Define Your Community Goals – SMPG Community Building Checklist
In our previous post, Community Building Checklist, we began posting our checklist for building your community – The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™.
In this post, we give you some ideas to help you define your goals for your community.
Define Your Goals
- Don’t go off half-cocked and just create a community space without goals and a plan
- Review the previous posts Create Social Computing Strategies and Elements of an Engagement Plan
- Determine the potential value you hope to create for enterprise and its clients
- Create your strategy, goals, and measurement techniques (known as Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs)
- Review the post Measure Results
- Know:
- What your community stands for
- Who ideally participates
- How they will create action in the real world
- Identify a Sponsor
- Key role
- Must be committed for long term
- Not necessarily a do-er, but the prime supporter
- Identify a Strategist
- Plots the development of the community
- Ensures the community tracks against goals
- Identify a Community Manager
- Responsible for day-to-day
- Could be a team
- Estimate the overhead: headcount, budgets and staff time
- Determine who can join the community
- If under age 18 or 13 are allowed, ensure that you understand the implications
- In US, must comply with COPPA[1]
- May need to set a cookie so that if you reject membership and the user returns and tries to change age, they can’t register
- Determine who can no longer participate
- Create a policy for trolls, or objectionable members
Next up: Research Your Community’s Needs
Define Your Community Goals is the 163rd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 403. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2
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[1] The US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act: bit.ly/cokKI5