Hello there. Yes, I’m a Community Manager and no, I don’t tweet for a living. Truthfully, I am not even that good at tweeting. My personal account, @jakattacks, has been transforming and changing audiences ever since I hopped on board in 2009. My witty attempts at self-promotion (reference previous sentence), sports fan-ship and brand support generate enough action to satisfy a small community of personal followers that come around and stick around. But for your sake, keep your company’s social media accounts out of my hands.
As I approach my one year anniversary as Community Manager at Krossover, it would be a disservice to content marketers everywhere to not share what I’ve learned. Due to some unique internal circumstances, I was forced to do community management differently. While our team has been basking in the benefits of this new approach, I believe many may still be stuck in old ways and could use a new perspective. Here’s my story:
In my first 8 months at the company, our Krew consisted of the founders, three operational roles, three sales reps (myself included), and a handful of developers. Everyone lent a hand in support and if you wanted an extra golden star that had zero monetary value, you could contribute to our blog. Sales was a priority and marketing came and went with the times. Krossover’s first full-time marketer came in spring 2013. Even after our new team member was added, he spent all of his time developing and ramping up social and email campaigns to generate more sales. By 2014, we were able to begin considering editorial content strategy.
I landed the position as Community Manager in February of 2014. The role was handed to me to create, as many startups develop new roles as they scale. Aside from renewing my hefty percentage of customers, I had no other metrics of success, only a faint hope from my colleagues that I was able enough to create these metrics over time. I was to keep our users happy and engaged with our brand throughout the on and off-season. I had our product, our data and a rapidly growing userbase of hard-working customers. How I executed was completely up to me.
By now, the marketing team grew to three total, two of which owned duties over all of our social media platforms; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even our brand new Instagram account. I quickly realized my dreams of paying my bills 140 characters as a time was simply not an option at Krossover. I had a community of roughly 5,000 customers to manage and zero social outlet to manage them with. When it came to creating my position, I went back to the drawing board.
In classic NY tech scene fashion, I signed up for a course on Community Management at General Assembly. I can’t knock GA. The class was well organized and did in fact provide information. However, I sat there for four straight hours of twenty-somethings furiously stabbing away at their google docs, fired up on green mountain office coffee, as if we were covering the latest and greatest in managing a community in 2014. I took notes and walked away with a not-so-impressive list of social media management apps and listening suggestions. All of which were useless to me in my current role. Was this all there was to community management? Not only did I not want to manage my community that way, I luckily didn’t have the option to.
As a member of the marketing team, my responsibilities were downright vital in fulfilling our team goals for the year. To begin the emergence of our brand and blog as a legitimate resource and sales generating machine, I’ll go through our three main priorities as a team, the problems I faced as community manager and what moves I made to solve them and create a hella strong community:
The Goal:
Content: At the beginning of 2014, the first goal to tackle was one that had never even came close to being accomplished before: post to the blog FIVE DAYS a week. That’s right, big aspirations. We were to focus on content that helped, informed, excited and engaged our audience of both potential new customers and current users. I took the lead on content creation to fill the hours of my non-existent, very existent new job.
What we were doing was nothing new. My time was split between writing articles on using our product, interviewing customers for features, sifting through user data and all of the research in between. We were able to hit our goals and increase social engagement almost instantly. Things were looking good for the team, but I was deteriorating fast. I’ve burnt out of a high volume content generation job before and after just two months in this role, I was beginning feel the same feels I felt during those times. Something wasn’t right.
The Problems with Content:
- The ‘Community’: I was unable to use these customers as often as I wanted to keep content fresh and frequent. You’ll see later in this post that keeping the community active with the current process of communication was lagging. Getting interviews and asking coaches to write blog posts more than once or twice a year with the current system came across as needy. I needed to enable hundreds, if not thousands of our customers to hit and blow through our expansive content goals for the year.
- Content Redundancy: I wasn’t able to give detailed product reviews on different strategies by speaking to one user at a time. What works for the goose does not always work for the gander and one user’s opinion isn’t as powerful of several. Content became repetitive and self-promotional. After a few months, we were slipping. Content quantity was there, but quality was derailing from our goals. If I was not able to team up with a user, I was to write the content myself. I struggled with this because I could talk the talk for content’s sake, but the truth was, I was not a user. Our users knew best. If I was to fulfill our goal of being a thought leader in the industry, I had to get more information from more customers, quickly.
