Community Manager Appreciation Day 2012

1. Community Manager
Insights 2012
Community Manager Appreciation Day 2012 #cmad

2. Happy Community Manager
Appreciation Day!
Each year, we check in with
some of the top
community managers in
the industry and ask them
about emerging trends,
their greatest challenges,
and their biggest victories.
Thanks to all the
professionals that
participated. Let’s start
with an overview:

3. Who’s participating in your community?
Real engagement
means breaking down
1-­‐5
employees
the silos and letting
More
than
16
48%
any employee work
29%
with a customer to
troubleshoot,
brainstorm, listen or
10-­‐15
6-­‐10
21%
resolve. The more the
2%
merrier!

4. What is the primary business objective
of your community?
While still anchored in
social support,
customer communities Sales
Support
are starting to include 16%
48%
objectives from other
parts of the Marke@ng/PR
organization.
11%
Feedback
25%

5. What are you measuring?
Phone
call
Email
volume
Ticket
volume
volume
Proving ROI and
Traffic
to
Par5cipa5ng
Par5cipa5ng
engagement is
community
users
employees
critical. Here’s a
Sen5ment,
Customer
Sat
Time
to
resolu5on
Topics
answered
few of the
metrics being
Peer-­‐to-­‐Peer
engagement
Net
Promoter
Score
Ideas
added
to
roadmap
used to measure
community
Sales
generated
Leads
generated
Contact
deflec5on
success.
Shares
to
Votes
for
new
Inbound
social
web
features
search

6. Trends
What’s old hat?
What’s coming up?
What’s already here?

7. Social Enters the
Contact Center
“The next trend will be
channel blending where
contact center agents
integrate social media
(Facebook and Twitter)
into the existing contact
channels they are already
supporting (calls, chats
and emails).”
Jake Larsen
Vice President of Support
Monavie
Rajomo1,
Flickr

8. Authenticity
is Key
“For a brand to be social is no
longer a competitive
advantage. Everyone is doing
it. The challenge is to stand
out. Authenticity, one-on-
one human engagement,
genuine customer service and
scalability will be key.”
Monique Viljoen-Platts
Vice President of Customer
Support
Yola
Portland_Mike,
Flickr

9. Private Communities
Remain Crucial
“I definitely think internal
online communities for
employees will become more
popular. The more I talk to
people about what I do they
can instantly see the benefits
in their workplace.”
Steph Cittarelli
Community Engagement Mgr
Telstra
Karen_roe,
Flickr

10. Everybody, Everywhere,
All the Time
“Customers are everywhere. It is our
challenge to ‘be where they are.’
The trend points to centrally
managed multiple social networks
with seamless integration to
appear coherent and establish a
linked brand across multiple
platforms.”
Patrick Donohue
Student Technology Mgr
Loyola University
Maryland
Faungg,
Flickr

11. Cultivate Engagement,
Expand the Brand
“Originally, we started the community as
a place to interact and collect feedback
from consumers. In 2011, we began
shifting content to brand/product
messaging. Surprisingly, we found that
consumers were more receptive to
brand messaging once we had taken
the time to connect with them on a
personal level first.”
Michelle Goodwin
Integrated Public Relations
AMP Agency
Kriztofor,
Flickr

12. Customers Take
The Wheel
“From just one GetSat topic, our Korean
users grew to become their own
community. They requested Korean
language support for Prezi and provided
all the needed assets to our
development team to have this project
added to our roadmap. Being amazed by
the strong community voice, with their
help, assistance and testing, we
developed the feature even though it was
not scheduled on our roadmap. They
continue to support us with great
product feedback, and evangelize the
product in Korea ever since.”
Zoli Radnai
Community Manager
Prezi
Goldberg,
Flickr

13. The Human
Touch
“It seems like social
media is becoming even
more over-
commercialized. So the
struggle for companies
will be to maintain a
human touch and
personality that isn't
generic.”
Jenn Lin
Technical Evangelist
Get Satisfaction
ConnorGillis,
Flickr

