Community Management + Strategy = What to do, How, for what purpose?
Community management is a reborn issue brought by social networks and influential people. Prior to the social thing community management was limited to internal matters for brands, and social networks were only supported by businesses like porn, gaming, and tech. And that’s where it comes to be interesting to look at a bit of history. New socializing process born from the Internet invites if not compels brands to update their messaging channels (I voluntarily don’t use the term “communication” here since it’s no more relevant when confronted to so-called Web 2.0 social media), their marketing content (vs marketing message), and way to join the conversation (brands can’t start conversation, they’re too late on the web to do so). These different terms are important, they build a specific point of view that can help your brand develop the right community management strategy to increase your business efficiency.
Community management can help you with many issues, but before joining the conversation you should make some adjustments regarding your marketing & communication department. You have first to find the right person to be your community manager, the human brand interface, the one guy who know the more the company and products, the one who’s the more easy to speak with and dynamic (you don’t want your community manager to go at a conference/ unconference and look like an average desk guy). You then have to give him some credits: don’t make him report to someone not a C-level. The reason to do so is simple, he’d be for some time your online & offline brand image representative (whatever you may think you can limit him to some business area) and so you have to empower him with important information and be confident in his ability to spread them wisely and efficiently to targeted people.
Now you’ve seen what abilities your community manager must have and clear stage 1 of your community management strategy game, you can walk the next step: the strategy setup. Regarding your business model and business area, different oppotunities are opened:
Awareness: steping into social media and creating a community to get known and famous. Valuable strategy if you’re running a startup and willing to develop your brand awareness. In that case, pay more attention to influential bloggers speaking about your business area (consuming your product type, interested in it, competitors) and related topics (for example if you’re speaking about selling t-shirts online, look at Threadless and other online t-shirts brands, but also design forums, blogs, and creative content creator).
Loyalty and brand equity: steping into social media and creating a community to show you’re connected, to empower your customers by giving them opportunities to talk with you and publicly engage with you (giving feeling of privilege). Valuable strategy if you’re aiming at upgrading your competitive advantage and and create a vibrant communication with your customers so that they can help you develop your brand equity and increase your innovation speed. But take care of your community when created, you don’t want to stop in the middle of the road and get stabbed by your gloomy customers.
Brand energy and recruitment: steping into social media and creating a community to empower your customers and turn them into brand ambassadors/ evangelists. Valuable strategy if you’re able to energize all your community and provide them with communication tools so they can become your point of information and word spreading spot. In contrary of loyalty and brand equity strategy, you’re not appealing people and inviting them to join your community of values, you’re going more aggressive by moving forward to meet influential people, create events to aggregate unknown people, and then share with them to see who’d stay and become your fans and your new network members.
Last part of the cycle (you’ll be doing constant fine tuning with each chosen strategy) is the monitoring and measurement. For the monitoring, have a look at this article: Social Media + Monitoring + Answering = Observing before moving and for measurement, read the killer post Chris Brogan has written on his blog: On managing a community
