Tag Archives: offline

February Community Manager Breakfast Notes – Metrics, Offline Community, and more

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At February’s San Francisco Community Manager Breakfast, we eschewed the pre-set topic and chose topics as a group. The result was a fantastic, varied conversation with folks from all different experience levels, business types, and focuses. Although you won’t get the full context from the notes – you’ll have to come to breakfast for that – there are some great observations and suggestions below.

A huge thank-you to Meredith Black for taking the notes! If you’re looking to hire someone very intelligent with events skills, check out her LinkedIn!

1. Launching a community from scratch

  • Choosing community focus
    • Test with Minimum Viable Communities – do things as simply as possible (Facebook groups are easy) and see what sticks. Less risk.
    • Consider that you may have more than one community – especially if you’re a two-sided marketplace. Don’t treat them the same.
  • Research
    • Go to Twitter chats, forums where market exists.
    • Hang out, follow, engage in conversations.
    • Note what engages people, where gaps are.
    • Once your community has started, these places can be perfect for sharing about your CMTY organically.

2. Engagement

  • What is a real, loyal CMTY member? Sticky, engaging, and offering value.
  • Do user testing for ways to push interaction.
  • ID the evangelists (Customer Support can be a great source):
    • Figure out how you can help them.
    • Give them responsibility – they want it, and it’ll help you.
  • Personalize:
    • Be the face of the brand: sign social media posts with your name, be the face/voice of the brand.
    • Use a personal email (ie Shannon@monument.com) – if you can’t handle the volume, have the rest of your team help with it.
    • Do the things that aren’t scalable (a la Paul Graham)
      • Phone calls, emails, friendships, 1-on-1 asks

3. Platform

  • Hard to launch a CMTY without a platform/ways for members to communicate.
  • Facebook Groups definitely work – but FB has a tendency to interrupt/pull functionalities. Move off it as soon as you can.
  • Platform suggestions:
    • Mobilize (built by former CMTY mgrs.)
    • Jive (can segment, has gamification)
    • Mighty Bell
    • Discourse
  • Mobile community platforms still pretty rare.
  • When moving a CMTY from one platform to another: do it in buckets, introduce users to forum, measure activity.
  • Moving has risks, challenges, so it’s necessary to get the CMTY more engaged.
  • Platform architecture can be overwhelming – don’t underestimate.

4. Offline CMTY-building

  • Offline is a trend (vs. 4 years ago).
  • Development is the same (set the tone/rules, power-user program, scale it).
  • How do you find your initial members?
    • Relationships are built face-to-face: get out there, tailor, make it personal.
  • Collaborate/empower users so they initiate events for the brand.

5. Offline Metrics

  • Know what the actual company goals are (often, management isn’t sure):
    • Brand recognition/association
    • Member-to-member interaction
    • Retention
    • Goodwill
    • Etc
  • Don’t have ROI measured yet? Provide management/C-suite with tons of general data:
    • Activity level
    • # signups
    • Engagement volume
    • Etc
  • Tell both stories – metrics and personal:
    • Emotional: interviews, feedback, Yelp reviews, etc.
  • Share successes pre-emptively:
    • Data
    • Learnings (shows you’re not just flailing)
    • Roadmap that can be quantified
  • These are the same challenges as for other soft departments (like PR).
  • Tools:
    • Google Analytics
    • Sprout Social
    • CRM
    • Good ol’ spreadsheets

6. CMTY+ (cross-functional integration)

  • Make friends internally and externally – get buy-in of tech team, C-level, support, finance, etc.
  • Don’t reinvent the wheel – partner instead.
  • CMTY+Sales:
    • Community can help retain, make repeat sales more likely.
    • Leads are more qualified/shared.
    • Deals close faster.
    • Benefits maybe aren’t apparent through regular CRM data.
  • CMTY+Marketing
    • Leverage current customers for leads to new growth.
    • Track evangelist movements, put in a bucket, use for PR/marketing (collateral, landing page quote, great story, reference for potential investors, etc).

Hope to see you at the next breakfast!