In addition to our weekly content calendar that includes all of the relevant content, we also have a snapshot view of our monthly themes, including larger activations such as HOAs. 3.4 Content Strategy & Style The Content Calendar Date Day Time Content Type Poster Category Content Image? Final Post Monday Tuesday 1 Bizdom re: content capture Wednesday 2 Thursday 3 Bizdom Jodi Text Q&A Friday 4 Saturday 5 7 8 Bizdom re: SEO 9 10 Bizdom Advisors Q&A SEO 11 12 14 15 Bizdom 1 refer back to Helpouts GYBO video 16 17 Bizdom Helpouts Text Q&A Brian Quimby 18 19 21 22 Bizdom re: YT 23 24 Bizdom YT HOA Ryan Park (influencer) 25 26 28 29 Bizdom re: PR 30 April Content — Larger Activations
74 75 Approval cycle. In the beginning, as we became familiar with our com- munity, we were on a weekly approval cycle for our content. The content manager created an outline of the content in a separate word doc to be reviewed and approved by the copywriter (if working with one), Team/Ops Lead and final approval by Google PMM. The peer review and approval process helps to ensure that all of the content is aligned with the Brand Voice. All of the content for a week should be reviewed and approved by Thursday afternoon of the prior week. As you get more comfortable, this should be bumped up to having content approved 2 weeks in advance. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.4 The Content Calendar  Timing Tip: Give your Team Lead and Google PMM a full 24 hours to review and give feedback for edits on the content. The actual content research and creation, including editing, formatting and creation of assets take 8-10 hours per week. Monday Post 1: Trivia  Monday: Post 1: Trivia Options: First choice, since we will be discussing marketing spending during the FICA: 66% of small businesses are maintaining or increasing spend on digital marketing. (AT&T Small Business Technology Poll 2013) 67% of businesses are using their website to market to customers. (AT&T Small Business Technology Poll 2013) Adding videos to landing pages can increase conversions by nearly 90%. (SocialTimes) Karina Elise 2:43 PM Jun 11 This copy really isn't adding anything to the table. Everyone already has some kind of morning ritual, so why tell them to have one? Maybe there's an interesting thing about a well-known business leader's morning routine.., does Bill Gates go for a swim at sunrise or something like that? And then have the CTA be the snack. Reply • Resolve
76 77 The RSVP functionality built into G+ is great for making sure members participate with your highest-quality interactive content. E-mail and G+ notifications allow you to communicate with attendees without needing them to proactively check your community. 4.1 Content Production Digital Events
78 79 1 Text Q+A A Text Q+A is the least expensive type of event to produce, because your expert can be located anywhere. It’s lot like a Reddit AMA (Ask me Anything). In our case, we invite a subject matter expert, choose a topic and then let members asked whatever they want. When our community was first created, this was a good way to ease our team and the community into the nature of real time questions and answers. Here is an example of one of our first Text Q+As with Jodi Wing from Ready State about creative content creation. Pros: Less pressure/more time to answer questions thoughtfully. Cons: Some members will be confused about where the Q+A is happening, looking for a video or chat room functionality. Over-commu- nication is key to explain and link to the thread and time frame where the conversation is happening. 2 Pre-Recorded Video A pre-recorded video can be an interview, panel or tutorial. Sometimes we produce these from scratch ourselves. Other times, we repurpose videos from teams with relevant topics—like this interview about how to improve your website. Instead of just posting the video to the wall, scheduling an event around it will help build momentum and conversa- tion around it. Here is an example of a pre-recorded video Hangout that we created around Holiday Search Trends with a Googler. Pros: This is the most polished, high-quality type of event you can have, because you have the most time to prepare and edit. Cons: No live interaction means that engagement for videos can be low, even with an event. We combat this by combining pre-recorded videos with a live text Q&A follow up to make it a more well-rounded event. Best Practice: Have the speaker repeat the question with every answer written. That way, fans reading the Q&A in line in the thread can follow along if they’ve missed the beginning. Did You Know? Planning videos or Hangouts on Air with external Subject Matter Experts are the most difficult and costly—you have to make sure that you have a substantial budget to fly the subject matter experts to a central filming location, provide transportation to the studio (usually either MTV or NYC as both have HOA capabilities and the Google sets), and put them up (if it can’t happen in one full day.) Best Practice: Those unfamiliar with G+ can get confused easily, thinking any event is a live streaming video. Be sure to over communicate and be very explicitly, saying things like “this is a pre-recorded interview with a text Q+A follow up” in your event descriptions and posts. Best Practice: Aim for a topic that can be easily explained without visuals. Best Practice: During the hour that the Q&A is live, create either a group chat or a hangout with the participant and your main moderator (as MC) to discuss the flow of questions and answers. Have your expert talk through their thoughts about answers that aren’t pre-planned on the group chat before they write them out. It helps them consolidate their thoughts and allows you to make sure they aren’t incorrectly addressing any sensitive topics. Content Production 4.1 Digital Events We host 3 types of events, each has pros and cons to consider before choosing which one(s) to move forward with.
80 81 3 Hangouts on Air Hangouts on Air are live, syndicated videos recorded and published to the community in real time. To follow the Hangouts Bizdom train- ing strategy, all of our community’s Hangouts on Air followed a Q&A format to answer their questions. We brought in a YouTube creator Ryan Park for our first HOA to discuss how to create quick & effective YouTube videos seen here. Pros: The community is eager to be involved. If you work with an influencer, they’ll most likely bring their following into the community to participate before, during and after the Hangout airs. Cons: This is a live syndicated broadcast, just like TV but with less lag time, so anything can happen! Clearly you don’t have any time to edit the video before it is published. Best Practice: The day of, you’ll need at least two (if not three) team members available and ready to make this successful. One will be conducting the interview on the Hangout, one will be vetting the questions to the interviewer being filmed and one will be looking for questions in the community in real time behind the scenes. Best Practice: Especially if you have multiple Subject Matter Experts involved (for a panel), practice the entire flow of the HOA at least once before you’re live. Best Practice: Fans like to be called out by name for their questions during Hangouts on Air. It allows them to feel like they’re a part of the conversation. Content Production 4.1 Digital Events
82 83 4.2 Content Production Production Checklist for Events Source topics: Your members will be vocal about what they want to learn about. Have your moderators help you keep a running list of topics for events. Find your talent: You’ll need someone with patience, charisma, tact, expertise and, as a bonus, a large social following that they can bring to the table. We use Googlers, our Advisors, and outside influencers—in- cluding co-marketing partners. We screen every person via video chat to make sure they will be a good fit. Book studio time: Create relationships with the studio managers- as they oversee the studio time and production process for all videos. In MTV, David Kruschke runs the Hangout studio. In NYC it’s Heather Duthie. Once you’ve formally filed a ticket via go/guts and emailed David and/or Heather to coordinate when you can film, send calendar invites to all teammates involved including the studio manager(s) to block off recording time. Also be sure to block out time for the follow up Q&A during the day that the content is published (if applicable). Create content in advance: Your expert can provide ideas about what angle on the topic they are comfortable with, and your content creator can help find a hook and catchy title for the event. Even though events like interview and Q&As are live, you should write a script so that every- one involved is comfortable with the general content. You can start by providing your speaker with a first draft of questions for them to answer, and then shape it into a script from there.
84 85 Promote the event: The goal is to promote the event at least a week in advance and follow up 2 times in separate posts to the community. We work closely with the G+ Your Business page which has 1M fans and a very similar message to ours. When our events are specific to other verticals (like HR), we’ll also have our Point of Contacts from those teams promote via their social channels. (I.E. Life@Google with the HR event, or Enterprise when talking about Google Apps.) Prepare your speaker(s): Whether you’re working with a Googler or out- side expert, outline how your event will work, what to expect, where to be, what time commitments are needed, and who their point person will be. Never assume they’re familiar with being on camera or live chatting in a community. Allow for more time to answer questions if you are interview- ing someone outside of Google. Say thanks: Once all is done, send a gthanks or a note to external partners (we created branded stationary and swag) thanking them for their time. Collect questions from members in advance: When you initially tell your community that you’ll be having a Q&A and ask them for questions, they’ll eagerly volunteer their inquiries, but not all on one thread. We usually direct fans to reply in the comment of the announcement thread, but when collecting the questions, we scrub all of the threads (the event page, the original post(s) and even other comment threads to make sure that we’ve captured all of the questions asked.) Event specific assets: Ideally you’ll have already worked with your creative agency to design opening, end and name overlay cards (as seen in our Hangout with GoDaddy here) to be used by the studio manager to brand it unique to your community. Have your studio manager upload the Hangout directly to your YouTube channel on a private setting, and approve it/provide edits via that outlet. It will save time for your modera- tion team in uploading videos down the road. Create the event: When you first created your community, it had to live under a G+ profile page. We’ve learned when creating events, it makes more sense to create the event under THAT page and invite the commu- nity, over creating the event exclusively in the community. Remember to create a circle for all RSVPed attendees leading up to the event, so if an emergency happens and last minute you have to cancel the event, you’ll have a list of all fans who have RSVPed to re-invite. Content Production 4.2 Production Checklist for Events Best Practice: Before launching your first event, create a ritual unique to your community. We created a standard “initiation” question that we ask every member (internally and externally) interviewed in the community. It creates a sense of familiarity regardless of the topic being discussed and puts both the interviewer and interviewee at ease. Develop a regular cadence for publishing your events. We have Q&A bizdoms every Thursday.
86 87 4.3 Content Production Other Creative Assets Events aren’t the only content that fall outside of our templatized, daily posts. Consider that you’ll need to plan in advance for a handful of other high-production creative assets, like:
88 89 Welcome/Anthem video: It’s powerful to launch with an introductory video as it allows for easy sharing and the moderation team can refer to it when explaining the community to fans who inquire. Something with animated graphics instead of live action can be fairly cost effective to produce with the right creative partner. Case Studies/Spotlights: While you might not have the budget to create one off videos initially, ask for incremental budgets to spotlight businesses that have an interesting story to tell. This spotlight example showcases LSTN during Small Business Week. You can also do a more budget-friendly approach by sending members a list of questions and some tips for filming and submitted their own videos. Custom infographics: Occasionally, we’ll want to go a bit deeper on a topic than a quick tip or stat. With some research into statistics and the help of a designer, we’ve created infographics (in the form of embedded presentations), like this one on family owned businesses. These are extra time and budget from our creative agency, since we do not have a designer on retainer. Best Practice: Form relationships with the SMBs you are spotlighting by reaching out to them directly. Then, ask them to engage via their G+ profiles directly on the thread as you spotlight them and their business. It makes the content more compelling, and community members will respond favorably to both the spotlight and the SMB who engages.  Timing Tip: Anticipate any custom creative production will take at least 2X the amount of time you’ll need for it to be live. This is due to internal approvals and delays in working with your creatives (as fast as they may be). Content Production 4.3 Other Creative Assets
90 91 5.1 Promotion & Aquisition Cross Promotion on Internal Platforms You’re blessed to be in the Google ecosystem with so many options for free/cheap promotion right at your fingertips, if you know where to look. We started out our search understanding what other teams had content that was relevant to us, and from there explored the following:
92 93 Social Channels: We chronicled every social channel we could find here, where they posted content and/or had a mission that was some- where related to the community. This also helped us meet more peo- ple who manage social channels at Google. Emails: We were able to partner with the Customer Marketing team for Adwords and send an email to all Adwords customers during Small Business Week and the Analytics team. Since they were sent, we’ve been able to partner with the contacts made on content for the community. The Google Analytics team sent a promo spotlight for their May email list, which was sent to a list of 250,000, and received an open rate of .2% Embedded Promos: We’ve been working closely with the webmas- ter team to get our community on the footer of various B2B sites. We also got the Blogger team, based in Australia, to include a promotion for our community in their dashboard. There are many more opportu- nities for in-product and in-site links that we are pursuing. Our team has a dedicated embedded promo person that helps us identify those opportunities. Home Page Promo: To kick off Small Business Week, we were able to get approval (go/hpp) on a Home Page Promo (deck here) celebrat- ing the week, working closely with the Small Business Administration. The Home Page Promo sent fans on Google.com directly to the Com- munity to experience specially created content for the week, includ- ing quotes from the SBW events and daily photo & video spotlights of SMBs in the community. Promotion & Acquisition 5.1 Cross Promotion on Internal Platforms
94 95 5.2 Promotion & Aquisition Influencers In addition to your advisors in the community, it’s important to think about how to attract influencers: individuals with a high social clout and can directly affect marketing or purchase decisions. They range from YT content creators like iJustine to Oprah, but because they have many followers in their respective social communities, it’s important not to shy away from their potential in helping you grow the community. Read more about partnerships here.
96 97 5.3 Promotion & Aquisition House Ads You may get to a point where you want to pay for a campaign to acquire members. House ads—search and display—are your most cost effective option. The Steps 1. Fill out the brief for a Search Campaign here one quarter before you want to run the campaign. 2. After the brief is complete, you need to fill out a media request to run the campaign. 3. Reach out to the Community Engineering team to figure out if they are able to place a remarketing tag in the code to track con- versions. If they are able to, you are good to go. If they are not able to, your bids will be limited to a cap of $0.50. 4. Some important notes • Budget $300k cash a quarter for Display Advertising campaigns • Search Ads, if you send over $10k per month you'll need to allocate some cash. • Reach out to Media Lab Office hours for any questions! 5. Determine the POC for who manages the account. We have our internal online marketing team who will help with the campaign.
