community management

If you have listened carefully to the opinions of your customers, paid attention to their changing wants and needs, and heard the wider conversations in your field, then you are in a far stronger position than ever before to understand and capitalise on the dynamics of your market niche.

Some of the best comic material comes from listening in to conversations on the local bus. A journalist’s best source is the trusted insider to conversations and events as they unfold before they become public. In business, having access to timely information, often gleaned from conversations round the water cooler, can profit the individual and potentially damage her company.

Community Champions are those members who are the most active and whom you have officially appointed to be volunteer leaders within your community. You may call them Advocates, Volunteers, Leaders, Mentors or a number of other names. SiftGroups calls them Champions.

Rituals are personal routines – the time of day I brush my teeth – or more interestingly shared activities – the time of day I sit down and join my family for a meal. In a community sense rituals are universally acknowledged and shared.  These rituals are needed to provide structure, predictability and character to the community to which the individuals feel they belong.

Stories get our attention. Good stories are easy to remember. Story-telling is the oldest form of human interaction, and helps convey meaning, values and custom. If we ignore the power of story-telling in building our online communities we are missing one of the most powerful conversational assets. Yet how many sites looking to engage with their audience demonstrate an awareness of this natural form of interaction?

Recently one of the Community Champions in a community I manage came forward to suggest that we link to a controversial video circulating on the internet. She approached the community team in private, in the separate Community Champions area of the discussions, as she was not yet certain that it was appropriate to place the video into the public-facing area.