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Category: Community Management

When we talk about community management, what is it that we truly mean?

What is Community Management?

Well, the truth is, the definition has changed a bit over time.

Before Facebook and the true monetization of communities, their management was a lot more on the side of what today we refer to as ‘trust and safety’.

If people were acting up, you kicked them out. If it was a quickie squabble, then you let them back in again, after an hour or a week or whatever. But if they were a repeat offender, then the time-outs got longer.

And if they were a truly horrible person, the bans were permanent. Who was truly awful? Spammers. Racists. Trolls. Anyone who tried to bring down a site or hack it.

A simpler time, in a lot of ways.

What is Community Management Now?

Today, while trust and safety is still vital, the role often splits into a few parts. One role is engagement. This is getting people to talk but also getting them to interact with advertising.

Another role is content. This is making content, yes. But it is also curating content and altering it as necessary. There may or may not be an outreach role, to bring in users and perhaps even to greet them.

For communities where there is art and literature, there may even be a copyright role under the general umbrella of community management.

Gone are the days when all you did as a community manager was to try to keep the inmates from running the asylum.

Community Management – Let’s Get this Party StartedCommunity Management, Scale. Freshening, Get Together, Love, Small Things, Without Management, True Community, Party Started, Terrible Netizen, Snakes, Circle Game, Look, Netizen, Corralling, Wandering off Topic, Facebook versus Forums, Superstar Users, Analytics, Community Roundtable, Community Management Haikus, Life of a Community Manager, Social Media Job Descriptions, Superstar Users, Community Roundtable 2010, community managers,

Community Management – Let’s Get this Party Started

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on December 15, 2020

Community Management Tidbits – Let’s Get this Party Started

W00t!! Let’s Get this Party Started! You’ve made the decision to have a forum on your website. Great!

It can be for any number of reasons, such as to cut the number of lower level technical support calls, to generate buzz for various advertising campaigns, to generate sales leads. It might be to bring together people interested in a common cause. And you have a site with forums, done up in Drupal, or maybe using a PHP application out of the box.

Or it might exist on Facebook exclusively. Or perhaps you’ve conjured up your own proprietary software.

And … nothing.

You’ve got no users, no content, no conversations. The community should be a hubbub of activity, a virtual village. Instead, you’re stuck with a ghost town.

Whaddaya do now?

Don’t panic.

Recognize that no one wants to be first attendee at a party. So, you’ve got to get the party started. But how?

Success?

For any website to succeed, you need to be strong in four areas:

• Design
† Metrics/Measurement
• Content and
† SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

So let us operate under the assumption that you’ve got the first two set (and, if you don’t, make sure you fix, perfect and beautify your design as much as possible). If you’re not already getting metrics, go get Google Analytics.

Now with those two set, you can, fortunately, work on the other two together. First of all, let’s work on some elementary Search Engine Optimization. SEO divides into optimizing onsite and optimizing offsite. So start with a few basic offsite measures.

It used to be that you had to submit your site to the late lamented DMOZ Directory. Yahoo ran this human-edited directory. Or, you had to submit to social bookmarking sites like Digg.

At this point in time, that advice is out of date. Don’t worry about it. You can do just fine with social media instead.

Create an X or Bluesky (or both) account for your website, and start to fill it with content. Follow likely members, or people you want to attract. In short, be a good netizen.

Content

For onsite SEO, let’s move onto Content. Because there is an intimate connection between the two of them.

Furthermore, your future users are going to want to see topics. And they are going to want to see them started by a number of different people. You’ll need to pull in some friends for this, and divide the new topics up as much as possible. Be sure to start with topics like this:

† Welcome to the New Members/Getting to Know You
• Basic News from outside your company, about you (if you’ve got a company blog or press page already, link to them here and
† A few (say, half a dozen) topics showcasing your best keywords but are written for humans to read

Keywords

That brings us to keyword research. Go to your competitors’ sites, right-click and select “View Source”. Which keywords are they using? Consider using similar if not the same ones.

So if your site is about, say, infant and child care, your main keywords and key phrases are probably going to be words and phrases like infant, child, child care, childcare, children, baby, babies, pregnancy.