98 99 6.1 Measurement & Optimization What We Measure & Why Measuring results on Google+ Communities at this stage in its development is a challenge. Because there isn’t a dedicated Analytics solution built into the platform, many— or most—measurements need to be done manually. Despite this, manual measurement can produce a lot of valuable data if it’s stored and interpreted correctly.
100 101 Post Type. Each post we manually sort into a category based on the different kinds of content we get, so we can encourage certain types of posts (like Discussion) and discourage other types (like Support Requests). The post categories we use are: 1. Sharing. “Hi! I just joined the community and I make widgets!” or “Hey I just read this article and I thought you guys would like it.” 2. Discussion. “Let’s talk about widgets. Do you guys use widgets? What kinds of widgets do you like to use?” 3. Advice Requests. “No one is buying my widgets, so I’m thinking of investing in a widget-based AdWords campaign. Does anyone have any suggestions for widget- based keywords?” 4. Tech Support. “I can’t log in to my widget-based AdWords account. Can you reset my password for me? 5. Mod Posts. “Today in the Google Small Business Community we’re doing a spotlight on people who make widgets!” Note that “spam” is included in our reports, but we track it in the “Removed Posts” document listed in the “Moderation” section. Post Date. Spreadsheets allow you to use this data to extrapolate day over day trends, but also weekly and monthly. +1s, Comments and Shares. These are the best tools we use to measure engagement. Some types of engagement are more valuable than others (for example, generally a comment or share is more representative of interest than a +1), but all of the data is valuable. Sometimes different posts are geared towards different kinds of engagement, and because we track them separately, we can gather more details. We measure these 24 hours after the original post date, since most posts have seen as much engagement as they’re going to get by then. This isn’t an ideal solution, since there is sometimes continuing engagement on older posts—but it’s the best compromise we could find. Post Link. This lets us do follow up. It’s also sometimes a valuable tool when we want to find a particular post—it gives us the ability to search using fields that Google+ doesn’t support. For instance, I can find all the posts from moderators that went up on May 18th—something that I couldn’t do on the Community itself without a lot of scrolling. Name of Poster. This lets us cross reference, find power-users, determine who is posting the most often, and easily distinguish between mod posts and user posts. It also makes it easy to track whose post you left off at if you get interrupted while you’re filling in the numbers. Our Analytics spreadsheet measures the following data: Measurement & Optimization 6.1 What We Measure & Why We pull all this data manually, but an automated dashboard is in prog- ress to save us the time. Reach out to cmonroe@google.com for more information on analytics. Best Practice: Chronicle everything internally. There is no such thing as too much documentation. It’s important to have data on hand, to not only track successes but to deduce insights and predict trends. Did You Know? It’s better to have too much data than not enough. Overcommit to tracking early, and then scale back later.  Timing Tip: Pulling this data takes half an hour to an hour per day. Post Type Date Category 1 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 2 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 3 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 4 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 5 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 6 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 7 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 8 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 9 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 10 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 11 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 12 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 13 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 14 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 15 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 16 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 17 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 19 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support SMB Community Analytics  Sharing 120 90 60 30 0 Tech Support Advice Request SpamDiscussion User Posts By Type: Prev. Month
102 103 A peek at our automated analytics dashboard Measurement & Optimization 6.1 What We Measure & Why Community Dashboard Community DashboardEdit Edit Posts Per Day Gender Breakdowns of Active Users Commends by Hour of Day Community Members Posts by Hour of Day Approved/Rejected Posts per day +1's by Hour of Day Cumulative Post Stats Select Post Type Date Filter 2014-05-15 2014-07-09
104 105 6.2 Measurement & Optimization Tools, Report & Process Reporting is a complicated process, and it depends a great deal on the goals and needs of the people you’re reporting to. That said, there are some general principles you can follow to make sure that you’re putting your best foot forward.
106 107 Measurement & Optimization 6.1 Tools, Report & Process Tips For Making Awesome ReportsWhat We Report On Growth. We report on the overall growth of the community, most importantly. We also report on the total number of +1s, Comments and Shares since the community opened—but that’s mostly a vanity stat. Engagement. We track the number of Comments, +1s and Shares for each post on the community, and we break them down into two categories—engagement on user posts, and engagement on our own content. We graph these out over time, to make sure that they’re continually increasing, and match them up with the number of posts per day. Post Types. Remember how we mentioned earlier that we break down posts by type? We chart these in pie graphs to make sure that the ratios are where we want them—lots of Discussion and Advice Requests, not too much Tech Support. Qualitative Feedback. It’s important to report on more than just metrics. Include key user quotes, stories, and other qualitative information. Next Steps. Always close with your plan for what to do next. Include an executive summary. This is good advice for everything, even just a long email—but you should always include with a few, quick key points to explain what you have to say. Make sure that even if they only read the summary, they’ll get the idea. Make your report tell a story. It’s important to align your information be- hind a single central theme. If you can make all the information in your report tell the same story, the people reading will be more likely to re- member what’s going on. Brand your report where possible. Having branded graphics in your re- port makes sure that everyone remembers what you’re reporting on. Don’t be afraid to brag. Many people can be reluctant to “toot their own horn” in a report. But you have to—you’re the only one who really knows what you’ve accomplished, and if you want other people to know, you have to tell them. GBC Report  GBC Report All systems are go for loud launch. Key Takeaways: The formula is working. The metrics suggest that our current approach is working well, and is leading to a steady overall increase in users, engagement with our content, and quality of user contributions. Our first HOA with Ryan Park was a big success. We had a lot of activity from both our network and from Ryan's. The video itself got nearly 1130 views, users have been posting about it for days, and Ryan has volunteered to become an Advisor in our community. Internal cross-promo is leading to more organic growth. Our internal cross promotion efforts have been very
108 109 Tracking Links to Your Community Link Shorteners: Link shortening isn’t just an easy way to cram a com- plicated link into a short number of characters—it also provides you with an alternate method of collecting analytics data. We recommend using goo.gl. While bit.ly, awe.sm and other link shorteners have a lot of tools available, as long as Google has an internal solution available, it only makes sense for us to use it publicly. We use link shortening whenever we need to link to a service internal- ly with a long or ugly URL—the most common case being Google Docs links, which tend to naturally be very long and full of ID and authentica- tion codes. We don’t use link shorteners when the page we’re linking to has an obvious, easy-to-remember URL—like http://www.google.com/mybusiness/. Create all the links yourself. If you’re working with an external partner to send links to your community, make sure they use a specific shortened link that you give them. Most teams will want warning, and to have the link well in advance. Goo.gl, like bit.ly, will allow you (or anyone else) to check the number of clicks on a shortened link by adding a + sign to the end of the link. With this in mind, you can track your analytics by assigning each campaign an individual tracking link. Here’s how we do it: Measurement & Optimization 6.1 Tools, Report & Process
110 111 Make a link tracking doc. Keep a spreadsheet of which shortened link you’re using for which purpose. For each link, we track the team that’s using it to send traffic, the date the campaign took place, and the actu- al link—with the “+” appended to the end of the URL, so a quick click will take you directly to the analytics for that link. Use a new link every time. Often you’ll work with the same teams sever- al times on a campaign—for instance, if your community is mentioned in an email newsletter, this may happen more than once. If you do this, try and generate a new tracking link every time. That way, you can track the performance of the link and see if it changes. Measurement & Optimization 6.1 Tools, Report & Process Start Date Xpromo Campaign Analytics link data End date (shortlink if applicable) (if applicable) 1 3/24/2014 GYBO Week content goo.gl/h2397 2 3/21/2014 Analytics mo. email promo goo.gl/ads98 3 3/31/2014 Official G+ Post goo.gl/082498 4 3/31/2014 Official Google Twitter goo.gl/9237 5 3/31/2014 Google.com/services footer goo.gl/0i2309 6 5/1/2014 Blogger promo spot goo.gl/973497 7 5/1/2014 Analytics monthly email goo.gl/o384 8 3/24/2014 GYBO Week content goo.gl/h2397 9 3/21/2014 Analytics mo. email promo goo.gl/ads98 10 3/31/2014 Official G+ Post goo.gl/082498 11 3/31/2014 Official Google Twitter goo.gl/9237 12 3/31/2014 Google.com/services footer goo.gl/0i2309 13 5/1/2014 Blogger promo spot goo.gl/973497 14 5/1/2014 Analytics monthly email goo.gl/o384 Xpromo Tracking 
112 113 6.3 Measurement & Optimization Setting KPIs Community Management is notoriously hard to measure. It’s difficult to strike a balance between quantitative measurement and qualitative understanding. If you’re careful, though, you can create measurable KPIs that actually help you meet constructive goals.
114 115 How to Choose a Good KPI Make sure you’re measuring something meaningful...to both your team and to the people you’re reporting to. Ultimately, this is how your success is going to be judged, so choose carefully. Make sure you’re measuring things you have control over. Measur- ing based on growth is valuable, but remember that a number of oth- er factors (like how many people are willing to cross-promote you) will have an effect on you. Don’t focus exclusively on metrics. Metrics tell an important part of the story, but not the ONLY part. Make sure you cover the rest of the story too. Measurement & Optimization 6.3 Setting KPIs  Timing Tip: Make sure you budget plenty of time to setting KPIs and benchmarks in the early phases—you’re going to want to dedicate at least a week or more.
116 117 6.4 Measurement & Optimization What We Chose We’re following a two part strategy with our KPI goals—we’re separately tracking both growth and engagement. Growth 100,000 members in the first year. This goal was set before we began, but we’re confident we can hit it. In addition to measuring our raw num- bers, we also tracked the %growth rate we would need to hit in order to meet our goal, and compared our growth to that number. Did You Know? Circlecount.com easily lets you track historical growth for any Google+ community, as well as a lot of other Google+ measurement tools.
118 119 Engagement. We broke our engagement goals out into multiple sub-categories. Continual upward trending. Our research on other Google+ communi- ties indicates that as communities get more posts per day, they tend to see reduced engagement on each individual post, since user attention gets spread out over a bunch of different posts. With that in mind, it was important to make sure that even as our volume increased, our engage- ment numbers continued to trend upward as well. Average engagement per post. We took the average engagement num- bers (+1’s, comments, and shares) on the current largest business-relat- ed community in the world, and aimed to beat them by 150% Measurement & Optimization 6.3 Setting KPIs
120 121 7.1 Working Together Internal Communications Standing Meetings: Our team uses morning “scrums” in the form of GVCs at the start of the day. No longer than 30 minutes, these provide a time for every person to list what their goals are for the day and to flag any concerns. During this meeting, the Team Ops/Lead briefs the team as to happenings outside of the day to day team responsibilities that are coming down the pipeline. It allows for a remote team to feel unit- ed in decision making. Weekly, we have status meetings with the PMM lead where they let us know bigger picture of any requests from exter- nal teams or content changes. We use this time to review content for the coming weeks and discuss larger activations. In addition, our Team Ops/Lead has standing weekly 1:1s with both community managers. This as an open time to look at any internal or external problems, and brainstorm how to best solve them. Establishing Trust: If your team is located geographically across the US, it’s important to establish a trusting foundation. The more your team feels safe and able to communication any reservations or problems within the community at an early stage, the more successful you’ll be to avoid any crisis down the road. This will also make them feel happier and more fulfilled, leading to a better community. Best Practice: A weeklong kickoff in person with the full team to get to know each other is highly encouraged—including nights out! Best Practice: Let the team work together to iron out the processes and practices that work best for them.
122 123 Days off/Coverage: It’s important to follow the moderation calendar and plan days off closely with your team. Give them enough warnings to an- ticipate your absence and plan their work schedules. Not only should your moderation shifts be covered, but delegate your most immediate tasks to specific teammates when out. At the Team Ops/Lead level, if you’re working with external businesses for event production, be sure to let them know of your absence as well. Unified Team: Your success is your team’s success- there is no distinc- tion between the two. This creates a safe place for the team to commu- nicate especially when facing obstacles. It’s imperative to be seen as one, as “Google” to our users. Because of this, to work like a team, you must think like a team. This means that we had to create an environ- ment to allow for questions, comments and observations to constantly flow from one moderator to another, effortlessly. The goal is to have var- ied responses to fans, but with one collective strategy in mind and slight voice differences unique to each moderator. Constant communication between moderators allows us to make sure we know of the context re- garding specific members (i.e. maybe they were already banned before), or sensitive topics to avoid (like issues that related to recent news or sensitive current events). Working Together 7.1 Internal Communications
124 125 7.2 Working Together Cross-team Collaboration The success of the community is contingent on the relationships you cultivate as a collective unit with all Googlers: this includes leads of other social platforms from products (like Adwords), to marketing (Enterprise) to customer service (Maps & Places). The more time you can invest, the more successful you’ll be in creating compelling content that hasn't already been discussed, moderating effectively using the most up to date information, and growing your fan base via cross promotion of other pages.
