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.
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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
Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV
What Others Are Saying
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“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)
“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances
[1] The US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act: bit.ly/cokKI5
