What Does an Advanced Community Management Presentation Look Like?
I am an active speaker on the topic of online community and how businesses and individuals can tap into the power of online community and grow and manage their own communities. I have logged 30 engagements thus far and have spoken at important digital conferences (like South by Southwest Interactive), to universities (like Northwestern and North Carolina State) and corporations (like FedEx).
Under that umbrella, I have delivered presentations or participated in panels on numerous topics. Everything from creating a positive environment on your forums and how to respond to feedback to ethical social media marketing and how to market your products to online forums and communities. Management, engagement, marketing and more.
As I develop presentations, one of the things that I am having a tough time coming to terms with is exactly what is an “advanced” community presentation? I have managed online communities for 11 years, so I’ve seen “everything” (you can never see “everything,” and I am always learning more, but you get my drift) and I write and speak about it. To me, it’s natural and I try to pick topics that I think will be interesting. For some people, one item might be beginner where, for another, it might seem advanced.
Due to this, I wanted to put this out there and ask for your thoughts in the comments. In your mind, what is an example of an advanced community management presentation or topic? How do you come to that determination? Whether it’s the management of structured communities that you host or the general public facing, social media community management. Example presentations or topic areas are welcome, as well. Thank you.
I think one of the hardest things for any community to deal with are growing pains. Once you’ve moved beyond the small, tight-knit group of like-minded individuals and into a larger space that requires planning, moderators, outreach and organization you start to see groups having all sorts of problems dealing with the new normal. Perhaps an “advanced” talk would focus on that critical point in time for a community and highlight “what not to do” or “small mistakes that have huge repercussions” ?
But, yeah “Advanced” can cover a lot of ground :(
I think “advanced” implies that the community is established and moderately active. The kinds of things I had to deal with once my community got to that point were:
1) How to stop the community from becoming clique-ish and hostile to newer members.
2) Deciding on hard rules about whether to merge duplicate topics, close old ones, encourage people to “bump” old ones, etc. Basically, once your forum’s been around the track, a lot of the same topics come up again and you have to have to decide how you’re going to deal with it.
3) Related to #2: start finding ways to differentiate yourself and give your users reasons to come back. A lot of them will “burn out” after a year or two, or a couple of thousand posts, unless you’re churning out a fairly steady stream of new tweaks and features. You need to decide well in advance what you have the stomach for. If you’re okay with the turnover, just focus on making the site fast, easy to use, and well-managed. But if you want to lean more towards keeping users, focus more on things that pull them closer together and give them more bells and whistles.
In terms of both #2 and #3, the real key, I think, is putting thought into it and deciding upfront, because in both cases the worst thing you can do is establish a mood or a rule and then have to change it. So the single-biggest thing is to anticipate these issues and have a reasoned plan laid out, no matter which way you go.
Most of all, though, I would focus on something I believe you’ve already spoken about: how to kill your community. Getting a community going is pretty hard, but if you do it right it can last quite awhile. So I’d mostly turn it into a list of what NOT to do. In other words “here’s how you stop your community from withering and dying.” Because the kinds of things an admin has to do with an active forum are very different than the ones they have to do to get that forum active in the first place.
I agree with Chris and Jason. How to scale communities is very important. It’s a whole different dynamic managing an established, large community than a small new one.
Thanks for the thoughts Mr. Levine, Chris and Sue. I appreciate it.
Hi Patrick,
Interesting article. Sorry I am a little late to the party. Just found this article via another link.
There are a few things that I would certainly consider “Advanced” and would probably be inclined to include.
1) Managing Multiple communities / subject areas.
2) Managing Multilingual environments
3) Dealing and working with other community managers working in the same space as you.
4) Dealing with edge cases in your community. Social services, law enforcement, lawyers, etc.
5) Analytics and its relevance as communities become very large.
6) growing, nurturing and retaining your “super fans”.
7) “Selling in” to your company. Once you start to become very successful your going to have to learn how to ask your CFO for more money/people to support the beast you have let loose.
8) Growth strategies – not just how you are going to grow the size of your community but also, how you are going to grow internally to support all the extra work it will generate.
I could go on here, but well, you’ll only get bored!
Cheers,
Thanks Phil! Appreciate it.