126 127 POCs: We identified one point of contact for each team/product/social platform and let them know that we'd be reaching out to them in the fu- ture should we have questions. We then asked if they're the best people to return to with future questions. Compiling a go to document like this one made difficult questions a breeze. Studio: As mentioned in the events sections, David (MTV) and Heather (NYC) are the team Ops/leads right hands for all video components. It's important that they understand the larger mission of the community and are on your side. This is because you will face tight content production turnarounds and seemingly unrealistic requests. Last minute video tweaks and/or launches are impossible without their assistance. They hold a great deal of creative power. Best Practice: Aim to tap into the data from teams who might have related content of interest to your community. For us, its newsletters from Think With Google, YouTube "creators" and even sales bulletins tracking what areas are frustrating for SMBs. DYK: There are 612+ social channels (including FB, TW and G+) with 350 Million followers owned and operated worldwide by and/or for Google. Think of all of the inspiration for content and potential for free promotion that those channels hold. Working Together 7.2 Cross-team Collaboration
128 129 7.3 Working Together Partnerships It’s not what you know, but who you know. We’ve relied heavily on our own social and professional networks to leverage and identify influenc- ers and subject matter experts to speak about topics that we’re not fa- miliar with, to validate our credibility, to increase exposure and to grow our community. The understanding is that we don’t pay the guests in the community to participate but in some circumstances we will pay for transportation for them to a Google office and/or set for production. It's understood that this is mutually beneficial, for this is free publicity for the partners company and/or business. We ask them in return to pro- mote the event via their personal and professional marketing channels. (Which includes but is not limited to social platforms, mass external & internal company wide email blasts.) Beyond who you know, who knows you? When identifying potential in- fluencers to host, you want to choose people who have expertise that is specific to the niche topic that you might be covering, and who have a sizable social footprint. This means that it's better to choose a speaker who has a larger Twitter following and writes for a handful of blogs be- cause if they have a good experience, they'll blog about it on all of their social sites. This content will only increase the positive sentiment about your community and your community's mission. Best Practice: As your community grows, you want to be sure to target larger and larger influencers, as a way to give your growing and active members inspiration and strengthen your credibility. DYK: Google was rated 2014's most valuable brand. This means that many influencers will happily work with you and your community simply because you're an extension of Google, a brand that they most likely have a positive affinity for. Vet through influencers blogs and note those who rave about you as that's an easy way in.
130 131 Paid partnerships: Unlike guest moderators and speakers for events, some of your partners will be paid. If you use a creative agency for your branding or video production, expect to bring them in as a very close member of your team. Nelson Cash has done a lot of work for G+ com- munities, and might be a good option for you. Brand Studio also has a list of approved agencies that are available and in the vendor system. Visit go/agencyteam to learn more.  Timing Tip: It’s never too early to begin conversations that can lead to partnerships and identify who are the decision makers in the organizations/ businesses you partner with. Working Together 7.3 Partnerships
132 133 7.4 Working Together Stakeholder Management All eyes on you: Directors and VPs love communities. They can get right in front of their customer group whenever they want. Unlike other mar- keting work that is more static, this can result in off the cuff sugges- tions or critiques that can come unexpectedly. Be ready to defend your rationale for anything that is up on your community, and remember to choose your battles—there’s nothing wrong with deleting a post every once in a while. Internal PR: Communities are a treasure trove for quotes, stories and new news. Make sure you’re keeping links for great threads/interactions and sharing them around to your wider team.
134 135 8 Parting Thoughts Creating a G+ community is no small feat, but it is a rewarding one. Witnessing the growth and genuine feedback from members is fulfilling. With that being said, we’re leaving you with some final words of wisdom: Every single process and plan you create will most likely be changed many times. Embrace the messiness, especially while launching, testing & learning different engagement strategies. Different strategies work with different communities for different reasons- not all people think the same way. Always be ready to pivot. Your own community will constantly teach you new lessons. Now go forth and prosper, you community creating guru, you.
136

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CommunityPlaybook (1)

  • 2. 2 3 Hello fellow Googler, G+ Communities are a fantastic way to bring together a group of people who can connect with each other to exchange ideas, opinions support and advice about a certain topic area. Based on the learnings from the launch and growth of the Google Small Business Community, this Playbook includes a detailed outline of all the steps you’ll need to take to launch a G+ Community, including hiring a team, moderation processes, content strategy, analytics, and more. Please feel free to reach out to lkashuk@google.com with additional questions. The GSBC Team A guide for Googlers who want to plan, launch, run and grow a thriving G+ community
  • 3. 4 5 1 Pre-Launch Planning 1.1 Justifying the Investment 06 1.2 Shaping a Strategy 12 1.3 Building a Brand 20 1.4 Hiring a Team 24 2 Community Management 2.1 Dealing with Spam 32 2.2 Offering Support 40 2.3 Service Level Agreement 44 2.4 Moderation Documents 46 2.5 Guest Moderators 50 3 Content Strategy & Style 3.1 Editorial Guiding Principles 54 3.2 The Google Voice 62 3.3 Visual Guidelines 66 3.4 The Content Calendar 72 4 Content Production 4.1 Digital Events 76 4.2 Production Checklist 82 4.3 Other Creative Assets 86 5 Promotion & Acquisition 5.1 Cross Promotion 90 5.2 Influencers 94 5.3 House Ads 96 6 Measurement & Optimization 6.1 What We Measure & Why 98 6.2 Tools, Reports & Process 104 6.3 Setting KPIs 112 6.4 What We Chose 116 7 Working Together 7.1 Internal Communications 120 7.2 Cross-Team Collaboration 124 7.3 Partnerships 128 7.4 Stakeholder Management 132 8 Parting Thoughts 134 Table of Contents
  • 4. 6 7 Don’t do it if: You have revenue targets: It’s not impossible to sell something via a G+ community, it’s just not the best place for sales messaging. Because of the focus on meaningful conversation, promotional messages do not perform well on this platform. Additionally, it is not easy to track sales coming from a G+ community at this point. More on analytics here. You are looking for mass awareness: G+ Communities are not built to be a scalable advertising platform for brands. Unlike Facebook or Twit- ter, where brands get millions of Fans or Followers, marketing messages can be broadcast out to those followers, and amplified through their net- works, a brand-managed G+ community is built to foster conversations between members. It’s more like a forum or group than a ‘fan page.’ 1.1 Pre-launch Planning Justifying the investment Best Practice: The KPIs of a G+ community must be primarily about quality of interaction (engagement), not quantity of people (membership). Did You Know? As of June 2014, the biggest G+ communities have around 500k members, while the biggest G+ page has 9 million followers. (And the biggest Facebook brand page has 152 million fans). Best Practice: Allow promotional messages only when you’re offering something free to members with a low barrier to usage. (For us, $20 toward a Helpout is ok. Spend $100 and get $50 off AdWords is not). Did You Know? 43% of customers say “blatantly self- promotional” content is a major turn-off.
  • 5. 8 9 Don’t do it if: Pre-launch Planning 1.1 Justifying the Investment Do it if: You don’t have people, time and money: Technically, it’s free to create a G+ Community. But to make one that truly adds value and grows over time, you’ll need a team of dedicated community managers and moder- ators at a minimum and an ongoing budget for content creation. You’re not prepared to provide technical support: Any public forum that is an official Google channel means that you’ll inevitably get people ask- ing you how to do that one thing on their Gmail that they used to be able to do and can’t find the button for now. They will find you, and you can- not ignore them. Before your launch a G+ community, have a plan (and the time) to answer or route tech support issues on any Google product. More on support here. You have an interested, like-minded audience: G+ Communities are a fantastic way to bring together a group of people who can connect with each other to exchange ideas, opinions, support and advice about a cer- tain topic area. A sign of a healthy G+ Community is when members be- gin to create high quality content that other members are commenting on. People appreciate that Google provides the forum—we don’t have to provide all the activities on it. You want to learn from your users: This is the perfect platform to build relationships directly with individuals, and to hear from the people that use your product or service. While a G+ Community should have an edi- torial calendar with content created by the brand, the content that is the most valuable are the interactions between members. Many Googlers don’t get direct, immediate access to users. Using your community as a place for qualitative research, quotes and beta testers is a great way to make us better at our jobs and involve the members directly in creating a better Google. Best Practice: Proactively head off technical support questions by offering resource roundups, links to help centers, Q+A’s and video trainings on frequently asked questions. Did You Know? The Google Small Business Community gets at least 3 technical support questions per week. Best Practice: Make sure your topics are something people are passionate about. Choose categories that have legs beyond product announcements and how to’s so your members won’t tire of the content and stop participating. Did You Know? Anyone can post and all posts are treated equally on the feed. Anyone can create an event. You may have some content areas in mind, but the democratic nature of the platform means that the members really get to control what is being discussed. Best Practice: Create a system that allows you to share the insights from your audience back with your larger team and cross-functional teams. Did You Know? The nature of interaction on G+ communities is deeper and more meaningful than other social networks. People are there to meet and talk and converse, not just ‘Like.’ Best Practice: A very well run community also involves copywriters, designers, video producers and editors, content marketers, analysts, and social strategists. Did You Know? Depending on whether your community is public or private and how large it will grow, expect to invest a minimum of $100k per quarter on it on an ongoing basis. More on budgeting and building a team here.
  • 6. 10 11 Pre-launch Planning 1.1 Justifying the Investment You’re a fierce protector of the Google brand: Unlike most market- ing materials which get edited, fine-tuned, proofread and approved up a chain of 10 people, the content that goes up on a G+ Community is alive and doesn’t have time to be perfected. One careless comment by a mod- erator 17 comments down a thread can become a screenshot that gets plastered all over the internet as something that ‘Google’ officially said. And unfortunately, there are sometimes detractors waiting for a slip up. Make sure your team and leaders have sharp creative instinct and expe- rience with what is ‘Googley.’ You want to build brand love: If your mission is authentic, your mem- bers will truly appreciate the effort. The Google Small Business Com- munity is a place where businesses can get the help they need to suc- ceed on the web by connecting with experts and each other. It’s entirely free and endlessly useful. When we launched, some of our new mem- bers even wondered what the catch was, and then eventually went on to evangelize the community to their networks. You’ll create advocates for Google naturally by simply being there for people. Best Practice: PR and legal training, extensive brand voice practice, and over communication among the internal team are imperative to avoid a trip up. More on escalation and brand voice here. Did You Know? Posts by moderators should go up 2-3x times a day, and comments on member posts can happen every few minutes. Best Practice: Be wary of other teams and senior stakeholders who may be tempted to turn your community into a promotional platform. Set a strong, pure mission upfront, sell it in, and stick to it. Did You Know? It feels good to be loved.  Timing Tip: Developing the rationale for the Small Business G+ community and securing budget took about 2 months. Jeff Bond Yesterday 2:38 PM +Brian Quimby & +Casey Monroe ... just got back home and have only one thing to say ... please give us #moar ;) thank you, i believe THIS is exactly how you build #community p.s. and thank you for the multiple camera tip brian, that works great! Shayna Jung Yesterday 2:38 PM So happy to be a part of the community! I am loving all of the productivty posts here already, what a great encouragement! Dianne P. 5:23 AM Thank you, Casey Monroe I've looked around and I've found some actually good information. You have a great community here. I'll stop by every day to see the updates and hopefully help others with my own experience. Ray Snoke Apr 10, 2014 Fantastic! Thank you for the information. I may have another question or two in a bit. But thank you very much. That's quite helpful. Do it if:
  • 7. 12 13 Insights: Uncover a real, human truth—likely something no one would say out loud—that you can turn into something that changes behavior. It probably shouldn’t be about your product. Instead, focus on cultural context or the consumer’s headspace—their attitudes, experiences or beliefs. Mission/Purpose: Given the insights you’ve pinpointed, what can your project do to improve their lives? Our community was built to help small businesses succeed on the web. What is yours for? KPIs/Goals: Now you can look inside and focus on the internal objec- tives of your new community. What would success look like? Are there acquisition and engagement goals you want to hit? Defining goals early on—even if they are edited—is important to getting senior stakeholders excited about your community. And as you hit them, it gives you ammo to get more investment in your project. More on establishing KPIs here. The Brief: Consolidate your strategy into a clear, inspirational one pager. You can use a template like this. Content Marketing Strategy: Ideally, your community will grow beyond just engagement (questions and answers), including a proper content marketing strategy to ensure that you’re bringing high quality information, inspiration and interaction to your members. Below are examples of some of the pieces of an early content strategy for the Google Small Business Community. The visuals that follow were meant as a guide to get us going—they evolved quickly as we learned from the members daily and adjusted. 1.2 Pre-launch Planning Shaping a Strategy
  • 8. 14 15 Types: Sketch out a plan for the topics and format of content you want, and what desired responses you expect. Service Responses to questions/ Routing to customer support/ Thanks for participation/ Office hours/ Help Outs Gratitude/Relief/Advocacy Snacks Infographics/Tips/Stats/ Quotes/Trivia +1 and share Discussion Thought pieces/Studies/ Reactions to current events/ Methods/Points of view/ Theories Consider and react Monday Snack: Quote from case study and link Training Tuesday Snack: Tip (Google yourself) CM Video Training: How to 1 Wednesday Snack: Infographic Discussion: Q/A Thursday Snack: Trivia Training: Share 1 Magic: Indv. spotlight Friday Recap: Highlights Discussion: Thought piece Ad Hoc Promo (1x) Magic: +1s, shoutouts Snack: Quote Service: GCS Hangout Snack: Tip Training: How to 2 Snack: Infographic Learn 10x Snack: Trivia Training: Share 2 Snack: Tip (GABO) Magic: Biz spotlight Promo (1x) Magic: +1s, shoutouts Snack: Quote from case study and link Training Snack: Tip (Google yourself) CM Video Training: How to 1 Snack: Infographic Discussion: Q/A Snack: Trivia Training: Share 1 Magic: Indv. spotlight Recap: Highlights Discussion: Thought piece Promo (1x) Magic: +1s, shoutouts Training Training/How tos/Education modules/Project show & tells/ Case studies Understand/Try Magic Google watercooler/Rewards and recognition/Surprise + delight Brand love/Advocacy Product Promotions/Links to campaigns/Product pages Click and become a member Cadence: Start to think about balance and flow of your content and devel- op a skeleton content calendar to get a feel for how it plays out day by day. Long-term Goal: 50% of the activity coming from members themselves Pre-launch Planning 1.2 Shaping a Strategy Description Content BalanceContent Types Content Calendar Template Desired response Desired response Description Snacks 50% Service Discussion 20% Magic 5% Training 20% Product 5%
  • 9. 16 17 1 Quiet Launch March 19 Content Pre-populate content into 'Be Found' and 'Advertise and Measure' Aquisition GABO week daily HOAs Capture long tail founding members via GABO week initiatives Operations First week of active moderation and activation of content calendar 2 Test April—June Rub SMB week special Promote growth via internal newsletters and communities Invite Googlers and friends/fam to 'dogfood' Test content to determine best formats, topics and cadence/Run experiments and proactive polling (first HOA, hashtags, behaviors) 3 Loud Launch July Regular programming based on learnings from test Need big activators/ Engagement stunt/ AdWords campaign/ G+ suggestions placement/ Other paid promos Add work together section/Hire additional team member/Plan for growth period 4 Grow August—September Regular programming Begin monthly newsletter (via SMB Hub) Paid aquisition continues and extends to other social channels Take over G+, FB, Twitter/Add LinkedIn/Hire additional team member(s) 5 Campaigns October—December Regular programming Begin monthly newsletter (via SMB Hub) Need holiday activation/ Engagement stunt/ Paid promo and campaign ideas Add 4th Earn category Sources: Who will create your content? You probably don’t want to start from scratch every time. Develop a who’s who of the voices for your community. Phases: Communities can be unwieldy compared to many other types of projects that are fully under your control. You should develop a tenta- tive plan for launching and growing your community over the course of the first year, knowing that as it grows organically, the way forward will becoming more and more clear. Here is a sample of our first stab at 5 phases of the Google Small Business Community. More on our how our content strategy netted out here. Who's who - Content Creators Phases of Growth Pre-launch Planning 1.2 Shaping a Strategy Daily The Pulse (hired teams/customer support/members) Weekly Experts (unknown Googler/Partners/comarketing/etc.) Monthly Thought Leaders (known Googlers/outside influencers) Quarterly Celebs Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