Do Google searches using these keywords and key phrases, with and without the words forum or community added.

Look at those sites’ keywords and key phrases as well. Because you want to keep thinking of terms that your target audience will use for their own searches. Incorporate these words into your site and into the titles of some of your first topics.

Look at synonyms! If baby works better than infant, then use baby in the title but you can still put infant within the body of the post. Think like someone searching. What are they really looking for?

Specifics to Get Your Own Forums Party Started

Don’t be afraid to be specific, for the child care site, try topics on such subjects as teething, sibling rivalry and readiness for kindergarten. Keep the keywords in the titles if you can logically and grammatically put them there.

Consider some really niche topics, such as handling siblings who are acting out because one child has special needs or a terminal illness. Because searchers are looking for those answers as well.

Now, you’ve got some content, and you’re getting some SEO, even if you are still low in rankings (don’t worry, it’s percolating). But you still need users. Here’s where invitations come in. You, me, all of us – we have online networks.

We’ve got friends on Facebook, followers on X and Instagram and a network on LinkedIn, and a whole host of other groups of online acquaintances.

Plus we’ve got friend and family email addresses.

Send Out Invitations to Get the Party Started

So craft an invitation. Make it polite, pleasant, simple and short. Be definite about what your forums are about (e. g. write more than “Please check out my site.”). So, if it’s a writers’ community, mention that!

In particular, if you know people who like forums (perhaps you already regularly post on some other forums site, even if the main subject is radically different), invite those people.

And do this in small doses, say, 30 people at a time. This will keep an influx of new members from overwhelming you. And you can greet everyone personally, at least to start. Furthermore, it will add to the feeling of exclusivity that a small site can engender.

Don’t worry if people start inviting others to your site, even people you’ve never heard of before. Because this is a good thing. You want them to do this.

So look for sites to link to you, and be sure to get reciprocal links. Consider adding Google News Reader, and a blog to provide directed quality content if you don’t already have one. Furthermore, it will keep your users updated as to outages and new features as you add them.

Add a Facebook fan page for your site, although I’d recommend waiting at least a little while after launching. After all, if no one likes you on Facebook, you’ll have the same issue. It’s trying to attract people who don’t want to be first.

Furthermore, you’ll need at least 30 Facebook fans (that number may rise in the future) to get metrics. And then you can really get this party started.

But above all, have fun. And get this party started!

Want More About Community Management?

If my experiences with community management resonate with you, then check out my other articles about how online communities work.

Community Management Tidbits

• A Day in the Life of a Community Manager
† Analytics
• From Small Things
† Get Together
• Going From a Collection of Users to a True Community
† Handling Yourself as a Good Netizen
• Let’s Get this Party Started
† Look at Me!
• Risks of a Community Without Management
† Snakes in the Garden
• Superstar Users
† The Circle Game
• Wandering off Topic

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Community Management – Collection of Users to True CommunityCommunity Management, Scale. Freshening, Get Together, Love, Small Things, Without Management, True Community, Party Started, Terrible Netizen, Snakes, Circle Game, Look, Netizen, Corralling, Wandering off Topic, Facebook versus Forums, Superstar Users, Analytics, Community Roundtable, Community Management Haikus, Life of a Community Manager, Social Media Job Descriptions, Superstar Users, Community Roundtable 2010, community managers,

Community Management – Collection of Users to True Community

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on September 10, 2020

Going From a Collection of Users to a True Community

What is a True Community?

I’ve written at least seven obituaries.

That is, perhaps, an odd thing to confess. But when Jill, Kevin, Paul, Joanne, Olen, Joan, and Mary all passed on, it was up to me to write something, to not only commemorate their lives, but to try to help comfort a grieving community.

I am not saying you will write as many, or even if you will ever write even one. And I certainly hope you will never have to, as they can be gut-wrenching. But it was with the first one – Mary’s – that it became manifest (if it was not already self-evident) that, to paraphrase the old Brady Bunch theme, this group had somehow formed a family.

How Can This Happen to Your True Community (Without the Tragic Part)?

But no one has to cross over to the other side in order for your collection of users to coalesce into a Community with a capital C. The secret is very simple, although many companies don’t want to hear it: it’s going off-topic.

