🚀 Content Coming Soon.

This space is aimed at uncovering what the community holds in store for businesses, and how it empowers them.

Being a community professional this information is crucial for you to understand, as it could help you in crafting community strategies and also ensure that your company takes community seriously and has executive buy-in for your community efforts.

Here we will cover

🚀 Content Coming Soon.

Launch Plan revolves around the following steps:

1. Creating an engagement framework

• Determine what content to put out.

• Determine the mediums to focus on

• Determine the frequency of outreach.

Keeping a balance between different types of touch points (content, events, 1:1, Outreach)

Content Calendar

2. Creating a Moderation framework

As it goes without saying, before getting into how to manage a community we have to first understand, what is the meaning of the word community. (literally! and in the business sense as well!)

Now that we have a broad idea of what a community refers to.

Its' time to clear some air about community management in the next chapter, where we decode the term CMGR.

What is the Business Objective that you are trying to accomplish through this community?

It could be anything, but generally, it is one of the following

• Increasing Sales

• Increasing Brand Awareness

• Decreasing the cost of customer service

• Co-creation of new products

• Establishing your brand as a thought leader

• Educating customers

• Enabling customers and community members to collaborate and share knowledge.

Also, this does not stop here. If your business is new to leveraging community, then it might require effort from your end to convince the c-suite and ensure executive buy-in.

Create one article about basics of scaling

Add links to engagement and gamification

1. Outlining business goals (provide a link to that chapter)

2. Art of compelling storytelling

Understanding the right kind of content

Creating a content calendar.

This Chapter is dedicated for anyone new to community management.

If you are looking to know what community means exactly, and you are thinking of making a career in this domain then this chapter is where you should begin.

Also if you are a professional who is transitioning from Marketing, Communications, IT or any other domain into your new role as a community professional, then this space will serve as a quick refresher.

In this space we will cover

There are three basic things you need to consider while developing a community Strategy:

Listen, Learn, Launch.

Any community strategy would essentially revolve around 3 tiers.

1. Need Identification (Community Objective, Business Objective)

2. Launch Plan

3. A Measurement Framework to track the success of efforts.

At the time when I was looking for guidance or specific information while navigating my role as a community professional, I always stumbled upon one difficulty.

The answer to any specific query is available but you have to search very hard. And most of the time the exact piece of advice that you are looking for is buried within the transcript of a podcast.

So I have tried to create a single repository for all things related to community building. All tagged according to their individual categories.

As this repository grows, we will have a curated list of community resources all segmented into requisite groups. The entire repository is searchable and anyone can find the best practices related to a specific field in no time, skim through the notes and decide on what steps to take further.

During the course of writing this guide, I have listened to 40+ podcasts, 100+ articles, and 3 whitepapers on community building.

If you want to get your talk to be covered here, reach out to on Twitter.

Comments and Feedbacks are always appreciated.

About Me

Hi, My name is Sanmaya. I am 25.

I am a passionate product marketer, community builder, data-nerd and dog lover.

Community Experience:

• PMM - PowerToFly (APAC & B2C Growth)

• Head of Community & Growth (Zuperly - A bootstrapped learning assistance startup/ 2nd Brain)

• Chapter Director - Startup Grind (Google for Startups)

• Regional Mentor (Technical Education) - AIM, Govt. of India

• Managed AIM's regional community (Odisha State) & educated 900+ youth in ATL on Python, Git & Data Visualisation.

• Organized 30+ in-person events (including Hackathons)

• Organized 10+ virtual events.

• Organized India's biggest open-source hackathon (Hackference).

• Other Experience:

• Worked as a Product Marketing Manager for Finin (A neo banking startup in Bengaluru).

• Independent Freelancer (Data Engineering) - Toptal/Upwork

I am currently planning to transcend my passion for communities into a full-time CMGR role.

Always on the lookout for great CMGR opportunities. Reach out to me via ⬇️

Email:

Connect with me on .

Find me on Twitter

Before diving further into the world of community management, it is better to make yourself familiar with the major terminologies used in the community industry.

