The Tite Group, FITC and DX3 held its first-ever conference dedicated entirely to community management on Thursday. Called CM1, the one-day event looked at everything from planning to moderating and reporting.
Given that community managers are now in the trenches managing the reputations of billion dollar brands, Tite Group CEO Ron Tite said he saw an opportunity to bring together community managers and marketing managers to discuss the discipline and how community managers can be better used by marketers.
“Companies need to be able to dial up their capabilities and skill sets so that community managers become part of the strategic team within an organization,” Tite said. “We thought it was time that we create content specifically for community managers and the people who manage them.
Here are five things we learned at the conference.
1. The three I’s of community management
Marketwired community manager Sheldon Levine opened the conference with a keynote on the different types of community managers. He also shared his three-point system to successful community management.
Inform: Keep consumers informed with blogs, reports and articles. Publish anything you think your audience will enjoy or want to know, not just company information.
Interact: Talk to your audience and treat them like humans, not numbers. If you establish a relationship with them, they’ll remember those conversations when they make purchase decisions.
Integrate: Bring your fans and followers together as an actual community through meet-ups, Twitter chats and fostering an ongoing conversation about topics relevant to your brand.
2. Start your planning with a listening audit
Tribal Toronto community cultivation manager Laura Muirhead recommended community managers start their content plans with a listening audit, a report that looks at what consumers are saying about a brand, its competition and category on different social platforms. Once a brand knows the type of language its target uses online and the type of content they share, it will be better prepared to create content they’re likely to consume and share with their own networks.
3. Focus on things your audience is already doing
Echoing Muirhead’s advice, Mosaic director of digital and social media Julie Sheldon suggested community managers look for content their audience is already sharing and shape their initiatives around it.
She cited a recent Instagram campaign by Cascade as an example, noting the brand knew Canadians would share pictures of their Thanksgiving dinner plates, so it asked them to tag them #giveaplate and donated $5 to Food Banks Canada for each photo shared.
4. Different social networks demand different strategies
What works on Facebook doesn’t always work on Twitter, according to Twitter Canada senior account executive Ryan Ginsberg. He said consumers often turn to Twitter to save time and get a quick view of the news, while they go to Facebook to socialize with friends and family. Because of that, he said community managers need to shape the content they share on each platform to suit the reason consumers visit that social network.
5. Community managers should measure social like paid and earned media
Andrew Cherwenka, co-founder and CEO of Authintic, an analytics and technology company, said community mangers should be reporting at least monthly on their posts’ reach, engagement and the demographics of their social audience.
He recommended weekly reports with one succinct insight and more detailed monthly reports that offer about three actionable insights based on the actions of the community, such as “coupons work with our customers” or “our fans on social appreciate advice.”
Cherwenka also suggested community managers give a number value to interactions on social media that match up with the brand’s other media metrics. For example, one click-through from a Facebook post to a brand site might be worth the same as or twice the value of a click-through on a display ad.
