Topics included:

• How has the role of community managers changed since the rise of social media?
• What will the future look like for community managers?
• How do the roles of social media manager and community manager differ?
• What are the tools used to grow online communities?
• To what extent is the community manager’s role regulated by the company’s leadership?

To check out the full transcript click here.

What are your views?

Check out my interview in Social Media Portal here.

Do you talk and actually listen to your customers via your social media channels or, be honest now…,  just pump out one way marketing campaigns?

Social media has undoubtably changed how businesses conduct themselves and, is the single most important thing, that has happened to commerce in the last 100 years. However, as a consumer, I still find many  companies will not speak to me via social media – i’m guessing all in the name of keeping costs down as far as they are concerned. But at what cost in the long-term?

So many companies still seem to be focusing on the wrong metrics  (likes, number of followers etc) and not listening and acting enough on what customers want.

This, in my opinion, is a big mistake. So much insight and intelligence can be gleaned from listening and engaging with your customers.

What’s more, with so many social media monitoring tools out there (Dis.cuss.it, Brandwatch, Crisp Thinking, Conversocial) the cost argument really loses any force. Such tools bring “customer service issues” to the attention of Social Media Managers (so they are not trawling through 1000s of comments 24 hours per day) and can even send them directly to the customer service team to be acted upon, as with other incoming enquiries via other means.

It seem that many companies need to rethink their social customer strategy in 2013. In that way, companies will show that they care and can be trusted, which is so important.

What do you think? Do you think lots of companies have improved in this area over the last year?

Striking the right balance of content and conversation is an elusive but necessary combination for success.  When developing the content component, online community managers often think in terms of monthly or weekly Editorial Calendars to ensure a steady flow of ideas and content sources to keep the site active. This is a best practice, as it allows community management to plan for the future, align site activities around topic themes and, frankly, helps forestall a constant scramble for articles and the like.  But in too many cases, calendars are devised with the primary goal of filling the content bucket, with little regard for the needs of and value to members. Community management hasn’t stopped to ask the “So what?” question on the members’ behalf.

What’s needed is the right kind of content to fuel interactions and provide ideas and insights that help members solve the problems that brought them to the community in the first place. The most important content in an online community is that which comes from its own members (i.e., members sharing their experiences) vs. content which the community organizer brings to the community from other places ((i.e., external articles published elsewhere.) Emphasizing community-generated content supports the peer-peer exchanges which brought members to the community in the first place.

I’ve created this chart to help visualize the how member contribution varies with the different content types in an online community:

 

We are pleased to announce that John Coate, former Marketing Director and Conferencing Manager of the WELL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL), one of the first online communities, will be keynoting at VirComm13.

As Marketing Director and Conferencing Manager of the WELL for its first six years John was instrumental in creating the online community that Wired magazine called “the world’s most influential.” (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_well_pr.html).

Although his formal title was Marketing Director & Conference Manager, he was in truth the first person to work as what is now commonly called an Online Community Manager.

John was also co-founder and General Manager of SF Gate, owned by the San Francisco Chronicle.  While there, he and his crew pioneered a number of innovations, many of which are now standard features at most news web sites.

 John was the chief fundraiser for the Electronic Frontier Foundation; he was the first “Hotel Manager” for the US version of Habbo Hotel – an online virtual world for teens, and has managed editorial and community matters at Techsoup.

Dominic Sparkes, CEO and Founder of Tempero, presented the cornerstones of social media management, as he sees them (or at least as he did then, 9 months ago). These cornerstones were insight, engagement and moderation.

Of these 3 cornerstones (social media management therefore being triangular), I found engagement to be the most…ahem…engaging. And it wasn’t just me – two of the most tweeted soundbites came from this part of his well-received speech.

Along with very sage advice such as “use or employ the best writers you can” (here, here!) and “triple check all spelling and grammar,” came this humdinger: “Don’t over engage – think 140.”*

Think 140? Characters? Words per minute? No folks, this is one of those clever devices to help you remember this:

1 Facebook wall post per day
4 tweets per day
0 customers ignored

Now, it’s pretty blindingly obvious that a brand should never ignore a customer, so the zero still rings true. But what about the frequency of Facebook updates and tweets? Does that hold true now, 9 months later?

Back in January 50.3% of UK residents owned a smartphone and now it’s 56%. With the majority of people being fed social media updates wherever they go, does it matter if a brand tweets a bit more often? Perhaps they need to, to have any chance of getting their message seen among the swathes of information being pushed to users. Or perhaps they need to scale back to avoid the dreaded unsubscribe?

What do you think? Think 140 ftw? Or Think 140 ftb? (For The Bin…)

* Dominic talks about this around the 09.55 mark in the video if you want to re-live the historic moment.