How I survive as a Community Manager

by Rose Kotze

I’ve read many ‘How To Manage Your Community In The Best, Most Super Way’ blog posts, but for anyone who doesn’t poop rainbows 24/7 or actively enjoys being cursed at by perfect strangers – these can often be misleading. Basically, I rely on three fundamental pieces of information to help me through the veritable minefield that is social media management. And here they are:

Think of your community as a party, and you’re the host!

It’s a universal (and mostly unpleasant) truth that it’s hard work to host a party that doesn’t suck. Keeping the guest loo stocked with toilet paper, making sure nobody puts the dog in the microwave, dealing with that friend hysterically crying while downing entire mouthfuls of straight vodka because her ex just walked in with a really hot nineteen year old… it’s tough work. Tough work that needs to be managed with the grace of Princess Di, before she got dumped by Charles for Camilla.

If we’re going to beat this metaphor to the ground, as a host the community manager needs to ensure everything at her party runs smoothly. She needs to maintain conversations and solve problems that come up before fists fly. She must acknowledge all of her fans with warmth and genuine interest – kind of like how you’d engage that Aunt who smells like cat wee and Listerine, but whose will is a major draw card. It also helps to think of your content as well thought out, gourmet canapés – even if the party is meh they’ll encourage people to return. Which brings me to my next point:

Be relevant!

Harlem Shake? Goats? Sit down. Like those canapés you want your content to evoke that kind of jealous awe present when one thin, hot girl encounters another thinner, hotter girl. Remember memes have a thirty minute shelf life, if that. Post about current events the day of or the day after. Nobody cares about Adele’s heinous dress at the Grammys anymore.

Remember, it’s nothing personal!

You just get those people. Those people who whinge about seeing adverts on their timeline.  Those people who ask for free things. Those people who insult you, your mum and your kitten in a 500 word tirade that they’ve copied and pasted on every single one of your posts. When dealing with this sort of abuse on a frequent basis, it’s easy to lose your positive outlook and consider giving it all up for a life of finger-painting and selling falafels at your neighbourhood craft market. Don’t let this happen! The kind of person who has the time to dedicate hours a day moaning on social media is the kind of person who got picked last for PE in grade five because they smelt kind of weird. Keeping a cheerful, positive attitude is a wonderful way to turn a negative experience into a positive one. Not really, but at least you can go home safe in the knowledge that your life is almost certainly better than Sonja van Pantoffel from Benoni’s. But seriously, when managing communities, it’s important to not let negative comments or experiences get you down.

Facebook Finally Adds 'Reply' Option to Comments

by Camilla Gildenhuys


Facebook announced yesterday that, after months of testing, the 'Reply' option is being rolled out to comments. Community Managers everywhere rejoice!

In their statement they said:

We've built a new feature that will improve the quality of conversation on your page: Replies. Starting today, you will be able to reply directly to comments left on your page and start a conversation thread. The most active and engaging conversations will be shown at the top of your posts.

There are 2 ways that we see Replies aiding us in everyday community management and page appearance:

1. Community managers can directly address fans comments and queries in a post: This allows one-to-one type engagement with fans even through there are multiple conversations occurring on a single post. It "will make it easier for you to interact directly with individual readers and keep relevant conversations connected," said Vadim Lavrusik, Facebook's journalism program manager, in an official blog post
2. The best conversations will be viewed: Facebook's algorithm allows for the best conversations to be seen at the top of the post. In this way fans won't wade through tens and hundred of comments, they'll get what they may want to see right under the post itself. Now, we still have to see what Facebook deems 'the best' (whether it be most replies from brand, other people, etc) but we're hoping it sits in the brand's favour. In saying this, we recommend that negative sentiment and commentary be taken offline to avoid highlighting of damaging conversations. 

You can start using Replies from today! There will be a banner under the Page's Admin Panel prompting you to 'turn on' Replies. If you don't opt in now, Facebook will do it for you automatically on 10 July 2013.

Replies is currently only available on desktop, but will be made available on mobile in the future.

Do brands undervalue using Social Media for customer service?

