Connie Bensen

User generated content can be an elusive piece in the social media mix. Where do you find it? How do you leverage it? This is one of my favorite parts of my job. Customers make powerful statements about your products & brand. Are you listening? (A hint – It’s probably not happening on your corporate site.)

I found this on Flickr along with over 150 gorgeous abstract images created using ACDSee software:

I’m having a love affair with my ACDSee photo edit program! And I’m finding it far superior to any past love affairs. It doesn’t abuse me, or try to take my power away from me. Quite the contrary, I find that it empowers me. I love my ACDSee!!! (smile)

And her abstract images are gorgeous! So I asked this customer to share her passion for ACDSee. I am highlighting her abstract images on the ACDSee blog. So you may ask how people respond to being asked to share their work? Here is Katharine’s response:

I have to say, I am very flattered and just a bit overwhelmed by this. Thank you!!!

And the response to my first post in the series:

Oh my goodness, Connie, I am so excited I am trembling!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! I’m going to need a little time to soak this all in

Flickr is a treasure trove of UGC for ACDSee. There is an active ACDSee Users group & I will continue to highlight people’s photos from there. This in turn will encourage more to post their work.

As a Community Manager I’m doing the following things concurrently:

1. Listening – My email brings in the Google alerts that I have set up. They provide me with the doorway to the outside world where our customers are talking about our products. People blog about our software & I comment on those posts. And because people use tags & social bookmarking I see examples of images created with ACDSee software. Radian6 does a great job of automatically monitoring what I do manually.

2. Interacting – Once the UGC (user generated content) is identified it’s easy to engage with the creator. I tend to try to gain some background information by viewing the person’s profile. A blog link provides a huge amount of information about the person. This is where the people skills come in. Contacting the person has to be done tactfully because most people go into shock & disbelief when a company rep for a product they obviously love contacts them. I still remember my response when ACDSee contacted me, so I can relate. Some pointers: identify yourself, be specific, & allude to your plan (ie: have a plan)

3. Responding – The plan is key – what can you do with the UGC? Be creative! think outside of the box. How can you highlight the person’s expression of their appreciation for your product?

• a blog is a great place to highlight it
• community forums can link to the blog
• a newsletter – it makes great content for that too as well as another way to introduce newsletter readers to your blog.

Think about all the ways people are moving around your site & connect them.

Here are some examples of things that ACDSee is doing with UGC:

• Blog series by a professional photographer highlighting his trip to Antartica
  • This was well received & the photographer answered questions
• Tutorials & videos by users placed in the Media Room on website

So what are your users creating around your product/brand? WHERE are they posting it online?

• How can you highlight their work?
• How can you get them involved with other customers?
  • I’m having the person who created the content answer the questions
• How can you use it to introduce your customers to other parts of your site?
• How can you encourage other users to post their work? (increasing WOM)

I’d love to hear how you are using your community’s user generated content.

*One of the best benefits for interacting with customers like this is that you truly get to know them. The person that I’m working with now expressed an interest in selling her work & so I’m connecting her with sites that will allow people to purchase her work as greeting cards, posters, etc. That’s the gratifying part of my working with our customers!

*artwork created from photos by Katharine aka LittleFeather100

This is the last part in this series. It’s also the segment that caused the most discussion in the original post.

As a community manager, I work with advocates at a number of levels. And I think that as your social media program succeeds you’ll realize this also. Over time you’ll have those that are super advocates, others that are proponents & you’ll encounter brand influencers out on the web & in real life. So engaging the energy of these people should be allowed to grow dynamically.

Here are some suggestions for success:

1. Create a communication area (Jeremiah Owyang describes it as an Air Traffic Tower). This area serves as a place to:

• provide training material & contact information – this greatly eases the transition when more people are brought on board
• provide advance information on products, promotions, etc – it’s part of their perk
• provide feedback that they’re not comfortable sharing in front of the public, but it’s still worthy of discussion amongst the moderators
• get to know each other at a higher level than in the general public – I think this part is really important. If you’ve ever moderated forums it can be stressful at times. I’ve done enough tech support & customer service to realize that people can be really demanding (obnoxious?!). So it’s nice to be able to provide moral support behind the scenes & give atta-boys.

The easiest way to make this area is if you have forums, just create an area that only the forum moderators have access to. My sister & I use wikis & another set of forums to collaborate also. Bottom line is that it’s about communication & connecting.

