Community Handoff

August 18, 2011 Leave a comment

How many of you have ever left an actively running community to manage another community or take a different job? I’m sure not many people have done this; yet I have had the luck in doing this twice. I thought I would share some of the ideas and methods that I have experienced to give you some ideas should you ever find yourself handing over your community to someone else.

1 – Remember that you are not the owner of the community; you are just another community member who happens to have a more influential position than others; however the community will not end because you have left
2 – Transparency – clearly notify the community of the new community manager and that a transition period is underway to hand over activities and functions to the new community manager
3 – Social Networks – create a list of all the social networks that you are aware of an ensure the new community manager has access rights to become an administrator/manger of the communities
4 – Remember that a new community manager will do things differently and that this is a POSITIVE for the community; fresh ideas and new ways to run communities always shakes things up and sometimes communities need a shakeup to keep away the “ghosts of routine”
5 – Work Together – spend time jointly working on important community activities so the new manager is familiar with your processes; e.g. weekly newsletters are very important to a community and a new manager will make changes (again, this is ok) and doing a few together will allow the new manager to better understand the previous decisions made as they make changes going forward

Beyond that, its simply good form to be there to help out even past the transition and also support the new community manager and even when feedback comes back from parts of the community not happy with the change. Over time, the community will move on and adjust to the new manager; however your efforts in building the foundation are always there and appreciated.

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Who is your Community?

August 12, 2011 Leave a comment

Next week I will once again be at an open source trade show, Linuxcon North America in Vancouver and will have the chance to see the latest in open source technology and new ideas in community management. Let me know if you are interested in any project and I can spend some time meeting with that team and even post an interview with them on the blog.

I am writing about how I segment a community to ensure that each visitor has the information and tools they need. When I first start working on a community, I create a list of all the various groups of people who will visit the community. From there, I specify the needs of those groups.

As an example, here is a partial list for a typical open source software community:

  • Developers – people who write the software and will upload code to the project
  • Users – people who will download the code and run it
  • Media – people who are interested in the project and will promote the various aspects of it to their audience

As you can see, the three groups have little to no overlap and are different parts of the community. It is critical to take the next step and list out the various needs. To give you an idea of this concept, here is a short list of needs for these three groups:

  • Developers
    • Simple tools to download and upload code
    • Communication mechanism to talk with other developers
    • Tool to promote what they are working on and why it is important
  • Users
    • Access to the final product for download
    • Instruction manuals, How-To Guides
    • Support tool (Forums, Mailing List, etc)
  • Media
    • Product information – what it does, why, how, etc.
    • Community Contacts – who to engage for more information, interviews
    • Community information – size, downloads, etc

Once you have completed this task, visit your website and look at your community from these various groups to ensure their needs are met. I do this every 6 months for my community to ensure that we are still meeting all the needs of the segmented groups and also to ensure that I watch out for a new segment whose needs are not met.

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Community Leadership Summit 2011 – Event Information

July 24, 2011 Leave a comment

I  just finished two days of non-stop community manager discussions and wanted to share all the information with you. Here is a selection of links to various information that I strongly encourage you to take a look at:

Event Home Page - http://communityleadershipsummit.wikia.com/wiki/Community_Leadership_Summit_Wiki

Saturday Session List – http://communityleadershipsummit.wikia.com/wiki/Saturday_Session_Schedule

Sunday Session List – http://communityleadershipsummit.wikia.com/wiki/Sunday_Session_Schedule

Notes from every session (AMAZING DETAILS) – http://communityleadershipsummit.wikia.com/wiki/2011/Notes

Twitter Postings during the event - https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23cls11

Pictures from community – bit.ly/cls11

 

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Community Leadership Summit

July 22, 2011 Leave a comment

This weekend, I am attending the Community Leadership Summit in Portland, OR hosted by Jono Bacon, of Ubuntu fame. This two day event is an unconference gathering of community managers from a variety of industries, not just software, to meet and share thoughts and ideas on the latest in community management thinking.

I will be there taking notes and posting my thoughts from the various sessions I attend on this blog post so my readers can get some idea of the latest thinking. If I have time, I will also take some video interviews with people at the event to get their thoughts on various community manager issues.

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Who Makes the Decision?

July 15, 2011 Leave a comment

Many communities are currently run from within corporations and often there is a conflict of interest between the two. A corporation enables and supports a community to benefit a particular product, cause, etc. Everything is all fine until the community is interested in heading off in a direction directly opposed by the corporation. This direction could be a simple decision as to where to host an event or it could be something more substantial such as the community goals or mission for the coming year. As the community manager, who are you supposed to back?