You can always come back to this module, whenever you need to find the meaning of a term.

Common Terms

CMGR: This acronym refers to a community manager or a community professional. Often known as #CMGR.

NPS: Net Promoter Score. It is a metric used in customer experience programs. NPS measures the loyalty of customers to a company. NPS scores are measured with a single question survey and reported with a number from -100 to +100, a higher score is desirable.

CES: Customer Effort Score is a type of customer satisfaction survey used to measure the ease of service experience with an organization. It asks customers to rate the ease of using products or services on a scale of “very difficult” or “very easy.”

90:9:1 Rule: This is the rule for participation inequality in Social Media and Online Communities. In most online communities, 90% of the users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of the users contribute little bit, and 1% of users account for almost all the action that happens in the community.

AMA: It stands for Ask Me Anything. These are community engagement programs that community professionals often employ to facilitate Question and Answer (QnA) exchanges between members and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). They provide a great medium to ensure transparency, accessibility, and knowledge sharing.

Ambassador: It refers to a member who participates in formal leadership programs inside a community. Often these programs are called "Advocacy Programs".

CRM: Customer Relationship Management. It is often an online tool that is used to manage the company's interaction with current and future customers.

Gamification: Gamification is the skill of understanding what game-based motivators may drive members and how to use those motivators to help members get value out of the community that they may not initially recognize. Often times gamification efforts appear in the form of points, badges, or 'games' that encourage gentle competition around engagement.

Lurker: A member who only views content.

Moderator: A person who moderates an Internet forum or online discussions. Sometimes the Community Manager fulfills this role.

On-Boarding: The process of bringing a new member up to speed in the community space.

ROI: Return on Investment.

"Commitment Curve" is a common tool for building communities. It helps community leaders map the level of commitment a member has and the effort they are willing to expend for the community.

The Commitment Curve helps community leaders to organize their ideas on how to improve the experience and increase engagement of their community members.

However, it is a subjective tool and requires clarity/guidance on the activities to engage members.

Carrie Mellisa Jones talks about the Commitment curve in very high detail in her blog.

In my opinion, it is a must-read for community professionals.

There are 3 levels of Users

According to the 90:9:1 rule for online communities, In any given community the members can be broadly categorised in terms of engagement, as follows

• Inactive Users (90%)

• Passive Active (9%)

• Power Users (1%)

The goal for any community professional is to move members up the commitment curve and bring more and more users to level 2 and 3.

However, some of the tips suggested by Carrie Mellisa Jones include:

• Continuously seek feedback to improve — take feedback as constructive criticism.

• Give a damn! It’s not really about you and your business. It’s about what people are going to get from being a part of the community

• create rituals (something most communities don’t do). When we look outside of our cultures and try to connect globally, there’s no global ritual. Build your own community rituals, be it something as small as a Monday morning welcome post or celebrating someone’s promotion. Celebrate things and create moments that matter.

• Make people feel special with giveaways that would make them feel recognized. For example, hand written cards

• Do something personal and do not worry too much about the instantaneous ROI

• The same could be adopted for offline communities. You could give every attendee a thank you note. Basically, something non-attendees wouldn’t get.

• In short, create moments. At CMX, they started giving hugs when people used to enter their events.

https://www.carriemelissajones.com/blog/community-commitment-curve

Now that you have a launch strategy in place, you need to have a measurement framework to keep track of whether your efforts are bearing fruitition.

Define some success metrics according to your goals, to measure the outcome of your community efforts.

Here is an exhaustive list:

• Unique visitors

• New member registrations

• Page views

• Retention/attrition

• Member loyalty

• Member satisfaction

• Most active members

• Top searches

• Message posts

• Conversion

• No. of First time contributors

• No. of customer service tickets

• cost savings for customer service

• Tech support tickets

• cost savings for tech support

• mentions on other sites

• User complaints

• referrals to community

We will cover community metrics in more detail in the next chapter.

Welcome to the CMGR Guide! This is a community repository managed by Sanmaya Mohanty that contains the resources that Community Professionals will need in their journey of building communities and nurturing relationships.