- Rewards are costly: More often than not, customers were looking decrease the cost of their package in exchange for their services. We were incentivizing these VIPS with discounts, often far larger than the regular 10–15%, up to 50% and even 100%. While we’re happy to provide these discounts, the reality is that little by little we undercut our services, lose money and our employees earn less. For the first 5,000 customers, this was a reasonable process. But with account upgrades and offers that cost us between zero and 15 dollars within our product, it would be foolish to continue to provide discounts when other options are available.
The Goal:
Expand influencer and advocate community: We don’t need to own anywhere near a large percentage of our market to know we belong. Our customers love us, their job and the industry community that lives online. Any customer facing Krossover employee receives emails of product praise, word of mouth referrals and countless offers to help grow our brand. We knew our customers were capable of influencing, but without a shiny twitter following how are we to measure, qualify and enable them to do more?
Per our content plan, if I wasn’t writing, I was weeding through the masses to pick out the customers that could help me execute. I polled the company for all of their notable customers, the good and the bad, created lists of VIPS as resources and invited these customers to be a part of our exclusive advocate program with a pretty invite. As an advocate, customers would be at the top of the list when it came to content creation or user research for the product team. With a click of a button, customers opted in to my exclusive group via google sheets, which happens to be a somewhat complicated platform for a lot of our customers. Nonetheless, they allowed me to contact them whenever, wherever, if there was something in it for them.
I was identifying and engaging with customers one by one, email by email, call by call and creating the community we aimed to have. Our content was born from the mouths of our customers to influence potential new ones. When it came to our team goals, this micro-management via email was a great start. However, It wasn’t long before I worked through our advocates, along with content to provide. Something wasn’t right.
The Problem’s with expanding our influencer and advocate network:
- Gmail and google apps are not good customer management tools: When it came to curating, communicating with and managing my list of advocates, I relied on the basics; email, phone and spreadsheets. I made sure to keep all of these resources available to our entire company to access for a variety of reasons, but they quickly collected dust from drive overload and lack of value. With one or two advocates per state, I felt like I was hardly scratching the surface and gmail was getting me nowhere, fast.
- Asking for favors: We’re lucky to have users willing and able to talk to us, however, one on one calls had to be quick and blog requests were always on our schedule, not at their leisure. With the chance to speak to customers came the anxiety of getting the best testimonials out of everyone. It’s safe to say that my list of top users and advocates all used the product similarly and reaped the same benefits. Scheduling and executing with advocates felt more like one-sided deal. I needed a way to provide instant gratification.
- Rewards are costly: Similar to content, our hand-picked advocates received some great deals. For an average of an interview per year, a few tweets and general availability to catch up at events, these customers were cashing in big for an hour or two of work, tops.
The Goal:
Create trackable referral and incentive process: Ah, like the sweet sound of a basketball dropping through the net, referrals were our layups. If you ‘got your game brain on’ (Krossover tagline) with our customers, they’d make it rain referrals. In my transition from sales to marketing, for this upcoming selling season it was my duty to renew all accounts under my name from the previous two years in addition to all of our customers renewing for the 3rd season or more. In other words, the most loyal customers played ball on my side of the court.
When you take a look at this group versus our first year renewals and new customers, these guys possess two characteristics that both helped and hurt our sales process. First, they were active. A significant number of these customers were early adopters that have made strides to expand our brand in their local market. On the other hand, they had little to no value. This group was locked in at our initial product pricing structure and received discounts for their advocacy. We understood these seasoned-vets were the minority and accepted eating the cash.
As I handed off lead upon lead this season, there was a domino effect in lead value. Customers would share package details to potential new customers who then wanted the same deal. Commission from these deals didn’t exactly contribute to the high cost lifestyle our post-grad reps signed up for in the big apple. I was giving the sales team layups, but they were worth a fraction of cold lead with no guarantee to close. Our referral system was broken. Something wasn’t right.
The Problems with our referral and incentive process:
- Referrals had no source: Every inbound lead other than referrals had a source that was being tracked in our CRM, close.io. Close.io’s features turn our sales team into speed demons, but works it’s true magic in it’s ability to connect to a number of apps with it’s API (My colleague, Nick Persico, has a hack for just about everything). Popular referral programs like Extole, Influitive and Ambassador didn’t cater to our sales process and gave us limited options to sync with close.io. We had no numeric value for an inbound source that was generating what we assumed to be a significant part of our sales.
