Effectively Managing Online Community | #CMmeetup
Posted by Natasha Attal in Blog on February 9th, 2011
Last night I attended a panel discussion about Effectively Managing Online Communities hosted by Community Managers meetup (#CMmeetup) at the offices of CBRE at the Metlife Building. This event was part of Social Media Week and we really delved into how to manage our online communities and really humanize the experience of interacting online . If you aren’t already familiar with Community Managers Meetup, it is a group of social media managers (community managers, digital specialists..whatever the proper name is these days) who get together monthly and discuss social media trends and practices. Members include representatives from Bizzy, Real Simple Magazine, Etsy, Foursquare and so on (basically it’s a group of VERY talented and energetic individuals looking to meet one another, exchange experiences and learn from each other).
The event was moderated by Zach Seward, Outreach Editor at the Wall Street Journal, who did a great job of asking thought provoking questions on everything from how to approach negative commentary posted on social media sites to asking the panelists what they love about their jobs.
The event started with an introduction from Mark Coatney, Media Evangelist for Tumblr, giving us some background on how he went from a journalist at Newsweek to managing social media for Tumblr. He really drove the point home that “customer experiences online should be the same as the old legacy product.” The customers should feel like they are physically getting the newspaper when communicating with you online. He emphasized that Tumblr puts the community manager role on a peer to peer level as the audience where audience members feel like they are interacting with a reader rather than a brand. Community managers must set expectations with the atmosphere they want to create - make your [tumblr] page friendly if you want to create an open dialogue. Mark also talked about why he enjoys working at a company like Tumblr; Time from thought to action is shorter with startups so you can act on ideas in a quicker way.
Mark then handed the mics to the panelists to dive deeper into our talk about managing online communities. The panelists included;
Brian Simpson – Director of Digital Media at Vikram Chatwal Hotels (@bsimi)
Jenn Pedde - Community Manager for MSW @ USC (@jpedde)
David Brown – Social Media Specialist at Etsy (@holidaymatinee)
Chrysanthe Tenentes – Community Manager at Foursquare (@eqx1979)
The panelists gave us some insights on how they work and build/engage with their communities. Here are some key takeaways from the event:
Connecting with your Audience: All the panelists agreed that to truly connect with your audience, you have to humanize your brand and let your customers/fans know that there is a person speaking to them on their level. The aspect of taking the online experience offline was also discussed and Etsy does a great job of not only making their readers feel heard but also connecting with them beyond the dot com. David Brown will sometimes reply to messages on Etsy by creating crafts, taking photos of the craft response and then tweeting it back to the person who asked the original question. In other cases, he will actually ask for the customer’s address and physically mail them the craft that he has created by mail. As he says, create that type of experience for your customers and “that shit will go viral like gangbusters.”
Blogger Outreach: Jenn Pedde mentioned that there are tiers of bloggers and it’s all about picking where you want to go in your outreach. You can go for the higher tier blogs like the NY Times and WSJ or you can choose the smaller mom and pop blogs (yes, she used the phrase mom and pop blogs..makes me think of all the mom and pop shops that get gobbled up by big box retailers. Time will tell if that happens to the blogging community though the Huffington Post sale to AOL seems like a good example). The thing about the smaller blogs (maybe 1oo+ hits/day) is that even if they’re not the huge influencers, you still have that ability to reach out to target customers. Just go where your audience is spending time!
Social Media Metrics: The general consensus on social media metrics is that no one has cracked the social media ROI code – it’s the blind leading the blind, but that’s not a bad thing. David Brown from Etsy mentioned that he has tried a couple different platforms and it is all about experimentation and your personal preference. What I thought was very interesting is that he said choosing the right analytic platform really depends on your audience. It’s easy to get side tracked by what the most popular tracking tools are but we need to take a step back and figure out what we want/need to track vs what others may be tracking. Certain analytics for some brands may not be as important for your brand. I suggest creating a list of the most important factors you want to track and then back peddling from there to find the right analytics platform for your brand.
Dealing with Negative Social Media Commentary: Brian Simpson took the lead on this discussion and since he is in the hospitality industry he has come across these scenarios in the past. He believes the best practice (in many situations) is for companies to respond publicly and move offline to resolve the issue. Brian once had a hotel guest post a negative comment on a Facebook page he administered about a New Year’s Party she planned at the hotel getting cancelled last minute. Brian responded online with his contact information, they took the discussion offline and were able to resolve the issue. He asked her, “if we didn’t have social, would you have called us” to complain with as much vigor as your comment on Facebook and she said “no, I would have just told all my friends that you sucked.” So, Brian didn’t lose this customer and was able to turn a sticky situation around. Luckily for Brian, this issue wasn’t as magnified as Kenneth Cole’s social media gone wrong debacle.
And on to some Foursquare chat..Chrysanthe Tententes, the Community Manager at Foursquare, talked to us about their first ever newsletter in two years and how they went from 200k users a year ago to over 6m users now. Chrysanthe (her name is pronounced Kris-an-theeee in case you were wondering) came up with the subject line of “check out the new hotness” for their newsletter and it was a HIT. Apparently email newsletter with the words “check out the” in the subject gets the most clicks according to Mail Chimp. There’s something I did not know before! Did you?
Thanks again to the organizers (Katy Zack from Sapient Nitro, Zach Seward from WSJ and Lea Marino from Bizzy) of the event for putting it together. It was eye opening and fun to meet other community managers.
Did you attend the #CMMeetup? Would love to hear your thoughts on the event and what key takeaway for you was.