What would your company use social media for? Everyone else is doing it, generating leads, spreading awareness, building a community and how about customer service? Find out if brands undervalue using Social Media for Customer Service below: According to a survey conducted by Alterian, few companies are utilising social media channels for customer-service objectives. Results reflected that when asked about the most important social media objectives to a company, 24% reported that the central objective is retaining existing customers, 26% believe that the most crucial objective is driving brand awareness and 30% are aiming for new customer acquisition. 1.2% cited that their most important objective is to offer customer service. "It's surprising that brands are reporting that they don't highly value deploying customer service in the social media channel," said David Eldridge, CEO of Alterian. "Many are under utilizing this approach, as all brands need to be prepared to handle their customers' complaints and act on them. While marketers may have different objectives than those working in the customer service department, it's important to have a cross-channel strategy and integrate outreach to gain maximum exposure and positive chatter about your brand online." Cross-Channel coordination is still needed Although their is lack of emphasis on customer service as an objective in social media, the survey results showed that about 90% of marketers believe that cross-channel coordination is indeed vital in marketing campaigns. Similarly, a whopping 61% of marketers said their brand's engagement with consumers occurs both online and offline, suggesting that engagement takes place on multiple platforms. Social Media engagement Based on survey results, marketers said they are increasingly viewing social media as a means for engagement as opposed to promotion. Three out of four respondents (74.8%) say their brand is either 'somewhat' or 'extremely' engaged in social media. Roughly 25.3% percent reported they are not very engaged, and three percent said they are not engaged at all with social media. Measuring ROI Yet the survey showed that measuring ROI is still a challenge. 37% of respondents said they are not able to measure ROI when it comes to the socialization of their brand, and 42% reported to be only somewhat able to measure ROI. Some marketers might be on the fence about ROI, the majority (57 percent) said they believe investing in social media has been a worthwhile investment for their brand. 35% claimed it's still too early to tell. Not one respondent reported that social media is not a worthwhile investment. "There are tools available today that help marketers measure the influence of their social media investment, and consequently understand the ROI for their social media efforts," said Connie Bensen, Alterian's Director of Community Strategy. "It's just a matter of identifying what you want to measure and tracking progress in a way that is appropriate for your brand." Reducing company costs Helping customers directly via social media is a great way to reduce costs! What’s the cost of a customer service call versus the cost of helping a customer via social networks? Also, as you begin to use social media to provide customer service, customers begin to help each other out by pointing you out to anyone that has problems. Here’s a few examples of companies that are using social media to lower customer service costs: InfusionSoft: The company provides web-based marketing automation software to small businesses. The company decided to create a community site to help customers better use the software, but InfusionSoft saw that the majority of the customers had customer service issues. So the company shifted gears a bit, and used the site to help customers with their problems. The company reports that in 2 years time it’s gone from having one customer service agent for every 55 customers (with a 77% customer satisfaction rating), to as of early this year having 1 agent for every 172 customers, and a 87% satisfaction rating. Cisco: The company needed a way to better organize product information/expert sources for Account Managers so they could handle issues for customers. The company created the Specialist Optimization and Results (SOAR) initiative, which brings the company’s vast knowledge base together in one location that can be easily accessed by Account Managers. It includes access to ‘virtual experts’, discussion forums, and marketing materials. The results the company has seen from this initiative include: Every 100 specialists can now do the work of 120, saving the company $5 million a year. Travel expense for Cisco product specialists are down by as much as 60 percent in teams using SOAR tools, and specialists report saving 17 hours a week on average, and boosting their productivity by 22%. Pitney Bowes: PB also utilizes company-backed forum to provide customer service (noting a trend here?). One interesting aspect is that the staff constantly monitor the forum for customer issues, but will wait a minimum of 24 hours before responding. They do this for two reasons: First, to give them time to properly research the problem and give the customer a better answer. And second, to give their fellow customers time to help out the other customer and offer advice. Obviously, you need a strong community in place to make the latter feasible. Results? The company estimates that every 5 visits to a specific question on the forum, or every 25 visits to a general post averts a customer service call, and that Pitney Bowes has averted a total of 30,000 calls to their customer service centers. At a cost of $10 per call, that means a total savings of $300,000. Thanks to Mike Hardy from Pitney Bowes for clarifying that in the comments. He added this: “While we don’t generally share hard numbers about our performance, I can say that we met all of our first year’s expenses, including startup, within 6 weeks of launching our forum.” Conclusion The study found that only 1.2% of brands surveyed utilise Social Media for customer service. In South Africa particularly, one only has to look at how seriously our brands take tools like Hello Peter to understand the value of engaging with customers in their domain on a customer service level. If taken seriously customer service through Social media can not only help build your community but save costs too.

Has your Social Media Strategy been vetted?

Social media needs a business focus. With social media network Facebook out-pacing Google statistically in March, the need for solid social media strategy development couldn’t be more in demand. Optimising your business for social media is not just about addressing the technology you have. You have to look at the cultural shift that is happening. Businesses need to understand that collectively and globally priorities are very different than they were ten or even five years ago. You need to think of social media as not only a communications channel. If you think of social media as the most disruptive resource since the Internet and the Web, one that could change the way you touch and interact with your customers, one that could change the way you market your product and services more directly, more effectively - then you will begin to see the possibilities you're playing with. Most businesses start their social media strategy as more of a test. They try the toe-in-the-water, stop-gap approach. They try a one off blog, Twitter account or Facebook page that isn’t integrated into anything and most people - even those within the company - might not even be aware of it. This isn’t a bad way to start, there’s a lot of learning that happens in this phase but it doesn’t qualify as a strategy, and more often than not yields poor results. The real problem is that the supposed “organisational alignment” with the overall communications strategy just isn’t supporting the business strategy to begin with. And because they are not aligned they are not achieving efficiency. This problem isn’t unique to social media. It plagues all communications groups; advertising, marketing, PR etc. So, what should brands and companies trying to adapt to new media and align their businesses to social media do? 1. Take a careful look at your actual objectives No - that’s not just a list of goals or tactics but a clear focus on what one wants to achieve. Be it brand awareness or lead generation, even customer referral. But most importantly - how does what you do in social media link to the business objectives and deliver results to the business and customer (yes them too!) 2. Unpack what initiative you should and could actually leverage with social media Be realistic... does anyone care that you are trying to get more people to open a bank account, change tyres or wear a pink ribbon. Well hell no .. not if it’s not relevant. Relevance is what social media is about. Would you potentially care about being the “African Quiz champion” to a general knowledge quiz on Facebook. Well probably not unless you were a loyal supporter of Zain Africa, a telecoms operator in Africa, who sponsors a TV quiz that has a solid following. Leveraging this initiative has seen the brand build a Facebook community of over 40 000 loyal users in just 2 short months and increase its digital presence cost effectively. 3. Look at the value chain within your company What’s your point of sale, packaging or the website got to do with social media? Plenty! They are all touch points to interact and pull your consumer into a centrally “housed” community. The value of having a direct communication channel (community) is double the value of all the marketing campaigns and ad spend you have done to date. Have your Social Media Strategy Vetted! These insights are part and parcel of Popimedia Innovations' expertise amassed from hundeds of Social Media campaigns across many industries including Banking, Insurance, FMCG, Motor, Mobile, Airline and more. If this thinking appeals, then contact us to assist in developing your strategy. Social media strategy development is offered as a once of cost service to clients that will lay the foundation for future marketing and social media initiatives.