Community is not possible without the willingness to forgive one another.
Which might also mean, if there is no need for any forgiveness between people in your crowd, you do not truly have community.
forgiveness
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Tag Archives: octribe
What qualities make someone a good community manager?
Got a great question today in my inbox, “what qualities make someone a good community manager?“
First, I can not promote the title community manager, because I do not believe the role is to manage the community. I don’t think the title is fair to the professional or to the community.
So, I can only promote titles like,
Community Architect A product centric person who designs and creates the spaces for communities to gather in and go about their life and work together
Community Curator A content centric person who is a good story teller, and can draw out great stories and examples from the community to reflect back to itself.
Community Cultivator A person who cares about rules and procedures and knows when to break them… the person who plants questions and content, moderates conversations, and mediates relationships.
Some of the qualities necessary for these roles are:
- Compassion – you must love people in all their shapes and cultures and proclivities
- Empathy – able to step in the shoes and head of anyone within the community, or outside the community
- Strong Character – able to roll with the punches, dodge attacks, and defend community guidelines
- Decider – gotta just make decisions quickly, communicate clearly, and keep moving
I probably need to add a hundred more, but these keep floating to the top.
Never Say Thanks
A friend in the community space asked me a great question this morning, and I realized I have never written about this.
Why do you say, “A community manager should never use the word, ‘thanks’”?
In my experience, when someone reaches out to a company, they are most often already in a place where they feel unheard or misunderstood. So, when they read your text based reply (where it is very difficult to express tone and emotion), their baseline assumption is that you will be dismissive or annoyed. So, in that context, it is almost impossible not to hear ‘thanks’ as “ugh, yeah, thanks a lot, whatever” but it is much harder to hear ‘thank you’ as anything but “I thank you for your question/idea/input”.
It might just be stupid semantics. But, it is one of those little rules I live by for the sake of the other.
Do you have any little rules like that?
Community College
I had a thought the other day:
“I wonder how many college students are looking for #cmtymgmt #octribe internships? Thinking about creating “community college” =)”
I have not nailed down all the details yet, but I’m trying to live my life as a draft, so I’m thinking out loud here.
Essentially, I’m trying to collect a group of folks interested in community cultivation, but who might not have quite the amount of experience many companies are looking for. We would talk shop about community cultivation, and I would be available as a resource to both the company and the intern, but the intern would get a TON of hands on experience.
love people, use techniques
The tragedy of our time is that we’ve got it backwards: we’ve learned to love techniques and use people.
[ via Herb Kelleher former CEO of Southwest Airlines - via Chip Conley CEO of joie de vivre hospitality ]
customers don’t go to your site for the features, they go for the content
I really enjoyed Karen McGrane‘s talk (embedded below). Some of my favorites:
- “People don’t go to your site to look at your templates. They go for the content.”
- “Emphasize the real goal: not new navigation buckets, but better information for site visitors.”
- “Our new web strategy said, ‘Organize the site around user needs rather than [features].’”
- And, just a general recurring theme, that content creation wasn’t included in any project plans/workflows.
Karen McGrane on Web Content Strategy or “Avoiding the Eleventh hour Sh*tstorm Problem” from UX Melbourne on Vimeo.
Content Strategy at UX Melbourne
View more presentations from Karen McGrane.
Apple Support Communities – Discussions aren’t Social?
“Apple Support Communities brings together thousands of Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad users from around the world to discuss Apple products and topics,” the official introduction reads. “Apple Support communities provides a wealth of information about your favorite Apple hardware and software products to help you get the most out of your purchase. And, in the spirit of community, you can also help other Apple Support Communities’ users by answering their questions.”
[ via AppleInsider | New Apple Support Communities social network to replace Discussions (thank you for the heads up Scott) ]
This announcement triggered a mini-avalanche of undigested thoughts for me:
- Are discussions not social?
- Can you call any website that includes an avatar, a profile page, and a couple of widgets a community? A social network?
- Is every new feature this year going to be called a social network?
I definitely don’t intend for these questions to be a sarcastic attack. I do not think we have come up with good answers to those questions yet.
Users Are People Too
Just ran across my new favorite #loveyourcustomer hack!
Back in the video days of Seesmic it was very easy to ‘humanize’ our users. They were real talking faces streaming down our screens all day long. I got to know many of them very well. Literally watching them laugh and cry, some at their lowest moments without hope, others during a wedding ceremony or the first moments with a new child. We flew from around the world to cram ourselves into a basement in the middle of winter, just to hang out with each other. So many of these people are still my good friends today.
For many companies, however, it is not that easy to see the people behind the usernames. Especially not on such a consistent and personal basis. But, no worries, Joe Heitzeberg came up with a wonderful solution:
How do you take a team that’s swamped with work and make them become incredibly customer focused overnight? … Every day, print out a few hundred new user photo thumbnails and post them on the walls.
[ via currentlyobsessed.com ]
Tweets inspired by morning sessions at DreamForce
I would love to come back to these tweets and dig in a little further under the surface. But, I wanted to at least quickly capture some of the thoughts inspired by this morning’s sessions at DreamForce. (The #’s link out to the original tweet.)
Do you have a visual, defined, roadmap for customer success that you use internally AND share with your customers? #
Learning how Starbucks implements Salesforce products to build customer community. Incl. mystarbucksidea.com #
Community Building Goals: 1 communicate value 2 build internal support (culture) 3 Engage ALL users. Also, understand purpose of new ideas. #
Types of Customer generated Ideas: Top, First, New, Sleeper, or Validates (an internal assumption). Name and treat accordingly. #
Healthy communities increase customer loyalty, attract quality prospective customers, and acceleratecompany learning (transform us) #
“OMG! If we create customer communities, we might have to listen to them, and have a conversation.” FastForward: We got richer. #
You probably don’t have ONE community. Build in neighborhoods. #
Visionary leadership essential to transition into community engagement. Business value (though likely) cannot be proved up front. #
Sustainable Community – Over Eager Greeter
Ricardo Nunez made a comment in a previous post, that got me thinking about the transition from “engage and help everybody” to “the community maintaining itself”? A noble goal for cultivating a community. Though, like infinity, it is a goal you can never really reach. But, I wanted to share a few observations I’ve made that help move communities in that direction.
Part 1: Over Eager Greeter
This one took me quite some time to recognize. My own excitement about greeting new members the second they joined the community (most services have the option to shoot off an email when there is a new member) meant that other members of the community didn’t get the chance. Obviously they could have gone up to greet people as well. But 8 (or 8000) “hi, welcome to x, let me know if you have any questions” would be awkward. and overbearing.
Related to this, some people just want to check out a new community. Maybe they don’t feel like they have *joined* anything yet, so pouncing on them the minute they “walk in the door” can throw them off guard and cause them to raise their defenses.
I don’t believe there is a magic number (i.e. 1 day or 386 minutes) of how long to wait before greeting new members. All communities have different cultures and purposes. Some have hundreds of messages/notifications per day. Some only meet once a month. Etc.
With each community (you probably have more than one in each organization) I try to figure out how much time someone might need to get a feel for the place, as well as the average time it takes for members the seize their opportunity to say hello first. Finally, I write the numbers down, and ask a few members if those numbers make sense. With that information in hand, I have a decent guideline for how long to wait before extending my own greeting.
photo credit: Photo Denbow
coming soon:
Part 2: Helping Should be Easy
Part 3: Make it Safe