Community Managers Meetup Recap (#CMMeetup)
Posted by Natasha Attal in Blog on October 21st, 2010
This Tuesday I attended a Community Managers meetup at the Meetup Headquarters in Soho. The meetup was created so that community builders (and other social media professionals) could connect and learn from each other. The event last night was structured so that there was a presentation from several companies and then the organizers had us break out into groups to talk about how we are reaching out and engaging with our community. This is by far one of the most insightful (and fun) networking events I have attended within the industry. I was surrounded with influential members of the social media community who were very open to learning from each other and sharing their successes and failures. There were representatives from a variety of companies ranging from startups like How About We and Bizzy to big news organizations like NBC and ABC. To view all the people who attended the event, check out this list that I put together using TweepML.
The two companies that presented at the event were NBC and How About We, a new dating site that puts a fresh spin on online dating. They gave us some tips on how they have built (and continue to build) their online communities and what strategies are key to connecting in an authentic way.
Presentations:
1. NBC
Ryan Osborn, the Director of Social Media at NBC, opened up the conversation by telling the audience that all communities start internally and that everyone at your company needs to be on the same page before you push out a social media plan. Companies have to bring their editorial (or content producers) and marketing teams together to achieve ultimate success. Ryan also stressed that social media is about the people, not the technology and that you have to put the people in your community first to build meaningful relationships.
It is interesting to note that Ryan had brought the idea of social media integration to his bosses at The TODAY Show years before they actually agreed to move forward with it. Ryan started with a page for the TODAY show and eventually expanded to additional pages once NBC saw the success of that one page. Although it’s hard to realize when I am in a room filled with tech/social media enthusiasts, there are still many high level executives that don’t understand the point of social media. If you are working at a company and are having trouble getting the green light to integrate social media into your marketing platform, take a look at this post on 5 Tips to Convince Your Boss to Engage in Social Media. Ryan also said that he thinks followers as a metric is a joke. You can have just as big an impact with 10 followers. I tend to agree given that social media is about quality (and engagement) not quantity.
2. How About We..
Brian Schechter (Co-Founder) and Michelle Dozois (Community Manager) from How About We gave us some background information on the concept behind the social dating site. Instead of looking strictly at profiles, the site lets users post suggestions for dates and if you see a date that interests you then you can respond to that user. Each date suggestion starts with the tag line “How About We.” An example that Michelle says is a popular suggestion (that she has used herself) is “How About We…grab a famous Elvis sandwich at Peanut Butter & Co and then have a picnic in Washington Square Park.
Brian discussed user engagement and acquisition strategies. One way they engage with their existing users is by providing date suggestions and creating partnerships with restaurants, movie theatres, etc. They partnered up with IFC Theatres for a screening of a french film and had How About We members “like” the idea in order to get tickets. The first X (I can’t remember the number) amount of people to “like” it would get tickets to the screening. Michelle told us that she expected it to reach the target “likes” within 2-3 days but it hit the target amount within minutes. It’s proof that if you listen to your customers and give them what they want (fun dates in this case), the response will be positive.
How About We also launched a contest for the best date and the winner would get 10 dates for free paid for by the company. They took this campaign to the streets with How About We posters positioned in front of date spots such as the Brooklyn Flea. The top ten finalists were then made aware that they were in the running and to win they had to get their friends and family to vote for them. The winner had one of the longest date suggestions I’ve ever seen that suggested a night cap at 3am. I hope she enjoys her date (which she hasn’t gone on yet). I’d have to really like the guy to hang out with him til 3am on a first date! This campaign increased awareness of the social dating site and got users engaged while voting for the winner.
**If you want to try out How About We, you can get a month FREE with this code: CMMeetup. (Thank you Brian and Michelle for letting me share this with my readers).
Breakout Discussions:
After the presentations we took a quick break before breaking out into groups to talk about the questions below. The groups didn’t get to answer all the questions but we touched on some key tips and tricks of engaging with your community and some of the tools you can use to do so.
CMMeetup Questions
Discussion Points:
- Use some free tools such as Hootsuite, Google Alerts and Hubspot grader to manage your brand and track your competition. Ex: You can use Hubspot’s Blog Grader to see how you are measuring up to your competition. Another cool tip: Add a + to the end of a bit.ly link to view the analytics for that link. This allows you to view all the analytics for competitor links if they use bit.ly.
- Offer incentives to your community: Giveaways, exclusive content, trivia questions. Ex: Julie Miller, editor of Seventeen Magazine, talked about how they made their @seventeenmag Twitter account private for one day where only followers would get the link to an exclusive photo of Justin Beiber.
- Bring the Experience Offline: Use Meetups to engage with your community. Bringing the online experience offline is the future. Ex: Dave from Etsy said they do some thing called the “Love Bomb” where they take Twitter questions and write the answers on physical notes and then send it to the user by mail (they DM them asking for their mailing address).
**Best line of the night was made by Brian Smipson (@Bsimi), Director of Social Media for the Roger Smith Hotel (@RSHotel). He said “An audience will watch you die in a fight; a community will jump in to help you win it.” Lesson learned? – Build your community first and the audience will follow.
Here is a great video that was made by Loren Appin from Pixable with photos taken by Anthony Quintano to recap the CMMeetup. Appropriate music and captures the spirit of the event. If you aren’t familiar with Pixable, it is a great site which aggregates and prints photos from social-media sites like Facebook and Flickr
Thanks again to all the organizers ( Vadim Lavrusik, Lea Marino, Katy Zack, Zach Seward, Stacy Green) of the event for making it happen. Thank you to Andres Glusman and the team at Meetup HQ for hosting the event and giving us a tour of the office – love the nap room although I wonder how many people actually use it). Looking forward to seeing you all again at the next meetup.
