Connie Bensen

This past week I was at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston. Before Alistair Croll started his session he apologized with a quick forewarning, “I’m going to be beating up on Community Managers”. I’m fine with that! I think that we need to be pushed out of our comfort zone.

Alistair started his presentation with – Community gardening is going to change. It’s about capitalism. Companies are concerned with the bottom line & everything needs to be measured. He wasn’t hard on community managers at all. His challenge was simply: We need to take it to the next level for it to be taken seriously in the Enterprise.

I totally agree & echoed the importance of measurement at my session on the day before. His presentation took it to the next level with a focus on measurement and is aligned with the book that he’s co-authored with Sean Powers, Complete Web Monitoring.

Measurement & reporting are key to building value around the community/social media role. The only way to grow the position is to provide concrete data supporting how it’s contributing to the goals of the organization. And in most cases that’s to increase revenue.

The Big Quandary – I can’t measure social media, right?

Everything is measureable now. Web analytics are mainstream and provide the statistics related to your site. Now conversations online can also be gathered, measured & analyzed in a number of ways. There are many free tools as well as professional ones. I work with Techrigy SM2 & we offer a Freemium version so you can get a feel for aggregating the conversations. (Many use it for their consulting businesses).

Alistair took it one step further. He shared ideas that make it easier for your web analytics software (Google Analytics in particular & it’s free) to track your ‘campaigns’. I’ve also been helping my Techrigy customers do likewise so they can maximize their measurement capabilities.

Why is this so important?

1.  Show Value – Quantitative data is the proof in the pudding. Every other department has reporting requirements, so this isn’t any different.

2. Grow your role – The only way that you’re going to get more resources (ie: time & people) is by providing concrete numbers on your progress.

3. Increased budget – Budgets are only provided to those that can justify them.

5. Expand the benefit to the company across more departments. We already know that there are huge benefits to talking with the customers across the touchpoints of the organization. The only way that more people will be empowered to work directly with the customers is by proving the value of that with numbers.

6. Job security – If you’re providing excellent service your organization will sense that. But how will they know what impact you’re having?

I look forward to reading their book! I predict that it will be a key read for anyone in a social media role.

Check out Alistair’s slide deck from his presentation.

What are you measuring? Is it showing the value of your role?

My friend, Dan Schawbel, has published his first book. And I say first because my guess is that there will be many more because he’s only 26 years old! Somehow he has found the insight that has taken me 40 years to find which included raising a family.

Dan truly walks the talk of personal branding. He crossed my path in July of 2007 by commenting on my post on branding on DigiScrapInfo.com. This blog didn’t exist back then. He added some ideas & we started a conversation. Two years later finds us having mutually mentored each other & celebrating each other’s successes.

Me 2.0 appears to be intended for those just beginning their careers. But it really is a roadmap for anyone interested in building an online brand no matter their age. I did it at the age of 40. This book is also for all of you that are interested in working in social media & community jobs.

Reading the book made me smile because there are so many parallels to community building. Dan, have you been reading my blog? He has a section on identifying & working with evangelists too! He provides four steps to establishing your brand and building community around it. It’s the same concepts that are used to build community around any brand. Dan does a great job of covering all the various components including social networking and the reasons to be at certain ones.

Dan relates many of his own experiences, including the one related to identity theft. As a result that section provides many good ideas on how to prevent identity theft & what to do if it happens to you. I also really liked the section on setting up a blog along with a check list of necessary items. Finally, his ideas on a press kit are very good & I need to review my presence on this blog and add the things I realized that I’m missing.

There are a number of very helpful charts in Me 2.0. I’m sharing this one because it underlines how interwoven his book is with the concepts of community. Read thru this & ask yourself if this reminds you of traits of a community manager? I had never considered myself entrepreneurial, but others have commented on it.

According to this chart I am. Along with this chart Dan lists the traits associated with it:

Someone that has:

• vision
• creativity – unconventional marketing
• strategic
• tenacity
• passion
• problem solving skills
• highly competitive

See what I mean? It has community manager written all over it!

Thank you Dan for providing us with a book that should be in every public library. It will serve as a great resource for those pondering what direction they should take. The book drives home the point that I continually make here that everyone has the ability to create their own way & be successful. It’s just a matter of establishing short term & long term goals & striving to accomplish them in a consistent way.

Communities have various ways of encouraging participation. At the DeFrag conference there was much discussion about leader boards for internal communities. Personally I prefer featuring those that are adding value to the community rather than just those that are the most vocal. This allows you to highlight contributors for a variety of reasons rather than limiting your own incentivization program. (is that a word? It looks good though). I met someone who leads a community that does this very well. And the best thing is that it’s a community for those of us that specialize in social media!

It was a total pleasure to meet Robin Fray Carey, CEO & Co-Founder of SocialMediaToday at the Social Media Strategies Conference in San Francisco last week. It’s always inspiring to meet women who are making a difference in the social media world.

SocialMediaToday.com is a unique community that offers bloggers a great springboard to share our thoughts & ideas. Here is why I love it: It aggregates them all in one place allowing us to read each others work, vote on it & comment. I have met new friends there & keep up with old ones. The value that it brings me is that my blog is syndicated there where it is exposed to new readers. They can click thru & explore my blog more fully because permalinks are offered. And they’re doing it in such a way that search engines don’t see it as a duplication & frown on it for SEO purposes.

I have been evangelizing SocialMediaToday for quite some time. I included it in my guest post on Problogger as a great way to take your blog to a new community. It really does give your blog legs! And if your focus is small business then you can syndicate your blog in their sister site, MyVenturePad.com. They have recently launched a new site for marketing specialists called TheCustomerCollective And I see that they have TheEnergyCollective too.

How can you add your blog & join the community? (I highly recommend it)

• Register for a profile
• Follow the instructions
• Your blog’s RSS is fed in & their fabulous Community Manager/Editor Jerry Bowles reviews the posts & chooses which to display.
• Sign up for their weekly newsletter – it rocks! by highlighting news & popular posts

Here’s my post from last week on using Twitter for Business that has been on SocialMediaToday. To date it’s had 524 views! And they kindly highlighted a link in the newsletter.

A huge thank you to Robin & Jerry for providing us with a place to aggregate our collective knowledge. It’s a rich source of information for those aspiring to learn & share our knowledge.

Someone told me that community managers aren’t interested in networking because they do it day in & day out. My sense is that that is so not the case! We thrive on being interactive. And the nature of the job results in situations that we want to consult with peers & mentors about. Here are places to meet like minded people & connect. And even if you aren’t a community manager, but you’re interested in social networking& branding, feel free to join these conversations!

Facebook

The Facebook group is very active. We’re soon going to have 2000 members there! And there are 120 discussion topics. People are seeking help & helping each other.

Friendfeed

On Friendfeed I created a room for Community Managers. I just popped over there & see that it’s active. Yay! Join in the conversation there.

Twitter

If Twitter is your thing then there are the Twitterpacks (I created a section for Community Managers). Here you will find many community managers & you can also add your username. The password is ‘project’. (The info went missing for a bit & gave me a scare, so I put a copy on my wiki. The password is ‘build’. Put your info on either & some day I’ll get them reconciled.)

Contribute to a Project to Create a White Paper

My work is gratifying but my professional involvement also adds to my satisfaction. Here’s an opportunity to get involved to further the community manager role. Axel from Xeequa has started a collective effort for a white paper on Best Practices for Community Manager Responsibilities. We invite you to add your ideas. It’s a pbwiki so easy to edit!

Where are you networking at & getting involved at a professional level?