Public
cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Community Manager Tips for 2017

Khoros Alumni (Retired)

What do I love about #CMAD? With a turbulent year just having finished (something to count on every year, but particularly 2016) and with end-of-year or mid-year reporting and check-ins done, the date is perfectly timed. It gives a great opportunity to look and plan ahead.

 

So, if you have done so already or are still contemplating, I wanted to share four tips on what to consider as a community manager going into 2017.

CMAD.png1. Review Shared Purpose – Align Stakeholders

Quite often when I talk to Community Managers wanting to take their community to the next level, the discussion uncovers that their goals are only vaguely defined. A mission statement though is crucial to ensure alignment of sponsors and stakeholders of the community in your organization. Defining such a shared purpose is usually part of the launch preparations, but it’s a dynamic contract that needs regular adjustment to the reality of your business, org structure and resource changes. We recommend revisiting it annually and doing so is a great opportunity to bring all stakeholders together and ensure clarity about direction and strategy. So why not start planning your internal 2017 community workshop now?

 

2. Join Communities – Get inspired

Our industry – luckily – is a very versatile and an ever evolving one. Every week I discover new and innovative approaches to interactions, engagement techniques or simple inspiring designs. Voluntarily or not we are competing with the Facebooks, Slashdots and/or LinkedIns regarding the attention of our audience. At the same time these networks are setting the baseline of what visitors expect from modern web and app experiences. To stay relevant for our audience, we need to innovate and get creative inspiration. Regularly visiting and experiencing other communities has proven a great source for that to me. It helps answer questions, such as: How do they on-board new members? When and how are their guidelines presented? How are videos employed for education and what makes this kudo button design so inviting to make me want to click it more often?

 

Personally, I recently discovered various Smart Home automation communities in my attempts to upgrade my home and drew some good inspiration from my visit. What’s a topic that interests you right now and did you set aside an hour to visit all the related communities?

 

3. Up-Skill on Data – Own the Story

Understanding what is happening in your community has gotten easier with built in insight tools giving you a view on your key community metrics (at a glance). Yet, we are seeing an increasing demand to “mashup” data from community, web tracking or customer profiles to understand or identify correlations. Also, more agile and experimental approaches to community engagement often requires more direct interpretation of metrics.

 

Although every CM should ideally have a data scientist on the team the reality is that regularly the CM is asked to answer data questions. The good news: modern data insight, dashboard and visualization tools are easier to use than ever before and you can often get to know them via free – often feature restricted – versions. So go ahead and dig into the metrics yourself next time. You will find that the more familiar you become with “your” data, the more confident you can answer those tricky questions yourself.

 

4. AI/Bots in Community Context

Of course, I can't end without a note on the hot topic of the year: Bots or AI are currently presented as the modern conversation paradigm. I can’t see them replacing natural human conversations on communities, but I do see them as a possible enhancement for a CM’s toolbox in the form of “cybots:” bots enhancing human intelligence in chat or conversations especially in customer support/service interactions. AI can help, particularly, support communities to answer common, repeated questions and leave the unique cases to be routed to be answered by the experts. I think we can expect some exciting developments over the next 12 months in this field and we should approach this new technology from this angle as an enhancement and not a replacement.

 

Let me know in your comments which of these areas you plan to focus on. Or maybe what important predictions for community managers in 2017 I missed.

8 Comments
Leader

Great post @ClaudiusH! Personally, I'm focused on #1, getting the organization aligned on the purpose, and potential, of community.

 

Any recommendations for SmartHome communities? I recently installed some Phillips Hue lights, looking to see what other innovative uses are out there.

Boss
Some very wise words....
I'm personally not sold on bots, I deployed a bot to my support site about 2/3 years ago whilst the tech may have evolved since then I found them very labour intensive constantly having to review and tweak and ultimately the deflection benefit it gave didn't outweigh the cost of maintaining, that bit is now no more.

With advances in machine learning etc who knows they may be better now 🙂
Khoros Alumni (Retired)

@BHall How are you getting along with understanding the alignment? Where you surprised by a certain theme and the absence of another?  I saw a few moments in this exercise where things turned out very much different than the community manager expected. That's a good thing though 🙂

Re Smart Home: I found that the best Smart Home advice was to be found in the Home Cinema area where there is an audience with a longer history of fiddling smart devices into their homes. Also for each device family you need to find the community that hosts that platforms' experts. Take a look at www.avsforum.comwww.automatedhome.co.uk and http://homeautomationforums.com. - Also check out www.yonomi.co - a smart home meta service that enhances Hue functionality with some nice presets.

 

@Fellsteruk Every failed/ flawed bot deployment will bring learnings and tool improvements. I even recall a computer fair in German in the nineties with a very early voice interaction. It was "the future" back then 😄 - I think the difference between back then and even your example is that the AI toolset has improved to allow for less awkward conversations.

 

Looking forward to review how far we got in 12 months from now.

Boss

Good post, Claudius! With the evolution of chat bots and the success many social support teams have seen in the space, I can see community being another channel to deploy this in. I hope someone tries it out so the rest of us can see and learn. Cat LOL

Mentor

Hey @ClaudiusH

 

Building off the AI comment one thing that's big on my list is Algorithms and Automation or "Algorithmic Business" as i've seen it called. The opportunities for using algorithms to automate key processes within community management eg. recommending relevant discussions based on interest and expertise of a member has massive potential! 

 

We've developed quite a few in the past which have proved to be extremely successful at driving traffic and contributions! 

 

Algorithms can't replace the personal touch that only a human community manager but they can do a lot at scale! 

 

Cheers

 

Euan

Adept

Thank you and great article @ClaudiusH, I like very much !

Otherwise, my congratulations for your new status at Lithium !

Guide

@BHall Hey! I'm one of the Samsung Community Moderators. We have a "SmartThings" business which fits under the "Cameras / IT + Everything Else" section of the Community. We haven't had a lot of traction on channel regarding the product but it might be a good start > http://eu.community.samsung.com/

 

@ClaudiusHHope you don't mind me sharing the link!

 

RyanM
Samsung Community Moderator 

Expert

Thanks a lot C for sharing these tips will be of great help. G