Let us assume, for example, that your community is a corporate-run one. And the product is a soft drink. Corporate tells you to stay on topic, on message. However, your users are saying something very different.

For it is easy, as you’re talking about the soft drink, to slide into discussing foods eaten with it (frankly, for such a community you’d almost have to go off-topic. Nobody but a truly dedicated corporate marketer can talk about a soft drink 24/7). Food slides into a discussion of recipes. Recipes turn into a talk about entertaining. And then suddenly you’re off to the races and talking about family relationships.

Corporate tries to pull you back on topic. Yet your users pull the true community ever further away. And they pinball from family relationships to dating, raising children, and elder care, if you let them.

The Community Manager’s Role

Here is where you, as the Community Manager, can talk to Corporate and forge a compromise. Corporate needs for people to talk about the product, tout it, and virally promote it. And they need people to make well-ranked (on Google) topics about it. Corporate may also realize that they need to hear the bad news about the product as well. The users need to talk.

So make a compromise. Create an off-topic area and move all off-message topics there. And be fairly loose with your definition of what’s on topic. In our soft drink example, the recipes topics, even if they don’t use the product as an ingredient, are still close enough so you can consider them on topic.

Also, don’t be surprised if the corollary is true. Hence topics that begin on message veer off it, even by the time of the first responsive post. That’s okay. Those topics should still be considered to be on message. Because Google is far more concerned with a forum topic’s title and initial post than with its tenth response.

The Benefits of the Off-Topic Section

Don’t be shocked if your off-topic section becomes a large one. And recognize that you and your Moderating staff (if you have one) may need to make on message topics in order to continue creating germane content. But your true community will be talking and the site will be a lively one.

It’s a party that’s going nonstop, your users will stick around and from this you can build a marketing database. And that is one of the standard corporate aims behind creating a community in the first place.

So when your users start talking about life events, such as births, school, divorce, moving, jobs, marriage, children and, yes, deaths, it matters. And when they start supporting each other through each of these phases, it marks a bright line distinction between a haphazard agglomeration of users and a true team of like-minded individuals.

Finally, that team, that family, that army, is what being in a true community is really all about.

Want More About Community Management?

If my experiences with community management resonate with you, then check out my other articles about how online communities work.

Community Management Tidbits

• A Day in the Life of a Community Manager
† Analytics
• From Small Things
† Get Together
• Going From a Collection of Users to a True Community
† Handling Yourself as a Good Netizen
• Let’s Get this Party Started
† Look at Me!
• Risks of a Community Without Management
† Snakes in the Garden
• Superstar Users
† The Circle Game
• Wandering off Topic

Next article

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Community Management – From Small ThingsCommunity Management, Scale. Freshening, Get Together, Love, Small Things, Without Management, True Community, Party Started, Terrible Netizen, Snakes, Circle Game, Look, Netizen, Corralling, Wandering off Topic, Facebook versus Forums, Superstar Users, Analytics, Community Roundtable, Community Management Haikus, Life of a Community Manager, Social Media Job Descriptions, Superstar Users, Community Roundtable 2010, community managers,

Community Management – From Small Things

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on September 3, 2020

Community Management Tidbits – From Small Things

What kind of small things? Small forums!

Every forum starts out small. Getting started is one thing. How do you get big?

The secrets to getting big go hand in hand with those for getting started: Search Engine Optimization and content.

Small Things Like SEO

Let’s start with SEO. If you haven’t checked your keywords in three months, check them now. Compare to your competitors, and check Google Adwords. Consider changing up your keywords for a while and see if you can draw more traffic.

The basic principles of offsite SEO apply: get your site listed on other sites which are more popular. Also, consider article marketing (if appropriate) and guest blogging. Perhaps some of your best content can be repurposed as articles or blog entries.

Ask the creator(s) of that content for their permission (even if your Terms of Service say that you own all posts, this is courteous) and update and repackage the content. Articles are a great way to generate interest in your site so long as you add your URL into the “About the Author” section.

And make it clear that you allow reprint rights only so long as the article remains completely intact, including the aforementioned “About the Author” section.