This guide is aimed at being the one-stop solution for everything that a community professional might need in his journey of learning. This is also aimed towards people who want to start a career in community management and want to learn all the ins and outs of community management.

This guide is an effort to assimilate a lot of lessons that community professionals around the world have learned from building and engaging communities -- all in a single CMGR Playbook.

License

This CMGR Guide is open-sourced under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license. See the license file here.

Credits

This repository is open-sourced and free to use for everyone in the community.

None of us are new to the idea of hype and exclusivity around product launches.

N26, Dropbox ran some of the most viral product launch campaigns by harnessing the desire for exclusivity.

It has some psychological ground, too: according to Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, we tend to want things simply because other people want them.

Human desire is not an autonomous process but a collective one — this is how we decide what we care about. On top of this, life inside the velvet rope is, well, pretty good.

There’s a real, psychological fulfilment of being “in” with the crowd and stoking envy among those around you.

How do you leverage the desire for exclusivity?

Here are some actionable insights for leveraging the desire for exclusivity.

1. Rewarding Community Members

• Giving community exclusive benefits.

• Providing them Swags.

2. Building in Public:

• Propose interesting product ideas and ask the community for feedback.

• Post screenshots of internal Slack messages showcasing company culture.

• Tell emotional stories about your company to pull at followers’ heartstrings

3. Creating designated Inner and Outer Rings.

• A larger outer ring is important as it creates FOMO, so more outsiders can evaluate a community before seeking membership.

• It’s important to have an inner ring too as this gives shared values explorers something to aspire to and provides that important safe space for your members.

• If you prefer welcoming visitors to all community activities, an inner ring can be designated by privileges. This means members are allowed to do things that visitors are not.

Now that we are well versed with almost all the major components that constitute the process of community building, namely what are communities, what are the business outcomes of it and how to covince your c suite to take action towards community, as we have understood the psychology behind why and how communities work and the strategies you need to create to foster a community building game plan

Now its time to combine all those insights to some actionable steps to build your community from scratch:

Establish Phase

1. Take care of business background aspects (Building a business case)

   Assemble executive sponsors

• YOu have to get executive buy in, for businesses that are unfamilliar with online communities in particular, be prepared to convince everyone at the top levels the value that an online community can deliver.

• Executive involvement has much to do with how well communities influence revenue.

• Pilot projects offer a safe learning environment to help the organization get comfortable and build competencies around community.

1. Identify business needs

Identify business needs

Identify audience needs and core member needs

Map business and audience needs to community featuers

form identity: find potential members who fit the community identity you envision.

Define success and create measurement frameworks

Prepare a budget

Preparing a budget for an online community, business case as with any forecast about the future is just intelligent well informed guesswork.

YOur budget should include both the cost and revenue sides of the ledger. You will probably be able to forecast costs with greater confidence than revenues.

community managers are in a position to raise awareness and set the tone for acceptable online behaviour. Therefore this will require the implementation of rules of engagement that are enforced when violated.

Anonymity is not necessary in most communities. Allowing a member anonymity provides more of an opportunity for inappropriate behaviour.

What type of community are you looking to build?

• Is it a community where one-off interactions happen or a community where you are continuously forging relationships.

• Is this a community where customers convene around a hobby? Just like Fitbit's community.

• Is this a support community where people go to get their problems solved?

Once you are certain from your end regarding the community type you are looking to build,

It's now time to do a member needs analysis. What your members are looking for from your community.

Perform a Member needs analysis.

People generally form a community to

1. Network and connect

Network with individuals to find members with shared passions Combat isolation, share emotions, share struggles.

2. Access tools

Find resources that allow them to do the job better shorten decision times and decrease risk.

3. Share the knowledge:

Explore ideas and participate in one-on-one discussions or public threads. Access actionable experience-based solutions from like-minded members.

Make sure that you find the common need/struggle that your members might share.

Conduct Community Profiling

Not every answer to your question is readily available. Therefore you have to dive deep and interview your prospective community members to exactly know what they are looking for.

• Interview or survey members to

  • Gain knowledge about their specific needs

  • Get to know the different member types and personas.