  • 10. 18 19 Best Practice: Your strategy will shift constantly, but having some guidance down on paper helps keep you moving forward. Keep your eyes open for opportunities and embrace change.  Timing Tip: Developing and getting all stakeholders aligned on the strategy took about 2 months. Launch Plan: If you’re starting your community from scratch, a plan to introduce yourself to the world is key. Communities should start small and grow fairly slowly in order to retain their relevance and activity. Because of that, we started with a “quiet launch,” taking advantage of another team’s initiative that generated some founding members and content for us. We ran tests and made hundreds of tweaks to our content strategy over the next two months working up to a “loud launch,” which would involve a much heavier push for new members. We ended up formally launching 6 weeks ahead of time to take advantage of a Small Business related national event. Instead of using paid advertising, we got a home page promotion on Google.com. Pre-launch Planning 1.2 Shaping a Strategy
  • 11. 20 21 Naming your community: We used a combination of keyword research and Google Consumer Surveys to form a recommendation for the name of our community. Because G+ has some great SEO benefits, it is im- portant to choose a name that is search friendly and memorable, vs one that is clever but not straightforward. The Challenge of Creative Excellence: Our SMB Marketing team aspires to create work that is beautiful, helpful and fun. Our team of communi- ty managers and content creators were certainly able to make sure the content of our posts was practical and relevant to our audience and in- teresting and entertaining to engage with. That’s what they do. But we didn’t have the budget for a designer to be at the ready every time we needed to post something (3x/day). A Systematic Solution: Before we launched, we worked with a creative agency to develop our branding: starting with our avatar (the closest thing you’ll get to a logo). Using Google’s Quantum Spec as a guide, we came up with a visual representation of what we wanted our community to be about: businesses interacting with each other. 1.3 Pre-launch Planning Building a Brand
  • 12. 22 23 Once that was approved all the way up through our VP, we used it as a guide to develop a comprehensive set of editable templates that would function as the visuals for our day to day content. There are over 60 templates in our set to account for those with pictures and icons, those without, and for variety in copy lengths and colors. Eventually, this same branding style was rolled out into things like swag giveaways (water bot- tles, etc.), animated end cards for videos, and other marketing assets like emails and paid ads. Best Practice: Hire a community manager who is fairly comfortable in basic Photoshop skills so he/she can use these templates to create the content each week. Best Practice: Try to come up with a system that is flexible enough for different media and applications.  Timing Tip: Developing and getting approval on the branding and templates took about 2 months and cost $150k. Pre-launch Planning 1.3 Building a Brand
  • 13. 24 25 Hire and Agency? Google teams, marketing especially, tend to default to using agencies to staff projects. In taking a look at the landscape and in- terviewing Googlers with previous experience in social, we chose to go a different route because: Boutique digital creative agencies They do more than social, so they ar- en't interested in community management/moderation in the long term. It's something they'll probably do, especially for Google, but not some- thing they work to hire the best talent for. To them, it’s not a sexy cam- paign, it’s an ongoing day job. The main thing this type of agency would be interested in with a G+ community project is the content creation side of things—and more so when it's higher production content that re- quires a lot of design or mini-campaigns/contests, videos, etc. With their own internal approval process, getting daily microcontent from an agen- cy would take too long, and we’d still have to solve the moderation issue. They often outsource the bulk of the moderation and manage that rela- tionship, or they would have to hire moderators for us specifically. 1.4 Pre-launch Planning Hiring a Team
  • 14. 26 27 Big, full service digital agency of record They are machines. They have a department for everything, so they often can manage social content and moderation. However, the plug and play resources and have high turnover, which leads to the possibility of different people on different days. With the nuance of the Google voice, the importance of a personal connection with moderators, and the intricacies of working with Google’s internal systems/processes, it’s tough not having a 100% dedicated team. With these types of agencies, you may also deal with account people trying to upsell you to use their other services. Social agencies. They know all the tricks of each social platform to hit the acquisition and engagement scores that they need to look good. They often even recycle content ideas across a ton of brands (New Year's Resolution post framing for a cracker brand, a B2B brand, a clothing company can look shockingly similar coming out of places like this). The quality of content from these shops can be formulaic, but their moderation is solid. Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team Hire a team: By personally recruiting 3 stellar team members, each with their own strengths, we were able to plug directly into a lean but close- knit team of specialists fully dedicated to our G+ community. We decid- ed to go the route of having the three red-badged TVCs split moderation duties in the beginning, knowing that we could scale that up easily later on by hiring a layer of junior moderators once volume was high enough.
  • 15. 28 29 Roles and Responsibilities:Here is what the model looks like: Content/Community Managers Moderators Team Lead Google PMM Google PMM: The Community Lead • Accountable for overall success and evolution of the community • Identify opportunities to improve and add to long term strategy • Manage creative process and approvals of all stakeholders • Liaison with other Google teams and own outside partnerships • Manage budget and hiring • Partner closely with Team/Ops Lead on event production • Concept special initiatives, activations and campaigns Content/Community Managers: • Concept ideas for content topics, formats and series • Research and write short and long form content • Own content calendar • Find, repurpose and curate existing third party content • Collect data and create monthly and quarterly reports • Run experiments analyze results for those, along with campaigns and activations • Daily moderation and/or management of moderators and guest moderators • Develop ideas and strategies for engagement and acquisition • Help execute events and activations Team/Ops Lead: • Responsible for day to day success of the community • Supervise Community Managers and moderators • Work closely with PMM on implementation of special initiatives, activations, campaigns and event production • Project manager of all processes and productions Moderators: • Respond to members • Remove spam • Listening and assistance with reporting • Pattern identification and trend identification • Sending swag and thank you notes  Timing Tip: It took about 1 month to find and hire our first 3 team members and 2 additional weeks to get them the access they needed via the tvc process. Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team
  • 16. 30 31 Best Practice: When you hit 20k members or 20 member posts/day, be ready to hire 1-2 additional team members who spend 100% of the time on moderation and spam removal. Consider hiring an offshore overnight moderator to ensure that each morning, your community has high quality content and conversations. Best Practice: Consider hiring two community managers, each with different strengths in the responsibilities listed above. Best Practice: Find a community management team that is passionate about what they do by recruiting via something like Meetup.com. Find people who are actively involved and interested in the community management industry extra-curricularly. Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team
  • 17. 32 33 2.1 Community Management Dealing with Spam As your community grows, you’ll notice that you’ll be defining and redefining spam. At first you might just think of it as electronic junk, multiple posts or gibberish words written in Arabic but as the community becomes more discoverable and active, so do the kind of spam posts that surface. It’s important to constantly evaluate what you consider spam and to inform your community, both with publicly posted guidelines and individually as people violate that policy.
  • 18. 34 35 Google Small Business Community Henry Akanno Work Together – 10:40 AM watching Italy Vs. Costa Rica world cup games! Best Practice: In general, anyone who only does this once gets a pass. But multiple offenders are quickly banned from the community. We’ve landed on 4 spam categories that might help you get started defining yours: 1. Spam: Electronic junk. No more explanation needed. 2. Irrelevant: This can be a judgment call. Often, posts like this are dis- cussed by the core community management moderation team. While it’s not a spam post, it doesn’t offer any value to the community. He isn’t asking a question or communicating with other members. Community Management 2.1 Dealing with Spam Best Practice: Have a group chat up during the day for quick gut-checks with the moderation team regarding spam. As you notice patterns, document them so you don’t have to have similar time-draining conversations over and over again. What We Do The Google Small Business Community is designed to help busi- ness people make the most of the web. It’s a place for business owners to connect with Googlers, industry experts, and their peers. Our moderators will be in the community to offer guidance and answer questions from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM Pacific Time on weekdays (except for major US holidays). What We Ask From You Be helpful. This is all about bringing people with varied expertise and experiences together to help each other out. Do your best to support your fellow contributors to the community with positive, relevant posts and comments. Be respectful. Other people in the community will have differ- ent perspectives, beliefs, and points of view. That’s okay. Please be polite and compassionate. If you have a disagreement, work it out professionally (and in private). Be specific. When you have a question, idea, or response, the more context and information you can provide, the better. Be constructive. This is your community as much as it is ours, and we know you have a lot to offer. We need your feedback to make sure that the community is the best it can be. Be family-friendly. Anyone with a Google account is able to see the community, so make sure you’re not posting anything you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see. Be open. We encourage you to give advice, offer help, and share your experiences doing business, especially when it comes to the web. Guidelines for the Community Don’t promote. This isn’t the place to post marketing material for your business. To maintain meaningful conversations about suc- ceeding on the web, we do not accept promotional offers, sales pitches via blog posts, or links to a general homepage (with the exception of introducing yourself or asking for feedback on a web site). Don’t post classified ads. This isn’t the place to job search. We want to remain focused on creating and fostering an environ- ment for business people to share their advice and experience. Don't post links without context. We encourage you to share links with our community as long as they're business-related. We ask that you include a short writeup in your post that tells mem- bers something you learned from the article you're sharing. Links without summaries will be removed by our moderation team. Don't worry if your link gets removed. We evaluate the content of each link shared to make sure it's up to our quality standards. Our moderators act as editors to make sure that the community feed always has a well-curated set of useful articles, with the best of the best included in our daily #BizLinks roundup. If your link comes down, please try again another time, with a different link. Don’t be mean. Abuse, insults, profanity, personal attacks, bul- lying or hateful comments (including but not limited to com- ments about race, gender, sexual expression or identity) will be removed. Don’t post personal information. Members of the community may share information with you that isn’t intended to be shared with the public. Because the Google Small Business Communi- ty is a public community, we ask that you be careful about what information you share. Please don’t post personal information about other users, like phone numbers, email addresses or cus- tomer ID numbers. Repeatedly breaking any of these rules will result in your being banned from the community. Here's a look at our community guidelines. Google Small Business Community KEIN TRUC NMB Work Together – Jun 1, 2014 http://094983487762724872.blogspot.com/ 094983487762724872 094983487762724872.blogspot.com +1  Add a comment... +1 
  • 19. 36 37 3. Self-Promotional: This is also a tricky topic. When our communi- ty first launched, we allowed many self-promotional posts because our standards for member created content was very low, and we wanted to allow people to introduce themselves. Over time we saw fans take ad- vantage of the fact that unlike a G+ brand page, they too could post their own content. This allowed us to evaluate on a case by case basis if the fan was just being self-promotional for their own sake or to genuinely contribute. Oftentimes we would have one off conversations with fans explaining our policy. We’d invite them to return following the policy by asking a question or commenting. 4. Link Dumping: Because we’re a business community, a lot of our members want to share business related links. This is great when they’re encouraging discussion, but you don’t want your community to become just an endless string of links with no discussion. Community Management 2.1 Dealing with Spam Best Practice: Positive encouragement and suggestions go a long way when private messaging someone who inadvertently posted spam. We’ve seen members come back and contribute in meaningful ways. Best Practice: We eventually settled on a policy where we allow links as long as they’re business- related, they include a summary in the post text (to add friction), and the articles themselves are high quality. We tell the community that we think of ourselves as editors of the community’s content, rather than just moderators. Did You Know? It’s better to start strict while moderating and loosen up as you’ve gained respect and control than it is to start relaxed and tighten up. Google Small Business Community Security and Investigations Be Found Online – May 21, 2014 Check out the DMOC Entertainment website like us on facebook.com/DmocEnt or dmoc-ent.com/ Dmoc Entertainment facebook.com/DmocEnt Google Small Business Community Steve Burk MiscBiz – May 12, 2014 Thanks for letting me join this community. I am one of the partners of a small repair shop looking for our chance to go bigger. Come check us out. Any feedback is appreciated. www.PeerlessInkc.com +1 +2   Google Small Business Community Allen Borza MiscBiz – Jun 18, 2014 How to speed up your business website Speed up and organize your website greengroup.com/blog/web/speed +1  Not Allowed Allowed
  • 20. 38 39 When you remove a post, you should to send some kind of message to the person whose post was removed, to let them know why you removed it. Google+ has three ways of doing this, but we recommend doing it via a comment on the removed post. Here’s the list of options, and why we made the selection we did: Escalation Flowchart Community Management 2.1 Dealing with Spam Hangouts. You can send a Hangouts message, but a lot of users don’t sign in to Hangouts or don’t notice the message, and miss it. In addition, it gives strangers in your community the ability to ping you BACK on Hangouts, which you usually don’t want. Finally, there’s a spam quota—if you send too many Hangouts in a short time, your ability to start new Hangouts is temporarily removed. Privately shared posts. Like Hangouts, this also has a spam quota—notify too many people too quickly, and your posts get removed. We also noticed a low response rate here. Comment on the removed post. For this method (and only this method) of messaging, Community Moderators are immune to the spam quota, which is reason alone to use it. It also has the highest rate of acknowledgement by the user being moderated. Two things to bear in mind, though: First, posts should be removed quickly—removed posts in Google+ communities don’t disappear until you refresh the community, but comments appear automatically. So if someone is on the community when you remove the post, the post will appear to remain up, but your moderation comment will be visible. Second, anyone who visits the profile of the person whose post was removed will be able to see the comment. So while your posts won’t be obvious to other people in the community, they still won’t be strictly private—so be careful what you say! Best Practice: Keep a document with a pre-written list of responses you can use to address the different types of posts that need removing.  Timing Tip: Expect to spend 2-3 days writing and revising your guidelines and spam policy. You should also expect to re-evaluate them both at least once a month—more often during the early stages. Is the post within the guidelines? Remove the post No No No No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Does the post ask a question or otherwise request follow up? Engage. Welcome the user and encourage them to feel at home. Is it a question that can only be answered by a Googler? Is it a question that is appropriate for us to answer? (Not related to competing products, etc.) Is it a sensitive question? (for example, online privacy in Google Drive) Escalate. Let the rest of the team know what’s going on, and loop in PR/Legal to get official language for a response. Encourage Advisor response. Loop in the #AskAnAdvisor hashtag and surface to the Advisors as needed. Contribute and call backup. Provide some info to answer the question yourself, but also loop in the Advisors for more detailed info. Offer Support. Redirect them to support resources, offer simple answers where possible.
