Community Breakfast August 2012 - Community management at small vs large organizations

 Raise your hand if you prefer working for small companies. Everybody raised their hands.  Why? Trisha: Larger companies are inundated with Bureaucracy, going from small to big, you’ve lost your nimbleness. Christina: The messaging changes, smaller companies have more character. Lauren: In a larger company a lot of your energy is spent internally. Brittany: Getting a message out to the uers is a lot harder now that the community is scaling.</li> Kim: Since VaynerMedia has opened the SF office, they’ve grown a lot. It’s important to Gary Vaynerchuck to keep the culture in</li> Jonah: Smaller communities mean better connections and relationships.</li> Trisha: Having moved from the smaller company to HP, she’s found her one on one time with community members becomes harder to aquire. “How do you balance that?” Megan: For Megan, she’s looking for that balance, but currently, it means working 24 hours. She suggests spending a set amount of time getting that one on one. And the rest of the time on other things.</li> Bruna: At skillshare, Social Media tools took up much less of their time than they expected... in the community Management Team, one CM was responsible for just power users.</li></ul></li> Lauren: When people step away, and uninstall, asking why they’re uninstalling helps Sometimes users are rescued that way.</li></ul></li></ul></li></ul>  Does anybody have experience with Internal Culture/Community? Trisha: Managed an employee community for a year, and it was less a management tool, it was a solution to what the employees want. At HP, while employees still want it, the team developing the internal community was more entrenched in the old way, and was used to things moving slowly.</li> Anonymous: “One of the things I learned about building employee community, is it’s important to break down the barriers between departments.” At [BIG ENTERPRISE COMPANY], they wanted to build the community in the same structures that they already had, keeping the departmental structure.</li></ul></li></ul>  How do you get things done being just one person in a small company rather than having staff at a large company? <ul><li>Several People: Interns</li> <li>Lauren: What I do is a combination of Support and Community. Most activity is REACTIVE, as users complain, send support requests, and tweet about the product. “It’s difficult for me to be ahead of the curve, and do things on my time.” <ul><li>Bruna: Perhaps hiring part-time support work would help, or dedicating the morning to support, the afternoon to other things.</li></ul></li> <li>Lauren: Is there a method or tool for prioritizing certain cleints? <ul><li>Anonymous: At [BIG ENTERPRISE COMPANY], users who have paid more for support are flagged with a “$”</li> <li>Megan: Perhaps, for some of the LARGER clients, having some higher ups interface with them wouldn’t be inappropriate.</li></ul></li></ul></li></ul> <ul><li> Who has had challenges/successes in hiring more staff and building up a team? <ul><li>James: “Yeah, we just hired Melissa” At Causes, they’re diligent about making sure everything gets covered, but as each new person comes onto the team, roles shift to accommodate.</li> <li>Lita: New Hires walk in with a fresh set of eyes. They provide a perspective that nobody else already at the company is going to have.</li></ul></li></ul>