- Rewards were costly: Referrals accounted for most of the discounts we gave. Though these discounts were smaller, in the 10–15% range, this is where we suffered the most from the discount domino effect. The losses weren’t too hefty, by the tens and hundreds of dollars, and were snackable enough for sales reps to toss around freely. So freely, the discount coined its own vaporwear term: Krossover Kredit. Between discounts and in-account upgrades, customers were receptive to the idea of being able to earn ‘Kredit’ through referrals and advocacy.
- YOYO (You’re On Your Own): Since Krossover has been around for four or five years, the technology built into the product didn’t allow for much, if any, flexibility when it came to adding features or pairing with other companies to encourage user engagement in-app. Luckily, all of our tech efforts are currently focused on a completely re-written version of our product that will help our cause in the future. Unfortunately, this didn’t help us achieve our goals now.
Our solution:
In the months between February and June, the manual labor met all standards expected by my position. The advocates were activated and the process was moving. We even went as far as to brand the ‘process’ as Krossover Kredit. However, It was the calm before the storm. Shortly, a new selling season would roll around and my workload would more than double with onboarding and usage responsibilities. I had two months to develop a plan that included all the help from our customers I could get.
After a few months worth of insightful, not-quite-right, research and demo’s for expensive, quick-fix apps to solve our problems, I had a pretty clear idea of what the perfect tool would accomplish for us. As of June, 1, 2013, I needed ONE platform for our customers to create content tasked by an administrator, submit referrals and most importantly, earn Kredit for doing so. We couldn’t ignore how basic our needs were, but had no internal resources to help us execute. We were done going back and forth with tools that could probably, sort of, not really help us and started looking into options on how we could just get the damn thing built ourselves before September 1, 2014. By then, this tool would be desperately needed.
At Krossover, we do our best to position our company as a top start-up in NYC. We may not be involved in the techiest of scenes, but our partnership with the StartUp Institute has been first class. SINY offers 8-week crash courses to go from zero to hero in the field of your choice. With a full-time schedule filled with classes, workshops and happy hours, SINY truly gives students all the tools they need to jump right in and help any growing startup. How do I know? From firsthand experience.
As a part of the course, SINY’s Partner Project pairs a full team of 2 front end devs, 2 backend, a designer and marketer with a local NYC startup. Partner companies are asked to present a real-life problem or case study for the team to analyze and solve. And of course, a check for $1000 in the name of the Startup Institute. Not a bad deal for the brand exposure and opportunities, but with no where to turn for help at the office, we were about to make sure we squeezed every cent of value out of this project. We opted in last minute, threw together a one-pager of our minimal viable product based on the problems we faced and decided to call ‘it,’ what we’ve been calling ‘it’ all along, Krossover Kredit.
SINY students generally have little to no experience in their field and will work to solve your problem at the pace in which they are learning at the institute. First timers over here! Myself included. In our first weekly meeting, we did introductions and explained our idea. Within two weeks our team quantified a Kredit value scale based on the actual monetary value of rewards, got accustomed with our style guide and designed wireframes. The following six weeks were focused on building out the three main features we needed and the assets involved in general UI.
Word at the institute was that other teams were jealous that our guys (yes, all men) were tasked to actually build something. Given our mini-company provided by SI, Kredit represented all aspects of not only working for a startup, but building a product from scratch. In my opinion, the startupiest move we made out of the whole project was take a risk with some of New York City’s least expensive freelance developers. Nonetheless, by September 1, 2014, we were ready to deploy the site live on Krossover servers.
I developed a few onboarding campaigns that tied into more relevant information throughout the fall. Between the months of September and November, our number of active customers jumps from the hundreds to the thousands. I was confident that as little as 100 users through these months was enough to help me tackle our content and referral goals.
