Marketing, Social Media And Communities
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your 👂🏼
Earlier this month, I was asked if I could speak at a meetup for Community Managers in Bangalore. It’s been about a month since we first hosted a CMX series event in Bangalore and with all the excitement following that, I couldn’t help but jump in and say yes!
Couple of days later, we spoke about the event itself and I was told the topic- ‘Community Building is Great Marketing’. If you’ve known me long enough, you’d probably know my passion for communities. I had to immediately inform the organizer that I was unhappy with the title and this had to be changed. Fortunately, she thought it made sense and agreed to change it.
What was the problem?
Well, I don’t have problems with the word marketing. I have a problem because organizations fail to have a human connect and this often results in them pushing out messages in the form of emails, newsletters, social media tweets or in-app notifications, when it’s clear that their users don’t want it. Users don’t want to be spammed by your sales and promotions.
What’s worse? Spam them on multiple platforms to increase ‘recall value’ and eventually get them curious enough to try out your product. You’d often hear Marketing professionals at companies say- “There’s no such thing as over-communicating”.
I’m going to tell you as a user, if I see an ad across platforms, while browsing, there’s a very good chance that I report the ad for showing up to often or click the ‘I don’t want to see this again’ box.
Tell your users what difference would it make to them. What’s your story?
At the core of this, the problem lies in the metrics we track. If the managers are asking for social media impressions, email open rates, number of link clicks- we have a problem. I’m not against the idea of measuring the impact, just that these shouldn’t just be short term goals. Some of these projects where communities are involved, the outcomes are usually long term. So if you really want to see engagement and participation, drive for an grassroots level strategy rather than spending shitloads of money 💰on ads.
Are there organizations that do this right?
At the top of my mind, I can think of a great example of a company that I’m a huge fan of- Buffer. It’s a great combination of transparency, openness and, above all, an organization that feels the importance of investing in their community members than pushing them off the edge with marketing messages.
I think of myself as a Buffer community member than a Buffer app user because they invest educating their community about social media.
I think this is where communities become successful. A social media product company investing in training social media managers to be successful at what they do, is the key.
I also love Mozilla Hacks for the developer content that they put out. Props to the MDN team for putting together resources and documentation to learn web technology.
Social Media
I’ve told this multiple times to multiple people. A community manager isn’t a social media manager. I’m not a social media manager, digital marketer or growth hacker. And yet, I get emails like this for social media jobs.
If you really want to know the difference between a social media manager and a community manager, I would urge you to click the link below.
Remember we talked about metrics? Some of these are due to the fact that we measure clicks, posts, likes and comments. This has given birth to click bait, sponsored posts etc. because we go by these metrics.
So what’s new this week?
This weekend, I’m speaking at meetup by HelloMeets on how community is transforming business.
On the online communities front, I’m also working on a Mozilla Open leadership project to improve participation on our Discourse forum. If you’re interested, let’s collaborate!
This blog is a part of my “One Blog Per Week” resolution. Contains random rambling, learning and experience. If you have any inputs/thoughts or just want to say Hi, shout out🗣 to me at @dun3buggi3.