Blogging

One good blog deserves another. If you want to see if your better content can go on others’ blogs, why not create your own site blog? So at the absolute minimum, you can use it to inform your users of site changes and planned outages. But you can use it for a whole lot more.

Because you can showcase and expand better content, announce contests and promotions, and keep important site information front and center. Plus, if you add a blog, you can again make the rounds of basic social media bookmarking sites like Reddit.

Add an RSS feed if you have not already. You can feed it into Twitter and Facebook using a promotional site like HootSuite.

Facebook

Create a Facebook fan page and, at minimum, populate it with the RSS feed. And also use it to assure users if your site goes down, particularly for unexpected outages. Because such an outage can make some users nervous. So, Facebook (and Twitter, too) can be a means by which you reassure them.

Small Things About Site Redesign

Another area where you might be able to better grow your user base is with some site redesign. Be careful with this as a community can often take (frequently somewhat unfounded) proprietary interest in the site’s look and feel.

One way you can ease users into a change is by telling them (don’t ask for permission) that you’re going to be testing some site changes. Consider using A/B testing and compare a few different versions and see which one works better.

Simplified Registration

Consider simplifying your registration process, if you can, and embrace user-centered design. You still want to use a captcha code and you still want to have your members sign up with a real, usable email address.

But look at your process and see if there are any unnecessary hurdles. Are you asking for something like a potential user’s middle name or home city? Isn’t that kind of useless (and many users would feel that the home city information would be excessively intrusive)? Jettison the question and your registrations might increase.

Since you’re tinkering with the signup process and not the overall look and feel of the site, your regular membership might not take so much of a proprietary interest. They might not even notice.

Analysis

Check your metrics. Small things on a daily basis are not going to matter too much. But if you’ve got a continuing decline over time, or if membership is staying the same and not really increasing much, you may need to take action.

To grow your site, you need to continue to promote fundamental principles: improve your site design and test it; take care to add and promote good, keyword-rich content; and continue good onsite and offsite SEO practices. And be patient as small things become bigger ones. Most communities weren’t built in a day.

Want More About Community Management?

If my experiences with community management resonate with you, then check out my other articles about how online communities work.

Community Management Tidbits

• A Day in the Life of a Community Manager
† Analytics
• From Small Things
† Get Together
• Going From a Collection of Users to a True Community
† Handling Yourself as a Good Netizen
• Let’s Get this Party Started
† Look at Me!
• Risks of a Community Without Management
† Snakes in the Garden
• Superstar Users
† The Circle Game
• Wandering off Topic

Next article

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Community Management — Get TogetherCommunity Management, Scale. Freshening, Get Together, Love, Small Things, Without Management, True Community, Party Started, Terrible Netizen, Snakes, Circle Game, Look, Netizen, Corralling, Wandering off Topic, Facebook versus Forums, Superstar Users, Analytics, Community Roundtable, Community Management Haikus, Life of a Community Manager, Social Media Job Descriptions, Superstar Users, Community Roundtable 2010, community managers,

Community Management — Get Together

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on August 27, 2020

Conquer Your Fears and Get Together

Yes, you can—and should — get together! Life online is all well and good. Many of us spend large chunks of our time connected, whether that is via a desktop PC, a smartphone, a laptop, or a tablet. Newer technologies will, undoubtedly, make it even easier to get and stay connected.

But sometimes you’ve just got to say: Stop the Internet, I want to get off!

Of course you go offline every night for bed (er, you do, don’t you?), at the absolute minimum. But there’s more to it than that.

When your community has been around for a significant period of time (say, a year), your users are going to, naturally, be curious about meeting one another. In person. With no screens dividing them.

And this is excellent. It is a sign of the community jelling. You should encourage this. Or, if you like, you can even suggest a meeting yourself.

I mean, why the hell not?

Informal Gatherings

For informal gatherings, there is little, if anything, that you need to do. If you can attend, great! And if you can’t, ask people to take pictures. However, remind your users they should get permission before they take any photographs and post them online.

Furthermore, if there will be minors present, emphasize that photographs of them really should not appear online. Be prepared, if the child’s parents ask, to remove such photographs if they end up on your site. But that’s about it.

