Community Implementation Strategic Plan: Part 3 of 3

First Installment: Summary and Data Gathering
Second Installment: Membership, Content and Scheduling, and Tools

Rollout Plan

The most successful communities are like a great party.  You know why you’re going, there’s great food and drink when you get there and you’re not the first one there.

Your community needs to be seeded with both content and members when the masses join.  This means creating a rollout plan where each set of constituents knows their role and can help support the community.  Start by getting the entire organization in to join, fill out profiles and seed content. Next, invite a select group of friends and family, those colleagues who are loyal, vocal and will be able to help seed content and be a community advocate.  After the friends and family have had time to participate, a sub-group of participants can be invited in.  This allows you to continue refining the tone and content in the community.  Lastly, open the community to the public and the community can grow in a variety of ways.

Community Management

The last element in preparing for community implementation is community management.  It’s valuable to prepare and train the designated community manager on how to be the voice of the community, deal with negative or imperfect feedback and how to deal with troublemakers.  This usually comes in the form of a plan of action.  Documenting the scheduling calendar as well as a plan and script for dealing with negative(and positive) feedback helps prepare your company for implementation.

Design

Working with either a hired design team or an internal design team, you need to designate a voice of the customer.  The designated VoC helps the designer and the technology team make sure that when the community is developed, the community follows the strategy.

Development

There will be many things to think about in the development phase.  Most community platforms have lots of hooks and switches that can be turned on or off.  The questions about how the community should be set up should match easily to the community strategy.

Launch

Circle back with the team to confirm that the defined strategy has been successfully implemented.  This is also the point that you’re putting the final touches on your promotional material.  This could be both internal announcements and presentations and member emails and banners.

Ongoing Management

Strategy does not end on launch day.  Communities evolve and grow and must be strategically reviewed on a regular basis.  The frequency and depth of a strategic review depends on the type of community and the evolution of the community.  Generally, more frequent strategy reviews are necessary in the first 6 months to a year of a community’s existence.  Communities are always evolving so make sure to keep a pulse on your community and make sure you’re addressing the changing needs of your community as a whole and the individual members.

Caveat

There are so many more elements that go into implementing a successful community.  Don’t think that because it hasn’t been listed here that it’s not valuable.  I also encourage you to read other’s blogs on the subject, such as Tom Humbarger’s blog, Social Media Musings.  He covers many valuable topics and I know, first hand, that he has a proven track record in implementing successful communities.  Here’s a great presentation on the 10 Commandments of Community Management by Amy Muller at Get Satisfaction.

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Community Implementation Strategic Plan: Part 2 of 3

First Installment: Summary and Data Gathering

Now that you have chosen a very specific area of your business to focus on in launching your community, you want to start thinking about the people, tone and content that make up your community.  This valuable process determines how employees and other members act, interact and perceive value within the community.  A solid strategy is critical but without thinking about how to execute against that strategy, you will not find success.

Defining Membership

Now that you’ve chosen the business area and audience you want to focus on for your community, you will want to break your membership down to understand who your membership is.  Breaking membership down into the demographics of target members allows the team to begin to understand how members want to be reached, what types of information will interest them, how they want to interact and how often they’ll visit the community.

Work with your project team to define things like:

• Member demographics
• Member interests
• Familiarity with technology
• Frequency of visits

Content and Scheduling

Content and scheduling often drive the initial success of the community.  Members may not have obvious commonalities, so the company must initially expect to provide value.  There are many ways in which content can be gathered for a community:

• You may already have significant information to share with the community.
• You may need to acquire internal or external subject matter experts to participate in the community by contributing content and/or interacting with other community members
• You also want to think about creating new content specifically for the community

Scheduling is just as important as content.  By setting a calendar of events for a community manager to execute, it insures that as members return to the community, there is new and fresh content to consume.  Scheduling can also be in the form of newsletters, webinars, or helping with promotion of offline events.  Scheduling can be formal, like posting a new podcast each week, or it can be informal, like starting new discussions on a regular basis.

Tools

Now that the strategy, membership and content and scheduling have been defined, the decision about what tools to use, how to use those tools and when to execute those tools can be defined.

Community best practices dictate starting small when launching a community.  This means, staying focused on a specific audience, usually even launching to a beta group of members.  This method of starting small should also be applied to the tools.  Launching a subset of the tools that will be used not only allows your company to focus energies on a specific area; it also allows the membership to focus on content and interaction in a specific area.  From that point, the community can grow both in member numbers, tools and available content.

Based on the prior decisions, many of the required tools will be obvious, but at this point, tool requirements should be documented and final decisions will be made.  You want to think about what tools will be used and how they will be used.

Final Installment: Launch and Management

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Community Implementation Strategic Plan: Part 1 of 3

Implementing a successful online community is like any implementing any successful project.  The key is making sure you are focused on defining the correct goals and setting you, your company and your community members up for success.  This is a very high-level plan that I have used successfully for many community implementations.  Because this is a long post, I have broken it up into a series of posts that I will publish over the next few days.  If you have questions or want more information, just ask.  This is a basic guideline for a generic community implementation.  Anyone who is managing a successful community can tell you, it takes significant planning and continued community management to find success.

This post does not address picking a platform vendor.  I strongly encourage you to either engage a proven community strategy professional or make sure your community platform provider has the in-house resources to help you create your strategy.  Most platform companies do not have community strategists in-house but they can often point you in the right direction.  Make sure to ask.

Summary

Here are steps in creating and implementing an online community strategy.  Like any implementation, creating a project plan and educating the project team on the project plan allows for better understanding and thus easier execution of the project.

A standard community implementation is broken into five parts:

• Strategy
• Design
• Development
• Launch
• Ongoing Management

A solid strategy for community implementation is critical to the success of a community.  Your community strategy must tie to your business strategy.  If you start your strategic plan with the list of tools you’re thinking about using, your approach may need some adjustment.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s very important to understand the value of each tool available so you can understand how the execution of the tools tie to your community strategy but the strategy really needs to start with a business need, then move to understanding the audience (aka membership) then understanding their content wants and needs, then understanding how to manage and support the community from a content and member perspective.

Strategy

Defining the community is a critical step in a successful community implementation.  Treat your community implementation as any other project.  You want to determine and gather the project team as well as the project consultants.  As in any project, you want to make sure your team members are on the same page by creating a project plan and educating them at a kickoff meeting. Next, you want to do some analysis.

Data Gathering
There are a variety of ways businesses come to the conclusion that they need a community.  I have seen the most success by starting small, focusing on a small group, single product or single business area.  Looking at both the business area that’s most receptive, either because they have expressed interest, they’re already connecting using their own methods, or they have the most pain with their current situation.

Competitive Research
In order to understand the environment in which the community is launched, it’s important to understand both the external competitors to the community as well as internal competition.  What are others in your industry doing?  Are there places where potential members are already interacting?  They could be interacting in another community, or even using a different channel, like face-to-face interaction.

Understanding Overall Business Strategy
The success of the community has a great deal to do with executing the community in a way that’s going to fit into both the organizational structure of the company’s organization as well as the overall business strategy and goals.

Understanding Community Strategy & Purpose
Now is a great time to get a general understanding of the purpose, membership and goals of the community must be defined so that the next stages of strategy can be defined.

This is also an important time to start discussing the tone of the community, the voice of the organization within the community and the interaction the client plans to have with other community members.

Second Installment: Membership, Content and Scheduling, and Tools
Final Installment: Launch and Management

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Dear Job Seeker

It looks like another one of my friends may get laid off. It seems like her company is going to lay her off at 5:00 PM on a Friday! Really!?!

I’m not a career coach so I plan to ask my career coach friends to read this and offer some constructive feedback for me and you in the comments section. I suspect I’m not far off on my advice, but they’re the experts, not me.

Anyway, I told my friend that if she did get laid off, I’d have my arsenal of advice ready for her. I immediately started my list of things I wanted to tell her. Then, I realized that others will find this information valuable. Thus this post was born.

Day One

I don’t think you should climb into your pajamas and vegetate in front of the TV on day one. I know lots of people will disagree with me, but for me, taking action on day one was immensely valuable. (Thank you so much Aaron Strout for being my brain when I got laid off.  Aaron gave me a step-by-step list of what I was going to do on day one.  It kept me from having a pity party and got me focused on making progress.)

