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.
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 today I posted a Tweet about an article I read in eMarketer, titled “Big potential For In-Store Mobile Marketing”. A few minutes later, a reply came in asking me what I thought it meant for SMBs.
The entire article is fascinating, but I found this part the most insightful:
As more in-store shoppers—especially millennials, who are used to turning to their mobile phone to stay connected anytime, anywhere—become mobile web users, demand for an in-store experience that takes advantage of web capabilities will only grow.
Developing and executing an in-store mobile marketing strategy can be expensive, which is why it will mostly be done by larger companies with numerous brick and mortar stores. However, opportunities exist for small and medium-sized businesses to develop a more cost-effective strategy for developing an in-store mobile marketing strategy.
When talking about social media with a skeptic, I like to remind them that social media has been around for about 10 years, and blogs have been around for closer to 15. Only in the last two years has social media become commercially viable. I whip out that line whenever I hear people dismiss a new evolution in the social media space as being a ‘fad’ or purposeless.
The latest evolution in social media, geolocation, has dealt with the same withering criticism by non-users. The difference is that the commercial applications of geolocation are much clearer than they are with Facebook or Twitter. There are many companies and services vying for geolocation users’ hearts, but right now that crown belongs to Foursquare.
Geolocation’s early adopters who saw the commercial appeal included Starbucks, who signed a deal with Foursquare to promote their Frappuccino Beverage by offering a discount to the “Mayors” of individual Starbucks locations.
Now it has begun to trickle down to SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses), who are also beginning to offer discounts and benefits to customers who “check-in” at their store.
Here are some tips that SMBs can use to engage their customers, encourage them to check-in and get them to tell their friends:
