Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

Although online Communities exist for many purposes; some are Brand owned for the intent of engaging their consumers others exist for people interested in a particular domain that want to share ideas and network. Whatever the purpose, it must be considered by the Community Manager or their intent to manage maybe misaligned (leading to a failure of the Community).

Community Manager's having understood why they are trying to develop a community need to find the bedrock of their Community. By bedrock, I mean what holds the interest of people coming to your site. Is it to look at some great photo's, read some interesting news or play some great games? Something within your site must provide a value that leads people to visit and return to your site.

For DMIC our Community, I would argue that the single most important element is our 'content'. Without good content what do we have? But what is good content for me, is not always good content for you. I understand that there needs to be an alignment for your Community members or you have the wrong members or wrong content. I found that the content in this Community that was more commented or read were articles that were more opinion based rather than industry news. I guess this opinions provided the Community and it's members with an angle on whats happening rather than just learning about a news story that could be found on the Adage or Media Interactive online mags.

When writing an opinion story I like to take a frank & honest view. This leaves people with no doubt on where I stand on an issue.  Make sure your ideas are authentic and not simply a repeat of what is being touted by others. 

The next most important element is 'bloody hard work'. Meaning that if you don't actively contribute, nurture and encourage then your Community wont last. Just think of it in terms of managing your own personal friendships (in the real world - not online). These all take a level of commitment and effort. So here is the basic's of what a Community Manager should do:

• Welcoming each member into the community
• Embracing the organic nature of the community - respond to comments as they happen
• The need to still take some control or leadership of the community - notes and updates
• Importance in keeping community members engaged - everyone likes the odd poke :)

But doing this alone, won't necessarily give you an active Community. It helps but what else? I can take some learnings from our Communities that I have been a part of and helped set up. They have used competitions (everyone loves a competition), polls, games and eCard generators. All different ways to provide members with a change to engage and create new content. 

Your Community environment must Evolve. Just as topics of conversation change, software changes, the industry changes (just look at where digital marketing was a few years ago) and people change, which all leads to needing to make changes to your online community. This is the strategic piece where you get to think about what the community should look like in one year or five years and make changes to the community to make sure that you achieve your goals for the community. 

I would say that DMIC has not done a good job in this respect. What started out as a Facebook like framework as not keep up with some of the newer UI's and as such has not really had many of our members participating. I found the mapping function was initially well used (to show where you are located) by the groups function and jobs had almost not active participation. The learning from this is that we should not simply look to cram as many 'cool' functions into a Community as you can hoping that members will use them but to make incremental evolutions that tap the 'hot buttons' of your members interests. This will be different for all Communities (remember to consider in the light of your Community purposes) but for DMIC I think a more simpler Community blog with polls and photo/video uploads may have been as effective rather than investing in functions that provided Facebook/Linkedin like elements.

I hope that other Community Managers can share their learning and for our members to give me your feedback on what you find valuable (or not) so we look to enrich the experiences when visiting DMIC.