Tag Archives: Community Management
Community Manager Appreciation Day 2012
This week, community managers everywhere participated in the third annual Community Manager Appreciation Day (also known as CMAD)! Now, while some of you may be thinking “oh no, not another made up holiday”, let me explain why Community Manager Appreciation Day is such a wonderful holiday to celebrate.
First of all, I’m sure all of you know at least one Community Manager. Whether you work with them, are friends with them, or interact with them through the communities that they manage, everyone knows a hard-working Community Manager. And because you know them, you know what an exciting and unique opportunity it is for them! Whether they are acting as a head-cheerleader, managing a disgruntled consumer or simply representing a brand, Community Managers wear many different hats throughout their days.
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Racist Comments Pile Up on Lowe’s Facebook Page
Every once in a while, a TV show comes around that really gets people talking. This season, TLCs “All-American Muslim” was that show. Taking place in Dearborn Michigan, the show follows the daily lives of Muslim families.
While many have revered the show, there has of course been some backlash. Some people were unhappy with the portrayal of the families, others were unhappy with the fact that the show was even on air. One group in particular was so outraged that they took it out on Lowe’s for airing commercials during the show. So they started writing letters. This group wrote Lowe’s so many letters that eventually, Lowe’s backed down and pulled all of their ads.
Now, opponents and supporters of this decision have flocked to the Lowe’s Facebook page to show their respective outrage and support. More than 23,000 comments have been left in reply to the note that Lowes posted, explaining their decision. Many of those comments berated Lowe’s or expressed disappointment for the decision they made and declared they will no longer be shopping at Lowe’s. But a good portion of the comments were also in favor of the decision that they’ve made–expressing blatant racism and saying they will begin shopping at Lowe’s based on this decision.
As you can imagine, the Facebook page has become a mess to moderate.
Remember that time you narrowly avoided total community combustion when the brand page was hacked? Or a team of cruel trolls who de-railed the prosperous conversations claiming your brand had done something horrible? Or how about the time you yourself made that critical (and mortifying) typo in real-time and it was fueled virally?
Community Moderators can commiserate with these examples and many more. I’m willing to bet we’d all benefit from a little therapy session to unload our deepest community confessions. Thankfully, there seems to be a connected community of CMs out there who keep each other sane sharing stories and tips. We decided to make something of this by creating a SxSW session proposal entitled, “Confessions of a Community Moderator” where we’d like to bring CMs from around the globe to participate in an interactive Confessional Booth and workshop discussion of common challenges and solutions.
Together, we could create the next Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook… for Social Media Managers. The funny thing is, despite the responsibility over channels that many view as “fun,” or even “easy,” Community Managers need to bring in best practices from a multitude of different roles, such as Copywriting, Account Management, PR (Crisis Management), Content Strategy, Publishing and Promotions. What we all really need is a list of most common challenges and solutions (as crowdsourced from a smart group of CMs at SxSW) that pull in best practices from all of those disciplines and many years of combined experience with branded communities. To give you a taste of the potential here, we’ve started the list. Behold:
The 7 Monsters under Every Community Moderator’s Bed
(and a Survival Guide for Claiming Victory Over Them All) Read More
We’ve gotten beyond the idea that brands using social media is more than just a trend. This year, social media has reached a critical mass at which we must handle the audience playing in that space with intelligence and strategy – It is not a “B” platform to follow your “A” platforms.
A recent Emarketer piece reinforced this. The article titled US Social Network Usage: 2011 Demographic and Behavior Trends outlined the slowing, and projected continued slowing growth of unique new social network users. With the knowledge that growth is slowing and the assumption that less new users mean more seasoned or savvy users, does this mean that consumers will start to tune out attempts to market to them in social media? If we’re in this stage of saturation and tune-out, what is the next chapter in community management? I’m going to focus the remainder of this post on Facebook and Twitter, but a future post will detail other opportunities to evolve social media marketing for your brand.
It’s official: the Guinness Book of World Records has declared a new record for the fastest time to reach 1 million followers on Twitter. Not surprisingly, the “#winning” honor goes to the psycho celeb du jour, Charlie Sheen. Like a car crash, his bite-sized, 140-character nuggets of crazy have captured the attention of Tweeple the world over—at last count, his following is well over 2 million strong.
Is it Sheen’s extraordinary social media savvy that has everyone riveted? I think we’d all agree that’s not it. It’s more likely the poetic verse rolling from his fingertips and the spectacle of a train wreck unraveling before our eyes.
“This Warlock is in the breach. Poised. T – minus 51 mins. read my tigerblood dripping lips; you’ve been warned.”
Right…. Sheen, like the Ashton Kutchers and Kim Kardashians of the world, has what most of us do not: spell-bind celebrity status that draws people into their digital web of antics like moths to a flame.
So what strategy should the rest of us (whether brands or individuals) employ in order to achieve social media success?
After nearly a year of engaging with my client’s beloved fans about the product that they all owned and “Liked”, the community had grown thrice over and evolved into just another dissonant group of Facebook users who really just “Like” to converse about themselves.
So how do I know they weren’t like that all along? Unlike the playground bully’s Mom, I have the metrics to back it up and went straight to our Marketing Science team for help. The whole situation felt like the beginning of a bad joke.
A scientist and a social media-ist walk into a room…
It didn’t quite end with the punch line I’d hope for but from what I was able to make of their findings, this was no joke. The product passion had fizzled and the community was a narcissistic nightmare.
To get a better grasp of the affect of our posts on the community over time, I examined similar page posts from each of the community’s life stages (5,000+ fans, 10,000+ fans, and 15,000+ thousands fans) spanning the last 8 months and did a little AB testing. Not the kind of AB testing done on websites but I compared post semantics. It must have been something I said.
Whether you seek to praise or offend a community, you’re going to have to go through a pronoun first so I took a look at how I was using or misusing them in my posts. Some examples of pronouns are I, you, me, we, it, us, and they; basically the most self-involved rhetoric in all the English language so it only made sense to start there.
