Our Community Leaders Forum has been around for a few years, and we’ve been pioneering in community land for a while now. We see tectonic shifts in the way communities are run. We identified two of them today.

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One is the drive to accelerate advocacy, which we call a vertical movement. The second is the drive to combine activities on your own enterprise platforms with activities on external social platforms. We call it horizontal movement. The expansion of those two we call the ‘community ecosystem’. Go where the user is and maximize the value experience.

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Since most of our Community Leaders Forum members come from ‘own enterprise platform’ activities, it was time we had somebody speak about their experiences of creating fans on the social media platforms and see what lessons we could learn from that. In return of course the speaker could put his challenge to the team and ask how to deal with that. That is the model for each presenter. You give to the group and the group gives back.

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I do not do social media?

We were lucky to have Maksim Zuromski of .Monks present his case. Recently, when you would ask a Community Manager about their job, you would hear almost immediately: “I do not do social media. That is so much different from what I do and it sits in a different department”.

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And, guilty as charged, so did I for quite a few years. Well, not anymore. Any major brand has now a very mature community operation. Long gone are the days where a brand would just broadcast a message on to the channels and ‘hope for the best’. These days, massive amounts of data provide detailed profiles and based on that, very specific messages are targeted for those individuals.

So what did we learn related to community management?

1. Combine data on audiences:

Larger brands all have massive amounts of data on their target audiences. If you are a community manager of an enterprise brand community, there is a good chance that when you compare audiences, there will be a lot of value in combining those two data sources.

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2. Involve Community Manager in brand campaigns early

Brand campaigns are massive and expensive. Brands themselves have the data and the profiles. They are the ones that craft the message. By the time the campaign reaches the community manager for execution, there is almost no way to alter, modify or downright stop the campaign because of doubts that a Community Manager may have based on previous experiences.

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3. Have your "Nasty FAQ" at the ready

We talked at length about this problem above. The conclusion is that “Prepare is better than Repair”. In other words: If you are running a campaign on a new product or service, you had better have your “Nasty FAQ” written out and make that part of the Community Playbook. Many community managers already do this individually but it was generally agreed that a Community Manager should have the “Nasty FAQ” before the product or service is launched. Going into a campaign without it is like driving a car without seatbelts. For Maksim this meant that he was recommended to have that as part of his work instruction and not go in without it.

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4. “Dark Posts” are transactional

“Dark Posts” are posts that are specifically targeted to an individual with a specific question. If I am looking for a new track saw, I will receive a post about a track saw from this brand. They are transactional and are similar to a forum question in community platforms.

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5. "Organic Posts" lasts longer

“Organic Posts” are posts that are more generic and address topics that people will respond to with a certain opinion. They last longer and will hold more replies. They are similar to discussions or microblogs.

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The interesting dynamics of the meeting was that it went from informational to very lively in the end. We left with the notion that indeed, Community Managers in the social platforms have much more in common with Community Managers in the enterprise platforms than was generally assumed upfront.

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