  • 21. 40 41 2.2 Community Management Offering Support The Google Small Business Community is not meant to be a community to get tech support on Google products. That said, any time you open a channel through which people can talk to a Googler, you will get tech support requests. Because we’re a marketing channel, we have a specific focus on making sure our community members walk away happy, which means that handling tech support requests can be a touchy subject.
  • 22. 42 43 Reactive: Answer the easy ones. Our first tool is to answer the question. If it’s an answer you know or can find easily, go for it. If it’s a complicated question, route away. If you can’t answer the question yourself (or even if you can), you should provide them with a support resource to get more information—usually the Help Center, or official support forum. You can find that list here. Always route somewhere specific. When you route, it’s always better to route someone to a page that directly addresses their ques- tion rather than a help center or forum homepage. Even if you’re just linking someone to the “tech support” category on the forums, that’s better than routing to the forums in general. Follow up. When you route someone, check back in on them afterwards (by PM if necessary) to make sure their issue has been resolved. This goes a long way to have members that feel personally connected to Google. Proactive: Post about support resources. Because posts on G+ aren’t preserved very well, be sensitive to questions that are coming up a lot, and proac- tively post to let people know where the answers can be found. Close any replies with posts directing people to support resources. When you answer a question, whether you get a final answer or not, always include a link to the support resources they would need to answer further questions. Post more heavily about non-product related things. We want to make sure we set the tone that we talk more about advice and strategy than directly about Google products. Keep a list of contacts. You should maintain a list of internal contacts at Google for every Google product you expect to get support questions about—as well as in the PR and Legal departments—in case you need to double-check your messaging. Partner with support teams. We have monthly meetings with the SMB Services team (AdWords support) to fill them in on what kinds of questions our members are asking and to share content back and forth between our community and their support forums. Our relationship with this team has been highly beneficial on both sides. Community Management 2.2 Offering Support Best Practice: Answering questions is good, but having your user base answer them for you is better. Once you get to know your community, you can +tag in another user who knows the answer. If you’ve covered something previously, be sure and call back to your earlier content with a link!
  • 23. 44 45 2.3 Community Management Serivce Level Agreement Hours of operation: We make it clear to our community that we will be online and answering questions during normal working hours (Pacific Time). We clean up spam and bad posts outside those hours, but we don’t engage directly. Having our hours posted helps set expectations. Procedure/time frame for responding: At our launch, our goal was to answer all questions within three hours. As long as it’s within actual working hours, we’ve had no trouble keeping to that schedule, even as our community grows to 25k or more. Follow ups: We keep a spreadsheet that tracks “open loops—” that is, any conversation where we know a user is waiting on us for an answer. Once we’ve responded and the matter is settled, we hide the row so we still have a record, but we know it isn’t pressing.
  • 24. 46 47 Date Moderator Link to post Reason for removal 1 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/1234 Spam 2 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2455 Spam 3 6/15/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2044 Link 4 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/a034 Self-promo 5 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/232455 Spam/Non-English 6 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/24084 Link 7 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/1234 Spam 8 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2455 Spam 9 6/15/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2044 Link 10 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/a034 Self-promo 11 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/232455 Spam/Non-English 12 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/24084 Link 13 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/1234 Spam 14 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2455 Spam 15 6/15/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2044 Link 16 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/a034 Self-promo 17 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/232455 Spam/Non-English 18 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/24084 Link 19 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/232455 Spam/Non-English 20 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/24084 Link 2.4 Community Management Moderation Documents This document tracks every post we find ourselves needing to remove. For each post, we note: 1. The date 2. The moderator who removed it 3. The name of the poster: This allows us to search by name to see if we have any repeat offenders. 4. A link to the post: This lets us check the actual post to verify how bad it was, and to read the comment that was used to reply to the post. 5. The reason for the removal: This lets us look for trends in different types of spam. 6. Whether or not the person was banned Removed Posts Removed/Flagged Posts from Community 
  • 25. 48 49 Form Responses  Canned Responses Flagged for Follow-Up This doc is where we pre-write our responses to removed posts. We up- date it frequently as we change our Guidelines and we see different types of spam, but the common thread is that each response polite- ly informs the user that the post was removed, explains why, links to the Community Guidelines, and invites them to try again. This document includes a link to every “open loop” thread—everything we need to make sure that no question ever slips through the cracks. In the document we track the following things: Each row is hidden once we resolve the issue, so we retain a record—but our goal is to keep this spreadsheet clean. • Name of the poster • Date of the original post • Link to the post • General question topic • Our next step Community Management 2.4 Moderation Documents Best Practice: If you see the kind of behavior on the community that you want, engage with it. Always acknowledge positive behavior and radiate positivity. It’s contagious. Self Promotion Maxim nonsequid erias voluptatur rero doloratat. Voluptatem estem aut paribus cipsandi iusant venim inciist oreprovitio officiis endemolectur re mode. Link Dump Maxim nonsequid erias voluptatur rero doloratat. Voluptatem estem aut paribus cipsandi iusant venim inciist oreprovitio officiis endemolectur re mod estibeatem fugia sinture ma et voluptis aut eictate ssimodit ulpa quas pos exceribe.. Blogspm Maxim onsequid erias voluptatur rero doloratat. Voluptatem estem aut paribus cipsandi iusant venim inciist oreprovitio officiis endemolectur re mod estibeatem fugia sinture ma et voluptis aut eictate ssimodit ulpa quas pos exceribe.. 9 ABCO 4/30/2014 plus.google.com/128912 AdSense not working! 12 Mihai GRBlog 5/11/2014 plus.google.com/1394 Denied for AdSense 14 Ashish G 5/21/2014 plus.google.com/94939 AdSense Help 17 Tuck Sing Leee 5/27/2014 plus.google.com/2423 Auto-posting blogs from social media Removed/Flagged Posts from Community 
  • 26. 50 51 2.5 Community Management Guest Moderators Our community has a group of dedicated third party volunteers, who we call Advisors. The purpose of the Advisor program is to make sure that every question gets answered. Setting up a volunteer moderator program is great if your internal team doesn’t have the bandwidth to engage with every active member at scale. And sometimes, as Googlers, we get questions that we can’t answer. Some examples of risky topics include: Competing Products. In many cases, it makes sense for a Google cus- tomer to also take advantage of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, or any number of other products that compete with Google. We never want to give our customers bad advice or a limited picture, but advising people on what competing products to use and how can be legally dangerous. Our Advisors can freely give advice on all business tools across the web. SEO. The precise workings of Google’s search engine are a closely guarded secret, and even if you’re only casually brushing the topic, offer- ing information “directly from Google” can always be risky. Instead, we link them to Google’s SEO handbook and then let others do the talking. In cases like these, we depend on our Advisors to make sure that we have a way to get these questions answered, without having to answer them ourselves.
  • 27. 52 53 Working with third party moderators Community Access. We don’t recommend providing third parties with moderator access to your community, as any moderator can make de- cisions (like removing posts) that you don’t necessarily want to leave in the hands of a volunteer. Unfortunately, “moderator” and “owner” are the only levels of access, meaning that you can’t easily make your vetted third party guests stand out. For this purpose we recommend using a doc (like this one) to identify your volunteers and make them stand out. Communication. Always make sure you can reach your volunteers via email. You may be tempted to reach out to them exclusively on Google+, but many people don’t check their G+ notifications the way they check their email. The Pitch. In many cases, you won’t have to sell people on an opportu- nity like this—recognition from Google goes a long way. That said, it’s important to make the benefit statement clear: What you’re offering is an opportunity to connect directly with potential customers, in order to build your brand and identity as an expert. We get their expertise, they get access to our user base and the validation that comes from a Goo- gle seal of approval. What they don’t get, is... ...Self-promotion. Make sure that your volunteers know that they’re not there to promote themselves at the expense of the community. It’s im- portant that they don’t use your community to advertise—but it’s also im- portant that they feel rewarded for their contributions, so be sure to use your own influence to promote them where it makes sense. Check-ins. We encourage you to have regular check-ins with your volun- teers to make sure they’re happy and excited to contribute. As long as they’re helping, it makes everyone look good. Vetting. Make sure that you carefully vet any volunteers before you give them the stamp of approval. The vast majority of the people in our Ad- visors group have already been vetted as Ambassadors for the Google Partners Community, so we know they have training both in how to use our products and in what they can and can’t say. If you don’t have anoth- er group to rely on, you’ll have to do that training yourself. Be careful! Surfacing Issues to Your Guest Moderators. We use two different tech- niques to let our guest mods know when an issue comes up that needs their attention. First, we created a hashtag (#AskAnAdvisor) to flag ques- tions that need their attention—our Advisors regularly check that tag for new posts. For times when we have exceptionally high volume (like Small Business Week), we also created a simple doc that lists links to rel- evant questions, identifies the topic, and then has a field where Advisors can “claim” the question, so they don’t wind up duplicating a lot of work by answering the same question multiple times. This isn’t necessary during normal volume, but it’s good to have ready for special events. Community Management 2.5 Guest Moderators
  • 28. 54 55 Plan ahead. When planning the rough outline of content topics for the community each quarter, the first thing we check is the calendar for big holidays that would be relevant to our members, such as Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Small Business Week, Earth Day, etc. We have at least a daily piece of content for these holidays, if not bigger activations such as interviews or business spotlights we can do in the community. Be flexible and timely. In addition to planning ahead for holidays, your content calendar should also leave room for last minute, unplanned additions or postponements. This can be the launch of another Google product (or community), a policy change in your moderation guidelines that requires an explanation post, or replacing a piece of content you had scheduled. Additionally, we keep a content repository to refer to when we need to plug in a piece of content - such as statistics to use for trivia questions, quotes to inspire conversation, and links to business related we can repurpose for branded content. Steal and share with pride. To capture the interest of your fans and be seen as a thought leader, find ways to produce your own unique content, rather than repost what you can find (even if it’s really awesome.) That said, borrow from other relevant Google content like Think with Google, Life @ Google, etc to see what you can repurpose for your community. Establish points of contact on teams that you share content with regu- larly, and be ready to share back! Create a Content Resource doc so content creators have a starting point that’s not a blank page. 3.1 Content Strategy & Style Editorial Guiding Principles Berrak Sarikaya MODERATOR MiscBiz  Jun 20, 2014 How to Share Your Best #BizLinks Our goal is to make sure that our community mem- bers are getting the help they need to succeed on the web. That can happen through useful content, like the links you share with us every day. But the best connections really happen through conversations. Re- cently, we tested a new way to handle submissions for business-related links to try to encourage interaction around fewer, better resourceds. We've been tracking this experiment closely, and have decided that there is an easier way for you to share the articles that you have found helpful with others. With this in mind, we're making a change.