14. Blended Metrics,
Blended Results
“People are the product. Businesses
will start to get this. Community
managers will live or die by their
ability to show the value of
communities to businesses using a
combination of traditional ‘call
center’ metrics with a
combination of marketing
metrics. Community managers will
develop better tactics to create
positive sentiment by studying
human behavior, herd mentality,
psychology and motivation.”
Jordan Kerr
Social Media Strategist
Virgin Mobile Australia
Wwworks,
Flickr

15. Challenges
Roadblocks and annoyances.
What holds a community back
from success?

16. Everyone
in the Pool
“My biggest challenge is helping the rest of our
employees, from engineers to business team
members, understand and digest our daily
feedback and bug reports. Being a community
manager puts you on the front line of all your
user communications and truly gives you a
different perspective on your product that can
be hard to relay to the rest of the company.
We’re able to create an open place were fellow
employees can openly read feedback from
real users to understand how they are feeling
about our service, ideas they have, and issues
that need to be dealt with or improved upon.”
Sarah Chorey
Community Manager
StumbleUpon
RaPler79,
Flickr

17. Government and Regulated
Industries Can Be Challenging
“Our customers are nearly all
government employees, and as
such, some are restricted from
visiting the site. Also, some of the
upper management have a
problem letting their users voice
opinions on how to improve our
product without first vetting those
opinions.”
Melissa Seccariccia
Customer Care Manager
JusticeTrax
Flying_cloud,
Flickr

18. Super Tuesday
Beckons
“With election year, community
managers and social media will
be forced to do a self-audit of
their processes and be extra
'real.’ This will be important for
maintaining trust. Google will
force its search engine hand so
much it will lead to less
interactions in other social
sites. Community managers
will be forced to create
something social out of
platform that is not
advertising itself as ‘social
media.’”
Steven Lowell
Community Manager
Voice123
HJL,
Flickr

19. Unflappable Patience
“The biggest challenge comes
when there is a hot topic and
people want resolution of the
issue immediately. The
community manager has the
unpleasant task of asking people
to hold on for some more time
before the fix is available.”
Kishore Balakrishnan
Program Manager
Captivate Team
Adobe Systems
Handolio,
Flickr

20. Crush Trolls
“Keeping the trolls
at bay as best as I
can.”
Mike Robinson
Community Manager
ReverbNation
Oceanyamaha,
Flickr

21. Victories
What was the best part of the
past year?

22. Recruiting
Rockstars
“Our community is very emotional
and passionate about their voiceover
careers. Our biggest success this
year was taking members of the
community, and hiring them with
the company, to turn around and
help their own colleagues! We had to
do it because we needed a team who
completely understood the day-to-
day usage of Voice123.”
Steven Lowell
Community Manager
Voice123
Wickenden,
Flickr

23. Praise is Always
Welcome
“One of the responses in our
community: ‘Wow, this is
fabulous news! Thank you
for the update. Also, it is
amazing that the Adobe
Captivate Team has so
quickly responded to this
issue! Thank you!’”
Kishore Balakrishnan
Program Manager
Captivate Team
Adobe Systems
Zigazou,
Flickr

24. Community Reduces
Email Volume
“We have noticed a significant
decrease in our user emails.
Many individuals who use our
site are choosing to post in our
community rather than sending
emails/making phone calls.”
Matt Wallace
Community Relations
VolunteerMatch
Richbs,
Flickr

25. Season’s Greetings
from Far Away
“We had one community
member send us a
Christmas card and
calendar all the way from
Australia, thanking us for
our games.”
Noel Paterson
Community Manager
Gamehouse
Andrewbain,
Flickr

26. Stumbling Down
the Aisle
“My highlight in 2011 was working with
two of our users to help create a
marriage proposal through StumbleUpon.
We organized it so as she Stumbled, she
would come across a special blog he had
made with a series of photos displaying the
message "Will you marry me?” I felt
honored that they wanted to involve and
share such a special moment of their lives
with us - all of us at StumbleUpon HQ sat
by and watched the whole thing unfold. The
room erupted in cheers when we saw she
had seen her proposal Stumble!”
Sarah Chorey
Community Manager
StumbleUpon
Catbeunier,
Flickr