This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Managing a Community.

Dealing with the negative can be a pretty scary proposition for any company stepping into social media marketing, let alone having to manage it with a community.  Some industries have a propensity for attracting negative opinions,  conversations and experiences for their audience.  Most of the time when people are sharing their negative experiences they are doing so because they were disappointed by the company in some way, shape or form.  Most likely it was not intentional, your customers can sometimes have very high expectations and when your company cannot meet those expectations the disappointment ensues.

Upset Customer or Constant Complainer?

These situations are opportunities for companies to step up and resolve the negative issues at hand.  If the person is sharing their experience in a somewhat rational manner, you can pretty well conclude that you have a disappointed customer on your hands.  How you respond and react to this situation is critical, you’ll either turn them into a raving fan or leave them even more disappointed and spreading their negative experience to all of their network.

But what about those “other people”, you know, the ones that will never be happy?  The ones that time and time again keep coming back at you telling you how horrible your company is?  What do you do with these type of people in social media communities?

Will They Ever Be Happy?

There’s a term for these types of people, when you’ve been in and out of many different communities you can easily spot them as well, a lot of communities refer to these types of members as “Trolls”.  Communities are smart, you can talk to that administrators and ask them “who are the trolls” and most likely they can readily point them out.  These people are the constant complainers or every other day there’s some injustice done to them.  Most of all no matter what anyone does or says, they are never happy – or the happiness is fleeting until the next day when some new unjust situation arises.

How do you know the difference between these “Trolls” and the “Disappointed Customer”?  There’s some tall tale signs that once you do your research into your social media communities you’ll be able to tell rather easily who are the people that tend to be legitimate & valuable contributors to the community and those who are just there to constantly complain.  More than likely those “trolls” aren’t just on one community spouting their story either, they are on several because at the end of the day their satisfaction is gained by the attention they receive by complaining.

Publicly Offer to Take the Conversation Out of the Community to Be Resolved

The best approach in dealing with these types of community members is to first acknowledge and then apologize for their negative experience.  Once you do that, then offer to speak to them about how you can amend the situation offline, give them the opportunity to contact you privately through the community’s messaging system.  This does two things, it stops the “troll” from saying “no one’s listening to me” or “they won’t do a damn thing”, then it also shows the rest of the community that you are serious about engaging with them and resolving even negative situations.  If you do this in a calm and professional manner, you’ll earn respect from the community members.

If the troll comes back and complains then that your resolution to the situation isn’t sufficient for them and they’ve displayed this pattern in the past, the influential community members tend to ignore or even step up for the company that offered to resolve the situation, putting the troll in their place.  Just resist the temptation to come back and “flame” the troll, this is what they want.  Sometimes silence or a controlled response is the best response.  The community has already seen you attempted to resolve the situation, and they most likely know this person is a constant complainer.  At the end of the day if you are true & transparent in your efforts with the community, your efforts won’t be ignored, but the troll’s constant complaining will be.

I’ve got a saying I like to share with companies dealing with situations like these:  “Don’t feed the Troll your baby goats, just pass by silently“

This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Managing a Community.

Whether you are just beginning to build a social media community, trying to revive one, managing a thriving one or wanting to become part of one, one thing is certain; none of those tasks can be accomplished unless you’ve built strong, solid relationships with the members of the community, both direct members and peripheral members, meaning the general community at large not specifically a niche community.

It takes time to build solid relationships that will help you manage a community.  Those relationships, those bonds of friendship that form, are built on a lot of trust and that just doesn’t happen overnight.  It happens by continually being of value to the other individual.  That value can take many forms, as we discussed in the Four Pillars of Social Media Marketing series, such as giving people content they find valuable, answering their questions, providing special incentive, being consistent with your words & actions and most of all, always saying thank you and you appreciate the other person’s time and contributions.

You can’t build solid relationships with community members by looking at them as another place to put your press release to test market your product or service.  If that’s all you’re into social media for, you might want to rethink your strategy and incorporate these 5 very important steps.

• Be Transparent

  The first thing any marketer needs to do when they are first stepping into any social media environment, whether its YouTube or a niche forum, is be transparent about who you are and why you are there.  If you aren’t honest about your intentions from the get go, you won’t be able to build any relationships, let alone solid ones.  The community is smart, they can smell a fake a mile away and when they uncover your true intentions, there’s no repairing those relationships that have been destroyed.

• Be Consistent with Your Words & Actions

  Everyone on your team and your company needs to be consistent with your messaging.  You can’t have the email team saying one thing and your social media team promoting something totally opposite.  You also can’t have one team offering something and another team saying that offer expired.  That does nothing for your creditability with the communities at large and makes members think your company has no clue what’s going on behind its own doors, and that does little to build the trust you need to build those solid relationships.