  • 29. 56 57 About this community Welcome to the Google Small Business Community—a place where businesses can get the help they need to succeed on the web by connecting with experts and each other. In addition to regular Hangouts and Q+As with Googlers, trusted Advisors and industry leaders, you'll also see: #BizBits - Stats, tips, quotes and trivia for a little learning every day #BizBytes - Case studies, infographics, thought pieces, and articles to discuss #Bizdom - Topic-specific training sessions led by web specialists #BizLinks - Roundups of your favorite resources every Monday/Wednesday/Friday #FeedbackFridays -Your chance to have the community weigh in on ideas #AskanAdvisor -If you have a question you want an online pro to answer Invite people Share this community Serialize everything. We’ve established specific formats of content we post on certain days of the week, so that our members expect it and can follow along to the programs they enjoy most. Brand these series with memorable hashtags to encourage repeat visits and interaction. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.1 Editorial Guiding Principles Be consistent. In addition to branded series that occur on a regular schedule, have a consistent posting format, always including a headline, hashtag and CTA. Member spotlights should always be called spotlights, rather than sometimes being snapshots. Same thing goes for recaps, roundups and resources. Using similar language helps train members on how to use the community and offers familiarity. Sort by categories. In addition to hashtags, utilize the G+ Community Categories. We decided that we would have 4 broad categories when we launched the community: Be Found Online, Advertise & Measure, Work Together, and MiscBiz (for anything that didn’t fall into the first three cat- egories). As the community grew, we added a weekly recap to our con- tent on Fridays, which led to the creation of the Week in Review catego- ry, which serves as an Archive of the best content. Welcome MiscBiz Be Found Online Work Together Advertise & Measure Week in Review Events  Search community 6 1 1 1
  • 30. 58 59 Let the members lead the way: Your members are your greatest inspira- tion, you should constantly be on the lookout for content ideas coming straight from their words. Your community should be a creative outlet for them to voice feedback, discussion topics and content series. For ex- ample, Google Small Business Community members posting questions about hiring for their business was the inspiration behind our Hiring for Your Business Hangout. Another example is a member who created an introduction video to re- ply to follow up questions asked by our moderators about his business. This led us to launch a series of SMB created videos. Always have a next step: Each piece of content should include a CTA to encourage engagement, such as a question tied in to your post, RSVPing and submitting questions for an event, or downloading a one-sheeter that we’ve created. When appropriate, we also include links to addition- al resources, as well as calling out any related content that’s been post- ed in the community. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.1 Editorial Guiding Principles Berrak Sarikaya MODERATOR MiscBiz  Jun 20, 2014 #BizBits Share your productivity tips with us The key to productivity is creating a routine and minimizing distractions. In addition to starting your day right with a morning ritual, increase your producitvity by setting limits on meetings, using technology and apps to streamline your business, and creating old-fashioned to-do lists. Want to know how other members being their mornings? Check out this post on with their commesnts on morning rituals: http://goo.gl/mbQOsJ Google Small Business Community Michael Stringfield MiscBiz – Jun 18, 2014 Thank you Casey Monroe for asking me for some thoughts. This is the video that I came up with. I have a ton of thoughts but I didn't want to drag on and on. Thank you again! +1 
  • 31. 60 61 Optimize Frequency and Cadence: • We’ve found that posting content 2-3 times per business day is the best for exposure and engagement. This will also allow your members to go back and comment on posts they may have missed. • This will take trial & error as you get familiar with your members. We’ve found that posting between 8:30 and 10 AM PDT to kick off the day works best for our members. We disperse the rest of the posts throughout the day, usually at 3 hour intervals. • You’ll usually receive a surge of activity after regular work hours, when businesses get online at the end of the day. • Pin & repin posts that are getting a lot of engagement to highlight them and continue the conversation. Let people talk about themselves. While 80% of our content is about doing business online, we break it up with calls for people to share about more personal things. For example, we ask our members about the books they’re reading, their morning routines, what gives them inspira- tion, etc. We try to have one of these a week to encourage more engage- ment and our members interacting with each other. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.1 Editorial Guiding Principles
  • 32. 62 63 Expanding on the already established Google Brand Voice and the User to User Guide, we developed a few best practices for the voice of the Google Small Business Community that applies to both the content we create and how the moderators interact with our members. No exclamation points, emoticons or internet slang of any kind. It’s easy to get carried away with these in social platforms, and it ends up sounding insincere when overused. We stick to straightforward punctua- tion, allowing our humor to come through within the words themselves. Be conversational. Use contractions. Google is friendly. No need to be stuffy or overly formal. 3.2 Content Strategy & Style The Google Voice Before: Give us your best guess! Try not to Google it ;) LOL. After: Take a guess. Try not to Google it. Before: We aim to provide you with information and knowledge so you can take advantage of op- portunities to succeed in online marketing. After: We hope you’ll learn a lot about using the web to better your business.
  • 33. 64 65 Steer clear of corporate jargon and acronyms. While we may be drown- ing in this at the office, we can’t let them escape into the real world. It makes people feel excluded and insecure. If we absolutely have to use certain terms, we try to define it within the context of the conversation. Always be positive. Try to avoid talking about hot button issues our team can’t solve, like “is Google spying on me?” Instead, we stay proactive and bring attention to the value we can provide. But when uncomfortable or sensitive issues arise, do not ignore them. Answer humbly and positively, thanking members for their feedback. Here’s an example of a positivity-led response to one of our few and far between negative posters: Be specific when suggesting resources. If a member has a very specific product question, do a little bit of research to try to find the answer. Barring that, find the appropriate forum that can help them or ask an expert to respond, instead of directing them to the a Help Center home page or leaving them hanging. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.2 The Google Voice Example Community Question Our Answer Nikolas Bogioglou Mar 20, 2014 I have a question. How can you convince/help us about google/google+ and SMB's when you have barely 4 posts and 100 followers? I am far from sure that you are the right person to even moderate this community. I have deep knowledge/belief on the semantic web and how google+ can kill many birds with one stone for SMB's BUT you seem to never believed this until you were hired as a community manager. If you need any help, no need to post in a community. Just PM me and I will do it unconditionally and ofc free of charge - This applies to everyone. Casey Monroe Mar 20, 2014 +3 We're glad you're doing your homework, +Nikolaos Bogioglou. Lauren, Berrak and I are always learning more about online tools. This is a great chance for us to explain our role as moderators. Our deepest expertise and passion lies in managing communites. Our job here is to facilitate conversation, make sure questions get answered, and connect people to help each other. We also act as our members' ambassadors. As we get to know our members and what they are interested in learned, we'll work to bring the most useful information and experts we can to address those topics. I'm glad you have advice to share freely with this group, and I hope you decide to share it here on our community so we can all benefit. Security and Investigations Be Found Online – May 21, 2014 Hi, do you know how I can secure my sheet in docs with a password? +8  Berrak Sarikaya May 23, 2014 Hi +Marek Dorsz, +Roxanna Daniel is correct. Your documents and spreadsheets in Google Drive are not accessible by anyone until you give them access. You can get more info on sharing documents in Google Drive here: https://support. google.com/drive/answer/2494886 Lee Pettijohn Advertise & Measure – May 16, 2014 Greetings, Thanks for the invite. I received the invitation in an email from Google Analytics that had a snapshot of one of my accounts. I'm hoping that someone in here knows how to create this kind of report for all the websites I watch. Any help is appreciated. Thanks. +8  Casey Monroe May 16, 2014 Hi +Lee Pettijohn—unfortunately, those particular reports are created specially for the email updates, and can't be edited. I've relayed the suggestion back to the Google Analytics team, though. In the meantime, as +Alexey Chesnok says, you can customize your reports in a number of differ- ent ways. More information can be found here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11 51300 We do appreciate you joining us here in the community, though, and we're happy to offer help where we can. What sort of business do you do? Before: Identify your target market to find prospective customers.. After: Find your ideal customers and be clear about why they should pick you over your competition. Weave in go-to phrases: For the Small Business Community, we say “Make the most of the web,” “make the web work for your business,” and “get the help you need to succeed on the web.” This reinforces our mission and the value we strive to provide.
  • 34. 66 67 All creative assets that are posted in your community should be consistent with your visual branding, which can require repurposing of content used from other sources. At a glance, all of the posts in your community created by your team should look uniform. 3.3 Content Strategy & Style Visual Guidelines
  • 35. 68 69 #BizBits Pis mossectibus num ipsunt optas rem eum quossincit anditiis et ex esciaepudi optaspis nit officiasit laborep elitibus, veri ius quia velest officidel moluptatus. Xeratia natibusae coritatum aspidelibus rere porae. Et ut eicit, voluptiniam sim sendit everaeprepe laboribus dolorei ciatque eseque velia pratestiberi     http://goo.gl  Left-aligned. All of our copy in our creative assets is left-aligned according to our Google SMB Marketing brand book. Shortened links. We shorten all of our links using the goo.gl tool, both for analytics purposes and for a clean look. For more formal uses such as a HPP, we use a g.co link that can be created by filing this bug Contnent Strategy & Style 3.3 Visual Guidelines Use hashtags in titles. Even when they aren’t clickable, hashtags in our images help reinforce the branding of our series and encourage people to participate. Always include a branded graphic element. Every post we have in the community is accompanied by either a branded share graphic or a video.
  • 36. 70 71 Photos. Every photo that’s posted in your community should include your branding, so your creative templates should include one for photos. Never use stock images when posting in a Google community. In addition to high-resolution images our creative agency provided for us, we also make use of the GCreative Library to find photos relevant to our content when applicable. When spotlighting a small business or featur- ing an interview, always plug in the photo to your branded template. Use appropriate icons. Our creative agency provided us with a library of icons in the photoshop files for our snacks. When talking about Google Maps, we have the maps pin icon. When discussing search, we use the magnifying glass, and so on. If there’s no appropriate icon, we leave it out. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.3 Visual Guidelines #BizSpotlight Bazaar Curiosities & Oddities
  • 37. 72 73 Find a format that makes sense for you and your team: Your content calendar should include all of the relevant information necessary for every member of your team to post in the absence of the content man- ager. We created a trix that’s broken down by week. Weekly vs. monthly views. In addition to our weekly content calendar that includes all of the relevant content, we also have a snapshot view of our monthly themes, including larger activations such as HOAs. 3.4 Content Strategy & Style The Content Calendar Date Day Time Content Type Poster Category Content Image? Final Post Monday Tuesday 1 Bizdom re: content capture Wednesday 2 Thursday 3 Bizdom Jodi Text Q&A Friday 4 Saturday 5 7 8 Bizdom re: SEO 9 10 Bizdom Advisors Q&A SEO 11 12 14 15 Bizdom 1 refer back to Helpouts GYBO video 16 17 Bizdom Helpouts Text Q&A Brian Quimby 18 19 21 22 Bizdom re: YT 23 24 Bizdom YT HOA Ryan Park (influencer) 25 26 28 29 Bizdom re: PR 30 April Content — Larger Activations
  • 38. 74 75 Approval cycle. In the beginning, as we became familiar with our com- munity, we were on a weekly approval cycle for our content. The content manager created an outline of the content in a separate word doc to be reviewed and approved by the copywriter (if working with one), Team/Ops Lead and final approval by Google PMM. The peer review and approval process helps to ensure that all of the content is aligned with the Brand Voice. All of the content for a week should be reviewed and approved by Thursday afternoon of the prior week. As you get more comfortable, this should be bumped up to having content approved 2 weeks in advance. Contnent Strategy & Style 3.4 The Content Calendar  Timing Tip: Give your Team Lead and Google PMM a full 24 hours to review and give feedback for edits on the content. The actual content research and creation, including editing, formatting and creation of assets take 8-10 hours per week. Monday Post 1: Trivia  Monday: Post 1: Trivia Options: First choice, since we will be discussing marketing spending during the FICA: 66% of small businesses are maintaining or increasing spend on digital marketing. (AT&T Small Business Technology Poll 2013) 67% of businesses are using their website to market to customers. (AT&T Small Business Technology Poll 2013) Adding videos to landing pages can increase conversions by nearly 90%. (SocialTimes) Karina Elise 2:43 PM Jun 11 This copy really isn't adding anything to the table. Everyone already has some kind of morning ritual, so why tell them to have one? Maybe there's an interesting thing about a well-known business leader's morning routine.., does Bill Gates go for a swim at sunrise or something like that? And then have the CTA be the snack. Reply • Resolve
  • 39. 76 77 The RSVP functionality built into G+ is great for making sure members participate with your highest-quality interactive content. E-mail and G+ notifications allow you to communicate with attendees without needing them to proactively check your community. 4.1 Content Production Digital Events
  • 40. 78 79 1 Text Q+A A Text Q+A is the least expensive type of event to produce, because your expert can be located anywhere. It’s lot like a Reddit AMA (Ask me Anything). In our case, we invite a subject matter expert, choose a topic and then let members asked whatever they want. When our community was first created, this was a good way to ease our team and the community into the nature of real time questions and answers. Here is an example of one of our first Text Q+As with Jodi Wing from Ready State about creative content creation. Pros: Less pressure/more time to answer questions thoughtfully. Cons: Some members will be confused about where the Q+A is happening, looking for a video or chat room functionality. Over-commu- nication is key to explain and link to the thread and time frame where the conversation is happening. 2 Pre-Recorded Video A pre-recorded video can be an interview, panel or tutorial. Sometimes we produce these from scratch ourselves. Other times, we repurpose videos from teams with relevant topics—like this interview about how to improve your website. Instead of just posting the video to the wall, scheduling an event around it will help build momentum and conversa- tion around it. Here is an example of a pre-recorded video Hangout that we created around Holiday Search Trends with a Googler. Pros: This is the most polished, high-quality type of event you can have, because you have the most time to prepare and edit. Cons: No live interaction means that engagement for videos can be low, even with an event. We combat this by combining pre-recorded videos with a live text Q&A follow up to make it a more well-rounded event. Best Practice: Have the speaker repeat the question with every answer written. That way, fans reading the Q&A in line in the thread can follow along if they’ve missed the beginning. Did You Know? Planning videos or Hangouts on Air with external Subject Matter Experts are the most difficult and costly—you have to make sure that you have a substantial budget to fly the subject matter experts to a central filming location, provide transportation to the studio (usually either MTV or NYC as both have HOA capabilities and the Google sets), and put them up (if it can’t happen in one full day.) Best Practice: Those unfamiliar with G+ can get confused easily, thinking any event is a live streaming video. Be sure to over communicate and be very explicitly, saying things like “this is a pre-recorded interview with a text Q+A follow up” in your event descriptions and posts. Best Practice: Aim for a topic that can be easily explained without visuals. Best Practice: During the hour that the Q&A is live, create either a group chat or a hangout with the participant and your main moderator (as MC) to discuss the flow of questions and answers. Have your expert talk through their thoughts about answers that aren’t pre-planned on the group chat before they write them out. It helps them consolidate their thoughts and allows you to make sure they aren’t incorrectly addressing any sensitive topics. Content Production 4.1 Digital Events We host 3 types of events, each has pros and cons to consider before choosing which one(s) to move forward with.
