Community Manager Insights 2012

Community Manager Appreciation Day 2012 #cmad

Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day!

Each year, we check in with some of the top community managers in the industry and ask them about emerging trends, their greatest challenges, and their biggest victories. Thanks to all the professionals that participated. Let’s start with an overview:

Who’s participating in your community?

1-­‐5  employees  48%  

6-­‐10  21%  

10-­‐15  2%  

More  than  16  29%  

Real engagement means breaking down the silos and letting any employee work with a customer to troubleshoot, brainstorm, listen or resolve. The more the merrier!

Support  48%  

Feedback  25%  

Marke@ng/PR  11%  

Sales  16%  

What is the primary business objective of your community?

While still anchored in social support, customer communities are starting to include objectives from other parts of the organization.

What are you measuring? Phone  call  volume   Email  volume   Ticket  volume  

Traffic  to  community  

Par5cipa5ng  users  

Par5cipa5ng  employees  

Sen5ment,  Customer  Sat  

Time  to  resolu5on  

Topics  answered  

Peer-­‐to-­‐Peer  engagement  

Net  Promoter  Score  

Ideas  added  to  roadmap  

Sales  generated  

Leads  generated  

Contact  deflec5on  

Shares  to  social  web  

Votes  for  new  features  

Inbound  search  

Proving ROI and engagement is critical. Here’s a few of the metrics being used to measure community success.

Trends

What’s old hat? What’s coming up?

What’s already here?

Social Enters the Contact Center

“The next trend will be channel blending where contact center agents integrate social media (Facebook and Twitter) into the existing contact channels they are already supporting (calls, chats and emails).”

Jake Larsen Vice President of Support Monavie

Rajomo1,  Flickr  

Authenticity is Key

“For a brand to be social is no longer a competitive advantage. Everyone is doing it. The challenge is to stand out. Authenticity, one-on-one human engagement, genuine customer service and scalability will be key.”

Monique Viljoen-Platts Vice President of Customer Support Yola

Portland_Mike,  Flickr  

Private Communities Remain Crucial

“I definitely think internal online communities for employees will become more popular. The more I talk to people about what I do they can instantly see the benefits in their workplace.”

Steph Cittarelli Community Engagement Mgr Telstra

Karen_roe,  Flickr  

Everybody, Everywhere, All the Time

“Customers are everywhere. It is our challenge to ‘be where they are.’ The trend points to centrally managed multiple social networks with seamless integration to appear coherent and establish a linked brand across multiple platforms.”

Patrick Donohue Student Technology Mgr Loyola University Maryland

Faungg,  Flickr  

Cultivate Engagement, Expand the Brand

“Originally, we started the community as a place to interact and collect feedback from consumers. In 2011, we began shifting content to brand/product messaging. Surprisingly, we found that consumers were more receptive to brand messaging once we had taken the time to connect with them on a personal level first.”

Michelle Goodwin Integrated Public Relations AMP Agency

Kriztofor,  Flickr  

Customers Take The Wheel

“From just one GetSat topic, our Korean users grew to become their own community. They requested Korean language support for Prezi and provided all the needed assets to our development team to have this project added to our roadmap. Being amazed by the strong community voice, with their help, assistance and testing, we developed the feature even though it was not scheduled on our roadmap. They continue to support us with great product feedback, and evangelize the product in Korea ever since.”

Zoli Radnai Community Manager Prezi

Goldberg,  Flickr  

The Human Touch

“It seems like social media is becoming even more over-commercialized. So the struggle for companies will be to maintain a human touch and personality that isn't generic.”

Jenn Lin Technical Evangelist Get Satisfaction

ConnorGillis,  Flickr  

Blended Metrics, Blended Results

“People are the product. Businesses will start to get this. Community managers will live or die by their ability to show the value of communities to businesses using a combination of traditional ‘call center’ metrics with a combination of marketing metrics. Community managers will develop better tactics to create positive sentiment by studying human behavior, herd mentality, psychology and motivation.”

Jordan Kerr Social Media Strategist Virgin Mobile Australia

Wwworks,  Flickr  

Challenges

Roadblocks and annoyances. What holds a community back

from success?

Everyone in the Pool

“My biggest challenge is helping the rest of our employees, from engineers to business team members, understand and digest our daily feedback and bug reports. Being a community manager puts you on the front line of all your user communications and truly gives you a different perspective on your product that can be hard to relay to the rest of the company. We’re able to create an open place were fellow employees can openly read feedback from real users to understand how they are feeling about our service, ideas they have, and issues that need to be dealt with or improved upon.”

Sarah Chorey Community Manager StumbleUpon

RaPler79,  Flickr  

Government and Regulated Industries Can Be Challenging

“Our customers are nearly all government employees, and as such, some are restricted from visiting the site. Also, some of the upper management have a problem letting their users voice opinions on how to improve our product without first vetting those opinions.”

Melissa Seccariccia Customer Care Manager JusticeTrax

Flying_cloud,  Flickr  

Super Tuesday Beckons

“With election year, community managers and social media will be forced to do a self-audit of their processes and be extra 'real.’ This will be important for maintaining trust. Google will force its search engine hand so much it will lead to less interactions in other social sites. Community managers will be forced to create something social out of platform that is not advertising itself as ‘social media.’”

Steven Lowell Community Manager Voice123

HJL,  Flickr  

Unflappable Patience “The biggest challenge comes when there is a hot topic and people want resolution of the issue immediately. The community manager has the unpleasant task of asking people to hold on for some more time before the fix is available.”

Kishore Balakrishnan Program Manager Captivate Team Adobe Systems

Handolio,  Flickr  

Crush Trolls

“Keeping the trolls at bay as best as I can.”

Mike Robinson Community Manager ReverbNation

Oceanyamaha,  Flickr  

Victories

What was the best part of the past year?

Recruiting Rockstars

“Our community is very emotional and passionate about their voiceover careers. Our biggest success this year was taking members of the community, and hiring them with the company, to turn around and help their own colleagues! We had to do it because we needed a team who completely understood the day-to-day usage of Voice123.”

Steven Lowell Community Manager Voice123

Wickenden,  Flickr  

Praise is Always Welcome

“One of the responses in our community: ‘Wow, this is fabulous news! Thank you for the update. Also, it is amazing that the Adobe Captivate Team has so quickly responded to this issue! Thank you!’”

Kishore Balakrishnan Program Manager Captivate Team Adobe Systems

Zigazou,  Flickr  

Community Reduces Email Volume

“We have noticed a significant decrease in our user emails. Many individuals who use our site are choosing to post in our community rather than sending emails/making phone calls.”

Matt Wallace Community Relations VolunteerMatch

Richbs,  Flickr  

Season’s Greetings from Far Away

“We had one community member send us a Christmas card and calendar all the way from Australia, thanking us for our games.”

Noel Paterson Community Manager Gamehouse

Andrewbain,  Flickr  

Stumbling Down the Aisle

“My highlight in 2011 was working with two of our users to help create a marriage proposal through StumbleUpon. We organized it so as she Stumbled, she would come across a special blog he had made with a series of photos displaying the message "Will you marry me?” I felt honored that they wanted to involve and share such a special moment of their lives with us - all of us at StumbleUpon HQ sat by and watched the whole thing unfold. The room erupted in cheers when we saw she had seen her proposal Stumble!”

Sarah Chorey Community Manager StumbleUpon

Catbeunier,  Flickr