What’s next? (III) | 互联网 2011 (III)
Community management
You’ve got some Facebook followers, what next? is an abbreviated version of a question I receive a lot when when I am doing consultancy work and training. Many organisations have at least experimented with social media; often in spite of, rather than supported by senior management. There is a need to justify the existing effort in terms of business returns and organisation realpolitik. The picture gets even more complex when you are dealing with a multi-branch, franchise or international structure.
Organisations that may have more experience might have orphan communities built around campaigns that have long since finished. On the one hand, a budget for a project is finite, on the other it is hard to build a community every time you have a campaign and chances are you will cause at least some former active community members to disengage from the brand if they are dropped like a hot potato at the end of the campaign. A number of people such as Ruth Speakman at Sony have been moving from campaign time-lines to budgeting for ongoing conversations, which makes sense in the context of social media.
Both of these scenarios often require agency help with community management:
- Expertise
- Monitoring
- Providing community tasks | calls to action
- Transition strategies where a community is moving from a campaign to a conversation, or is being moved from organisation-run to community-run
What’s next series of posts
Just media – drop the social
Augmented reality – use sparingly
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