  • 41. 80 81 3 Hangouts on Air Hangouts on Air are live, syndicated videos recorded and published to the community in real time. To follow the Hangouts Bizdom train- ing strategy, all of our community’s Hangouts on Air followed a Q&A format to answer their questions. We brought in a YouTube creator Ryan Park for our first HOA to discuss how to create quick & effective YouTube videos seen here. Pros: The community is eager to be involved. If you work with an influencer, they’ll most likely bring their following into the community to participate before, during and after the Hangout airs. Cons: This is a live syndicated broadcast, just like TV but with less lag time, so anything can happen! Clearly you don’t have any time to edit the video before it is published. Best Practice: The day of, you’ll need at least two (if not three) team members available and ready to make this successful. One will be conducting the interview on the Hangout, one will be vetting the questions to the interviewer being filmed and one will be looking for questions in the community in real time behind the scenes. Best Practice: Especially if you have multiple Subject Matter Experts involved (for a panel), practice the entire flow of the HOA at least once before you’re live. Best Practice: Fans like to be called out by name for their questions during Hangouts on Air. It allows them to feel like they’re a part of the conversation. Content Production 4.1 Digital Events
  • 42. 82 83 4.2 Content Production Production Checklist for Events Source topics: Your members will be vocal about what they want to learn about. Have your moderators help you keep a running list of topics for events. Find your talent: You’ll need someone with patience, charisma, tact, expertise and, as a bonus, a large social following that they can bring to the table. We use Googlers, our Advisors, and outside influencers—in- cluding co-marketing partners. We screen every person via video chat to make sure they will be a good fit. Book studio time: Create relationships with the studio managers- as they oversee the studio time and production process for all videos. In MTV, David Kruschke runs the Hangout studio. In NYC it’s Heather Duthie. Once you’ve formally filed a ticket via go/guts and emailed David and/or Heather to coordinate when you can film, send calendar invites to all teammates involved including the studio manager(s) to block off recording time. Also be sure to block out time for the follow up Q&A during the day that the content is published (if applicable). Create content in advance: Your expert can provide ideas about what angle on the topic they are comfortable with, and your content creator can help find a hook and catchy title for the event. Even though events like interview and Q&As are live, you should write a script so that every- one involved is comfortable with the general content. You can start by providing your speaker with a first draft of questions for them to answer, and then shape it into a script from there.
  • 43. 84 85 Promote the event: The goal is to promote the event at least a week in advance and follow up 2 times in separate posts to the community. We work closely with the G+ Your Business page which has 1M fans and a very similar message to ours. When our events are specific to other verticals (like HR), we’ll also have our Point of Contacts from those teams promote via their social channels. (I.E. Life@Google with the HR event, or Enterprise when talking about Google Apps.) Prepare your speaker(s): Whether you’re working with a Googler or out- side expert, outline how your event will work, what to expect, where to be, what time commitments are needed, and who their point person will be. Never assume they’re familiar with being on camera or live chatting in a community. Allow for more time to answer questions if you are interview- ing someone outside of Google. Say thanks: Once all is done, send a gthanks or a note to external partners (we created branded stationary and swag) thanking them for their time. Collect questions from members in advance: When you initially tell your community that you’ll be having a Q&A and ask them for questions, they’ll eagerly volunteer their inquiries, but not all on one thread. We usually direct fans to reply in the comment of the announcement thread, but when collecting the questions, we scrub all of the threads (the event page, the original post(s) and even other comment threads to make sure that we’ve captured all of the questions asked.) Event specific assets: Ideally you’ll have already worked with your creative agency to design opening, end and name overlay cards (as seen in our Hangout with GoDaddy here) to be used by the studio manager to brand it unique to your community. Have your studio manager upload the Hangout directly to your YouTube channel on a private setting, and approve it/provide edits via that outlet. It will save time for your modera- tion team in uploading videos down the road. Create the event: When you first created your community, it had to live under a G+ profile page. We’ve learned when creating events, it makes more sense to create the event under THAT page and invite the commu- nity, over creating the event exclusively in the community. Remember to create a circle for all RSVPed attendees leading up to the event, so if an emergency happens and last minute you have to cancel the event, you’ll have a list of all fans who have RSVPed to re-invite. Content Production 4.2 Production Checklist for Events Best Practice: Before launching your first event, create a ritual unique to your community. We created a standard “initiation” question that we ask every member (internally and externally) interviewed in the community. It creates a sense of familiarity regardless of the topic being discussed and puts both the interviewer and interviewee at ease. Develop a regular cadence for publishing your events. We have Q&A bizdoms every Thursday.
  • 44. 86 87 4.3 Content Production Other Creative Assets Events aren’t the only content that fall outside of our templatized, daily posts. Consider that you’ll need to plan in advance for a handful of other high-production creative assets, like:
  • 45. 88 89 Welcome/Anthem video: It’s powerful to launch with an introductory video as it allows for easy sharing and the moderation team can refer to it when explaining the community to fans who inquire. Something with animated graphics instead of live action can be fairly cost effective to produce with the right creative partner. Case Studies/Spotlights: While you might not have the budget to create one off videos initially, ask for incremental budgets to spotlight businesses that have an interesting story to tell. This spotlight example showcases LSTN during Small Business Week. You can also do a more budget-friendly approach by sending members a list of questions and some tips for filming and submitted their own videos. Custom infographics: Occasionally, we’ll want to go a bit deeper on a topic than a quick tip or stat. With some research into statistics and the help of a designer, we’ve created infographics (in the form of embedded presentations), like this one on family owned businesses. These are extra time and budget from our creative agency, since we do not have a designer on retainer. Best Practice: Form relationships with the SMBs you are spotlighting by reaching out to them directly. Then, ask them to engage via their G+ profiles directly on the thread as you spotlight them and their business. It makes the content more compelling, and community members will respond favorably to both the spotlight and the SMB who engages.  Timing Tip: Anticipate any custom creative production will take at least 2X the amount of time you’ll need for it to be live. This is due to internal approvals and delays in working with your creatives (as fast as they may be). Content Production 4.3 Other Creative Assets
  • 46. 90 91 5.1 Promotion & Aquisition Cross Promotion on Internal Platforms You’re blessed to be in the Google ecosystem with so many options for free/cheap promotion right at your fingertips, if you know where to look. We started out our search understanding what other teams had content that was relevant to us, and from there explored the following:
  • 47. 92 93 Social Channels: We chronicled every social channel we could find here, where they posted content and/or had a mission that was some- where related to the community. This also helped us meet more peo- ple who manage social channels at Google. Emails: We were able to partner with the Customer Marketing team for Adwords and send an email to all Adwords customers during Small Business Week and the Analytics team. Since they were sent, we’ve been able to partner with the contacts made on content for the community. The Google Analytics team sent a promo spotlight for their May email list, which was sent to a list of 250,000, and received an open rate of .2% Embedded Promos: We’ve been working closely with the webmas- ter team to get our community on the footer of various B2B sites. We also got the Blogger team, based in Australia, to include a promotion for our community in their dashboard. There are many more opportu- nities for in-product and in-site links that we are pursuing. Our team has a dedicated embedded promo person that helps us identify those opportunities. Home Page Promo: To kick off Small Business Week, we were able to get approval (go/hpp) on a Home Page Promo (deck here) celebrat- ing the week, working closely with the Small Business Administration. The Home Page Promo sent fans on Google.com directly to the Com- munity to experience specially created content for the week, includ- ing quotes from the SBW events and daily photo & video spotlights of SMBs in the community. Promotion & Acquisition 5.1 Cross Promotion on Internal Platforms
  • 48. 94 95 5.2 Promotion & Aquisition Influencers In addition to your advisors in the community, it’s important to think about how to attract influencers: individuals with a high social clout and can directly affect marketing or purchase decisions. They range from YT content creators like iJustine to Oprah, but because they have many followers in their respective social communities, it’s important not to shy away from their potential in helping you grow the community. Read more about partnerships here.
  • 49. 96 97 5.3 Promotion & Aquisition House Ads You may get to a point where you want to pay for a campaign to acquire members. House ads—search and display—are your most cost effective option. The Steps 1. Fill out the brief for a Search Campaign here one quarter before you want to run the campaign. 2. After the brief is complete, you need to fill out a media request to run the campaign. 3. Reach out to the Community Engineering team to figure out if they are able to place a remarketing tag in the code to track con- versions. If they are able to, you are good to go. If they are not able to, your bids will be limited to a cap of $0.50. 4. Some important notes • Budget $300k cash a quarter for Display Advertising campaigns • Search Ads, if you send over $10k per month you'll need to allocate some cash. • Reach out to Media Lab Office hours for any questions! 5. Determine the POC for who manages the account. We have our internal online marketing team who will help with the campaign.
  • 50. 98 99 6.1 Measurement & Optimization What We Measure & Why Measuring results on Google+ Communities at this stage in its development is a challenge. Because there isn’t a dedicated Analytics solution built into the platform, many— or most—measurements need to be done manually. Despite this, manual measurement can produce a lot of valuable data if it’s stored and interpreted correctly.
  • 51. 100 101 Post Type. Each post we manually sort into a category based on the different kinds of content we get, so we can encourage certain types of posts (like Discussion) and discourage other types (like Support Requests). The post categories we use are: 1. Sharing. “Hi! I just joined the community and I make widgets!” or “Hey I just read this article and I thought you guys would like it.” 2. Discussion. “Let’s talk about widgets. Do you guys use widgets? What kinds of widgets do you like to use?” 3. Advice Requests. “No one is buying my widgets, so I’m thinking of investing in a widget-based AdWords campaign. Does anyone have any suggestions for widget- based keywords?” 4. Tech Support. “I can’t log in to my widget-based AdWords account. Can you reset my password for me? 5. Mod Posts. “Today in the Google Small Business Community we’re doing a spotlight on people who make widgets!” Note that “spam” is included in our reports, but we track it in the “Removed Posts” document listed in the “Moderation” section. Post Date. Spreadsheets allow you to use this data to extrapolate day over day trends, but also weekly and monthly. +1s, Comments and Shares. These are the best tools we use to measure engagement. Some types of engagement are more valuable than others (for example, generally a comment or share is more representative of interest than a +1), but all of the data is valuable. Sometimes different posts are geared towards different kinds of engagement, and because we track them separately, we can gather more details. We measure these 24 hours after the original post date, since most posts have seen as much engagement as they’re going to get by then. This isn’t an ideal solution, since there is sometimes continuing engagement on older posts—but it’s the best compromise we could find. Post Link. This lets us do follow up. It’s also sometimes a valuable tool when we want to find a particular post—it gives us the ability to search using fields that Google+ doesn’t support. For instance, I can find all the posts from moderators that went up on May 18th—something that I couldn’t do on the Community itself without a lot of scrolling. Name of Poster. This lets us cross reference, find power-users, determine who is posting the most often, and easily distinguish between mod posts and user posts. It also makes it easy to track whose post you left off at if you get interrupted while you’re filling in the numbers. Our Analytics spreadsheet measures the following data: Measurement & Optimization 6.1 What We Measure & Why We pull all this data manually, but an automated dashboard is in prog- ress to save us the time. Reach out to cmonroe@google.com for more information on analytics. Best Practice: Chronicle everything internally. There is no such thing as too much documentation. It’s important to have data on hand, to not only track successes but to deduce insights and predict trends. Did You Know? It’s better to have too much data than not enough. Overcommit to tracking early, and then scale back later.  Timing Tip: Pulling this data takes half an hour to an hour per day. Post Type Date Category 1 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 2 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 3 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 4 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 5 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 6 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 7 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 8 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 9 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 10 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 11 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 12 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 13 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 14 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 15 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 16 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 17 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support 19 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support SMB Community Analytics  Sharing 120 90 60 30 0 Tech Support Advice Request SpamDiscussion User Posts By Type: Prev. Month
  • 52. 102 103 A peek at our automated analytics dashboard Measurement & Optimization 6.1 What We Measure & Why Community Dashboard Community DashboardEdit Edit Posts Per Day Gender Breakdowns of Active Users Commends by Hour of Day Community Members Posts by Hour of Day Approved/Rejected Posts per day +1's by Hour of Day Cumulative Post Stats Select Post Type Date Filter 2014-05-15 2014-07-09
  • 53. 104 105 6.2 Measurement & Optimization Tools, Report & Process Reporting is a complicated process, and it depends a great deal on the goals and needs of the people you’re reporting to. That said, there are some general principles you can follow to make sure that you’re putting your best foot forward.
