Today I attended my first Community Management Training course presented by WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association), Market Context and Program Management.  Today’s speakers were Rachel Happe and Jam Delcambre (Community Manager of AT&T).

 

Market Context

Rachel started the session off with an excellent definition of community. 

Community is defined as a group of people with unique shared values, behaviors, and artifacts.

Rachel also reminds those following along that social media management and community management are not the same.

Social media management includes responsibilities like sharing info into groups that are without shared or unique characteristics, maintaining comments and responses across a variety of networks, and interaction within the social community.

Community management requires managers to give up a little of their control while creating tight-interlinking relationships over a wide variety of topics and encouraging a stable core membership.

Types of Community

According to Rachel, there are basically three different types of community:

Exclusive – think Weight Watchers or Problogger & Chris Brogan’s Third Tribe, B2B customer communities, and market research communities.

Discrete – for instance, B2C product support communities, consumer media communities, or an internal community for employees.

Distributed – B2C  and B2B products and services

Benefits of Having Community Management and the Risks of Not

Another topic Rachel touched on was the benefits of having a community manager and the risks of not having one, so lets go over some of them.

Benefits

Managers:

• -provide a consistent human experience
• -ensure the consumer experience is optimized for production outcomes
• -balance the needs of the members with that of the sponsoring organization
• -measure the community project and suggest/make improvements

 

Risks

Your community could become a:

• -Ghost town
• -place where people are interacting with not curated an possibly useless content
• -drama central
• -circling storm
• -clique for members

Recommended Resources & Reading

Books

Online Community Management For Dummies – Deb Ng

18 Rules of Community Engagement – Angela Connor

 

Project Management

AT&T’s Community Manager Jam Delcambre took over about half way through the first session to discuss and go over the intricacies of Community Management in the sense of Project Management, in the following section you will find a brief overview of the material covered.

Elements of Community Management

The Differing Roles of a Community Management

• -Specialist
• -Manager
• -Strategist

Examples of a Specialist’s Activities

Engagement – monitors trends and emerging issues, monitors engagement levels, and assists in getting creative assets posted.

Content – moderates forums, posts new content as it pertains to the community, and identifies the need for and sources new support content.

Reputation Management – assures the points engine is working, runs measurement reports, and identifies high performing users

Member Relations – on-boards and engages new members and heads up outreach to encourage new members.

Measurement – measures engagement, usages, community quality, etc.

Mediation & Escalation – monitors and reacts according to community terms of service, uses proper escalation process, and monitors content and engagement for tone.

Characteristics of a Great Specialist

• -Knowledgable
• -Understands the memvers or customer perspective
• -Great communication skills (written and verbal)
• -Resourceful (finding the right internal person when needed)
• -Comfortable with online interaction
• -Detail-oriented
• -Empathetic
• -Customer-care background
• -Passion for your Product

Ethics

You must be genuine and transparent within the community you are managing while remaining fair and empathetic.  All rules must be enforced the same way across the board, that is all members are treated the same and follow the same rules.

Recommended Resources & Reading

Michael Wu’s blog

Web Strategy: Jeremiah Owyang (blog)

Brains on Fire – Robbin Phillips

The Thank You Economy – Gary V

Enchantment - Guy Kawasaki

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the course and am excited to start the next class.  Over the course of the next 6 weeks, I will be attending these Community Management Training courses every Tuesday and Thursday and will try to share my notes with you as soon as I am able.  Thursday’s course is called Strategy Leadership and Culture, where we’ll be going over the “formation of a community strategy, as well as a broad understanding of how the leadership and cultural environment in which they work impacts day-to-day community activities.”

Follow me (@HighImpactMom) and the learning on Twitter with these hastags: #womma #cmtraining

Did you attend as well?  What were your thoughts?

If not, what would you most like to learn about concerning Community Management?

Image Credit: WOMMA

All book links are affiliate links and I will receive some pennies if you decide to buy any of them through the links provided.

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Posted in: Social Media Impact

Tags: community management, community management training, Market Context and Program Management, WOMMA

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