• Don’t Blatantly Market to Them

  Resist the temptation to just start pushing your products or services as soon as you step foot in a social media community.  To build solid relationships with key members of social media communities you have to realize that they are there to, first and foremost, share their own experiences.  Second on the list is to gain or acquire knowledge that they might not have had before.  They really don’t want to be marketed to.

• Appreciate Their Time & Contributions

  It takes time to share what people are experiencing.  Whether they write a blog post about it, shoot a video, or take pictures, that is still time the community member could have taken to do something else rather than share their experience with your product or service.  Even if it’s not the experience your company wants to hear about (no one really likes “Bad News”), you still need to be very cognizant of the time they took out of their day to contribute their experience.  They wouldn’t be doing it unless they really cared at some point in time.

• Always Say Thank You

  There’s something to be said for taking the time to say “Thank You”.  There’s even more to be said about taking the time to write one – more on that later next week when we talk about Rewarding a Community.  It takes only a few seconds to post a comment on a picture on a fan page, that a fan uploaded for you to say “Thanks for contributing”, or “really awesome picture, so thankful you share it with us”.  Making sure you thank the community and its members is a very important factor in building a solid relationship with them, not only does it show you appreciate them, it shows you aren’t taking advantage of them either.

Without solid relationships being built within your own community you’ll find it extremely difficult to manage and promote it all on your own.  There is definitely that aspect of “Being Social” to have a successful social media community that is needed.

This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Building a Community.

We’ve covered some pretty basic concepts that companies and marketers need to consider when they are starting to build a community in social media and I’d like to round out this weeks topic with the importance of Learning the Rules of the Road.  Communities have them for a reason, and if you don’t pay attention to them, you can really find yourself either in a heap of trouble with community members or out in the cold and having no friends or allies to build a community with.

Read the Written Rules

When a community posts its rules for everyone to see and read, they mean it.  You may get lucky if your break one of their written rules once by exclaiming “you didn’t know there were rules”, but if it’s a rule that was put in place because it angers community members and they know you are a marketer, claiming that you “didn’t know” might not be something that saves you.

Over the years admins of communities have been hammered by spammers, and abused by marketers.  For these reasons, a lot of times, this is why the rules are posted.  You might not be allowed to drop a link, you might not be allowed to be promotional, you might not be allowed to use your company’s logo as an icon, you won’t know unless you read the rules first.  The rules can be your friend, they can help guide you through the ins and outs of the community as well as give you subtle queues and hints into the reasons why the rules are there in the first place.  The last thing you want is for your actions to be a reason another rule is written, so read them and use them wisely.

Learn the Unwritten Rules

The unwritten rules, or norms, are a bit trickier to navigate in the beginning.  These rules aren’t written anywhere and the only way you really get to know them is to first, observe and then engage.  The first layer of norms you’ll be able to see when you watch how the community interacts.  Perhaps the community is a bit relaxed and a small bit of vulgarity is acceptable, or it can be a completely professional and conservative community where if you use any remotely vulgar language in your engagement, you’ll find yourself shunned.  That takes observation to figure out.

The second layer of norms that you may encounter isn’t until you actually start engaging.  The way you interact with people can have a whole other set of norms you won’t uncover until you start making friends in the community.  Maybe there are back conversations going on behind what’s posted publicly.  You won’t find that out just by lurking.  Once you start building the relationships you’ll find that the members might converse off the site via IM, or email or the private message system the community offers.  These unwritten norms can be tough to learn and slow going, but in the end are well worth learning to move your efforts forward.

When you learn the rules and use them as a guide, whether they are posted for all to see or you have to figure them out, you’ll be much better off than if you just jumped into the community with both barrels blazing and pissing community members off because you didn’t take the time to respect them or their community rules.

This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Building a Community.

Transparency can have many levels and if you are a company that is planing to send your marketers into social media communities, making sure your companies actions are transparent on all levels is a very important part of building a community.    Building solid relationships built on trust is what makes your efforts continuously success in social media, it’s also what will bolster you up when firestorms hit.

Be Transparent About Who You Are

Let’s face it, in any community, the members are smart.  They are in there day in and day out, conversing, sharing, and experiencing.  They form relationships and can queue in instantly to anything that remotely smells of a fake.  The worst thing any company can do is go into a community and “disguise” themselves as a customer or fan.  The moment you start interjecting that your brand is great, your brand would be a solution, or just automatically start talking about your products, services or company, without establishing yourself first, trust me, the jig is up.

Community member protect their own, whether it’s other members or the integrity of the community itself.  The moment they smell an impostor, they are hot on the trail to dig up who that person is.  In today’s day and age, you might think you are anonymous, but admins in these communities can see your IP address.  An email to the technical team of any social networking site about suspicious activity will send that IT person on a trail to hunt down who you really are.  When that become public – and trust me it will, you won’t ever have another shot with your community again.