  • Predict their needs.

  • Look for variation in their needs.

  • What are they looking for in the community?

  • how do they like to interact

  • what level of confidentiality or openness are they looking for

  • Do they want exposure

  • Do they want to Influence others

  • Do they want to shape the industry

  • are they time-crunched? How much time can they devote?

• Use this information to craft a compelling community content strategy.

• you can create micro-niches in your community to further drive engagement.

Toolset Audit

Based on the data gathered in the previous steps, Determine the required tools - software, applications, templates, and guides.

Additional Steps

• Complete a competitive audit of your community strategy to know your social positioning.

• Create a budget and then secure the investment required.

#CMGR

The term CMGR is an acronym for Community management professionals. It is a very popular twitter hashtag. #CMGR.

Btw I would suggest you to follow the hashtag on twitter #CMGR to keep yourself updated about the world of community management.

What is not Community Management?

As someone who is beginning their journey into getting to know what community management is, it's pretty natural to get overwhelmed by the uncanny resemblance the domain has with other domains such as marketing or social media management, and not being able to spot the distinction.

While at times there could be some overlap between all these different domains, let me assure you community management is not social media management, it is also not online customer support.

These are just some of the tools and skillsets that a community manager is expected to and should hold in his arsenal.

What is Community Management?

In its truest essence community management refers to the role of creating or altering an existing community in an effort to make it stronger.

In the modern business scenario, It also involves

• attracting new faces into a community.

• providing existing members the opportunity to engage with each other in the community.

• generating content for them and providing value for the community

In the end, communities empower all its stakeholders (people, businesses) to have more authentic relationships.

Expectations associated with Community Professionals?

Who is a Community Manager?

A community manager is a person who acts as the liaison between an organization and its audience. They act as the voice, tone, and moderator of the brand through community support, content distribution, and digital engagement to build brand presence and trust, both online and in-person.

What does a community manager do?

Community professionals are responsible for building and maintaining a brand's community -- at times both online and offline. They also do ORM (Online Reputation Management) and craft the public perception of the brand.

This role requires engaging audiences on a variety of channels including online forums, social media platforms, Messaging Platforms (like Slack), in-person groups, and more to reach all audiences where they are.

Certain expectations associated with community managers include:

1. Getting customer feedback and generating content ideas as well as product ideas from community members through real conversations.

2. Increase brand and product awareness.

3. Being the go-to person and the face of the company for your community members and providing support for them whenever they need it.

4. Learn about the customer and community needs and providing that information to the C-Suite to drive product development around customer needs.

5. Build real relationships with community members and be a facilitator for driving relationships among the community members.

6. Increase the interactions with the community and use those insights to increase sales and revenue for your company.

Guided tours

• Provides a walkthrough to the new members and explains the starting points of the community.

• The explainer content should be easy to understand and highly specific so as to show the new members the clear benefits of doing certain tasks.

• Eliminate any kind of ambiguity from the beginning.

Welcome video

• Create a short video that explains all things that your community stands for.

• The Dos and Don'ts of the community.

• That provides information about the POCs of the community.

• It should provide information about how things are done in your community.

SuperUser Programs

• You can create a superuser program comprising of some of the most active, friendly and engaging members of your community.

• Since they know all the ins and outs of the community they can guide the new members and get their questions answered.

• This is a great way to forge networks within the community.

Webinars

• You can also arrange a webinar specifically for the new users to have real-time interaction, solve the queries, share how your community works, and understand them better.

Personalized calls

• If you are starting out with the community consider having personalized calls or chats with the new members.

• Try to learn why they have joined your community, their goals, their special skills, and figure out if they can add value to the members.

• David Spinks creates a fb post each Monday mentioning the new members that joined the CMX community the previous week.

Now that you have an onboarding process in place. It is time to take note of the effectiveness of the process by analyzing the metrics.

The SPACES model can be used as a framework for defining your community's business value.

This model was originally conceived by David Spinks with contributions from Carrie Mellisa Jones and Evan Hamilton.

The below image briefly explains all the aspects of the SPACE Model.

