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