I’m reading a research article on how the meaning of community is constructed through a minor league baseball team. The article begins with this quote:

I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it.
…I know the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would
die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as
certain if I let go of the crowd
–Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Even though this quote is unrelated to community and the online world, it just seemed to put a different spin on the persona of a lurker. Curious about others’ thoughts…

I tried my hardest to not write a post with the words Oprah and Twitter in it, but I just couldn’t steer away from the soft glowing light of popular discussion (though I guess I am a bit late).

So Oprah and a continuing bevy of celebrities are hitching their brand wagons to Twitter and spurring their faithful followers to give the microblogging service a try. Just one problem: these new members are walking in and just as quickly walking out. From Nielsenwire Blog, Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth:

When Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today. Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty. Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.

What does this say about Twitter? I’m not going to cast doom-and-gloom on the service but there are two lessons anyone who is building or managing communities ought to consider:

Welcoming. Twitter’s been overhyped lately and the fact that folks are coming and going really shouldn’t be a shock. All the media-fed mania did was increase the curiosity of folks who wanted to see what the hubbub was about. And when they got there, they were likely disappointed by what they found because there really is no community with Twitter. It’s a social network that inspires community. Because its a social network first, there is no formal welcome, no Twitter 101, no management plan for helping newbies feel comfortable with the lingo. (Come to think of it, maybe Twitter really does need a Chief Community Officer.)

When a newcomer visits your online community for the first time, do they feel welcome and safe to explore the community space? Or do they feel like they’ve just exited the plane into a strange land where their first inclination is to want to get right back on and go home? Think how nice it is to have a friendly gal or guy waiting on you when you deplane, hand you a lei, and say “Aloha.” If that happens, you might want to hang around and explore all your destination offers. Have a welcome strategy and prepare to execute it in a way that will scale just in case Oprah decides to make your community her next cause célèbre.

Integrating. But don’t stop at “Hello!” or “Aloha!” if you’re still dreamily hanging out at the Hawaii example. Most communities that fail do so because they don’t take the next step which is engagement. Why do some people try out Twitter then lose interest after a few weeks? There could be many reasons and would be a good use case for ethnographic work. I’ll propose one possibility: lack of ongoing value. We’re inundated by so many other distractions (like kids, spouse…okay only joking there). But the competition for eyes, minds and hearts is fierce. Is your community maintaining consistent value for your members? Do they feel engaged by their interactions in your community? Whether your community is tied to a cause-based nonprofit or a business, these are just a few of the questions you need to ask.

This topic of engagement is one of my favorites and one that fuels my own anthropological research. It was also a specialty in my association membership work so I can relate to how challenging it is not only attract new members but keeping them. Yet, retention is crucial so think strategically and make a plan. If you’ve found great ideas for keeping engagement levels high among your new members, share them with others in the community here.

I’m in a unique position where I straddle a few different roles. My role as Chief Community Officer for JobAngels puts me in contact with jobseekers around the world who need help finding work. But this is currently a part-time, voluntary role so I’m also seeking work myself. I’ve chosen to put myself out there through Gravit8 and offer services to help organizations build communities and think about their customer relationships differently. As a starting point, I laid out what types of work I’m open to on my Hiring Chris page: www.gravit8.com/about-gravit8/hiring-chris/.

If you’re out there and looking for work, think creatively about your options. You don’t have to go down the same path (I fully understand it may not work for everyone), but if you’re looking for just a full-time job you might be missing opportunities. To this point, read Connie Bensen’s latest post: Reinvent to Find New Opportunities (I’d like to think that I inspired bullet #3). But the truly juicy nugget is bullet #4:

Put yourself out there. There are many seeking jobs. You need to TELL potential employers that you’re interested & how you can contribute to their business objectives. How do you know who the potential employers are? Look around because they’re everywhere. Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn make it easier than ever to connect with everyone at a company no matter their position. (Tip for LinkedIn – if you don’t know someone’s email address, use Groups & select one that you belong to. Add a note as to why you want to connect.) This is the time to stand out from the crowd. Make your success happen.

I’ve learned through my own experience and experiences of others that waiting for others to make the magic happen for you isn’t a gameplan for success. I won’t lie…putting yourself out there takes courage. I still struggle with it at times. But here are a few strategies I use which have been successful:

Know what makes you unique. Don’t think one singular talent or skill, but think cumulative. For me, it’s my combined background in association membership development, experience working with clients on developing actionable websites, in-depth knowledge of social media and growing expertise in business anthropology. See how each of these particular elements add to create something special? It’s the same for you.

Know how your unique professional self can help an organization solve a problem. One sure way to distance yourself from the jobhunting pack is to not think about employment from your own perspective, but approach from an employer’s perspective. Think how you can help take away a pain felt by a prospective employer. Your reputation for being indispensable begins with tackling problems that clear the way toward increased sales or reduced costs.

