What do you think?
The Community Manager's Playbook: How to Build Brand Awareness and Customer Engagement
Savvy companies recognize the value of a strong community. Think of Nike and its community of runners, Nike+, and you’ll quickly understand that creating and fostering an online community around a product or brand is a powerful way to boost marketing efforts, gain valuable insight into consumers, increase revenue, improve consumer loyalty, and enhance customer service efforts. Companies now have the unprecedented opportunity to integrate their brand’s messaging into the everyday lives of their target audiences. But while supporting the growth of online communities should be at the top of every company’s priority list, all too often it falls by the wayside. That’s why brand strategy expert and digital marketer Lauren Perkins wrote The Community Manager’s Playbook (#CMplaybook on Twitter), a must-read guide for business and brand builders who need to strengthen their approach to online B2C community management and customer engagement.As Perkins explains, if companies want to create thriving online communities focused on their product or brand, they must do more than simply issue a few tweets a day, create (and then abandon) a Facebook page, and blog every once in a while. Instead, organizations of all sizes must treat community management as a central component of their overall marketing strategy. When they do, they will be rewarded handsomely with greater brand awareness, increased customer use and retention, lower acquisition costs, and a tribe of consumers who can’t wait to purchase their next product. Perkins not only teaches readers how to build an engaging community strategy from the ground up, but she also provides them with the tactical community management activities they need to acquire and retain customers, create compelling content, and track their results along the way. Distinctive in its comprehensive, step-by-step approach to creating online communities that are fully consistent with a company’s existing brand voice, The Community Manager’s how excellent community management provides a competitive advantage with a large impact on salesProvides an in-depth overview of brand and business alignmentTeaches readers how to identify their community's online target audience and influence their needs and wantsDetails the appropriate online channels through which content should be distributedChampions the use of an agile approach through repeated testing to maximize the return on every company investmentDiscusses the many diverse metrics that can be used to measure community scopeToday, there is no brand strategy without a community strategy. Companies that are not developing communities are losing control of their brands and missing opportunities to optimize their marketing investments. With The Community Manager’s Playbook as their guide, however, marketing professionals and the companies and brands they represent will be equipped with the tools they need to manage their online marketing efforts, engage their core customers at every level, leverage community insights into the product development cycle, and ensure that their messaging is heard across all corners of the digital landscape.
312 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 5, 2015
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 15, 2022
It's a pure marketing book, and has no much about community management. I'll go instead to either David Spinks' or Jono Bacon's books. I finished almost third of the book and skimmed the rest quickly. Nevertheless, it has some useful quotes:
- Community Definition: community brings individuals together around a common purpose, interest, or goal.
- Other traditional communities are based on shared characteristics (religion, sports, univ alumni, residential area, antics owners) - shared interest without engagement is not a community thing (e.g. people waiting for a bus); on the other hand, a social cause or a political purpose are forms of communities due to the high engagement of their believers.
- Ugly baby syndrome: No one wants to admit their baby is ugly. This applies to creative babies as well. Whether the baby is a campaign, brand image, or consumer product, no one wants to admit their idea or product isn’t desirable (or that it’s an outright failure). Brand marketers have
invested so much time and energy into their creation that they do not accept it could be ugly, or worse, an abject failure.
Community managers must inspire community members to interact with each other. Think of them as the ultimate host. All great hosts are skilled at curating the guest list, the menu, and matching everyone’s tastes and preferences.
If community members are not connecting with each other, it will quickly cease to be a community
On top of those responsibilities, community managers also help build and maintain a company culture that supports customers and community members.
Campbell’s Soup Company began as a community built around exchanging recipes and sharing stories about how members prepared meals for their families. Building on that involvement, Campbell’s has become one of the largest corporations in the world.
Branding and community management are often valued at a 4-to-1 ratio on a business’s balance sheet.
Community feedback supports targeted innovation that addresses specific customer needs. That means products and services could be created with a known consumer base. It’s the closest thing to a crystal ball that businesses can have!
Community builders grow and manage communities around a brand, product, or cause, and they are the ultimate curators.
Beware: it is rare for builders and maintainer types to be interchangeable and you need not to keep either in a position too long if the community approach or stage changes.
One easy way to differentiate the roles is to think of social media managers as channel managers, and community managers as people managers.
Skills can be acquired, capabilities can be transferred, experience can be gained, but the instincts to be a good community manager are innate. At the end of the day, the most important thing community managers bring to the table is their ability to connect people, ideas, opportunities, and insights.
Qualities That Every CM Must Have: Caring, Connecting, Listening, Conversing, Believing, Strategizing.
