Connie Bensen

I was asked to present a 3 hour workshop on Community Building as part of Online Marketing Summit in Minneapolis. There is a certain challenge in creating a deck that will provide for an unknown audience over that length of time!

We kicked off the session by talking about the philosophy behind an online community. The most important aspect is the definition of “community”. A community is much more than just a hosted platform. I outlined my definition of community in my post on the ‘Community Strategist Role’.

The deck below outlines five steps. I included a section on digital marketing and SEO because inbound marketing is imperative to growing a healthy community. Efforts in this manner will also make great strides in building organic SEO.

1. Listen: Get to know your People
2. Planning: Create a Strategy & Metrics
3. Digital Marketing: Content is King & SEO is Queen
4. Engagement: Create a Party
5. Reporting: Measuring Success

What are your essential steps to building an online community?

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Over the years I have presented many new ideas. It’s always a challenge to offer new methodologies along with compelling reasons for adoption of them. With social media this usually requires the implementation of a pilot on a small scale. For some the ideas are threats and for others the concept of change and the related fear is more than they can handle.

Over time I heard myself repeating key concepts. Combine this with my habit of providing mentorship sessions and I happened upon the solution to more effective presentation of ideas. It requires the creation of charts and diagrams to structure the presentation of your material. Executives and managers want to see the ideas presented in a simple straightforward manner. This affords the highest probability that your proposal will be understood, well-received and adopted.

I came to this realization during the sessions when I provide mentorship. I sit with paper and pen and talk through my methodologies and philosophy. It allows an interactive approach as well as pushes me to structure the conversation. The result is a much more compelling story for the listener and has greatly improved my presentations.

The following show two concepts that I have expressed in charts to show how marketing has changed:

My role is the convergence of Corporate, Field marketing (lead gen) and product marketing. I work to span these three areas and interconnect them.

This chart shows a concept that has been expressed in a number of ways:

old (push marketing, outbound marketing) and new (pull marketing, inbound marketing)

But what does that mean? How has it changed and how does it affect the marketing organization overall?

Here are some tips on how you can do this:

1. Make an outline of the concept

2. Talk through the steps and jot them down using scratch paper

3. Explain them to someone else and start with the first point and work through to the last (this is where it falls into place in a more graphic manner)

4. Over time the refinement will become apparent

5. Remember that less is more!

Today I was helping a client write guidelines. That’s a good time to be succinct & concise. People will glaze over them so make your points easy to skim. Less is more.

That exercise reminded me of this great welcome I received when I registered at docstoc. I saved it to share as an example. It accomplishes many things:

• a warm welcome
• personalizes the message & tells me who the community manager is
• invites me to engage immediately
• thanks me for choosing to join

Subject: Welcome to docstoc
Hey,
I saw you recently signed up and wanted to send you a message to say hello and welcome.
I’m Kat, the Community Manager here at docstoc, so if you have any feedback or recommendations about the site, please feel free to message me back.
Please consider taking a moment to upload and share some of your documents, so we can continue to grow our community.
http://www.docstoc.com/uploads/bulkupload.aspx
And FYI, you can embed any document on docstoc on other blogs or websites.
http://blog.docstoc.com/embed-documents-on-docstoc-into-your-blog-or-webiste.html
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/422284/Embed-Documents-in-Myspace
Thank you for joining our site, and I look forward to chatting,.
Kat

Thank You,

The docstoc team

What would you add to it? Do you reach out to your newcomers? Does it make a difference?