Know there is strength in partnerships. If you’re open to the idea of being flexible and pursuing contract or consulting work, realize you don’t have to go it alone. Find other agencies or consultants who could benefit from your unique services and pitch the possibility of collaboration. Just remember the first two points above also apply here: know what makes you unique and how you can help them solve a client problem.

Don’t sit around waiting for magic to happen. Realize that you do have something unique to offer either an employer or a partner. Think about what that might be and then go get it. And let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you.

How do you communicate with your current customers? Do you only send them mail when you’re launching a new product or email them when there’s an upgrade to purchase? Have you taken a good hard look at what you communicate and how often you communicate it? Is it all BUY, BUY, BUY?

If so, that’s a prescription for buyer fatigue. The reality is that sales are driven by relationships not broadcasted advertisements.

In many ways, this is nothing new. Years ago, when I took over as director of membership development for a professional association I encountered similar outreach attitudes. The only time the association sent a message to a member was when their membership was about to expire. For first year members, the communication path was to send an overwhelmingly large welcome packet (or the “hernia kit” as it was jokingly termed) and little else until their membership expiration notice nine months later. As you can imagine, that did nothing to build the kind of engagement necessary to guide that new member toward renewing for a second year. Does this sound familiar?

When I entered, we assessed the plan but we did more that just retool around specific objectives. We knew what we wanted: renewals. What was missing from the prior plan was what our members actually wanted. They wanted value, they wanted a relationship with the association, they wanted to be recognized as more than a walking wallet.

Take a look at how your company is building relationships with your customers. If your only communicating more ways for customers to buy, then you’re likely not cultivating the long-term relationships necessary to generate more sales to your current base. And this is a base that – if they’re wildly engaged and passionately loyal to your company – are going to spur referrals.

I don’t believe in creating “hard and fast” rules but I do adhere to some common principles in any work I do. The most important one I know (and incidentally, the hardest for me to live since I can be overly sensitive, at times) is not taking anything personally. Now listen…you might be thinking to yourself, “Gee Chris, that’s pretty much common sense. Is that all you got today?” And I will reply, “Yes, it’s all I have today. And why don’t you take your snarky, moronic, know-it-all attitude and just…” Oh, right. We’re talking about not taking things personally.

While I list this as a commandment of community management, it really does apply in almost all professional and personal situations. Those among us who can master the ability to not shred someone who criticizes our work or ideas may not inherit the earth but they will be far more successful.

The question I ask when confronted with an individual or situation that challenges me is: What can I learn from this? It’s simple and it gets me thinking about other possibilities. If you’re managing a community, how do you deal with criticism, particularly if its negative criticism? Do you defend your position by erecting a barricade or do you welcome the commenter in and try to understand the world from their perspective?

Your company’s community and customer engagement may hang in the balance.

Are you getting caught up trying to sell a process? Perhaps trying to sell a process that is probably easily replicable? Or worse, trying to sell a process that’s proprietary and mired in so much paranoid legalese and bureaucratic crap that the client really doesn’t know what they buying? Josh Kamler at tiny gigantic urges you to stop:

I’d say that intuition and innovation are similar beasts. That innovation doesn’t actually happen without intuition. The sooner you get your your clients to realize that they’ve bought not a process but a rare group of people who have the courage, creativity, humility, and perseverence to begin making a thing without knowing what it will be and who have the intuition to suddenly see it when they’ve stumbled across it, your services become way more valuable and way less common than some guaranteed proprietary process.

Sell what truly makes your service marketable – the unique genius of you and your people. All the other stuff isn’t really that remarkable.

BONUS: Rosa Say also wrote a post called When Made to Stick Will. You’ll find similarly intriguing ideas there.

We all have expectations of service when we pay for something, right? Go to even a moderately priced restaurant like Outback Steakhouse and you expect to be served well. If you purchase a computer online from Dell, you want to be taken care of if something doesn’t work. And if you pay dues to your professional association, you expect a level of service to match the cost. So, how does free membership in a community alter our expectations? Should we expect the same level of service for something that we pay no money to support?

I offer two cases: Twitter and Facebook. When things blow up on either of these services, do we as users have any right to demand quick, speedy or personal support? We don’t give one dime for the ability to communicate and expand our networks. The cynical among us might even suggest that we users are really just leaching off of both Twitter and Facebook for our own gain. So if we don’t pay anything for these services, what right do we have to express outrage when we’re met with failwhales, questionable changes to terms of service or disabled features?

This is the conundrum facing most online community managers: delivering service in an age where its expected even on free sites. Perhaps the solution here is that we have to change our ideas of what defines a relationship. We can no longer strictly use the financial transaction as a point for determining service level. Since users bring value to the community through their interactions, it seems that we community management professionals need to adjust our own thinking. That failwhale impacts a user’s overall experience which, in turn, impacts the service’s brand. It’s a rippling effect that defines a daily reality for online communities.

Thoughts?

