Tag Archives: community

Do You Have The Essential Traits To Be A Successful Community Manager?

Despite these tough economic times, some website and blogs are succeeding and growing. How do they do it? By a laser like focus, not on themselves, their service or product, but on community. Successful blogs recognize what information or tools their community wants and their goal is to keep up a continuous stream of helpful, information in a simple, step by step manner. Good community managers are able to weave in their company‘s story while supporting their community’s needs. It’s a challenge. Stuart Foster , marketing consultant in the Boston area and author of a blog at Thelostjacket.com addresses this in 5 Essential Traits for Community Managers:

“Community manager is the new it position in social media. To establish hardcore communities of evangelists around your brand, you need to have one. However, what makes up a successful community manager? Every community manager must have their own style and idea about how to run things for their company, right?

Some basic tenets and rules apply regardless of the company. I spoke to some of the best in the business to get their thoughts on what makes a great community manager. I’ve narrowed it down to 5 essential traits.

1. Loving your job

This is absolutely essential and cannot be faked with any amount of money, time and effort. You have to absolutely love doing your job.

Muhammad Saleem, community manager for Tip’d, recommends that you “Be incredibly patient and approachable and never lose your cool, ever. Always start with the assumption that you’re wrong and the community member (or whoever else you’re in an exchange with) is right, and work from there onwards. Always have lines of communication open with your community as well as those outside your community (even competitors) and be available to chat/discuss/troubleshoot/resolve. Remember that the community always comes first, no matter what decision you’re trying to make. All decisions should be made with the community in mind. Ask yourself, how does this improve the community experience?”

Muhammad is able to put the community’s needs ahead of his own and maintain a calm and cool visage.

2. Ability to promote others as well as yourself

It’s great to push content and provide awesome information about your company to your community, but you need to provide more.

Daniel Honigman of Tribune Interactive made this commitment from an MSM news organization: “Linking to the Sun-Times and other sources right off the bat showed our readers and followers that we were doing things differently, that we’re willing to be good netizens. For a mainstream media organization to aggregate outside content in a non-bastardized way, that’s a huge step.”

This goes a long way in promoting more than just your corporate interests and fostering a trusting community in support of your company. It’s just common netiquette.

3. Ability to empower & support your community

This is essential. You can’t use your newfound powers and access for evil (you can’t go against the will of the people – some circumstances excluded).

“When instilling an attitude that isn’t one of control or management. One that people can relate to and feel comfortable with past the right culture built within the comm, you’ve got to create VALUE and make people WANT to be a part of the community and make them feel that they’re a part of something big and have that rapport spill over throughout all community members,” said Sonny Gill, a social media marketer.

This requires a time commitment. Amber Naslund of Radian6 elaborates, “Flexibility: this isn’t a 9-5 job, nor is it always a neat and tidy job description. That means being what your company and community need you to be, when they need you. Sometimes it’s communicating, sometimes it’s listening, sometimes it’s strategy and sometimes it’s execution.”

4. Transparent, fun, and engaging personality

The ability to be yourself in print, on Twitter (

), and via other types of communication is extremely important. Amber says it essentially comes down to people skills. “It’s about being yourself, yes, but it’s also about fostering relationships between other people. You also need some good relationship/biz development skills (NOT hard sales) because you’re often the first face of a company, either online or in person. You need to really thrive on connecting with people. The passion really matters.”

Amber came at this from a background that may not have looked exactly like that of a typical community manager, but the same traits were there. Amber’s “background is a blend of nonprofit fundraising, business development, client services, and marketing (B2B). I took a bit of a non-traditional path, but the undercurrent to all of those positions was relationship building in order to drive business. The social tools are just the mechanisms; the most important part is being passionate about stripping out all the broken ideas about impersonal communications and getting back to the idea of humans as the basis for good business. Social communications feel like the ‘home’ to me that I’ve always wanted in my job – the part of customer service and communication that always felt good and not so contrived.”

It doesn’t really matter where you come from, as long as the same morals, attitudes and desires remain the same.

5. Extensive knowledge about the company

Be able to answer any question, concern, or thought directed your way. Get your CEO into the mix.

Daniel Honigman ran into this problem when trying to gain access to the Tribune’s management: “I was extraordinarily lucky when I started out at the Chicago Tribune by having access to folks at all levels of the newsroom. However, you still need to make inroads with different departments and levels – groups that may traditionally be siloed – in order to get your job done quickly. You’ll find that as a result, internal communication will improve dramatically. And you can serve customer needs a hell of a lot quicker.”

