Social Media Event: Community Manager's Campaway – Key Learnings
Arranged and organized by Invoke Labs, the CM CampAway event was attended by a wide variety of Online Community and Social Media managers, coordinators and specialists.
It was a fantastic event, held at the Cheekamus Centre South, North Vancouver Outdoor School in Squamish, British Columbia.
Telling their stories, were:
Crystal Henrickson – Host and Head of Community and Culture at Invoke Labs
Connor Meakin – Community Manager at Hootsuite
Ligaya Tichy – Angel Investor
Ian Walker – Digital Marketing Analyst at Invoke Labs
Jarrett Vaughn – VP of Strategic Partnerships at Qoola Frozen Yogurt
While my notes were scribbled down, the lessons were important reminders of why we do what we do, and why we love it.
Lesson 1 – Evolution of Community: Put the people first.
- Build a product that people love, by understanding the customer
- Create meaningful interactions
- Drive awareness both online and offline
- Promote loyalty to your customers by building real relationships
- Reward meaningful interactions
In new companies – Community Managers should be in the first 5 hires! They are your voice who can build trust and truly understand the product.
Lesson 2 – Relationship by Design
When communicating with your community – use GRACE.
G- Growth: Your community should grow organically, sharing conversations and find people with a problem to solve
R- Response: Respond to the needs of your online family
A- Activity: Be an active part of conversations and discussions around your product, industry and whatever else comes up
C- Connectedness – Be connected with your community. Strive to understand with them on a personal level
E – Enthusiasm – As a Community Manager, you must be enthusiastic about the cause you’re promoting
Lesson 3 – Live Your Values
- Create unexpected joy – As a brand, talking directly to an individual, you are in a position to give back, speak directly and share a moment. Just retweeting, liking a comment or giving thanks can mean a lot.
- Never stop listening – Opinions change, news happens, questions get asked – if you’re listening, you can help and move in new directions.
Lesson 4 – Metrics, Goals, Tools and Useful Reports
Goals:
- Your goals must align with company objectives
- Track your efforts – it’s not all about acquisition rates
The hard part of measuring community management is the conversations and how they help reach your goals.
Tools:
- Google Analytics – this is the everyday tool which all Community Managers should be using. Experiment with creating custom dashboards and reports
- Excel – Keep track of the useful numbers. If you don’t need some data, don’t capture it and spend time measuring
- Hootsuite – View, engage and track your entire community. (The analytic reporting tools are being improved soon)
- Spredfast – An all-encompassing tool for building micro-sites, Facebook apps, managing your entire community, measuring and creating reports (my fave!)
Lesson 5 – Crisis Management
- Monitor, monitor, monitor
- Craft your messaging as a team – ensure that it’s the right one for your company
- Be positive – respond with confidence
- Trust yourself
- Post-mortem and refine plans – learn from what happened, how you responded and the conversations which followed.
Lesson 6 – How We Tick
- Spend time learning how your customers talk to each other – Certain wording impacts how we act and engage
- Find your future customers – listen to conversations, join relevant online groups, find a problem to solve
- We all crave validation, so do your customers. Thank them for being involved and show your appreciation for them
- Be local- everywhere with social media. Geo-target your posts to appeal to smaller communities. Don’t be afraid to be area specific in some of your messaging. It’s good to show an understanding for real-life communities and their localized area.
- Arouse a desire to belong
- Empower ambassadors – treat the people who tell others great things about you, like royalty.
- Share ‘interestingness’ – give your community something to talk about
- Use smiley-faces – it builds friendships and shows nuance 🙂
- Use names in your feedback.
- People want to be appreciated
Thanks again to everyone who hosted, shared their stories and to all those who came. It was such a valuable experience and I can’t wait for the next one.
For more photos of the event – please click HERE
CMCampaway – Event in Cheekamus House, Squamish | Smith, Abroad
June 28, 2014 at 7:20 am[…] For more on the event, and what I learnt, click HERE […]