Don’t worry…I’m not abandoning Bailey WorkPlay. But I am putting this enterprise and blog on semi-hiatus to focus my attention on building my consulting practice and Gravit8 Social Marketing. Right now, Gravit8 and the consulting I provide to organizations building online social communities is where more opportunities lie for business growth. So, here’s the plan and how you can help:

1. Visit Gravit8 Social Marketing and subscribe to my feed – in particular if you’re engaged in work involving online communities, engaging customers/members/constituents, and social media.
2. Visit Chris Bailey Consulting Works and subscribe to my feed there. I’ll be posting new resources, upcoming presentations and speaking gigs, and other goodies there.
3. If you like what you read and know about the work that I do, please consider referring business my direction. As someone who has spent his career working with organizations to increase their customer acquisition and retention, I can’t say enough about how important referrals are (and how much I truly appreciate them).

Thanks, y’all…I’ll be back soon.

Imagine the scene. Two nonprofit association membership pros talking in a crowded restaurant at lunchtime, commiserating with each other and sharing their professional anxieties that they fell into the wrong line of work. Not that they dislike what they do…quite the opposite. They enjoy working with members, building relationships to improve the member experience, strategizing new features and the like. But there is something nagging at both of them: they wonder if anyone outside of association management understands and values what they do. They worry that they’ll always be confined to associations because they don’t think there is any clear parallel in the corporate world. They leave the restaurant thankful for each other’s company but no closer to putting their anxieties at ease.

Okay, one of these characters is me and this is a scene from my life roughly six years ago. After graduating from college with a liberal arts education, I fell into the nonprofit association membership profession purely by accident. And after doing membership work for five years, I was concerned that few of the skills and experiences from that work would be appreciated outside of my narrow niche.

Let’s fast forward to today. Do I still think the skills, experiences and insight gained from a membership career is unappreciated outside of associations and not viable in the corporate space? Nope…quite the opposite. In today’s business reality, this unique experience translates incredibly well to the needs of social media, most specifically to the role of online community management.

Drawing on a recommended community manager job description posted by Connie Bensen, here are the parallels to membership management:

• Creatively and proactively assist customers.
• Serve as the initial point of contact for inbound requests from online company properties and the web at large.
• Monitor online conversations and participate in them to build brand visibility and thought leadership.
• Author blog posts, articles, podcasts, videos and screencasts – whatever media you want to use – to creatively communicate product uses.
Association membership development is about attracting prospective members and retaining current ones. That means knowing how to communicate well, building strong relationships with members, helping them get more out of their membership, and assisting them with thorny issues. Membership pros are multifunctional in role and serve as customer service, product management, marketing, and corporate communications.

• Identify and analyze issues, patterns and trends in customer requests and product performance.
• Transfer the information to the appropriate departments so that they can respond accordingly.
• Proactively escalate issues, observations, opportunities, and insights to the executive team.
• Communicate issues, opportunities and insights to the company at large.
Membership professionals serve on the front line, listening to members and determining whether their issues are problems needing resolution or opportunities needing to be addressed. Membership professionals must then be able to influence key stakeholders to effect changes on behalf of the audiences they serve.

• Identify and engage advocates.
Membership professionals must connect with their organization’s volunteers and help them put their enthusiasm to good use. Knowing how to find and then successfully guide passionate supporters is a must, particularly since most associations need these volunteers to help put initiatives into action.

• Stay up to date on new social media tools, best practices and how other organizations and companies are using them, so that the company can continue to be an early adopter of these technologies.
• Participate in professional networking by interacting with peers and influencers and attending events.
Membership professionals must explore the latest technology, leverage networks and resources, and plot a strategic path that will provide the most beneficial products and services to their association’s members. It requires a curious and creative individual who enjoys collaborating with people.

I write this post for a couple of reasons. One, I hope it gives a closer look at who I am and why my current work in social media and online communities is simply a natural extension of the work I’ve done since I first started my career. Two, maybe it offers membership professionals a roadmap to guide them toward other career possibilities and emphasize that their expertise is valuable beyond associations.

If your company is seeking its next great community manager or chief community officer, consider expanding your search to individuals beyond the corporate world and include nonprofit association membership professionals.

I’m too late for Webstock 2009, but I’m keeping the 2010 conference in my sights. It looks like they put together a powerhouse learning experience. Plus, it’s in New Zealand. So, I have a little less than a year to woo these good folks into a speaking gig.

One of their key workshops in 2009 was on Online Community 101 and presented by two online community heavyweights: Derek Powazek and Heather Champ. Even though it focused on the basics, both speakers delivered some strong recommendations for anyone creating communities.

These four summaries provide a terrific overview and are chock full of useful ideas:
Julie Starr at Evolving Newsroom
Courtney Johnson at LibraryTechNZ
Sarah Jones at Lunchbox
Dean Stringer at the Waikato Centre for eLearning

Maybe 2010 will be the year I finally make it to New Zealand? Even if I can’t land a speaking engagement it looks like a great opportunity to share experiences with a dynamic group of folks.