Formal Gatherings

Formal gatherings allow for a lot more dazzle. A get together can be as expensive or cheap as you like. Your attendees might wish to reserve a block of hotel rooms, or even a hall. Or you might just need to make reservations at a restaurant.

Or you could think outside the restaurant, and consider a visit to a museum, historical attraction or nature preserve. Your group might enjoy attending, say, a minor league baseball game (it’s often a nominal fee to get your site or company mentioned on the scoreboard or over the public address system. Usually this takes the form of a charitable donation).

Or your users might even enjoy a potluck, or a cruise, or a bowling tournament for fun. They might like to run a 5K race (or just watch) or even attend lectures or form a book group. And they might even enjoy helping to build a house for charity or volunteer at a soup kitchen for the day. The only limits are your imagination and the focus of your community.

Because a forum devoted to young mothers, for example, might enjoy a gathering where they can bring their children. Whereas a board focusing on a hip hop artist might prefer attending a concert.

Get Together Swag

For a gathering (in particular, for one specifically planned and sanctioned by you), it’s nice to bring swag. That is, forum- or company-specific merchandise. Make it free for the taking! Hats, tee shirts, frisbees, key chains, whatever you like.

The young mothers’ forum might like diaper bags or onesies. That hip hop forum might like licensed mix CDs, or special music that they can download.

Just give them the URL and a key or password, so they can get it exclusively, at least to start. And, it’s not a problem if people begin to share the URL and the password. Because you want them to do this.

Gatherings are fun. It’s enjoyable to finally see and get together with people you only know from online. Once you’ve heard their voices and seen their mannerisms in the flesh, you’ll never read their posts the same way again.

Want More About Community Management?

If my experiences with community management resonate with you, then check out my other articles about how online communities work.

Community Management Tidbits

• A Day in the Life of a Community Manager
† Analytics
• From Small Things
† Get Together
• Going From a Collection of Users to a True Community
† Handling Yourself as a Good Netizen
• Let’s Get this Party Started
† Look at Me!
• Risks of a Community Without Management
† Snakes in the Garden
• Superstar Users
† The Circle Game
• Wandering off Topic

Next article

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A Day in the Life of a Community ManagerCommunity Management, Scale. Freshening, Get Together, Love, Small Things, Without Management, True Community, Party Started, Terrible Netizen, Snakes, Circle Game, Look, Netizen, Corralling, Wandering off Topic, Facebook versus Forums, Superstar Users, Analytics, Community Roundtable, Community Management Haikus, Life of a Community Manager, Social Media Job Descriptions, Superstar Users, Community Roundtable 2010, community managers,

A Day in the Life of a Community Manager

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on November 21, 2017

A Day in the Life of a Community Manager

Whether paid or volunteer, the life of a community manager tends to be fairly similar. Community management can be a piece of Social Media Marketing and Management, but it doesn’t, strictly, have to be.

Most of a Community Manager’s time divides into three different modes:

1. Discussions
2. Nurturing and
3. Disciplining AKA Trust and Safety

Discussions

The discussion piece involves creating new discussions and shepherding them along. Users will not return, day after day, without new content. While the users are, ultimately, responsible for the content in a community, the Community Manager should create new content as well.

This is not always topics as it can also encompass informing users about changes in the site’s blog (if any) and even a Facebook fan page (if it exists).

This discussion piece evolves as the community evolves. In a community of fewer than one thousand users, the Community Manager’s content might be the only new content for weeks! Which…can sometimes be problematic.

As such, it can loom very, very large, but can also have a much stronger calming effect if other content is snarky.

As the community grows, the Community Manager’s contributions should diminish. But there should still be some involvement. Otherwise members may feel the Community Manager is hanging back a bit too much.

It is a community, and that means that the users want to know the Manager(s). An easy and somewhat safe way to do this is by creating discussions.

On Topic/Off Topic

And the discussions need not always stay on topic! Lively discussions can be almost spun from whole cloth if the Manager can get the people talking. An automotive community might thrill to talking about cooking.

A cooking community might engage in an animated discussion about the Olympics. And a sports community could very well bring its passion to a topic like politics.

In particular, if the community is single subject-based (e. g. about, say, Coca-Cola), going off-topic should probably at least peripherally relate to the overall subject.