Self assessment for community manager personality traits:
https://birkman.com/
https://www.kolbe.com/
https://www.discprofile.com/
Community managers community: https://cmxhub.com/ (by bevy of eventtus)
At Quirky, Community members, our inventors, were getting frustrated because they expected products to come to market much faster than was realistic. We also used Get Satisfaction to create a community driven FAQ. As community members learned more about the Quirky process and its complexities, the veterans would help me “onboard” new inventors.
Beware of the “kid in a candy store” tendency to want it all in a CM. Even if you have the budget for such a robust role, it may not be money well spent if those functions don’t map to business goals. And worst case, as highlighted in the last sample job description, it exposes a systemic disconnect between expectations and reality.
Customer-centric culture: While it can’t be everyone’s job to constantly talk to the customer, it can be everyone’s job to consistently ask, “Is this activity creating value for our customer?
Community managers translate customer comments and reactions into opportunities to create value and mitigate risk across the entire organization and in collaboration with all departments throughout a business.
In short, community managers take the essence of a customer-oriented perspective—doing business with the customer’s best interests and value
creation in mind—and embeds it deep into an organization’s culture and process.
Think like a Brand. Act like a Startup.™ - striking the balance between stability and agility is a must to compete - thinking like a brand is an essential ingredient to set up your community.
The sense of belonging that come from members of tight-knit communities drive a company’s ability to build or maintain relevance for the customer.
the advocacy phase is so important for CMs to help facilitate and foster in their communities in order to cement customer preference and increase their loyalty!
Small companies can’t risk investing in too many unproven ideas at once, so discovering the “right problem” is crucial to their immediate survival.
Seth Godin (digital marketer and bestselling author) defined brand as “the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.“
The essence of marketing is testing strategies and comparing them against data in order to come up with plans to grow the business’s reach. Typically, this is divided into two areas: user acquisition marketing, used to obtain new users or buyers, and retention marketing, used to keep the customers you already have loyal.
Value proposition - Remember, features tell—but benefits sell.
How to Build a Community Strategy in Alignment with Your Customer and Organizational Needs : “Find problems and passions - Brant Cooper
Exercise 2: Create an Empathy Map: to really know your customers. - interpreting empathy maps can be challenging in practice. - we try to get into the customer’s head.
To do this, don’t start with a hypothesis. Avoiding assumptions is one of the hardest aspects of doing an empathy map. If you find yourself doing this, at least be aware that you are and try to disassociate yourself from your assumptions.
The 3 Strategy Questions:
What are your business needs? •
Who are you targeting? •
Why are you building this community? •
The 3 Execution Questions:
Where will you host your community? •
When will you organize content and community efforts? •
How will you tactically execute this strategy? •
The 3 Key Takeaways Based on Your Answers:
What your company’s CM should be targeting based on expectations, brand, and desired outcomes. •
What it takes to achieve buy-in. •
What success looks like for your brand and how the CM can use community to make that a reality. •
Typically, segmentation falls into four categories: demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral.
The four steps to defining your target audience:
1. Ideate (develop hypothesis)
2. Discovery (explore and test hypothesis)
3. Profile (synthesize assumptions and solidify what you know)
4. Create persona
When conducting an audit of these potential target markets, it is important to ask:
Are the benefits of your product (or service) easy for •
them to understand?
Will your product (or service) fit into their regular •
routine?
How do you think they will use this product (or service)? •
How large is this group? •
Do they influence any other groups?
It’s important to have a plan that drives the growth and development of a brand because it doesn’t happen organically.
The Different Facets of Brand Strategy: Positioning, Promise, Essence, Personality, Awareness
- Community Definition: community brings individuals together around a common purpose, interest, or goal.
- Other traditional communities are based on shared characteristics (religion, sports, univ alumni, residential area, antics owners) - shared interest without engagement is not a community thing (e.g. people waiting for a bus); on the other hand, a social cause or a political purpose are forms of communities due to the high engagement of their believers.
- Ugly baby syndrome: No one wants to admit their baby is ugly. This applies to creative babies as well. Whether the baby is a campaign, brand image, or consumer product, no one wants to admit their idea or product isn’t desirable (or that it’s an outright failure). Brand marketers have
invested so much time and energy into their creation that they do not accept it could be ugly, or worse, an abject failure.
Community managers must inspire community members to interact with each other. Think of them as the ultimate host. All great hosts are skilled at curating the guest list, the menu, and matching everyone’s tastes and preferences.
If community members are not connecting with each other, it will quickly cease to be a community
On top of those responsibilities, community managers also help build and maintain a company culture that supports customers and community members.
Campbell’s Soup Company began as a community built around exchanging recipes and sharing stories about how members prepared meals for their families. Building on that involvement, Campbell’s has become one of the largest corporations in the world.
Branding and community management are often valued at a 4-to-1 ratio on a business’s balance sheet.
