HLV Connect Reminder - CM Bootcamp - June 6

Thanks for attending Vanilla Connect on June 6. Here is the recording. The passcode is 91+0QqQ. .

Here are the notes I took.

After discussing upcoming Vanilla Connect topics, new office hours, and the icebreaker, we started by discussing our personal history in online communities.

Some of us felt we had always been in communities, one way or the other. One came by way of teaching, then a director of content before landing in community management. Another was in systems and security engineering before becoming a community manager. Someone else came from a demand marketing role, and fell in love working with their customers, which then transitioned them into managing communities. One attendee just came to community three and a half months ago; their background was managing people. They wanted a change and landed on community management in the B2B space.

We transitioned to talking about managing communities from the perspective of moderation needs. Piper starts this way because she believes setting up your moderation team or your moderation processes for success is one of the most effective ways to make your community run smoothly.

If your moderation processes aren’t clear on how the community is supposed to run, your community members won’t know how to use the community.

So, the first question to discuss was, “What’s the first thing/task you think of when you consider moderation?”

• Keeping an eye on the conversations within the community. Looking for:
  • Tone
  • Content
  • On topic
  • Does it belong?
  • Does it add value?
  • Is it respectful?
  • Liselotte offered an interesting perspective at 13:41
• Interacting with the members. You get:
  • To know what they want
  • To know what they need
  • To understand them
  • How they think
  • How they want to help you
  • Enforce guidelines.
  • Crisis management.
  • Troll management
  • Make sure questions get answered.

A moderator’s tasks are reactive. A community manager’s tasks are proactive.

• What types of tasks fall to a community manager?
  • Creating procedures for the moderation team (if you have one.)
  • Keeping the moderation team informed of what’s going on behind the scenes, including upcoming changes.
  • Communications with the organization
  • Communications with the moderation team (if you have one.)
• Getting other departments from the organization involved.
  • Tony Reinke’s community has a lot of support from the organization. 24:41
  • Shauna noted that some communities have started including a staff leaderboard, visible only to staff, to encourage both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for participation.
  • Liselotte shared her system. 25:42
  • Shauna shared how she approaches other departments by offering to help them rather than asking them for help.
  • Guide the product team into supporting your community.
  • Heather said that she spent a lot of time educating the other departments about the community. She listened to their goals, found their pain points, and then identified areas where the community could help.
  • She also said it’s also important to protect the community from a team who wants to view the community as their own personal tool or funnel.
• Question from Kayleigh Bateman for Heather – In collaboration with other teams, what KPIs have you both agreed upon?
  • Heather’s full answer 34:47. Snippets include:
    • The number of posts the moderation team released to the community per week.
    • The number of posts moved to the correct category.
  • Tony Reinke tracks new members, engagement rate, and questions to accepted answers.
• Question from Shauna – What is your daily routine as a community manager or moderator?
  • Shauna’s answer
    • She tries to read every post and make sure it gets responded to within 24 hours.
    • In essence, see what’s going on today.
  • Piper does the same and sends greetings to new members (not scalable for huge communities, but it’s a great onboarding tool when it works.)
  • Kayleigh Bateman follows a similar routine and adds a question.
    • She runs a community for a SaaS company. She is recruiting internal people to find answers to community questions but is having difficulty because the number of internal Slack channels is overwhelming. How are other community managers overcoming difficulties like this?
      • Heather shared that she has identified a group of active users and asked them if they’d be willing to step in and provide answers for unanswered threads.
      • Tony observed that it’s like building a champion’s program.

Shauna briefly explained how she set up a Zap (Zapier) to send a notice to a Slack channel when a new thread or new member applies to join the community. We use those messages to help us approve applications quickly. We can also draw the CSM’s attention to the fact that one of their customers joined the community. Other customers use Zaps to feed new users into a Google sheet.