Create Initial Content for Your Community – SMPG Community Building Checklist

In our previous post, Create Your Community Policies, we discussed how to design your community policies, a part of our community building checklist.

In this post, we continue posting our exclusive checklist that you can use to execute your project for building your community – The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™. We discuss creating the initial content for your community.

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Create Initial Content

• Set the stage by designing various forums around key issues of interest
• Seed each forum with starter questions
• Have a forum for newbies called “Introduce Yourself”
• Have a forum called “What <product> Means to Me”
• Test with a few volunteers, and get the discussions started
• Invite community influencers
• Be careful to not look artificial or staged
• Gradually widen the discussion
• Initial testers invite their friends

Launch

• Get enough volunteers to staff the site for initial phase
• Blitz all your online and offline contacts
• Create a media package to distribute if you get press interest
• Target a soft launch to work out bugs and test engagement. A soft launch is where you go live, but don’t do publicity, and only invite a small group to participate.
• Launch early in the week, early in the morning
  • Tuesday or Thursday are high traffic days on the Web
• Ensure the initial page tells your story, and includes pictures of your team / clients
• Include a survey or quiz
• Ensure that your site has Facebook “Like” and other social media badges so your members can spread the word
• Give something away
• Reward people for creating a complete profile
  • Perhaps just a white paper or other downloadable content
• Create an offline launch party and invite your board, clients, supporters
• Video the unveiling of the new site and post on YouTube
• Create an online event within the first two weeks
• Plan major new content within the first month

Next up: Manage Your Initial Content

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Create Initial Content for Your Communityis the 167th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 411. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Posted in Enterprise Social Media, LinkedIn How-to, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Media Strategy | Tagged beginner, enterprise social media, relationship, social computing, social media, social networking | Leave a comment

Ditch the likes: Why enterprise social media is nothing like Facebook

See on Scoop.it – Enterprise Social Media

The power of social networks such as Facebook is distorting businesses’ perceptions about their own social collaboration efforts.

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

This is what we’ve been saying!
http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson

 

"Firms are so hung up on the Facebook model that they’re applying trivial consumer metrics to enterprise social media and ending up wondering why it’s not working.

In many cases, the misapplication of consumer-type metrics is leading them to misjudge the take-up and effectiveness of social tools, according to Tibco social-computing president Ram Menon."

See on www.zdnet.com

Poll: Vt. Workforce Unenthusiastic

See on Scoop.it – Social Media for Workforce Development

Poll: Vt. Workforce Unenthusiastic
Valley News
A Gallup survey shows Vermont has one of the least-engaged workforces in the nation. According to Gallup, only 27 percent of the Vermont employees are “emotionally engaged” at work.

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

So they’re all like, whatevs . . .

See on www.vnews.com

Design Your Presence – SMPG Community Building Checklist

In our previous post, Research Your Community’s Needs, we discussed the importance of researching the needs of your community, deciding on a logistical approach, and finding out what’s already out there.

In this post, we continue posting our exclusive checklist that you can use to execute your project for building your community – The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™. We discuss how to design your presence in your community.

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Design Your Presence

• Don’t develop your community as a stand-alone, in a vacuum
  • Create a social presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube
  • Leverage the power of each of your social presences to drive people to your community, and your Website
• Coordinate branding, graphics, messages across your social media presence
• Use your research to determine what features the community needs and will use
• Avoid too much complexity
• Consider creating an advisory board or surveying prospective members to gauge interest in the planned feature set for the community space
• Consider creating user levels
• Reward content creators and question-answerers with recognition
  • Best Practice: Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) an award for exceptional technical community leaders who voluntarily provide technical expertise within Microsoft support communities — see the post Run Contests for more information
• Determine how you will encourage connection and participation
• Create guidelines for community behavior
  • Indicate how the community can contribute to the guidelines
  • Ensure guidelines are not overly-restrictive or prescriptive
• Enable community enforcement of behavior
  • Consider implementing a “flag this post” feature
  • Consider implementing voting for posts
  • Consider creating a special area for power users
  • And listen to what they say there
• Select your platform
  • Many create-your-own platforms to choose from:
    • Joomla Community Builder and JomSocial
    • Ning
    • Cisco
    • Capterra
    • KickApps
    • Jive
• Determine your platform requirements — attributes to consider include:
  • Is platform widely supported (or commercially viable)?
  • Forums (of course)
  • RSS Feed support
  • Easy posting
  • Ability to feature posts
  • Security and identity — information security measures and also security features that affect the user experience such as onerous login procedures
  • Privacy
  • Video and other media support (consider embedding from YouTube instead)
  • Mobile support
  • Customization
  • Easy administration
  • Backup
  • Removing posts
  • Approving posts

Next up: Create Your Community Policies

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Design Your Presence is the 165th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 407. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances