The Historian

Let’s face it; sometimes Community Managers can’t do everything. You need help, but there just isn’t room in the budget to get another person in house. Often the help you need is right there in your community waiting for the chance to play a bigger role.

So what qualities should you look for when you are thinking of getting volunteers to help?

• Interested and Knowledgeable: Sure a volunteer has to know how to get the job done, but they also need to want to do it. If they are not interested in the community and it’s focus, then they are not going to be excited to help and the community will suffer. Look for volunteers that will go the distance because they have something to add.
• Strong and Effective Communicator: Communication is an important factor in a successful community. When looking for volunteers, take into consideration each person’s skill in conveying thoughts and ideas, specifically with other people. Ensure that each member can communicate beyond “one to one” and that they can work well in a “one to many” situation.
• Teaching Attitude: Teaching and sharing is so important because it shows that not only can a team work together, but that it can improve by sharing knowledge. A team built with people that share with each other can be a powerful tool for successful communities. I can’t tell you how many Community Managers I know that started by volunteering.
• Finding and bringing together an amazing team is only part of the picture. It’s up to the Community Manager to keep things running smoothly. A great team will make your role a lot easier, but of course it does not offset the need for good management.

Facebook has a new security feature called “Profile Review” so that when you are tagged in a photo or a post, you’ll will get to approve it before it shows on your wall or news feed. Unapproved tagged posts and photos will appear in a new section called “Pending posts.”

This really should be the default, instead of an opt-in feature.

Here’s how to activate Profile Review:

1. Go to Account> Privacy Settings.
2. Next to “How Tags Work” click “Edit Settings”.
3. In the “How Tags Work” pop-up, click “Edit” next to “Profile Review”.
4. In the next pop-up, click “Turn on Profile Review”.

Click the image for a better view.

I recently inherited a few twitter accounts with well over 3000 followers each that were following almost as many twitter feeds. Unfortunately the quality of these followers and those we were following were not that great. A significant number of them wouldn’t typically be interested in what we were posting and we certainly didn’t want to see “$50 FREE SLOT PLAY” every few minutes in our feeds. For our feed to be valuable to us, we need to know our audience so that we can communicate things that are valuable to them. You have to get to know the users the community will potentially serve.

Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others. – Seth Godin: What do you know?

Start by gathering information. If you can, have person interviews.  Ask what your users need?  Do they have problems?  Where do they hang out online and how do they participate?  What are their likes and dislikes in those communities? Who are the most important people in the community?

Leverage this listening data and make changes. From there, keep two questions in mind. “What are we doing wrong?” and “What are we doing that we can we do better?”.

I’ve been sitting back for a few a bit trying to take in all the changes that have been going on with Community Management and the “Rise of Social Media”. I put that in quotes because most CMs have been doing Social Media forever, we just didn’t call it “Social Media”. So here are a few things that I think today’s CMs should really take to heart.

Be Human

Today, being a Community Manager is so much than running a forum and posting news and updates. Be a real person, if you are having a great day let the world know! If you are having a busy day, drop a tweet or status update that says, “Leaving one meeting, heading to another”. Anything you can do to become someone they want to know.

You should also be engaging beyond text-based mediums. Get a podcast going, or make yourself available to other podcasters. Hold webinars and plan face to face meet-ups with your audience. Record interviews with interesting people In and around your community. Be visible in as many ways as possible.

Go Easy On The Marketing

You represent the brand, but you shouldn’t be the total marketing force. Do not let yourself become a “Social Media Marketer” where your only goal is to drive numbers and analyze metrics. Some marketing is fine and you do want to help promote things, but try not to be overly formal. Your forums, Facebook Pages and Twitter are all great places to drive marketing but you want them to be sociable too. Engage your users and be friendly; make it fun to keep up with what you and the community are doing.

Take Your Days Off

This, is a tough one. We all know that the Community doesn’t sleep, doesn’t take vacations or even take the holidays off. We often feel like we need to check in every day to make sure things are running smooth. And you know, it’s fine to check in, but don’t get sucked in. You need to have time to process things and to have a life beyond your community. If you have a team working with you then make sure you have people there to help, if the community needs it. If you need to make announcements, Tweets or Facebook posts there are a number of tools to help automate things so you don’t need to be “on” 24/7. Relax and get away for a bit or you will burn out.

I hope you found this useful and good luck with your Community.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

I haven’t had much desire to write lately, I suspect it is the busyness of the season. I know some of you are waiting for me to continue with the “My Acclaim” stories, but I’m just not sure what I want to write about next, though it will most likely be Project Top Secret.

The challenges of 2010 are still near. My holiday shopping has been minimal and where I usually make great efforts to find those odd, unusual and fun gifts; I’ve instead opted for the simple and easy.

I am looking forward to 2011 and a New Year with a fresh mental restart.