According to the SPACE model all communities inherently derive their business values from one of the following areas:

In his blog post featured in CMX Hub, David Spinks has completely mentioned each and every aspect of the spaces model and choosing which objectives to focus on.

It is a must read for every community professional.

This guide is meant to inspire action and be a ready reckoner guide rather than a theoretical piece of work.

So in this module we will look at some actual community manager job posts and will guide you how we can help you acquire those skills and be industry ready.

1. Community Manager Role at Clickup.

Now lets go through how to acquire the skills required for this job by using this guide.

1. Creating and laucnching events world wide. Both inperson and online.

2.Revamp partnership programs: Learn more about increasing engagements.

3. Community Strategies

4. networking properly and building relationships with customers.

2. Community Manager Role at Binance.

Now lets go through how to acquire the skills required for this job by using this guide.

Growing online and offline communities.

Moderating content for binance.

analysis of market growth.

This space is for community professionals who are bombarded with online engagement issues in their internal or external community program.

Before getting to know how to boost engagement, its advisable to make yourself familiar with the psychology behind user enagagement.

Belonging means acceptance as a member or part.

Such a simple word for huge concept. A sense of belonging or the desire to belong and feel like a part of community is a basic human need, much like the need for food and shelter.

So far so good. But question might arise, as community professionals is it important for us to consider about sense of belonging ?

A big YES !

Belonging is a primary component of inclusion. When community members are truly included, they perceive that the business cares for them as individuals, their authentic selves.

A lack of belongingness will definitely lead to

• Lurking behaviour (no engagement)

• Low morale

• Lack of initiative

And not to mention the participation and engagement will fall, which are directly proportional towards showing a lack of trust of your community members in your company. On a personal level feeling like an outsider is a painful, negative experience.

This in turn will sabotage all your community efforts.

Ok we get it. Sense of belonging is important.

Actionable insights to foster a sense of belongingness

• Create a robust onboarding process. As this is the first interaction that your new members are having with your community, make sure to add some events to break the ice and make them feel special. Give new members the opportunity to get to know and see each other while they talk about membership goals and interests.

• Show them The Full Picture Community members need to know the community's full picture. Communicate the history of how the community was set up, by whom, when, the vision it stands for. Share internal news. The current position of all endeavors, the milestones achieved, and future goals.

• Tell them where they Fit in this full picture: Make them aware of their expections towards the community. Tell them about the communication protocols, community guidelines.

• Make sure the conversations are not unidirectional: Get to know their personal goals and understand how the community can help them.

• Recognition: Incentivize Participation. We will talk more on this on the gamification module.

• Make sure you offer transparent paths to leadership, with many ways to get there. Invite and seek different perspectives—a healthier approach for any association. Also make the POCs clear. Let them clearly know who the points of contacts are and how to reach out to them in case the need arises.

At the end increasing the sense of belonging is to look for ways you are similar with others instead of focusing on ways you are different, you just have to imbibe it into your core community values.

Simple answer, so that the different stakeholders of the business (customers, employees etc.) don't feel a disconnect to others and the companies they do business with.

When businesses invest in community management, they transition from a normal brand to a more human brand — one that takes care of the needs of the people who support them, work for them and interact with them.

Some obvious benefits to Businesses from Community Engagement:

• Enthusiastic members help acquire new members, resulting in lower customer acquisition costs and a tight viral loop.

• Members are less likely to abandon the community, resulting in increased retention and therefore improved lifetime value.

• Members support one another, resulting in high ROI from the community due to a lower cost of service.

Community efforts give way for very real network effects: as the engagement grows, the community gets smarter, faster to respond, more globally available, and generates more value.

Companies that leveraged community to their advantage.

• Salesforce

  • a cloud and CRM tools giant with a behemoth $140 billion valuation.

  • has also created a community of nearly 2 million members who support each other. The company’s annual “Dreamforce” conference, which attracts nearly 200,000 acolytes to

  • The company’s annual “Dreamforce” conference, which attracts nearly 200,000 acolytes to San Francisco each year, represents a mecca for its ecosystem to convene, build relationships, and advance its corporate agenda.