The second Kredit launched, I began to really learn what it meant to manage a community. The reality of this new platform was that it was indeed a product and did indeed need to be marketed and ‘sold’ to our customers. We were selling the community as a whole, the opportunity to share knowledge, an efficient way to submit referrals and best of all, earn free upgrades. Communicating with the masses proved to be far more effective than my previous club of VIPs. I was unlocking and enabling new advocates everyday, and ironically, most of our original advocates were so busy being awesome, they never came around to signing up. Here’s how my process changed:
Content: Per Kredit’s feature set, I was able to post goals that users could submit to. The first few goals were basic product reviews and testimonials to feel out how responsive our users were. Two or three responses was enough to qualify for publishing. In a few minutes, I was now able to ask a number of users, a number of different questions for them to answer… (wait for it)… on their own time (*breathes sigh of relief*).
Luckily, the number of active customers at the time was 1/10 of what it would be in a few short weeks, meaning our test group was already segmented and ready to go. We plugged the opportunity to earn free account upgrades in routine mailers but kept the offer off social to ensure only customers signed up. After two weeks, Kredit’s activity had validated it’s existence. We successfully posted two user-generated posts per week in our first two weeks.
Though our ‘test period’ gave us the glimpse of success we hoped for, I knew our ‘move fast and break things’ mentality kept me from introducing our bare-bones, completely disconnected from our main product, brand new rewards platform to our community in a proper manner. Will enough customers respond to the UI and understand the steps needed to earn Kredit? Will we generate enough engagement to meet our lofty content goals in our busiest season?
It was time to fill the site for the largest, most active customers in our community. I transferred over a months worth of content ideas from our calendar and ramped up invites to the masses. Posts were worth between 50–100 Kredits, allowing customers to commit 2–3 actions to claim rewards with value. When it came to topics, I opened up posts to everything and anything that could help our customers and most importantly, potential new customers, in our market ecosystem during that time of year. In October, a high school basketball coach is balancing pre-season workout, scheduling and using our product to prepare for a new year. In November, we asked about practice plans, game day workflows and how to begin to use our product. We even asked our customers why they made the switch from our competitor. As mentioned, we wanted our blog to be a fulfilling resource for all coaches. I saw the transition from writing for our community to writing with our community as the only way to execute.
In Kredit’s very early days, we measured success with production. If we could produce two posts per week, we learned the about the activity necessary to reach our goals. We wanted to implement structured user and engagement benchmarks after we understood what it took to produce. After the content dump, I officially began transitioning from 3–4 posts per week, to one. Our one proven measurement of success was met. I then looked at our user to comment (blog submissions) ratios, which still trends positive (1:3 in the first four months, currently sits at 1:1.09). Despite creeping closer and closer to even with user content ratio, we have met all of our content needs while only using 30.3% of submitted content. Come selling season, this content is valuable beyond immediate editorial needs. In six months, our content locker room is filled with sales campaigns, ebook material and scripts are written for any video’s we need. A gift that fortunately, won’t stop giving if we continue to play our cards right.
Expand influencer and advocate network: Krossover Kredit was not a shared google folder, a Typeform that collected emails or a Slideshare. Kredit was a location, a place for our customers to go, see and manage themselves. Communication with our customers at large only lived in the sale or support process. By the time Kredit was needed, we were balancing the launch of our new Krossover product, onboarding and the busiest selling season. We needed to remain as efficient as possible which meant minimal efforts went into marketing the tool to our customers.
Kredit was promoted biweekly as a small subtopic or bi-line in our newsletters. We tested copy to see what got customers clicking through more. Did free account upgrades get them moving? Or was the community and it’s opportunity more effective?
With our first two marketing efforts in the first month, we added 55 users. Yes, this was a very small percentage of our user base, but more importantly, this group of advocates already trumped my previous advocate club. Only five members of this first group had advocated for us in some way before. I uncovered 50 fresh names that opted in to help us grow our brand.
When it came to marketing Kredit and other campaigns, I had to be conscious of how many emails I was sending. The product was nowhere near ready to be shoved down anyone’s throat. Because of this, our second month was spent less on sign-ups and more getting these users to do some work. I pumped content into the platform and planned for the activity increase that was right around the corner. We saw only 13 new users in our entire second month.
October featured a month-long promotion that included eight Kredit posts in our content calendar. This month, we began inviting customers to hop on board as a standalone mailer. The opportunity to earn Kredit for upgrades right before our customers began using Krossover presented the perfect angle. We welcomed 57 new advocates for a total of 126 users by November 1.