I find this dilemma interesting as companies create communities with the best intentions but quickly lose patience when control shifts to the community. If a company comes down to hard on the community and forces its way, the community will quickly disband and the company will lose all the benefits they carefully created in the formation of the community. If the company allows the community to run free and redirect itself against the company supporting it; there will be less benefit to the corporation and it will lose complete control over a valuable asset. Thus the dilemma falls to the Community Manager as the community and corporation will both exert pressure. What to do?

My thinking on this dilemma does fluctuate a bit but I do try and follow these guidelines in making my decision on what to do:

  • Small Issues – The smaller the issue and less relevant in the scheme of things to the corporation, the more likely I am to support the community and “turn” against the company. After all, you need the goodwill from the community on other decisions they will not like so much
  • Substantial Issues – It is these times that a good community manager will step in and attempt to negotiate within the corporation on behalf of the community as their representative to try and scale back the impact on the community in such a way that the corporation retains its “control” and also allow the community to not feel abused to the point that people walk away. Of course, no matter how this goes, you will always lose community members but attempting to minimize the impact will prevent the complete collapse.

Ok, what are your guidelines for such a situation?

 

 

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Barriers to Entry – Do You Really Need All That Information?

July 12, 2011 Leave a comment

When looking at a new community to join or thinking about joining, I tend to see what information is requested from me to join. Is it just a simple email address for validation, detailed contact information, or nothing at all. In my current community, we ask for no information from a member to take part in our community unless they wish to become a developer at which time they are required to complete a special legal agreement dealing with IP ownership of open source code which is fairly standard. All other community members can actively participate without submitting an email or profile for membership. Is this how your company works? If not – why not?

I am interested to learn what information you require from your community members upfront to take part and what do you do with it. How does requiring them to give you this information help?Do you email them with that info? Do you do an email verification to ensure they are real? How does it serve you to require members to register? Is there something hidden that only special, registered members can access? If so, why are you building a private community that is not open to all?

I offer another approach for member recruitment that eliminates people from not joining due to your upfront registration. Here it is… simply allow everyone to join the community and see everything and let them register for mailing lists or forums on their own should they wish to participate. A public blog is viewable by everyone regardless of registration status and you can leverage an open, free to join mailing list that allows members to pick and choose what info they want to receive from you and how. In this way, the community is not in control of the member but rather, the member can leverage the community in the manner that best fits them.

So, I am looking for people with registration requirements to help me understand better why a wall makes sense?

 

 

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How Many Social Networks Can You Handle?

July 8, 2011 Leave a comment

So, Google launches a new social network and I can hear the moans, not another social network? After all, that just means another group of people to send the same content to. In fact, I decided today to see how many social networks I monitor/contribute to for the OpenStack community:

  • Twitter
  • Linkedin (English and French)
  • Facebook (English and French
  • Xing
  • Ohloh – OpenStack, Nova, Swift  (all separate groups in the social network)
  • Chatter – an internal Rackspace community I push community info to
  • OpenStack Blog
  • Ping.fm
  • Mixi (Japan)
  • SlideShare
  • Vimeo
  • Flickr
  • Plurk

To help you find all the Social Networks you are mentioned on, try this tool http://socialmention.com. You may discover, as I did, several new groups talking about your topic/community which you should immediately start connecting with. In fact, I had never heard of Plurk before running this tool and have since discovered a sizable group of people talking about OpenStack who are now better served with information directly from myself.

Finally, how to manage all the pushing out of content? I am currently using HootSuite to post info to Twitter, Facebook, Ping.fm, and Plurk at once and am waiting for the LinkedIn connection to go directly to a group and not just myself. The rest are all done by hand. I am always looking for better ways to enter once and push out to multiple social networks so your advice is appreciated.

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When is your Community a Community?

July 5, 2011 Leave a comment

Many people talk often about how they want to have a community and then create a Facebook group or LinkedIn group and then tell me – look I have a community. Really? Is it just that easy or is there more to a community? Is having 5,000 people subscribed to a community site enough? What actually defines a community?

To understand this concept more, I want to present example that I am currently working on with a Xing group for my OpenStack community. I setup the group about 6 months ago and have really done nothing except occasionally post something in the news section and also list the Xing group of the main OpenStack community page. As of last Friday, I have 28 members in the group so it has taken time to build up a following in this community; certainly nothing like my Facebook or LinkedIn groups which are much larger. So, is this a community of not? Here are two ways to think about it:

  • Yes – any group of people interested in a specific topic (in this case OpenStack) and are willing to “sign up” to belong to a group with information on that topic is a community
  • No – a community requires interaction and some level or commitment from the members to actually accomplish something

I tend to follow the 2nd answer as I believe that a group of people just joining a group but not contributing or doing anything other than receiving feedback is not a community. They are merely just a group. To be a community, people must interact, share ideas, work together to a accomplish a goal. To contrast the Xing group, I have another group of people from around the world who are leading OpenStack community efforts in their various countries (more on this global community building effort in another post) all connected via a Google Group email. The people on this email system share ideas and questions with each other in an effort to solve problems that others probably already have fixed. In fact, we get several emails a day in this group for different members. To me, this is a community. While it only has about 20 people in it, everyone is communicating and taking actions thus it follows the “No” answer from earlier in this blog post.