  • 54. 106 107 Measurement & Optimization 6.1 Tools, Report & Process Tips For Making Awesome ReportsWhat We Report On Growth. We report on the overall growth of the community, most importantly. We also report on the total number of +1s, Comments and Shares since the community opened—but that’s mostly a vanity stat. Engagement. We track the number of Comments, +1s and Shares for each post on the community, and we break them down into two categories—engagement on user posts, and engagement on our own content. We graph these out over time, to make sure that they’re continually increasing, and match them up with the number of posts per day. Post Types. Remember how we mentioned earlier that we break down posts by type? We chart these in pie graphs to make sure that the ratios are where we want them—lots of Discussion and Advice Requests, not too much Tech Support. Qualitative Feedback. It’s important to report on more than just metrics. Include key user quotes, stories, and other qualitative information. Next Steps. Always close with your plan for what to do next. Include an executive summary. This is good advice for everything, even just a long email—but you should always include with a few, quick key points to explain what you have to say. Make sure that even if they only read the summary, they’ll get the idea. Make your report tell a story. It’s important to align your information be- hind a single central theme. If you can make all the information in your report tell the same story, the people reading will be more likely to re- member what’s going on. Brand your report where possible. Having branded graphics in your re- port makes sure that everyone remembers what you’re reporting on. Don’t be afraid to brag. Many people can be reluctant to “toot their own horn” in a report. But you have to—you’re the only one who really knows what you’ve accomplished, and if you want other people to know, you have to tell them. GBC Report  GBC Report All systems are go for loud launch. Key Takeaways: The formula is working. The metrics suggest that our current approach is working well, and is leading to a steady overall increase in users, engagement with our content, and quality of user contributions. Our first HOA with Ryan Park was a big success. We had a lot of activity from both our network and from Ryan's. The video itself got nearly 1130 views, users have been posting about it for days, and Ryan has volunteered to become an Advisor in our community. Internal cross-promo is leading to more organic growth. Our internal cross promotion efforts have been very
  • 55. 108 109 Tracking Links to Your Community Link Shorteners: Link shortening isn’t just an easy way to cram a com- plicated link into a short number of characters—it also provides you with an alternate method of collecting analytics data. We recommend using goo.gl. While bit.ly, awe.sm and other link shorteners have a lot of tools available, as long as Google has an internal solution available, it only makes sense for us to use it publicly. We use link shortening whenever we need to link to a service internal- ly with a long or ugly URL—the most common case being Google Docs links, which tend to naturally be very long and full of ID and authentica- tion codes. We don’t use link shorteners when the page we’re linking to has an obvious, easy-to-remember URL—like http://www.google.com/mybusiness/. Create all the links yourself. If you’re working with an external partner to send links to your community, make sure they use a specific shortened link that you give them. Most teams will want warning, and to have the link well in advance. Goo.gl, like bit.ly, will allow you (or anyone else) to check the number of clicks on a shortened link by adding a + sign to the end of the link. With this in mind, you can track your analytics by assigning each campaign an individual tracking link. Here’s how we do it: Measurement & Optimization 6.1 Tools, Report & Process
  • 56. 110 111 Make a link tracking doc. Keep a spreadsheet of which shortened link you’re using for which purpose. For each link, we track the team that’s using it to send traffic, the date the campaign took place, and the actu- al link—with the “+” appended to the end of the URL, so a quick click will take you directly to the analytics for that link. Use a new link every time. Often you’ll work with the same teams sever- al times on a campaign—for instance, if your community is mentioned in an email newsletter, this may happen more than once. If you do this, try and generate a new tracking link every time. That way, you can track the performance of the link and see if it changes. Measurement & Optimization 6.1 Tools, Report & Process Start Date Xpromo Campaign Analytics link data End date (shortlink if applicable) (if applicable) 1 3/24/2014 GYBO Week content goo.gl/h2397 2 3/21/2014 Analytics mo. email promo goo.gl/ads98 3 3/31/2014 Official G+ Post goo.gl/082498 4 3/31/2014 Official Google Twitter goo.gl/9237 5 3/31/2014 Google.com/services footer goo.gl/0i2309 6 5/1/2014 Blogger promo spot goo.gl/973497 7 5/1/2014 Analytics monthly email goo.gl/o384 8 3/24/2014 GYBO Week content goo.gl/h2397 9 3/21/2014 Analytics mo. email promo goo.gl/ads98 10 3/31/2014 Official G+ Post goo.gl/082498 11 3/31/2014 Official Google Twitter goo.gl/9237 12 3/31/2014 Google.com/services footer goo.gl/0i2309 13 5/1/2014 Blogger promo spot goo.gl/973497 14 5/1/2014 Analytics monthly email goo.gl/o384 Xpromo Tracking 
  • 57. 112 113 6.3 Measurement & Optimization Setting KPIs Community Management is notoriously hard to measure. It’s difficult to strike a balance between quantitative measurement and qualitative understanding. If you’re careful, though, you can create measurable KPIs that actually help you meet constructive goals.
  • 58. 114 115 How to Choose a Good KPI Make sure you’re measuring something meaningful...to both your team and to the people you’re reporting to. Ultimately, this is how your success is going to be judged, so choose carefully. Make sure you’re measuring things you have control over. Measur- ing based on growth is valuable, but remember that a number of oth- er factors (like how many people are willing to cross-promote you) will have an effect on you. Don’t focus exclusively on metrics. Metrics tell an important part of the story, but not the ONLY part. Make sure you cover the rest of the story too. Measurement & Optimization 6.3 Setting KPIs  Timing Tip: Make sure you budget plenty of time to setting KPIs and benchmarks in the early phases—you’re going to want to dedicate at least a week or more.
  • 59. 116 117 6.4 Measurement & Optimization What We Chose We’re following a two part strategy with our KPI goals—we’re separately tracking both growth and engagement. Growth 100,000 members in the first year. This goal was set before we began, but we’re confident we can hit it. In addition to measuring our raw num- bers, we also tracked the %growth rate we would need to hit in order to meet our goal, and compared our growth to that number. Did You Know? Circlecount.com easily lets you track historical growth for any Google+ community, as well as a lot of other Google+ measurement tools.
  • 60. 118 119 Engagement. We broke our engagement goals out into multiple sub-categories. Continual upward trending. Our research on other Google+ communi- ties indicates that as communities get more posts per day, they tend to see reduced engagement on each individual post, since user attention gets spread out over a bunch of different posts. With that in mind, it was important to make sure that even as our volume increased, our engage- ment numbers continued to trend upward as well. Average engagement per post. We took the average engagement num- bers (+1’s, comments, and shares) on the current largest business-relat- ed community in the world, and aimed to beat them by 150% Measurement & Optimization 6.3 Setting KPIs
  • 61. 120 121 7.1 Working Together Internal Communications Standing Meetings: Our team uses morning “scrums” in the form of GVCs at the start of the day. No longer than 30 minutes, these provide a time for every person to list what their goals are for the day and to flag any concerns. During this meeting, the Team Ops/Lead briefs the team as to happenings outside of the day to day team responsibilities that are coming down the pipeline. It allows for a remote team to feel unit- ed in decision making. Weekly, we have status meetings with the PMM lead where they let us know bigger picture of any requests from exter- nal teams or content changes. We use this time to review content for the coming weeks and discuss larger activations. In addition, our Team Ops/Lead has standing weekly 1:1s with both community managers. This as an open time to look at any internal or external problems, and brainstorm how to best solve them. Establishing Trust: If your team is located geographically across the US, it’s important to establish a trusting foundation. The more your team feels safe and able to communication any reservations or problems within the community at an early stage, the more successful you’ll be to avoid any crisis down the road. This will also make them feel happier and more fulfilled, leading to a better community. Best Practice: A weeklong kickoff in person with the full team to get to know each other is highly encouraged—including nights out! Best Practice: Let the team work together to iron out the processes and practices that work best for them.
  • 62. 122 123 Days off/Coverage: It’s important to follow the moderation calendar and plan days off closely with your team. Give them enough warnings to an- ticipate your absence and plan their work schedules. Not only should your moderation shifts be covered, but delegate your most immediate tasks to specific teammates when out. At the Team Ops/Lead level, if you’re working with external businesses for event production, be sure to let them know of your absence as well. Unified Team: Your success is your team’s success- there is no distinc- tion between the two. This creates a safe place for the team to commu- nicate especially when facing obstacles. It’s imperative to be seen as one, as “Google” to our users. Because of this, to work like a team, you must think like a team. This means that we had to create an environ- ment to allow for questions, comments and observations to constantly flow from one moderator to another, effortlessly. The goal is to have var- ied responses to fans, but with one collective strategy in mind and slight voice differences unique to each moderator. Constant communication between moderators allows us to make sure we know of the context re- garding specific members (i.e. maybe they were already banned before), or sensitive topics to avoid (like issues that related to recent news or sensitive current events). Working Together 7.1 Internal Communications
  • 63. 124 125 7.2 Working Together Cross-team Collaboration The success of the community is contingent on the relationships you cultivate as a collective unit with all Googlers: this includes leads of other social platforms from products (like Adwords), to marketing (Enterprise) to customer service (Maps & Places). The more time you can invest, the more successful you’ll be in creating compelling content that hasn't already been discussed, moderating effectively using the most up to date information, and growing your fan base via cross promotion of other pages.
  • 64. 126 127 POCs: We identified one point of contact for each team/product/social platform and let them know that we'd be reaching out to them in the fu- ture should we have questions. We then asked if they're the best people to return to with future questions. Compiling a go to document like this one made difficult questions a breeze. Studio: As mentioned in the events sections, David (MTV) and Heather (NYC) are the team Ops/leads right hands for all video components. It's important that they understand the larger mission of the community and are on your side. This is because you will face tight content production turnarounds and seemingly unrealistic requests. Last minute video tweaks and/or launches are impossible without their assistance. They hold a great deal of creative power. Best Practice: Aim to tap into the data from teams who might have related content of interest to your community. For us, its newsletters from Think With Google, YouTube "creators" and even sales bulletins tracking what areas are frustrating for SMBs. DYK: There are 612+ social channels (including FB, TW and G+) with 350 Million followers owned and operated worldwide by and/or for Google. Think of all of the inspiration for content and potential for free promotion that those channels hold. Working Together 7.2 Cross-team Collaboration
  • 65. 128 129 7.3 Working Together Partnerships It’s not what you know, but who you know. We’ve relied heavily on our own social and professional networks to leverage and identify influenc- ers and subject matter experts to speak about topics that we’re not fa- miliar with, to validate our credibility, to increase exposure and to grow our community. The understanding is that we don’t pay the guests in the community to participate but in some circumstances we will pay for transportation for them to a Google office and/or set for production. It's understood that this is mutually beneficial, for this is free publicity for the partners company and/or business. We ask them in return to pro- mote the event via their personal and professional marketing channels. (Which includes but is not limited to social platforms, mass external & internal company wide email blasts.) Beyond who you know, who knows you? When identifying potential in- fluencers to host, you want to choose people who have expertise that is specific to the niche topic that you might be covering, and who have a sizable social footprint. This means that it's better to choose a speaker who has a larger Twitter following and writes for a handful of blogs be- cause if they have a good experience, they'll blog about it on all of their social sites. This content will only increase the positive sentiment about your community and your community's mission. Best Practice: As your community grows, you want to be sure to target larger and larger influencers, as a way to give your growing and active members inspiration and strengthen your credibility. DYK: Google was rated 2014's most valuable brand. This means that many influencers will happily work with you and your community simply because you're an extension of Google, a brand that they most likely have a positive affinity for. Vet through influencers blogs and note those who rave about you as that's an easy way in.
  • 66. 130 131 Paid partnerships: Unlike guest moderators and speakers for events, some of your partners will be paid. If you use a creative agency for your branding or video production, expect to bring them in as a very close member of your team. Nelson Cash has done a lot of work for G+ com- munities, and might be a good option for you. Brand Studio also has a list of approved agencies that are available and in the vendor system. Visit go/agencyteam to learn more.  Timing Tip: It’s never too early to begin conversations that can lead to partnerships and identify who are the decision makers in the organizations/ businesses you partner with. Working Together 7.3 Partnerships
  • 67. 132 133 7.4 Working Together Stakeholder Management All eyes on you: Directors and VPs love communities. They can get right in front of their customer group whenever they want. Unlike other mar- keting work that is more static, this can result in off the cuff sugges- tions or critiques that can come unexpectedly. Be ready to defend your rationale for anything that is up on your community, and remember to choose your battles—there’s nothing wrong with deleting a post every once in a while. Internal PR: Communities are a treasure trove for quotes, stories and new news. Make sure you’re keeping links for great threads/interactions and sharing them around to your wider team.
  • 68. 134 135 8 Parting Thoughts Creating a G+ community is no small feat, but it is a rewarding one. Witnessing the growth and genuine feedback from members is fulfilling. With that being said, we’re leaving you with some final words of wisdom: Every single process and plan you create will most likely be changed many times. Embrace the messiness, especially while launching, testing & learning different engagement strategies. Different strategies work with different communities for different reasons- not all people think the same way. Always be ready to pivot. Your own community will constantly teach you new lessons. Now go forth and prosper, you community creating guru, you.
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