Often you will need to break down cultures ingrained within your corporation’s DNA and this can’t happen without a buy-in from management.

Amber Naslund added, “Sometimes, you just have to shut up and realize you’re not the one with the answers. You need to have first-hand knowledge of what’s happening in your company to communicate that to customers and you need to shepherd information and insights back from your customers to your company. Sometimes the best person to provide an answer isn’t you, but you can help connect and put the right people in touch to make sure their experience with your company is always a good one. You’re more often the means than the end.”

Community management is a delicate balance; you need to be able to serve both your company’s needs and those of your company’s community. A lot of trust, respect and responsibility comes with being the voice for your brand. It’s a lot of power, but if you use it wisely it could be a boon for your company and your community.

So, what do you think are essential traits for a community manager?”

Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

Image representing WordPress as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

Ok. This post is not for all you bloggers on the Jedi Warrior level. We know you know how to blog. This is for all those out there, and particularly women, who have a lot they want to say and just haven’t gotten the hang of blogging yet. ( We’re telling you this because, as you know by now, if you have been reading this blog, we are encouraging women to jump on to the Net and develop their own communities and blogs in support of other women.)

Maybe you haven’t started your own blog yet because you’re intimidated. Maybe you’re just discovering the blogosphere. Whatever the reason, we can almost guarantee there is such an ease and an immediacy and a sense of shared community with similarly minded bloggers, that once you start, you’ll be hooked, like the rest of us.

Whether you want to start a business or a women’s community or a news magazine, you can blog.

The start up is the hardest part – which is probably true of most things – and it is not so much hard as detailed.

If you want to spend a lot of time weighing your platform options and strategies, Choosing a Blog Platform at ProBlogger will walk you through all that. You may want a hosted blog at a company like Blogger or a stand alone platform powered by WordPress.org or MovableType or one of many others. You may want to build your own brand ( highly recommended) , and if you do, you will need a stand alone platform. Personally, I prefer WordPress.org. It is feature rich, continuously updated, with thousands of man hours in development time. It boasts communities of developers offering plug ins which automate hundreds of the most useful tasks imaginable, from SEO ( search engine optimization so your blog can be found) to spam catching to putting in Google Adsense or Yahoo ads on every post. New plug ins are offered almost daily and there is ample support for whatever your needs are. There are many ways to customize the plugins, widgets, and themes or change them with a single click. And did I mention, it’s free?

There are several ways to set up your WordPress.org blog.

WordPress.org offers its own Quick Start Guide, which, incidently points out the advantages of self hosting. It’s pretty straight forward and intuitive, with a well known “5 minute install”, but if you’re not comfortable with mildly techie tasks, such as using ftp, this is probably not for you.

Making A WordPress Blog adds screen shots to the process of walking you step by step through the set up of your blog, using a hosted platform at WordPress.com. Simpler, ( since there’s no ftp or techie tasks involved) but still, possibly not what you want if you are trying to build your own brand, which, one day, you hope to sell.

Paying a pro WordPress guru a couple of hundred bucks to install your blog is simple, stress free and a good investment. We Fix WP Blogs is one example of a provider who can perform this task for you, simply, seamlessly and relatively inexpensively. I just used We Fix WP Blogs for a pretty extensive installation of mine – 3 blogs – so I can personally recommend them. And the bonus is that you will have a WP guru already familiar with your blog, should you ever need help, an upgrade, to migrate servers or simply some quick advice on the fly. There are a number of WP gurus out there, some mentioned on the WP site and others you may have to Google to locate.

Once you’re at this point, you just have to be able to write in plain English ( or French or German or Spanish or whatever language you speak.) Although the program is really intuitive and very simple to learn you can return to Quick Start Guide or Making A WordPress Blog with screen shots, to walk you step by step through the process of writing your content, saving it, then publishing it to the Net.

Whatever moves you or stirs you, motivates or inspires you, we want to see it on the Net, in your blog. When you fulfill yourself, we are all one step closer to fulfilling ourselves and to creating real progress on the Net. So start your blog. And please do share your story and experience with us.

For more, see these:

Yes, Some Blogs Are *Very* Profitable – And Some Of Them Are Women’s Blogs

Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

Women Power: From The Ballot Box To The Blogosphere

“Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”

Image via Wikipedia

Feminist Law Professors » Blog Archive » Inverview With Congressional Rep. Carolyn Maloney About Her New Book, “Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”.

This is exactly the kind of coming together and collaboration of women’s communities of interest that AdvancingWomen.com has been talking about and, hopefully, encouraging.

Part one here. Part two here.