This is why its important for the very start off in your community building efforts with being transparent about exactly who you are and don’t try and hide it in covert ways.

Be Transparent About Your Intentions

Right up there with being honest about who you are when you engage with different social media communities is to make sure you are very transparent about your intentions for joining the community.  If you are there to gain a better understanding about what people think about your company, say so.  If you are there to just listen, engage and share, say so.  If you’re there just to hand out coupon codes, make sure you are very upfront about it.

A huge misstep would be to say “hey we’re just here to listen and learn” and then the next week start posting links to your weekly or daily promotions.  That’s one way to piss off a lot of community members really fast.  It’s also the quickest way to a cold shoulder from community members.  Stating your intentions and sticking to them is a very foundational concept that marketers miss a lot of times with all the excitement of implementing their social media tactics.  Once they dig in and see all the possibilities, this totally miss the opportunity to make sure they are transparent about their new intentions and then soon find themselves out in the cold of the community they just joined.

Be Transparent About Changes Within Your Company

When ever change comes to your company and your team knows about it, make sure you are transparent about that too.  The last thing you need is your social media marketing team hung out to dry with a community because they were made to look like they lied about some change that happened within your company that was beyond their control.  When changes happen, your social media team should be one of the first teams to know what’s going on.  Word travels in social media communities faster than you can imagine.   If your team is up front and honest with your chosen social media communities that the changes are coming to your product, services, company or even your employees your foundation of trust grows and your community feels more connected to you.

If they have to find out from another news source, it could look like you are hiding something from them, or worse you lied to them.  Neither of which bode well for you to keep building a solid community.

At the end of the day, trying to trick any social media community or keep information from them is a bad move.  When the truth comes out, you’ll have a worse firestorm on your hands.  At least if you’ve been transparent about who you are, your intentions and anything going on within your company you’ll have more of a fighting chance a building a solid community, one that may actually stand by you when those firestorms hit.

This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Building a Community.

This week starts our brand new series of thoughts on social media marketing in the area of Community Building.  Over the next three weeks, we’re going to feature pieces on:

• Building a Community
• Managing a Community
• Rewarding a Community

Keep in mind a community isn’t merely a forum or a message board, a community can be a fan page in Facebook, a tweetchat on Twitter, a photo group in Flick or your subscriber base in YouTube.  A community in social media can be anywhere, on any site and take many forms.

So lets jump right into it with looking at whether you should build your own social media community or just join an existing one.

There’s a lot of agencies and companies out there that sell a slick list of “things we can do for you” without even knowing what it is your company actually does, who your audience is or where they are currently interacting.  They’ve built really cool, whiz-bang tools that create super connected communities that are going to be the next, latest, greatest thing in social media … and you should sign up now!

Hold your horses there partner, you just might be putting that cart before the proverbial horse.

In the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing series, we talked about research in social media as well as human analysis in research.  This is something you definitely have to invest in before you even consider starting your own social media community just because an agency approached you with the idea.  There’s a lot of unanswered questions if you just throw up a “community” and expect people to automatically start participating.

Is There a Need?

You need to dig into your research and see if there is really a need to be filled.  Are people scattered in their conversations, or is there already some sort of established community out there.  Is there some sort of gap the existing communities are missing that you could possibly fill and build your own community with?  The reason you need to identify if there is a need for a new community is because it’s very difficult to get members to move out of a community they’ve already formed relationships with.  They come to trust and become very comfortable with their existing community, it can be a pretty tall task to just start a community and expect the existing one to move over to your platform, just because you built it.

What’s The Right Platform?

Along with your research you’re going to find out just how people are engaging and sharing in social media communities.  Just because there’s this new whiz bang platform some company is touting, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the platform your audience will want to use to communicate, engage and share.  If they are primarily on Twitter, it’s going to be pretty tough to move a community over to a forum more message board type of community.  If they are use to uploading photos and talking in groups, it’d going to be a tall order to move them over to your Facebook page.  Understanding if its the right platform is another key element to success or failure here.

How Will You Build the Community?

One of the other pieces you have to consider about building or joining a community is how will you build the community?  How will you promote it to get new members, how will you bring in the influentials?  What do you have to offer that’s special?  Will you rely on other forms of marketing and communications to drive interest in the community or will you rely solely on the one on one engagement and invitations to become an exclusive member?  What kind of community do you want to grow, one that’s private, one that’s semi-private or one that’s wide open?  How you build the community can be just as important as the need and the platform because it brings a lot of different personalities together to share and engage.

Just keep in mind, just because you built it, doesn’t mean they’ll come to your social media marketing “field of dreams”.