• Fitbit

  • has a community of more than 25 million members, who share and refine their exercise regimes

• • increased loyalty when their members felt like they’re creating a movement instead of just being a customer to the bike giant.

  • It has created more than 1,400 local chapters around the world for enthusiasts to get together in person and discuss their bikes.

• • Pinterest increased its odds of finding and maintaining product-market fit as it was constantly learning from its community members. This helped Pinterest adapt its product direction with its changing needs.

• Codecademy

  • Since the company was founded nine years ago, more than 50 million people have taken one of its courses.

  • Users of Codecademy Pro (the company’s paid offering) have access to a Slack group so they can meet, mingle and share best practices with others and gain access to events with industry professionals and peers.

Here is a list of common KPIs to be considered while dealing with communities.

1. Event KPIs (Both Digital and In-Person)

• No. of RSVP for events

• Percentage of new event attendees

• Percentage of return attendees

• Rate of churned attendees (% of people who only attended only one event)

• The average number of attendees per event over time

2. KPIs for Online communities:

Behind every community member is an actual person, and engagement comes only if the companies understand the needs of that person.

This is where community profiling plays a major role.

Persona Specific Metrics

• What industries is my community attracting?

• What position does the community member have within their company?

• Do I have content to meet the needs of each persona?

General KPIs

• Number of community members on Slack, Discord, etc.

• Percentage of monthly active members

• Number of new member sign-ups

• Number of posts added in the community by employee and non-employees

• Number of comments created in reaction to the community’s posts

• Percentage of comments from new community members by cohort

• Number of members leaving the community

Content KPIs

• What content has the most engagement (i.e. likes, up votes or comments)?

• What content has the lowest engagement?

• What content topic is the most popular?

• What content topic is the least popular?

• What content is lacking on the site that members are requesting?

• What content type is the most popular (i.e. video, Q&A, etc.)?

3. Open source communities:

• Number of pull requests by non-employees

• Number of non-employee contributors

• Percentage of code contributed by non-employees

4. Social communities:

• Number of followers

• Growth rate of followers month-over-month

• Number of retweets by month

• Number of @ mentions by month

• Average number of likes and comments per post

5. KPIs to track CX (Customer Experience)

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

• Customer Effort Score (CES)

• Number of community ambassadors.

Engagement

direction

Onboarding new members to your community is a critical process as it is their first interaction with your community.

The experience is very similar to going to a new place and meeting new people. Therefore it is necessary to have a proper onboarding process to remove the fear of socialization of new members.

The primary goal is to thwart off the fear of socialization and provide an engaging experience from Day 1, so as to make them come back as regular participants in the community.

You can achieve this by:

• Making people feel special with giveaways that would make them feel recognized. For example: hand written cards

• Do something personal and do not worry too much about the instantaneous ROI

• You could give every attendee a thank you note. Basically something non-attendees wouldn’t get.

• In short, create moments. At CMX, they started giving hugs when people used to enter their events.

Metrics to track to know the effectiveness of Onboarding Programs

• NPS

• CES

• Generate Heatmaps and Take screen recordings to verify whether the newcomers are moving in the intended direction of onboarding flow.

• Set up micro goals and gamify those goals, for eg. how many people are completely furnishing their profile data.

Set up 30, 60, and 90-day check-ins to understand if the members are on the right track and how much your onboarding process has influenced the same.

Also look at the below page to get more ideas about which metrics to track.

All the podcasts and resources that are covered will be updated here shortly.

An ROI model is necessary to calculate the monetary value of your community for your business.

There are several ways in which a community provides cost reduction for the business and thus demonstrates ROI.

• Measuring Decrease in Customer Support Tickets:

  • When you enable a self-serving community, then you have empowered the community members to get their queries answered within the community.

  • This results in monetary savings as it relieves pressure from your customer success team.

  • You can calculate the exact monetary value by finding out the cost per Support ticket and multiply it to the decrease in the number of support tickets to find the ROI.