Hence Coke could branch out into cooking and, from there, into family relationships. Or into health and fitness.

But a push to discussing politics may not work unless it’s based on a major recent news item or if there is precedent. And, if you get started with politics, it’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle.

Finally, if a member is ill, or has passed on, getting married or having a child, an off-topic discussion can spring naturally and effortlessly. This happens regardless of the community’s main subject matter.

Corporate management may not love off-topic discussions. But they keep a community together, and they help to keep it viable.

Nurturing

The nurturing piece relates to the discussion aspect. However, it tends to encompass responding to and supporting good discussions on the site.

This is especially helpful if the Community Manager identifies superstar users who are good at making topics who the community likes.

And then nurture them to promote those persons’ discussions over more inferior ones.

Use nurturing to encourage newbies. And use it to encourage members who might become superstar users if they only had a little more self-confidence. Give them a track record of support and positive reinforcement.

Welcoming people can get old rather quickly. But there’s nothing wrong with a form welcome, whether it’s an email or a private message or even a popup. Why not explain where to go to contact a Moderator? Or where to look and even where to report if the site is down?

Another use for a welcoming message can be to link to the Terms of Service and any other rules the community must abide by.

The Life of a Community Manager and Relationships

Nurturing can also take the shape of developing relationships with members. The Community Manager doesn’t have to be friends with everyone, even if the site is very small. However, they should get to know the users.

Private messages (if available), writing on a wall or the like can do this.

Furthermore, the Community Manager can use private messages, etc. to head off potential problems at the pass.

Headstrong members might be wonderful when they write on topics not related to their overarching passion. Or they might respond to a tactful request to tone things down a bit. Or a lot.

The Community Manager can encourage those members to take part in those other discussions. The manager can reach out to other community members. Friendship can help to minimize flaming.

Disciplining AKA Trust and Safety

And this leads me to the disciplining part. It’s often the first thing that people think of when they think of community management. That includes things like pulling spam.

It also includes giving users timeouts or even outright suspending them when their activities run against a site’s Terms of Service.

Trust and Safety can also mean checking content to be sure that it fits community standards. Those can be everything from avoiding porn to getting rid of health misinformation.

The Facebook Trust and Safety team, for example, once had the unenviable responsibility to weed through violent and disturbing imagery. Nowadays, that’s done by AI.

And it also includes shunning and ignoring. These can be extremely powerful. The Community Manager can help to mobilize other users.

But Do It Right

An email or private message campaign is almost always a very poor idea. Rather, the Manager must lead by example. Don’t take the bait when challenged, unless it’s absolutely necessary. But that is rare.

It’s the Community Manager’s call when to take it, particularly if personal insults fly.

Often the best tactics include: (a) get offline and cool off. And (b) ask another Community Manager or Moderator to determine if it warrants disciplinary action. And then enforce that if it is.

One thing a Manager should never forget: there is far more to the community than just the people posting. There is often a far larger audience of lurkers, both registered and unregistered.

They are watching events unfold but rarely comment. By leading by example, the Community Manager can influence not only active posters but also the community at large.

Customer Service is Key for a Community Manager, Even if the Forums are Free and There are no Real ‘Customers’

During a typical day, new members register. Also, members lose their passwords, or start and respond to topics. Furthermore, they answer older topics. People engage in private communications (if permitted on the site).

Members may disagree on something and they may do so vehemently. The site may get spam. Or someone might add violent and disturbing imagery.

The Community Manager can become involved as a content creator if content creation lags or goes too far off subject. He or she should discipline difficult members if necessary.

However, generally, a Community Manager’s main task, both daily and over the life of the community, should be to carefully nurture and shape relationships.

Want More About Community Management?

If my experiences with community management resonate with you, then check out my other posts about how online communities work.

Community Management Tidbits

Here are some posts about my years in community management, and what I’ve learned.

• A Day in the Life of a Community Manager
† Analytics
• From Small Things
† Get Together
• Going From a Collection of Users to a True Community
† Handling Yourself as a Good Netizen
• Let’s Get this Party Started
† Look at Me!
• Risks of a Community Without Management
† Snakes in the Garden
• Superstar Users
† The Circle Game
• Wandering off Topic

Next post

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