The Historian

Circles are a beautiful thing… but they are more than Circles, they are also topics of interest.

In the past week as I’ve watched my Stream fill with G+ tips, LOLCats and Viral stuff. A fair bit I have no interest in, but because I’ve elected to have them in my circles, I see what they post to whichever circle they’ve put me in. Because of this, I’ve made an effort to actually consider what I’m send to whom. I’ve been extremely selective about who goes where.

Now when I post content, I really consider who will be interested in what I’m putting out there. If it is Community Management stuff it only goes to that circle, interesting gaming info there’s a circle for that too.

As the banner says, share the right things with the right people.

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.

When filling out your Holiday cards this year, please take ONE CARD and SEND it to this address:

Holiday Mail for Heroes
PO Box 5456
Capitol Heights, MD
20791-5456

I don’t care what your feeling are about the ongoing war, these men and women deserve to be remembered this holiday season.

If we pass this on and everyone sends one card, think of how many cards these soldiers could get to bring up their spirits!

At my current company we have an “official” blog, a Facebook page and three twitter accounts; one for promotions, one official and one for a specific region. The regional twitter account is the most active and was actively posting about a new store opening in their region… unfortunately there was no mention of the opening on the primary twitter account or blog and the blog hasn’t been updated since December of last year. There was some activity on the Facebook page for the opening, but mainly because of the customers were commenting. Additionally there was a Foursquare check-in promotion running but it wasn’t communicated very well to the stores so there were issues with employees not helping our guests.

All this just shows how important it is to have a consistent and defined plan for how you plan to use Social Media to enhance your customer’s experiences.

Bring all the pieces of your Social Media puzzle together and outline the message you want to send. If you have an event coming, plan ahead to get the message out consistently across all of your outlets. With people in different regions, be sure they are aware of what is going on in other places so that that can either support the interested users or at least point them in the right direction. And of course if you have promotions being sent via Social Media, be very sure that your employees know what the promotion is and how the guest will be taking advantage of the offerings.

In the end, a well planned, well defined and well executed Social Media plan can have dramatic impact on your customer’s experience encouraging them to share their positive experiences with their friends and family.