October 3, 2012

Bring Teams Closer to the Community Management Frontlines

by Kary Delaria

Bring Teams Closer to the Community Management Frontlines

If community management or maintaining the activity on your company’s social channels is your responsibility, you’ve likely struggled with keeping the rest of the organization up to speed on your activities.

When you’re on the front lines, routing, prioritizing and responding to posts, nothing can impede that process more than having to wait for an email or phone call return from someone else in the organization who has the information you need to share with a community member (or group of members) who are patiently waiting.

Also frustrating are blank stares of disbelief when trying to relay intelligence gathered from social media conversations to internal teams who have no context for understanding where the information came from or why it is relevant.

Depending on your needs, here some ways you can bring your team or other departments closer to the day-to-day social activities:

  • Use Yammer, Chatter, or Facebook to create a private group for members of the organization (if you have a social media advisory committee, and you should, these folks should be here). Use this group to a) seek feedback and approval on how to respond to posts when you’re unsure of the appropriate response; b) share positive feedback and accolades from your community.
  • Provide RSS feeds of all of your organization’s social feeds to your team so they are able to subscribe to them, whether or not they have personal profiles on these channels. You might also consider subscribing to them yourself using Google Reader and creating a bundle to share internally via email or on your intranet.
  • Use Storify or Paperli to publish relevant posts from your community, your competitors, or industry though-leaders and share these with your team.
  • Use Hootsuite Conversations to create a group or groups, and collaborate internally, whether it be with regard to individual posts, or entire campaigns.

You don’t need everyone in your organization to actively participate on social channels. But, it is important that the community management team isn’t operating in a silo. By using social tools to bring key team members closer to your activity, you’ve positioned yourself for greater organizational support and overall success.


Tags

community management, community management tips, community manager, Social Business


  • These are excellent points and I need to check out Yammer, Chatter and Storify.

    For larger organizations who don’t need to know HOW to do social media but what the result is, these “curating” tools are perfect.

    Put the content in front of them so they eventually contribute. That’s my biggest hurdle…to get folks to understand what I need from a content perspective.

    • Yes, Jayme! The starting point does not have to be get an account and participate. Show them the conversations and what is coming of them, so that they can contribute, even if just internally. The support and understanding makes our job as community managers so much more effective!

      Do check out those tools and see if they are a fit for your needs. They’re great if you can get your team to use them. 🙂

      Good luck and thanks for your comment.

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