Community Management

Community management here …

Your current or potential customers are out there discussing your products or services, chatting about your competitors, sharing their experiences with your company, and influencing others about purchasing decisions. The bad news is that these conversations cannot be fully controlled. The good news is that you can find these conversations and engage with the participants. This is your opportunity to mitigate the risk of negative feedback, and when it occurs, directly interface with the unhappy customer to seek solutions or to correct misinformation.

Brands need to think about the social web as an extension to their own web sites. While there is no technical ownership of these properties or the discussions within them, they do serve as potential channels of conversation thus allowing any number of conversations to occur. These could be service and support related, pre-sales questions, or intercepting negative commentary and performing damage control.

There are three key ingredients:

Management Strategy

response work-flows
the when and hows of engagement
training

Social listening

leveraging tech
social mention
scout labs
radian6
trained social media / PR personnel

Engagement

audits
tracking
lessons learned