2. Your strategy to work closely with your evangelists needs to be a delicate balance between:

• interacting closely with them but enabling them to engage fully with the community as they would naturally
• allow them to have ownership – there are so many benefits to this: when people in the community act inappropriately (attacking the product or the brand) then their peers will step in quickly. Anyone who values the community will take action. Whenever I see this occur I’m always proud of the sense of value we’ve created. You can empower people by:
• involving them in projects, planning & brainstorming – give them the objective & they’ll add the energy
• provide them with the resources as they need them & step back – no need to micro manage

3. Finally, thank them & reward them. This was always the most challenging part for me as supervisor in my last job too. I need to remind myself to express my gratitude to those I work with. In my last article on “10 Rules for Designing Social Networks“, Stephen commented that

establishing reward for participation is of the utmost importance. These can be social AND emotional as well as financial or knowledge-based. To define them, one must work hard to understand the motivations, needs and wants of the community. This very activity is at the heart of our own Planning stage of community creation.

Thanks Stephen, those are very valid points! People may be promoting your brand for various reasons. These people can get burned out so if you value their contributions make sure that they’re aware of it.

Well, that’s my overview of engaging proponents of our brand. It may sound complex, but it’s really quite easy & very gratifying. These people are your most valuable resources! Can you afford to not engage them?

If you’re listening then you’ll find where people are talking about your brand.

Google alerts are my favorite form of listening. I prefer subscribing to them by email rather than rss because it seems to provide more collective results. Technorati has a similar search function. And watching the pattern trends on Feedburner & Google Analytics will also indicate where your traffic is coming from.

If you’ve had a blogging presence for a long time then you’re probably going to need to go where the discussions are at. It could be on other people’s blogs, social networking sites, forums, etc. If you’re actively involved with your community, you’ll have a good sense of where the discussions about your brand are happening at.

What to do at these places?

• be helpful, answer questions about your products or services
• offer assistance
• interact & be a part of the community

When you identify people that are evangelizing for your brand, interact with them. You’ll get a sense really quickly of those that truly love your brand. The next step is contacting them.

But before you do that ask yourself: Do you have a strategy? This should’ve been decided before you started listening. If you don’t have one yet, then it’s time now to step back & decide on what it is. That will make the next steps so much easier.

If you’ve been paying attention your evangelists will talk about what they want. They will be giving feedback before you ask for it. Some options that you have:

• thank them for their support of your brand
• identify your affiliation with the company
• express what your ideas are (this comes from your strategy)
  • make sure that it is specific enough so they can respond
  • don’t overwhelm them with your enthusiasm
• offer complimentary product for their review
• make the contact in private through personal message

After the initial contact give them some time to respond. People are sometimes surprised to be contacted by someone from the company and they need to think about their response. As with any business, follow up is good. Make sure that you follow thru!

My next part in this series will address Organizing the efforts of your Evangelists.

Comments on the first post in this series made me realize that I needed to expand on how to enable your influencers.

The first step I listed was to ‘Identify your Influencers’

• Who are they?
• How will you recognize that they promote your product?
• Why do you want to engage with them?

First off, I don’t think that you can know who your influencers are if you’re not involved & interacting with them. To identify them, you must be an active part of the community. Otherwise, how can you really know the people there? This is the beauty of the role of Community Manager – we’re involved & interacting.

A quick example that’s specific to my work as a Community Manager:

• In my listening I noticed someone posting beautiful abstract images created using ACDSee effects. The collection kept growing while I watched
• I contacted the person and asked if they would consider having their work featured on the ACDSee blog & talk about how they created their art from their photos.
• The response was an absolute agreement.
• This person is an influencer thru their art & tagging the images with ACDSee

My blog is an abstract example. I have a little community here that’s growing.

How do I know?

• I’ve been ‘listening’ & know that my blog is on a number of blogrolls by other people’s choice (thank you for that!)
• My comment to post ratio is 3:1 so people are interacting

But you may ask, what is your product?

• It’s the information that I share on community management & networking.
• The resources that I link to
• People are asking for mentorship – this tells me that they trust my advice

How do I know that they’re promoting my product?

• Linking to my posts & commenting are good indicators
• New niches are connecting with me on Twitter & Facebook
  • a contingency of youth ministry people (isn’t that a great obvious profession to use social media?)
  • an artist connected & asked if artists create their art for themselves or their customers/community? What a great thought provoking question!

And speaking of that artist – I’m going to reprint Komra’s comment from my other blog post here. So is that a potential evangelist? It sounds like she’s promoting building community, so I’m glad to have her as a part of mine! She gives me the highest compliment (in my opinion) of having printed my writing.

As an artist with a website I am learning from you how to interact with my audience. From what I see most artists have websites geared toward galleries and shows, they don’t engage in a conversation with their viewers. But to do so is a new way of interacting… so there is much to learn. Thank you for this post. I printed it out! and will be referring to it often.

Now think about who your advocates are? Even as bloggers we have our influencers (frequently referred to as friends). And I’m thankful for all of you!