Episode #17: What is community management?

Tourism Tweetup the Podcast

In episode #17 of Tourism Tweetup the Podcast we chat to Alison Michalk CEO of Quiip. Quiip are a 24/7 community management and social media management service. We discuss the difference between community management and social media management and why we need to understand this difference.

Alison Michalk shares with us several tips and insights from her extensive community management experience and gets us to think about what is important and relevant across our social media channels.

Highlights, Notes & Links We Mention in this Episode

Working with Big Brother and Essential Baby, Alison Michalk has been working with large online communities since 2006 after developing an interest while still in high school. Aside from being CEO of Quiip, Alison is one of the founders of the SWARM conference, a conference for community managers.

We chat to Alison about the difference between a community manager and a social media manager. Alison explains it is important to know and understand the distinction.

Social media management is largely focused on reach, message out there, new audiences, new customers.

Community management and developing an online community is about working with members, members talking to each, members largely create the content, primary source of content is members talking to each other, very relationship driven. Examples of communities include a telco help forum, Lonely Planet travel forum etc.

Alison says it is hard to develop a community on Facebook due to the set up of Facebook itself (listen to more on this at the 6 minute mark) as when you post as a brand it goes out to everyone but when a member/followers posts it doesn't so facilitating peer interaction is tricky.

Facebook groups tend to work more as a community rather than Facebook pages.

There are certain things you can do if working with Facebook to harness the sense of community including reposting followers questions/comments/content.

Forums can be great when looking for depth around a topic.

It is important to make the distinction between community management and social media management as the staff member managing may need different skill sets, the objectives may be different plus the metrics or measurements used to judge success will also be different.

Re measurement with on online community you tend to look at 'increasing things or decreasing things'. For example you might be trying to decrease costs around customer support/call centre and developing a customer support forum may do that by peers answering questions rather than staff. Also companies may hire from within the community so it may lead to decreasing recruitment costs, decrease marketing costs. When looking at increasing things it may be linked to increasing sales, increasing customer loyalty, increase customer retention and all those are proven to work with people that are part of an online community.

When understanding if your business requires community management or social media management or both across different platforms, coming back to objectives is important (listen to details at 11 minute mark).

First step is looking about what online communities already exist in your space and deciding if it is better just to be an active part of communities that already exist rather than creating brand new ones (listen around the 13 minute mark).

At around the 15 minute mark we talk about LURKERs and how they fit into a community.

Timeliness of response online: "Research has shown if someone gets a response within the first 5 minutes the chance of them coming back is significantly higher than if they got one 24 hours later"

At around the 18 minute park we chat about the Facebook group Australian Community Managers group which is a very interesting example. During this discussion Alison talks about the importance of 'social density' which is ...

Tourism Tweetup the Podcast

In episode #17 of Tourism Tweetup the Podcast we chat to Alison Michalk CEO of Quiip. Quiip are a 24/7 community management and social media management service. We discuss the difference between community management and social media management and why we need to understand this difference.

Alison Michalk shares with us several tips and insights from her extensive community management experience and gets us to think about what is important and relevant across our social media channels.

Highlights, Notes & Links We Mention in this Episode

Working with Big Brother and Essential Baby, Alison Michalk has been working with large online communities since 2006 after developing an interest while still in high school. Aside from being CEO of Quiip, Alison is one of the founders of the SWARM conference, a conference for community managers.

We chat to Alison about the difference between a community manager and a social media manager. Alison explains it is important to know and understand the distinction.

Social media management is largely focused on reach, message out there, new audiences, new customers.

Community management and developing an online community is about working with members, members talking to each, members largely create the content, primary source of content is members talking to each other, very relationship driven. Examples of communities include a telco help forum, Lonely Planet travel forum etc.

Alison says it is hard to develop a community on Facebook due to the set up of Facebook itself (listen to more on this at the 6 minute mark) as when you post as a brand it goes out to everyone but when a member/followers posts it doesn’t so facilitating peer interaction is tricky.

Facebook groups tend to work more as a community rather than Facebook pages.

There are certain things you can do if working with Facebook to harness the sense of community including reposting followers questions/comments/content.

Forums can be great when looking for depth around a topic.

It is important to make the distinction between community management and social media management as the staff member managing may need different skill sets, the objectives may be different plus the metrics or measurements used to judge success will also be different.

Re measurement with on online community you tend to look at ‘increasing things or decreasing things’. For example you might be trying to decrease costs around customer support/call centre and developing a customer support forum may do that by peers answering questions rather than staff. Also companies may hire from within the community so it may lead to decreasing recruitment costs, decrease marketing costs. When looking at increasing things it may be linked to increasing sales, increasing customer loyalty, increase customer retention and all those are proven to work with people that are part of an online community.

When understanding if your business requires community management or social media management or both across different platforms, coming back to objectives is important (listen to details at 11 minute mark).

First step is looking about what online communities already exist in your space and deciding if it is better just to be an active part of communities that already exist rather than creating brand new ones (listen around the 13 minute mark).

At around the 15 minute mark we talk about LURKERs and how they fit into a community.

Timeliness of response online: “Research has shown if someone gets a response within the first 5 minutes the chance of them coming back is significantly higher than if they got one 24 hours later”

At around the 18 minute park we chat about the Facebook group Australian Community Managers group which is a very interesting example. During this discussion Alison talks about the importance of ‘social density’ which is about having the sweet spot of enough people but not too many. Too many people can drive people away as your sense of community starts declining.

TIPS for great social media management: 1) Alison mentions how important content (developing quality content) is for social media management. 2) Also re-posting other peoples posts and questions 3) using users content 4) its all about the content!!

Article Alison mentions re brands engaging within communities/forums well.

Quiip on Twitter

Alison on Linkedin

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