At Communispace, we get asked a lot about lessons learned and best practices for online communities. Since we’ve been doing this for over ten years, we have plenty of experience about what works and what doesn’t. I wrote a blog post for the Harvard Business Review blog network that covers some of the Mistakes to Avoid if you want to be successful with your customer community. Please check it out and let us know…do you agree? What did we miss?
My co-author is Professor Anat Keinan from Harvard Business School. She’s an incredible marketing professor who recently published a case study on Communispace for use in the first-year MBA marketing curriculum. It’s great that the top business schools are teaching MBAs about “social business” and the power of listening. For this new generation of business leaders, engaging in conversations with customers online will be second nature. Interesting, eh?
Debi:
Great piece. Hearing a lot of interest from marketers about the roles, competencies and activities of highly effective community managers. Would love to hear your views on this.
Lois
Great to hear from you Lois! I think that community managers need to have a multitude of skills in order to be effective. For the members, they need to be warm hosts in the community, with a sense of how their members would interact in the “real” world and be able to make that come alive and feel authentic online. It’s their job to create an inviting, personal space to get members to participate. Encouraging conversation, building on ideas, making connections, giving members many creative ways to express themselves – all are important.
For the community stakeholders, the community managers need to be great communicators internally to help align the work of the community to the most important issues at the company. They also need to be “connectors” within the organization, knowing the business goals and priorities of all the different stakeholders of the community and how to make the work of the community relevant to them. The best community managers are also passionate about their business or mission – this makes the whole thing really hum! What else? I could go on and on… maybe I’ll save it for another post. Stay tuned.