So, the next time someone tells you they have a Facebook community with thousands of members, ask them how often people are sharing ideas or asking questions. Without action from members all you really have is a fancy newspaper with subscribers.

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Responsiveness – What is acceptable?

July 1, 2011 Leave a comment

How quickly and often do you respond to a community member or prospect? Are you an instant response person to 100% of the community members, do you wait a day or two before responding, do you have people you just don’t like that you ignore or wait a few days to respond? I have been thinking about this lately as I have started tracking all my community activities daily in an electronic diary that is helping me to better understand how I spend my days and my responsiveness to community members. From this tool I have discovered that I am not really doing what I thought (what else is new).

GOAL – My goal is to respond to every community member or prospect immediately if I am at my desk and working. If I am not at my desk, I respond immediately to all members/prospects as my first task when getting back to my computer. When I am out of the office over the weekend or a holiday I respond fist thing when getting back to work.

I should mention that a response does not mean an immediate answer but merely letting the person know that I have seen their request and will respond as soon as my schedule opens up.

ACTUAL – I find that certain members of the community who engage with me regularly are responded to based on my GOAL and any new prospect that inquires about the community also follows my GOAL methodology. The problem appears to be with some community members who often inquire about information easily available or are so frequent in communication that they become bothersome. These people are not receiving my immediate response and I tend to push them down on my priority list.

This insight into my community communication responsiveness is probably familiar to other community managers and I am interested to learn what your thoughts are on these types of people. Should I continue my current process of not properly responding to them or should I work harder to ensure they receive the same communication methodology that other members and prospects receive? I’m torn on the best way to go and perhaps I should just ignore these people altogether although that seems extreme to me but perhaps that is the best solution. Looking forward to your thoughts?

 

 

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Daily Life of a Community Manager

June 28, 2011 Leave a comment

I am often asked by many friends and relatives to explain what I do and most are still confused when I try and explain my definition that I detailed in the previous post. My next attempt is to list the various activities I do on a daily basis as a way to help people better relate to my job. Here is a list of tasks that I usually work on in a typical day:

  • Existing Member Interaction – With a large global community there are always a variety of questions and issues to handle for community members
  • New Member Q&A -  New people are always looking at your community and many have questions they can’t find an answer too
  • Website – Keeping the community website updated regularly is important as content becomes stale and out of date quickly; it’s also critical to review what information new members are asking you about to find better ways to make that information public – it’s the only way to make yourself scalable
  • Social Networking Monitoring – It’s rare to find a community that only exists in one place on the web, thus the need to stay in touch with members who choose to interact in a variety of common tools such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing, etc. In fact, be sure to explore the many global social networks that exist as you may find people looking for information on your community in places you have never even thought of. I will post more on this topic in a future blog as to a good methodology to find your members and respond in an efficient manner.
  • Community Blog – Having a single community blog is an important tool for your members (more on that in another blog post on tools to run a community) and ensuring that members are regularly posting and with appropriate content requires daily oversight. In fact, I set a target to have at least 5 new blog posts a week as a minimum to keep the community updated without overwhelming them with information.
  • Scheduled Work – Regardless of the constant monitoring and communication with the community, you will also have a series of tasks/projects that need work over an extended period of time. Some examples of this: Planning of Community Events, Community Statistics Gathering/Management, Community Deliverables (Presentations, One-Pagers), Member Promotion, and Webinar Planning to name a few items.
  • Weekly Newsletter – On a weekly basis, I produce a community update with a variety of information to allow people following the community to get the latest data without having to monitor the community activities daily. Preparing portions of this newsletter daily ensures that critical information is not forgotten and it also saves me time every Friday in producing the newsletter.

Of course, there are plenty of other activities that occur daily such as corporate overhead, team meetings, computer problems, LUNCH, and reading blogs/information on the field you work on. All these tasks occur randomly throughout the day and having a flexible schedule with the ability to move from task to task assists in not losing your mind. After all, this type of job can be stressful unless you love unstructured days, random interruptions, and helping people.

 

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