In my last blog, I talked about
Building A Community From Scratch At A Technology Company. It inspired me, for some reason, to put together a PowerPoint deck to key people in my organization around community needs. To back up a little, we are close to closing on a deal with a community platform and my goal is to have our first community up and running by mid-June. I cannot wait to talk about the process that I went through for that!
I feel like that the role of a Community Manager is sometimes a challenge. It is lonely at times. At times, it feels like I am the only one in the room that knows anything about community management. I go home daily thinking about what my next move is and hope I don't miss anything along the way. I have started to look at community management as doing several projects. I can only do so much and only work on a few projects at a time.
Here are some of the projects that I came up with. Keep in mind, that doing these "projects" requires doing a lot of other little things to make it successful. What would you add? This list is only what I'm focused on today, but I hope to hear more from you.
1. Understanding the organization culture
2. Understanding the strategy of the organization
3. Create a community strategy
4. Evangelize and get organizational buy-in
5. Select a vendor
6. Creating a content plan
7. Create a engagement plan
To get back to my original reason for this blog. I created a PowerPoint last week so that I can talk to key people around content planning. Basically I need people within the organization to help me create this content. There are four key things I asked for from upper management and from the teams.
1.Commitment to contribution to content building (end of April)
2.Commitment to dedicated moderators (June – onward)
3.Commitment to community experts to the to support customer questions (June – onward)
4.Commitment to continuous and dedicated support throughout the year
I haven't heard anything from upper management, so I decided to take things in my own hands. I have scheduled calls this week to talk to Directors of Support, Directors and Managers of Sales Engineers and other people around the organization to ask for their buy-in, help and support.
To help in guiding the conversation, I added the definitions, duties and expected time of a moderators and experts. I would love to hear from you on if you agree, disagree or would add more to the definitions.
#strategy #communitymanagement #vendor #Moderator #Expert