What is Community Management?

Community management webinar series has started! We held the first program of the community management webinar series, which is organized as 5 programs, on Thursday, March 10, 2022. In the first program held with community management and strategy consultant İlker Akansel and Octo founder Özer Akıncı, we had a pleasant conversation on the basics of community management.

What is a community? What are the differences between audience and community?

While communities have been around for a long time, community management is still a new concept. We call a community a group of people who have a common denominator or feature, feel and own this community, and communicate with and support each other. In the audience, communication and interaction with other members of the group is generally not seen. For example, if we consider the fan base of a celebrity, there is a strong bond between the famous person and his fan, but if the fans do not have any communication with each other, we cannot talk about such a strong bond between the fans. The community differs from the audience in terms of communication among its members and the support of the members to each other.

While the communication within the community was done physically before, today, with the widespread use of the internet, communication is maintained in the online world.

What are community types?

There are 5 types of communities:

Interest communities: For example, sports, technology, programming language communities.

Action communities: NGOs, communities for social benefit and action.

Geographical communities: Country, provincial and district branches of NGOs or companies.

Profession communities: Doctor, engineer, lawyer societies.

Circumstance communities: Communities that provide support after problems, distress or natural disasters. For example, a group of people who have a certain disease or who have lost their jobs.

Not every community has to belong to only one of these community types, it can belong to several of these community types together.

What is community management?

Community management is an approach that transforms a community into an ecosystem, a mechanism that will create value for its members, and keeps the community on this path in this journey. The name given to the people who do this job is the community manager. A community manager is a person who manages the community using a certain methodology and communication tools and updates this methodology when necessary.

Community managers remove barriers to the community. It helps the community realize its purpose and establishes and maintains the structure that will enable the members to communicate with each other. Harley Davidson's customer community, Lego's insight community, and Apple's customer support community are good examples of community management.

Although community management is confused with social media management, these two concepts are very different from each other. The differences between these two concepts will be discussed in future programs.

How should the community strategy be set up?

First of all, it is necessary to start with the value produced by the community. Communities are established to produce a value, this value must be presented very simply and clearly. For example, the FeverBee community management strategy consists of four steps and starts with the value generated. Second, the goals come. You should set goals for what you want from community members and how you will achieve it. The third step is strategy. The strategy here is the emotions you will make the community members feel. It is very important to give community members a sense of the value of their work and what they really changed. Fourth, there are tactics. Tactics are used to implement the value, goals and strategies found in the first three steps. Most of the actions such as the website, social media posts and events are under tactics. For tactics, ambassador programs can be created, hackathons can be created, personas can be studied, and community stereotypes can be created. Community strategy should not be determined by a single person, but should be determined by a common idea with community members.

Community management strategies and tactics should be devised by experienced managers. Inexperienced people should be trained by an experienced community manager to gain experience.

The strategic approach in the communities should be reconstructed and, if necessary, deep studies should be made for these strategies. It is not the right approach to settle the strategy over time after the community is put into practice. For example, problems may be encountered in cases where the rules that people in the community must follow are not clear in the beginning.

You can watch the entire program via this link. Our webinar series is will continue with its second program on the subject of "Who is the community manager?" on April 14, 2022 at 21.00.

See you on April 14 👋🏻