Last week I wrote a post about whether your company needs an online community manager. In today’s business climate, it’s becoming an increasingly important position to have as part of your staff. I still believe that.
But the post I read this morning by Richard Millington, an online community consultant, made me realize that while some companies can make due with just one community manager, larger companies will need a team.
Richard breaks it down into five roles: The Friend, The Recruiter, The Enforcer, The Editor, and The Entrepreneur.
If your community is growing and you need to recruit more people, it makes sense to split these roles. Let the editors focus on content, the entrepreneurs focus on business development and the recruiter recruit.
Until recently the business attitude toward social media was to build a branded outpost on Facebook or Twitter, populate it with content and direct customers to it. While this has worked well for a few years, patterns are emerging that suggest social media is maturing and becoming more vertical.
This trend towards vertical online communities presents businesses with a choice: Leverage Facebook and Twitter to develop your online community and online customer experience, or develop your own bespoke online community.
For many companies it will come down to a matter of budget: Twitter and Facebook are free, or nearly free (depending on whether you pay for added options) whereas developing an online community costs money to plan, build and maintain. Sites such as socialengine and Ning both offer the ability to develop branded online communities, for a price.
Even though his face was really made for TV, Renaissance Creative’s Social Media Strategist, Ben Lamothe will be working out his vocal chords this coming Monday. Ben will be joining host, Melissa Ross, on our local NPR / PBS affiliate, 89.9FM’s “First Coast Connect” at 9am (7/12/10), to discuss the Crisis in the Gulf. Ben will specifically be addressing BP’s social media response to the crisis. After a fumbling start, BP now has substantial social media strategy in place- but is it working, or being upstaged by Twitter’s satirical BPGlobalPR? Ben will let us know his thoughts. This is educational stuff, so tell your boss to “Back off!” (…or “Tune in!”).
A favorite hobby of bloggers who specialize in social media and online communities is producing elaborate infographics to prove a point. Most of them are interesting, but a few really drive the point home.
Here’s a good example of that from ZDNet’s Enterprise 2.0 blog about community management:
Earlier this week I attended a strategy session with Social Media Club — Jacksonville, for the domestic violence shelter Hubbard House. During the two-hour session we examined the status of Hubbard House’s current social media strategy, and looked for opportunities where they could grow.
A theme that came up consistently throughout is the “time” dilemma: There are these social media platforms that your company or brand should be using, but everyone is stretched so thin that the time just is not there to make anything work.
It happens to bloggers, too. It even has a name, called “blogger fatigue.”
Here’s what I told the people from Hubbard House to help them overcome this problem and move onward to a sustainable and realistic social media strategy:
