that canadian girl

Do you work as community manager? Fancy meeting a few others who work on the front line representing their company?

After meeting a few other company bloggers, customer care people and other community folks at South by SouthWest this week, we thought we’d arrange a little informal gathering before the week ends. It’ll give community managers who work for companies, big and small, a chance to meet others who play that role.

Join us (Ros Hodgekiss, Kelly Rusk and myself) on Tuesday 16th March at 3:30pm at Iron Cactus on 6th Street for a drink and a chat.

Hope you’ll join us there!

[Note: It's TUESDAY, not Monday as I've stupidly been tweeting all afternoon!]

Recently, I seem to have had this conversation time and time again with businesses, individuals and consultants who are beginning to take Facebook seriously as a place to peddle their wares, so I thought I’d immortalise it here for future reference.

Facebook started as a way to network students of a single college together, with a firmly teen-to-early-20’s audience. In recent years, my mom (and probably yours too) has joined and the average age of Facebook user is on a steady increase. It can no longer be dismissed as “kids’ stuff” by businesses who have a direct to consumer audience, hence the many discussions about creating fan pages.

The problem with creating a fan page for your business is that, unless your brand is incredibly sexy & fun, nobody wants to be a fan of it. I’m lucky to have a great local baker & cake maker, but would I really want to be a fan of her business on Facebook? And what good would come out of me becoming a passive fan?

Facebook can facilitate something much greater than just the digital equivalent of a bumper sticker promoting someone’s business.

Facebook gives these business owners the opportunity to be an authority on something they’re passionate about. Taking the example of the cake maker, she would no doubt get much more participation from her customers if the fan page was for cake lovers, for example.

Lead the conversation

Encourage fans to talk about the best cakes they’ve eaten, the cutest cupcakes they’ve seen, the failed homebaking attempts (we all have them, don’t we!?) and the healthy alternatives for those weeks where we need to eat a bit lighter.

Share recipes and tips

Realistically, no skilled baker will lose business over this, as we’re all too busy or lacking the skill to make the kind of cakes we’d buy from a real cake artist!

Listen to hardcore cake fans

What do they want? What occasions do they buy cakes for? Even if the fans aren’t local, this is a goldmine of information which can help a perceptive business owner plan future promotions.

Bonus: You’ll have more fun

Best of all, taking this approach will make content creation much easier and enjoyable than trying to keep it solely focused on your business. You’ll be recognised as a cake-baking authority (or whatever your business may be) yet not be known as the navel gazer who only talks about your own products!

By celebrating a shared passion rather than simply asking people to be a fan for the sake of accumulating numbers, you’ll find that your Facebook fan page will have much more interaction and that people far beyond your existing customer base will join. Go out, have fun and talk about things you’re passionate about.

[Photo credit: Super Mario Brothers Nintendo Cupcakes by clevercupcakes on Flickr, Creative Commons license]

As I’ve mentioned before here and there, one of the most successful Pepsmedia activities these days is training courses. It also happens to be something I truly love doing.

The next “Blogs & Social Media in Business” introductory workshop day is next week, on Thursday 19th November, at Wallacespace St Pancras in London and due to a change of plans with one company (who have now opted for an in-house training course for their whole team), all of a sudden, I have 8 places available on the course.

In order to fill the course and have enough participants to make the course interesting, I’m offering these places at cost, only £95, instead of the usual £395!

If you secretly wish you understood why people use hashtags on Twitter, how to work social media tools into your existing marketing plan, need to manage online relationships or just wonder how to approach bloggers in your industry, then this one is for you. We tackle all the jargon that flies around the web, and make it make sense.

Complete this form and mention the blog post to get the course at the awesome low-cost of £95 + VAT (I feel like Billy Mays in an infomercial, help!) for a full day of training, as well as tasty breakfast, lunch and snacks throughout the day.  

In the past, we’ve had attendees from a range of industries – solicitors, travel & tourism marketers, luxury fashion retailers and small business owners – all of whom said they thoroughly enjoyed the course and learned a lot.

Grab the workshop brochure here for more details, and join me next Thursday for a fun and insightful day on social media.

Members of your community do a lot. You rely on them to make the community a success. You can influence the direction of your community, you can influence its content and you even have an influence over the type of members you want in the community. However, when it comes down to whether your community is going to be successful, your members are all that matter. You need to not only attract members that will help your community grow and continue to develop, but you need to keep them. You can do this by making sure they feel special.

via communityspark.com

Community Spark has turned out to be a real gem in explaining how community building works and why community management is such an art.

The best thing a company can do to its community management efforts is to put a passionate and dedicated person in charge, and give them the *time* to do their job well.