Tim Walker has some great posts on being laid off. Start with What to do when your friends are laid off. I realize it’s from a different perspective but it’s still good information. Then read his series Notes on job-hunting: It’s not over until you win.

Now that you have read these posts, get your resume in order. Actually, you should always have your resume in order. Someone once told me you should go on an interview at least once a year so that you can stay in the game. If you don’t already have your resume ready, do it right away. Don’t wait.

Tell people you were laid off. I know this is controversial because there is a stigma attached to being laid off but I think it makes it easier for people to help you if they know you’re laid off. Plus, in the 2009 market, I don’t think there’s as much stigma. After all, when people like Rachel Happe and Jim Storer have been laid off, you know you’re in good company. How do you get the word out there? Tell people on Twitter, update your status in Facebook and update your LinkedIn profile. On LinkedIn, update your experience, title, and the “what are you working on?” status sections. Anyone on your network will be able to see that you’re looking. While you’re at it, add some folks to your LinkedIn network. You should have already done this, but better now than never.

People will immediately start asking you what they can do to help. Be prepared to respond. Write a job help email. It’s an email you put together so that when someone says, “send me your resume, I may know someone who’s hiring” or you’re proactively reaching out to someone who may not be hiring but would be willing to help, you can tell them what you’re looking for. Keep it very brief. Offer your contact information and thank them.

Breathe

Now you can take a breath.

Start thinking about what you want to do next. Write down what you want to do. Look at what you wrote. Think about it, then adjust it until it becomes your elevator pitch. You should sound enthusiastic when you say it. If you don’t sound enthusiastic, people won’t hear you. If you’re not enthusiastic, maybe you’re not doing what you love. I credit this advice to Liz Baker McKay, a kick-butt Career Consultant in Austin. (I wish she’d tweet, she’d kick butt at that too.)

Start a list of all the companies you want to work for. I want to stay in Austin, so I started with the Austin, Texas Book of Lists. Narrow it down to 30 (not many more than that). I would even add companies that aren’t hiring, it worked for me. I have been continuously adjusting my list, deleting those where clearly we’re not a cultural match and adding ones as I read or hear about them.

Go to your LinkedIn list and do a search on your 30 list and see which of your friends are 1st or 2nd connected to people at these companies. Then ask your friends and colleagues if they’ll make a connection. If your contacts are local, ask if they’ll have coffee or lunch with you. Don’t expect that they’re interviewing you. Actually, prepare by knowing who they are, what they do, and what their company does, but don’t expect anything. The conversation goes much better this way.

Stay Busy

Don’t just stick to your list. Have coffee or lunch with people who are interesting to you. I have had coffee and lunch with dozens of people and there has only been one meeting that I walked away going, hmmm, that wasn’t that productive. Even if this person can’t offer you a job, you can learn from them, or help them with something you know. Enjoy the conversation, expect to share what you know. You just do not know what that connection might bring. Meet up with them again. Have coffee again or invite them to something they might be interested in. Stay connected. Again, I’ll go back to Liz Baker McKay here. She says, it’s not one meeting, it’s creating relationships, and those don’t generally happen with one meeting.

Throughout this process, review and update your elevator pitch, your resume, and your job help email. I’ve been making small and large tweaks to these throughout my search and I think they’re much better than they were three months ago.

Go to events and activities in your area. Go to the ones that sound interesting to you. Invite others to these interesting events as well.

Appreciate people. Thank them for their time. Meet them when and where it’s convenient to them. Try to offer them something in return.

Stay busy. You may find that you have a lot of free time on your hands. Stay busy. Aside from going to events, conferences, etc. commit to do something for yourself. I’m doing lots of gardening, working out, meeting up with people for coffee. I have also done some project work, not for profit work, volunteering, and learning.

Some days will be better than others. My friends tell me I seem happier now than I did a couple of months ago. I don’t feel much different but I know I’m happy. I feel like I’m learning something by being unemployed right now. It’s been interesting.

Wow, I got through this whole post and didn’t once mention searching for jobs online, or the cover letter. I’m sure others have talked about this but my favorite job search site is indeed. There are also lots of industry specific job lists. I found that most of the traditional job boards, like Monster and Career Builder aren’t for me.

Let me know how it goes for you.

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