Ben points out an interesting, yet ultimately fruitless exchange between a brand manager and a blogger. Basically, a smart brand manager reaches out to blogger talking about his product and offers to bring the blogger into the fold. Blogger gets excited, brand manager leaves the company and doesn’t tell the blogger, blogger becomes disappointed. And here we are talking about it.
The reality is that employees leave companies all the time and for a variety of reasons. Who knows if this particular brand manager was fired or simply moved on. Either way, this type of thing is normal and expected. But it can create problems when you hope to "create relationships" with your consumers. After all, we know that true relationships take time to build, and are hard to simply "pass off" to the next person.
The key to answering this question is applying the Bus Test:
"If ___ [your name]___ gets hit by a bus, what happens?"
The idea is simple – whether you’re a community-focused company employee, or an outside service provider – build redundancy into your community interactions and relationships. Redundancy may seem a bit odd, considering that you may be a rogue personality with your colleagues. Redundancy doesn’t happen quickly, and it’s not easy but it’s crucial.
So how do you make this happen? Here’s a few ideas for all you community manager types:
Implement a public communication device
This might seem obvious, but it’s easy to forget – create a mechanism for public communication, and require that your community contact points are using it regularly. Whether it’s a blog, a certain area of a message forum, or even just static web content, it’s crucial that there’s a historical record.
Perhaps more importantly, these communication efforts need to be tied to the company or the brand, not the individual. Certainly community folks can have their own online presence, but the core business activity needs to happen on a site owned by and associated with the company. Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble blogged at scobleizer.com, his personal site. When he left Microsoft, he took his site – and all its content – with him. (To be clear, there’s absolutely a place for personal sites, but not as your key source of community contact)
Provide global contact info
Good community managers always share their contact info freely, and great community managers make their contact info easy to figure out. (i.e. using jake@company.com rather than jake_mckee@america.corp.company.com) But even more important is to create a mechanism for that communication that can be picked up immediately by someone else. Email accounts tend to get shut down and bounce messages sent when people leave the company (like Ben’s story), and there’s no worse message to send than "We’re not here anymore, you have to start over getting in touch with us".
One idea might be to create a global "community" email inbox that allows multiple email addresses to dump into one place. So jake@company.com, bob@company.com, and community@company.com all use a shared inbox, accessible to multiple people.
Remember it’s not about you
Remember that a community manager’s role is comparable to a marriage counselor’s role – the focus is never on you. Community managers need to fight the natural tendency a community has of making them a "rock star", and instead turn the focus to the larger company. If you want to make a name for yourself, do it by making a name for the company.
Your primary task is teaching
Too often your colleagues think that since you’re the "community manager" that you’re going to own and implement any project idea that’s developed. In reality, the role of a community manager is one of teaching and mentoring. The goal is to get all your colleagues "infected" with community thinking. The more people in the company who can successfully reach out to the community on their own, without requiring your assistance, the better. Worried about putting yourself out of a job by doing this? Don’t. The more people in the company have been converted to the "religion of community", the more you look like you’re a genius worthy of promotion.
Don’t forget that teaching is often doing, not just talking. Showing someone how well a program can work can teach a lesson as good as formal instruction.
Document.
It’s easy to lose track of documenting your ideas, but it’s important to have a running list of why you did various things. Start a wiki and track every concept you implement, and include points like:
Not only does this help you capture cool ideas, it allows for anyone to get up to speed relatively quickly.
Many times when I talk to younger community managers, they voice significant fear that if other people can figure out what they do, then they’re putting their job at risk. This should be a secondary worry. A good community manager will be more concerned about making sure that their community will be taken care of properly in any situation. Besides, this isn’t just about getting "hit by a bus"… it’s also about getting promoted. After all, how can you move on to a bigger, better paying position if no one else can possibly do your job?
Alex blogged about our "casual development" efforts over at Big in Japan in three posts:
Check out the what, how and why about Egorcast. It was a fun little project mashingup Twitter, Jaiku, WordPress and Jott!
I almost hate to post about this because I don’t want to continue the discussion… so just consider this a vent of a quasi-political nature.
This week everyone from the Huffington Post to Advertising Age has been talking about Sheryl Crow getting yelled at by Karl Rove.
According to the Huffington Post article from Crow and Laurie David, they were simply being kind, level-headed global warming teachers. Just a few of their take on how nice they were being:
"We felt compelled to remind him that the research is done and the results are in (www.IPCC.ch)."
"We asked Mr. Rove if he would consider taking a fresh look at the science of global warming."
Kind words. I’m sure that’s exactly how it happened. It reminds me of that guy who finds "religion" of some sort, and starts proselytizing forcefully. You know that guy – he’s not much fun to be around, and tends to do more damage to his cause than he helps.
Here’s the real kicker:
As someone who’s been a (very very) minor celebrity, I completely understand how personal space violation can get under your skin. I can’t possibly imagine how little space Rove has for himself. Just because someone’s (theoretically) hot doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to be irritated when people get all up in your grille. Imagine the furor if some fan tried to touch Crow – she’d have her security team physically remove them, I’m sure.
OK, rant over. Thanks for listening. Let’s all drop this foolish story and get back to the real news of the day: Anna Nicole Smith’s favorite color.
Tags: Off TopicThe latest Clue Unit podcast has been posted, this time we focus on co-creation.
(click here to subscribe to this feed)
Since we were talking about co-creation, we’d be remiss if we didn’t call out one of our favorite examples of co-creation: JPG Magazine. In the spirit of wonderfulness that JPG is bathed in, they have offered up several subscriptions to the print magazine for us to give away.
If you’re interested, the rules of this contest are simple:
In about a week, we’ll randomly select 2 random qualified entries. Winners will be reading/drooling over JPG with the very next issue!
If you’re interested in increasing your odds, you can submit more than one entry (only one per day, please).
What are you waiting for? Start your search!
Tomorrow night Joseph Jaffe is coming to Dallas, and dinner will be had. Sounds like anyone’s welcomed, here’s the details. Make sure to let Paul know if you’re coming so that you have a seat when you show.
At Big in Japan, we have devised a plan to release "casual apps" once a month. These apps will span the comical (MyEvilCyberTwin.com) to the functional. The idea is to design, develop, and launch an entire application in about a week, showcasing some key concept of agile development, social strategy, and the future of web functionality.
Our April release is almost ready for primetime. We started coding the application on Friday and had our first release this evening (at DemoCampDallas2). It works, and we should be launching soon. Allow me to introduce you to EgorCast:
Jake McKee is the Chief Strategy Officer and Ant Wrangler at Ant's Eye View, a customer experience strategy practice focused on helping clients escalate their customer experience. With a rich background in customer collaboration, online communities, and fan groups, and Web development, community management, and product development, Jake helps organizations understand how to act like groups of people, rather than soulless money making machines.
