Community Management | Cecilia Edwards

Long before there was Google+, the concept of +1 was used to address the topic of extraordinary customer service. In 1993, Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles wrote Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service. In Raving Fans, Blanchard and Bowles cover three areas: Deciding what you as a business want; Discovering what the customer wants; and delivering plus one.

So what did they mean by delivering plus one. Here are some of the key points they articulate:

Being consistent in your performance to create credibility with your customers
Limiting the number of areas in which you want to make a difference so that you have a chance of doing them well
Promote more service and deliver more (as opposed to under-promise and over-deliver)
Meet expectations first, exceed them second
Be flexible

Since one of the primary reasons to have an externally facing online community is to deepen relationships with your customers, it seems that the +1 concept from Blanchard and Bowles fits well for online communities. Here are 10 suggestions for ways you could +1 your community this year. Continue reading →

A Best Practice of World Class Communities is to Encourage Ownership of the Community by Members

One of the strategies Telligent encourages for building World Class Communities is to encourage a level of ownership of the community by its members. There are several benefits associated with this:

People tend to support the things they feel they have ownership of
The cost of managing the community can be lowered with community volunteers
Community members can often be more ardent supporters of the community rules and also more effective evangelists of your products than employees

This usually works well because the interest of the community members is in alignment with those of the company sponsoring the community. The following chart is an example of the typical types of things both a set of customers and a company would be focused on:

The key is ensuring that the community’s interest stays aligned with the interest of the company that is funding the community, otherwise there is a problem.

Sometimes, Community Ownership can Turn into a Community Hijacking

Steve Pavlina had this happen to him with his forums that had been successful for five years.

Click here to read the entire post on Telligent.com and find out the five things you can do to avoid having your community hijacked.

Cecilia Edwards

All Things Strategy – Some of Them Social

Tag Archives: Community Management