The Right Content at the Right Time: Influence Analytics 3 by Dr Michael Wu

What this strongly reminds me of is my own blog post (‘Greg is one way to make money out of social media’) about how communities managers can potentially play a role as influencers if done properly:

What I want to say for the benefit of companies trying to see how to make money from using social media in the marketplace is to see your own community manager if you have one, and other partner’s community managers, as influencers in their own right.

I pretty sure I’m not breaking any ethical code by saying that, after all your community manager isn’t just going to start spamming the community with product messages – that wouldn’t work. Quiet the contrary, what I’m talking about is the subtle, patient task of persuading members of a community of the value of a particular offering – which requires both intelligence & integrity.

Now after reading the latest piece from Dr Wu, this suggests to me is two things. Firstly that your community manager using SNA tools for large communities, or their inside knowledge coupled with community anayltics for smaller ones, can ‘lead the charge’ to find these right influencers.

Secondly it suggests that they themselves take on this role indirectly by nurturing debates around certain products, nurturing influencers who command attention, and then helping them reach the right users at the right time.

This avoids them directly playing the role of influencer as such, but does give them the power of delivering this tool as a means of creating revenue which has long been the holy grail of community management.

Practically realizing that tool is a combination of the SNA/analytics, plus consultancy work with the community manager to help deliver this.

“This is a Community Manager’s most important function. It’s not marketing, advertising, nor social media, it’s just plain old fashioned expressing yourself about a product that you believe in. It is word of mouth & the power is phenomenal. You can’t buy it & you can’t force it.”

But the point I want to make today is different. What I want to say for the benefit of companies trying to see how to make money from using social media in the marketplace is to see your own community manager if you have one, and other partner’s community managers, as influencers in their own right. I pretty sure I’m not breaking any ethical code by saying that, after all your community manager isn’t just going to start spamming the community with product messages – that wouldn’t work. Quiet the contrary, what I’m talking about is the subtle, patient task of persuading members of a community of the value of a particular offering – which requires both intelligence & integrity.

In other words community managers should be considered influencers in their own right. After all they get to know a community better than most; they get to know the issues better than most; they should know the needs of members better than most; so surely they should be considered a key influencer themselves? Traditionally the role has been seen as someone who should stay ‘objective’, and be the advocate for members first and the host organisation second. But in the reality the needs of business suggest otherwise. Your community takes advertising, it takes sponsors blogs, so why not allow the community manager to advocate a particular product. After all isn’t that what communities set up by the Dell’s and IBM’s of this world do? Don’t get me wrong, this approach applies to both b2c and b2b communities.

Take for example a company which is trying to create a social media strategy, but which wants to make sure it’s going to deliver value for money. One of the obvious way to achieve this commercial goal is to consider what the existing business partners are doing. For example if you are a global business service organisation partnered with a number of airlines, there’s a good chance that a brief audit of your partners will show you they already have a presence on Facebook with a fan page as with Virgin Atlantic, or are starting a community as in the case of Ryanair.

In the case of Virgin Atlantic their community/forum manager Greg Hamling is in a key position of influence with Virgin Atlantic customers. So my question is if you were approaching Virgin to discuss your social media strategy and the mutual benefit of endorsing your product when relevant, wouldn’t you want to include Greg as a key influencer? From reading his replies to customers, and from the look of him from his Facebook profile, he’s certainly the kind of guy who could pull it off.

Update: I’ve just come across this expert post on the role of influencers, and what they need to do with their ‘targets’ to be effective, by Lithium’s Principal Scientist of Analytics Dr Micahel Wu: The 6 Factors of Social Media Influence: Influence Analytics 1.

A Simplified Model of Social Media Influence

His analysis makes good sense to me, emphasizing from the target’s point of view that influencers need to have credibility and to deliver relevant information at the right time and place, for the target/s to take action. Here’s what I said in a comment:

What you’ve written about influencers also accords what what I’ve read recently, that it’s not necessarily the size of the influencer’s network, but their passion which is key (which I’m guessing may relate to their perceived credibility).

Bearing these points in mind I’ve asked in a recent blog {this one} as to whether community managers should themselves be regarded as key influencers (& therefore a potential revenue driver), despite the risks involved in turning them into “glorified marketeers” if not done correctly.

Is there something more accurate and precise than the 90-9-1 rule out there? IMHO, Lorenz Curve and Gini Coefficient. Do you know anything else? The Economics of 90-9-1

My answer as part of yesterday’s Online Community Manager group discussion kind of sums up where I’ve got to after reading Dr Wu’s blog previous post and this latest one:

I like the approach you have using economics-based models. I’ve come at it from a more particpant-observer type sociological point of view, so what I’d like to see is for your analysis to return a new ‘rule of thumb’ based on your in-depth data analysis.