Running off of the momentum on both user signups and content, we had three more solid weeks to onboard the hell out of these guys before their availability vanished. Keeping pace meant cruising through the new year with plenty of content to pick from my content tree. Each week I saw more and more users from around the country dive right in. They were right there in front of me, working hard on our behalf, not lost in a sea of timelines or news feeds. With another 50 signups in November, I really began feeling the changes in my workflow. Instead of talking and writing, I was managing and posting.
While engagement stayed consistent, signups dipped over the holidays, increasing back to 50 in January. The new year brought a sense of routine with Kredit. Signups were looking good and content was looking better. We were able to keep our advocates coming back with new, interesting goals. Kredit was manageable, so it was time to make a move and tap into our customers again. It had been 2 months since our last marketing promotion around Kredit. By now, our customers had become more familiar with the concept. In just one mailer, Kredit added over 100 users in one week for a total of 406 users by it’s sixth month.
Let’s just remind you that not only are these people users, but they are my advocates, my sales team, and my community that loves Krossover just as much as I do. Not to mention, they’re now fully enabled to do the work I get paid to do. Wouldn’t you want your paying customers working for you?
Create trackable referral and incentive process: We combined the need for a trackable referral and incentive process since rewards for referrals applied to the masses. Though not every one of our customers was involved in our VIP advocate club for content generation, every customer was able to and encouraged to refer new customers. Every referral deserved a reward, regardless of if the lead eventually closed or not.
With this knowledge, we added a referral page to the user interface. Each submitted referral awarded a customer 10 Kredits. Thanks to the handy dandy Kredit value scale our SINY team put together, a submitted referral earned a user 1/10 of a free breakdown. If one free breakdown is 100 Kredits, and a breakdown costs us $50, that’s roughly a $5 value. If customers refer an average of three leads, that’s a $15 value. Would you rather give a customer a $150 discount for three leads or give them a fraction of that? Yeah, thought so.
Yay guys! We have a referral and rewards process! Refer away dearly beloved… 50 users! We immediately realized that though our new lead machine was ready for action, no one but our small group of users could use it. Currently, onboarding was my problem and my problem only. In order for our sales team to effectively use the referral page as it stood, it meant they had to be familiar with onboarding, navigating the UI and finally directing the customer to the referral page. Throwing this new product and process at the sales team in the heat of selling season wasn’t an option. Ain’t nobody got time for that. (Insert public referral page here).
The public referral page was a giant leap for Kredit. Upon arrival on the homepage, a customer could sign up for the program or choose to just simply submit a referral. By leaving initial information to confirm they are infact a Krossover customer, the public referral page acted as another option for onboarding. In one step, our customers were actually completing the first two steps in getting started. And most importantly, our sales team was given a one step solution that gave all customers the opportunity to submit referrals. The standalone url found a home in emails, signatures and support correspondence. Referrals began ramping up and our data began compiling in one, organized place.
I’ll admit CRM integration was a nice-to-have in our initial eight-week partner project, but after the project was over and we began using the tool, it wasn’t too long before it became a must-have. Our guys were down for contracted work and began exploring the close.io API. It wasn’t until the integration was made did I see how black and white a CRM can be. Polluted with heartbreaking lost leads, endless missed calls and redundant notes, our CRM lacked engagement information. A rep could have a superstar customer and not even know it! Integration added a note whenever a user committed an action on the site, like submit a referral or a goal. Additional notes were posted on the referred customer’s lead indicating who submitted that referral. Notes always include a snapshot of that specific user’s activity, a perfect way to display engagement for our reps. Oh yeah, and of course there was that whole data and tracking benefit too.
Since Kredit’s launch, referral numbers have coasted at a steady 1:1 user to referral ratio. The public referral page give us the opportunity to incentivize customers to shower us with referrals at the exact times we may need that bone. With the off-season coming up in a few months, we’ll really begin to explore how to use referral campaigns in unique, gamified ways.
With that, yes, I am a community manager, and no, I don’t tweet. I enable, encourage, support and manage my community of like-minded individuals. I hope this post opens the eyes of community managers and content marketers on how they can execute on user generated content. Right now, there are a lot of people saying ‘DO IT, use your customer base for content’, but there isn’t much to find out how to execute efficiently.
Does your team face similar issues with content and advocate strategy? Could you benefit from a platform like Krossover Kredit? I’d love to hear feedback on your experience.
jgoldner1@gmail.com
