In our previous post, Create Initial Content for Your Community, we discussed how to adapt your policies to your ever changing community, a part of our community building checklist.
In this post, we continue posting our exclusive checklist that you can use to execute your project for building your community – The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™. We discuss how to manage your initial content.
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Manage Your Community
- Read the community management experts’ blogs:
- Amber Naslund’s Brass Tack Thinking[1]
- Connie Bensen’s Community Strategist[2]
- Tom Humbarger’s Social Media Musings[3]
- Heather Stout’s Social Media Building Blocks, in particular her series “Community Implementation Strategic Plan”[4]
- Mike Pascucci’s Online Moderation & Management Musings[5]
- Ken Burbery’s Web Business[6]
- Assign a community manager to:
- Review all activity
- Answer questions
- Stimulate conversation and connection
- Approve posts (if required)
- Manage the growth
- If community grows too fast, members may lose sense of connection
- If commentary gets too noisy, or too fractious, members may disengage
- Be responsive
- The community will expect you to respond to issues they bring up
- Moderators should participate in the community
- Use moderation lightly
- Remember, it’s the members’ community
- Encourage self-policing
- Allow off-topic posting — they’re still engaged!
- Model the behavior you’d like to see
- Contact rogue members privately; Confronting publicly may be counterproductive
- Ensure everyone knows the troll policy and other community policies
Next up: Attracting Community Members
Manage Your Community is the 168th 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 412. 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
“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies
“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] Amber Naslund’s Brass Tack Thinking: bit.ly/aI4Ne6
[2] Connie Bensen’s Community Strategist: http://bit.ly/cdX83j
[3] Tom Humbarger’s Social Media Musings: bit.ly/bNWsZz
[4] Heather Stout’s Social Media Building Blocks: bit.ly/dxDWY0 and bit.ly/aemsl0
[5] Mike Pascucci’s Online Moderation & Management Musings: bit.ly/9VbRJx
[6] Ken Burbery’s Web Business: bit.ly/cTb6X9