The 90-9-1 rule is useful to community managers because it helps provides a starting point for understanding, as Arantza says above. For example it would be useful to know from a practical point of view whether for more open communities (as opposed to niche market research or project based communities) the 90-9-1 is a useful tool for helping launch a new community.

It’s partly about creating a social dashboard that can explain to a member of senior management why a certain kind of community activity may help or hinder greater participation.

I did this kind of work previously in the National Health Service, creating simple reports on the success of a national public health initiative, which worked well for senior managers (government ministers in that case).

So I come back to the challenge, the age old relationship between lab & fieldwork if you like, what would be the new rule of thumb/thumbs?

I’ve chosen to highlight multiple feedback loops as a useful tool, to help drive top contributors for example (taken from the HP Labs research), but I take your point that for commercial ROI purposes more precision is required. To put it another way in such a dynamic social context how does precision allow you to create heuristics for day to day community management?

• How to pay special attention to your top community contributors
• Why it’s worth helping your community manager avoid burnout
• HP Labs report predicting content popularity & thus revenue
• How can mentoring help online communities?
• Why are profiles important?
• Why member organisations need to adapt to succeed in the online world
• Heuristic tools to help community managers
• Common pitfalls of Communities of Practice
• Taking the hard work out of measuring the success of your community
• Have you been to measurement camp?
• New metrics to help you grow your community

]]> http://www.stuart-hall.com/2010/01/06/myy-community-blog-posts-of-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.stuart-hall.com/2009/06/04/why-its-worth-helping-your-community-manager-avoid-burnout/ http://www.stuart-hall.com/2009/06/04/why-its-worth-helping-your-community-manager-avoid-burnout/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:12:35 +0000 Stuart Hall http://www.stuart-hall.com/?p=2375 Continue reading →]]> After reading a blog about burnout the other week I’d been thinking about how to help community managers avoid the same problem, faced by pressures from managing difficult issues online to getting buying from across their organisation. The issue came back to me today after reading FreshNetwork’s Holly Seddon ask how to best deal with burnout in the Community Manager group:

Being immersed in the details of people’s lives, and often their traumas and upsetting experiences can take it’s toll on moderators and CMs. I know on previous communities I’ve been affected by some things I’ve read and have had to take five minutes, have a cup of tea away from the screen or talk it through with a colleague… What do you do to avoid emotional burnout?

I confess I have both a professional and a personal interest in this subject having been a community manager (CM) helping to set up an award-winning professional community at the ICAEW, and as a consultant working in a mentoring capacity with other CMs. Speaking on a professional level was I found useful recently was a discussion I had with Rachel Happe, one of the founders of the Boston-based Community Roundtable (CR), a new community for CMs to learn from each other, including accessing mentoring. Or to use its tagline: “A peer network for community managers and social media practitioners”.

Rachel started off by saying that in the US companies were despite the downturn starting to increasingly invest and hire people for community roles, but (in what was no doubt one of the driving forces behind setting up the CR) often they failed to hire senior enough people. The problem is that CMs in this position are being asked a lot, not just ‘running a community’ but dealing with crisis management issues for instance, which means a lot of pressure when such hires may not be trained strategically or have much experience in how to manage a business. This of course itself raises the question of whether companies considering hiring CMs for such pivotal customer facing roles should look to get help in defining early on what such a  role should include. That’s a consultancy service we offer at Sift Groups, just to get the plug out the way!

Rachel’s informed view was that this not surprisingly put a lot of strain on people hired, faced with high expectations, and lack of experience at a senior level in knowing how and when to push back organisational demands. She said a lot of such CM roles did not come from a management background, did not have the skills and experience to operationalize such the role (see Rachel’s recent post ‘Eight Competencies to Socializing your Organization’ for example), which meant effectively what the know-how to help change the business were back to ‘square one’.

In particular the role of the CM in a profit-driven organisation where the culture maybe particularly corporate in style was highlighted by Rachel; this is set against the pressure from customers who (as Clay Shirky recently pointed out in his example of the UK bank HSBC’s climbdown in the face of a student revolt over bank fees hike — see Suw Charman-Anderson’s paraphrased account of his RSA talk) who can increasingly organise to put pressure on companies without the need for the efficencies of command and control at the disposal of the average corporate. In conclusion Rachel advised was that CMs in such a position need to have a core team around them to help operationalize the community within the business. Otherwise the problem of burnout, coupled with lack of senior level leverage and inexperience in strategy and operationalizing the role, could mean CMs walking away and leaving an online space which fails to deliver the ROI everyone wants to see it deliver.

PS: Maybe using the acroynm ‘CM’ for community managers is a bit jargonesque, what do you think? If you are looking at the demands of this role it ‘s certainly worth reading the 35+ comments to Jeremiah Oywang’s post ‘Job Hazard’s of the community Manager’.