• ROI from Share of Voice:

  • When you build an engaging community, your community members spearhead your brand presence, providing you cost reduction in terms of PR.

• Customer Effort Surveys:

  • In a QnA session with Adrian Speyer (Head of Community, Vanilla Forums) in the CMX Summit 2020, he told the benefits of Customer Effort Surveys.

  • You can run CES surveys, which are essentially pop-up surveys where you ask your users were they able to achieve what they wanted to achieve from their visit to your community support resources.

In this space, we will try to understand the psychology behind our craving for communities and collaboration as human beings how to leverage that to build dream communities.

This would help community professional to understand why people behave a certain way and how to hack those things in their favor.

In my opinion this is one of the most important spaces of this guide, as understanding the psychology behind the actions of your community members would enable you to forge stronger connections with them.

Managing your community

1. Having a promotion/ awareness plan

from launch to ongoing management always have promotion/awareness plan.

Use existing promotion channels in your company (newsletters, websites, emails etc.)

If an external / public community then take advantage of social media.

2 Have resources and guidelines to support your community

have a clear code of conduct

set a tone of conversations.

community moderation strategies

there should be 3 types of resources

1. core team resources (active day to day management and moderation of community)

2. Extended team resources (employees)

3. Community resources(MVPs, Volunteers etc)

These are some of the traits of exceptional community managers:

• Strong Interpersonal Skills: As the CMGR role is a customer-facing role, therefore they have to deal with real people. Empathy, Good Listening skills, Storytelling these are some of the crucial skills for crafting a good social bond with the community and promoting a good perception of the organisation.

• Understanding of Community & Business Needs: They craft the community strategies keeping in mind the needs of business and communities alike, so that all the stakeholders are in the same page.

• Good with Metrics: Often it is necessary to keep track whether your efforts are yielding the right results or not. Also the needs and the shortcomings in your community are not always evident during developing the strategic roadmap. Therefore great CMGRs make metrics their guiding star and achieve both community and business outcomes.

• Adaptable: Since community management as a domain is still relatively new, therefore the position is constantly evolving and so is the job description. Great CMGRs are great learners and they adapt to adjust to new expectations.

Now that we have theoretically covered how great community managers look like on paper.

Let us dive deeper and see some actual Community manager Job descriptions to know what skills businesses are looking for in a community manager, and how to learn and address those skills in this guide.

In this space we will crunch the dreaded metrics. This is one of the areas that still remains a pain point for majority of community professionals according to the CMX survey.

In this space we will discuss on what are the different types of metrics that exist, how to quantify that data and calculate the numerical equivalents of your community efforts.

As matthew broberg quotes

"Community is most visible when its out at a conference, or a member of a Community is tweeting great swag. Conferences and swag are expensive. Any responsible leader will eventually ask the question of “how much are we spending on this?” That number may be easy to find and it’s guaranteed to be significant. The next logical question is “what’s the ROI?” Calculations of return on investment are not nearly as straightforward."

In this chapter we will cover

If you are new to community building then start out with:

After that it is important to understand the business outcomes of the community:

If you are looking to know more about metrics then head over to:

Most Requested Pages

How to Measure Success?

For companies building a community initiative, the areas to be tracked should be:

1. Community Consumption and Creation.

• Track active participation and the value that members consume and produce.

• Measure sign-ups,

• Measure individual contributions (e.g. answering questions, running events, improving content), and other areas.

• Community Traffic

2. Delivery and Execution. (Internal Metric)

• Looking at the efficacy of your community strategy, estimating the work, and executing effectively.

• No. of hits at your internal community resources (Employee Resources) and removing bottlenecks in the process if any.

3. Community Management Experience of the Organisation

• Creating a proper reaction plan towards community metrics

• Having an online reputation management framework in place.

• Having Clear guidelines and resources for conflict resolution, moderation and tracking the number of hits to those resources.

Communities have arrived and if done well, and when the community values are intentionally woven into the fabric of the business, communities can offer a sustainable competitive advantage and drive brand awareness, value creation, and therefore bump overall commercial valuation while delivering a world-class, personal, gratifying community member experience.