Community Management

A Community Manager (CM) is someone who breaths and eat blogs and practically lives on Internet. CM’s internet social presence is much more important than the physical social presence. CM has to drive a vibrant online community by engaging and retaining readers online.

Community is all about people so needless to say CM has to be a people’s person. CM should be able to congregate people for a common cause/objective/interest. CM is the tipping point of any community. CM brings together people and creates a community and grows it until it reaches to a critical point good enough to tip the cause for which community was created.

How do a CM create and grow communities successfully is a very subjective question and there can be thousands of opinions for the same. I am collating certain points that I have figured out from reading and managing communities myself:

Internet presence
CM’s internet presence is critical; your community consists of people who are online at different times; so to have a comprehensive overall view point of the entire community it is very important that the CM is online most of the times.

Motivation
Most of the people are consumers rather than producers. They love to read the messages posted on community forums but rarely do they want to respond due to different apprehensions. CM must act as a catalyst to encourage, facilitate and moderate user generated content on the community forum.

User profile
CM should categorize the community members as high, medium and low users and should incorporate customized marketing strategies for different categories of user profiles.

Interesting Community
All work and no play make Johnny a dull boy. Information is good to have thing but loads of information and only information cant keep people interested for a long time so provide your members with loads and loads of fun quizzes, contests, games and other fun stuffs in addition to critical information about the product.

Dialogue
Community is a platform for communication not only for company but for the users as well. Take the feedback seriously and give them regular updates about their feedback. In other words, don’t just listen to their feedback; get back to them.

Transparency
It is of supreme importance to create the trust for you within the community so for a CM Transparency is the best policy.

Last but not the least
CM should be updated all the time with the latest happening about the subject in the market. Keep reading and participating on all the blogs and events related to your subject and keep on updating your community. That’s the unique value proposition that a CM should provide to his/her community.

That’s my two cents regarding Community Management; you can join some active groups around Community Management as mentioned below to discuss it further:

Yahoo Groups:
a) E-Mint
b) Online Facilitation
c) Successful Website Marketing

Facebook Groups:
a) Community Manager, Advocate, and Evangelist
b) Web Community Forum
c) Online Community Roundtable