In this instance, Feminist Law Professors and The New Agenda are focusing on the same themes found in “Rumours of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated” and reflected in this Interview With Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney by MadamaB, Crossposted at The Confluence and MadamaB’s own blog

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney is described by author, MadamaB, as a “gracious, intelligent, fiery and fabulous feminist.” Among the many points Congressman Maloney makes is that real progress will come “when there is a critical mass of women in government. Once 30% of our representatives are women ( Ed. some say 50%) , women’s issues begin to be addressed. The United States is nowhere near that critical mass yet.”

What is important, in the context of women’s emerging communities on the Net, is not the specific point a women’s activist makes, but the fact that she is taking a pro-woman stand in a society where there is a systemic bias which diminishes women and results in limiting their progress. What is significant in this instance is that Feminist Law Professors , The New Agenda, The Confluence and MadamaB’s own blog have all come together on the Net to reinforce each other’s perspective on the themes in Maloney’s book.

AdvancingWomen.com‘s position is that “it is important that a meaningful part of content on the Net be shaped and produced by women and offer new paradigms to support women’s advancement…. Our first task is to foster a sense of inclusive community among women’s groups with many different agendas and ideologies because that is the catalyst which will drive open communication among them and form the foundation for both networking, and its further evolution into a support system….
To achieve women’s advancement in many areas – business, law, politics, academia – we need a critical mass of women and women’s organizations to share their knowledge and strategies.”

When AdvancingWomen.com sees women’s groups like Feminist Law Professors , The New Agenda, The Confluence and MadamaB come together to share their knowledge and strategy, we feel very encouraged that the first steps towards that synergistic nexus of women’s communities on the Net has been taken and its evolution in growth and influence has begun.

When we look at the tools women have created or managed on the Net, a common theme runs through them: “Tina Sharkey at Johnson & Johnson’s (JNJ) BabyCenter ( networking and sharing information about child care and child raising); Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr (photo sharing); Mena Trott, co-founder and president of blogging powerhouse Six Apart ( connecting and communication through blogging); and Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, which lets users build their own social networks ( do it yourself, customized social networking)”. In one way or another, all these women have addressed the technical “how to” part of the equation of women’s communicating and networking on the Net. Other groups, many just now forming, are driven by the need to fill this new engine for thought and dialogue with their own passion, to level the playing field for themselves and other women.

In the beginning, many purposeful and committed women may have found themselves a bit put off by the jarring disconnect of the techie culture, in contrast with their own more reflective styles. Very young men in tight T shirts with screaming logos or rebellious, clever or obscure quotations, slumped in bean bag chairs for an all night “hackathon” until some got leg burns from their lap tops, amid crumpled, empty pizza boxes, crushed Red Bull cans and blaring music pulsating through a giant open space, frequently a loft or run down office. Was there a flash of genius there? Definitely, sometimes. Mostly they could have produced the same work from 9 to 5 but the crazy hours and adrenalin high were all part of the exuberant experience for them.

For equally driven women, either in their corner office, having fought tooth and nail to get there, or who might have met at Starbucks for a latte or a caramel frappe, or be sipping oolong tea on their deck or multi-tasking in their home office, Blackberry in one hand, baby on a hip, stepping over the tennis shoes of their son, roughly the same age as the founders of some of the new Net companies like Facebook….there may have been a sense that they didn’t belong in this new Net frontier. Not that the wonderboys were swinging open any doors for them. But women have long ago learned no one is swinging open any doors for them. If women want to walk into the tech scene and become powerhouses on the Net, we have to step up, open our own doors and “make the path by walking on it.”

AdvancingWomen.com has no doubt that women will go for it and stake our own claim to our sphere in the Networked world, particularly now that the social networking era with all of its new, automated tools is upon us. We have a hunch that “our” Net, the “women’s communities’ Net” will be different. It will be less about technical wizardry…..not that we don’t appreciate every ounce of that as it makes our work easier….give us those WordPress plug ins by the barrel full; it will be more about solving deep rooted problems woman have faced. It will be less about reaching out for new Net frontiers to conquer, than working together to reshape attitudes and stereotypes from the past that have prevented us from crossing old frontiers.

This time, we don’t have to ask permission to join the “old boys’ game”. ( Many of the old boys got “kicked under the bus” by the wonderboys anyway.) This time we have the tools and the ability to use the Net to route around the existing power structure, bypass the gate keepers, and ignore the often condescening “talking heads” to speak directly to each other, each from our own community of interest reaching out to like-minded others.

Also see:

Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

Don’t Cry for Us, Silicon Valley

AW WebBiz & Social Media Blog

Mentoring, Tools & Strategy To Succeed