Community feedback supports targeted innovation that addresses specific customer needs. That means products and services could be created with a known consumer base. It’s the closest thing to a crystal ball that businesses can have!
Community builders grow and manage communities around a brand, product, or cause, and they are the ultimate curators.
Beware: it is rare for builders and maintainer types to be interchangeable and you need not to keep either in a position too long if the community approach or stage changes.
One easy way to differentiate the roles is to think of social media managers as channel managers, and community managers as people managers.
Skills can be acquired, capabilities can be transferred, experience can be gained, but the instincts to be a good community manager are innate. At the end of the day, the most important thing community managers bring to the table is their ability to connect people, ideas, opportunities, and insights.
Qualities That Every CM Must Have: Caring, Connecting, Listening, Conversing, Believing, Strategizing.
Self assessment for community manager personality traits:
https://birkman.com/
https://www.kolbe.com/
https://www.discprofile.com/
Community managers community: https://cmxhub.com/ (by bevy of eventtus)
At Quirky, Community members, our inventors, were getting frustrated because they expected products to come to market much faster than was realistic. We also used Get Satisfaction to create a community driven FAQ. As community members learned more about the Quirky process and its complexities, the veterans would help me “onboard” new inventors.
Beware of the “kid in a candy store” tendency to want it all in a CM. Even if you have the budget for such a robust role, it may not be money well spent if those functions don’t map to business goals. And worst case, as highlighted in the last sample job description, it exposes a systemic disconnect between expectations and reality.
Customer-centric culture: While it can’t be everyone’s job to constantly talk to the customer, it can be everyone’s job to consistently ask, “Is this activity creating value for our customer?
Community managers translate customer comments and reactions into opportunities to create value and mitigate risk across the entire organization and in collaboration with all departments throughout a business.
In short, community managers take the essence of a customer-oriented perspective—doing business with the customer’s best interests and value
creation in mind—and embeds it deep into an organization’s culture and process.
Think like a Brand. Act like a Startup.™ - striking the balance between stability and agility is a must to compete - thinking like a brand is an essential ingredient to set up your community.
The sense of belonging that come from members of tight-knit communities drive a company’s ability to build or maintain relevance for the customer.
the advocacy phase is so important for CMs to help facilitate and foster in their communities in order to cement customer preference and increase their loyalty!
Small companies can’t risk investing in too many unproven ideas at once, so discovering the “right problem” is crucial to their immediate survival.
Seth Godin (digital marketer and bestselling author) defined brand as “the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.“
The essence of marketing is testing strategies and comparing them against data in order to come up with plans to grow the business’s reach. Typically, this is divided into two areas: user acquisition marketing, used to obtain new users or buyers, and retention marketing, used to keep the customers you already have loyal.
Value proposition - Remember, features tell—but benefits sell.
How to Build a Community Strategy in Alignment with Your Customer and Organizational Needs : “Find problems and passions - Brant Cooper
Exercise 2: Create an Empathy Map: to really know your customers. - interpreting empathy maps can be challenging in practice. - we try to get into the customer’s head.
To do this, don’t start with a hypothesis. Avoiding assumptions is one of the hardest aspects of doing an empathy map. If you find yourself doing this, at least be aware that you are and try to disassociate yourself from your assumptions.
The 3 Strategy Questions:
What are your business needs? •
Who are you targeting? •
Why are you building this community? •
The 3 Execution Questions:
Where will you host your community? •
When will you organize content and community efforts? •
How will you tactically execute this strategy? •
The 3 Key Takeaways Based on Your Answers:
What your company’s CM should be targeting based on expectations, brand, and desired outcomes. •
What it takes to achieve buy-in. •
What success looks like for your brand and how the CM can use community to make that a reality. •
Typically, segmentation falls into four categories: demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral.
The four steps to defining your target audience:
1. Ideate (develop hypothesis)
2. Discovery (explore and test hypothesis)
3. Profile (synthesize assumptions and solidify what you know)
4. Create persona
When conducting an audit of these potential target markets, it is important to ask:
Are the benefits of your product (or service) easy for •
them to understand?
Will your product (or service) fit into their regular •
routine?
How do you think they will use this product (or service)? •
How large is this group? •
Do they influence any other groups?
It’s important to have a plan that drives the growth and development of a brand because it doesn’t happen organically.
The Different Facets of Brand Strategy: Positioning, Promise, Essence, Personality, Awareness
May 30, 2017
Probably well suited for an audience that is literally just getting into community development, with a company that is more of a dinosaur - larger corps that maybe need more convincing of the value of community development. The tips and tricks are good but all very basic on how to build a community strategy, ROI, etc. Interesting context, but not super useful to me.
January 26, 2021
Informative, applicable, and easy to comprehend.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews