Community Manager Breakfast January 2011 - Keeping your sanity while dealing with social media and community - Notes

Hosted by UserVoice

Attendees

Evan Hamilton

Jenna Langer

Jeremy Hicks

John Riley

Maria Ogneva

Moran Serr Hirsch

Riccardo Fabi

Poll

 * Who has checked email and/or Twitter first thing in the morning? Everyone


 * Who has had to skip a social event, time with their significant other, or sleep to deal with a crisis? Most everyone


 * Who has someone who handles community management when they are not available? Only one company

Three sanity-challenging issues emerged
1. Finding free time when you're on call all the time

2. Handling the emotion of dealing with angry people

3. Dealing with the disappointment of not getting engagement on something you've done a lot of work for

Horror stories:

 * Jenna got personal DMs from users on the weekend who wanted her response right away
 * Moran feels that even just having to read a tweet (even if you don't respond) during your free time takes you out of it

Solutions:

 * We probably have to be always monitoring and ready to respond if something goes horribly wrong, but we shouldn't screw ourselves over by setting the expectation that we will be available all the time. We don't owe an answer on the weekend
 * Evan: We've trained users to expect instant responses - let's train them to not expect that.
 * Maria: Put service hours on your Twitter and website
 * Evan: Explain to people why you didn't respond
 * John, Riccardo, Maria, Evan: Humanize - tell people "sorry, I'm out for a hike, I'll respond later. Check out this photo from my hike though, it's gorgeous!" or "sorry, we're actually only an 8-person company, which is why we're not around 24/7". Companies are too focused on seeming professional, when humanizing will make their jobs easier
 * Riccardo would LOVE to have AmEx tweet him to say "sorry, I'm on a hike"
 * Maria thinks the Twitter quick-response fad may self-correct; surely when email first became a trend they were overwhelmed with responses expecting a quick reply, but now people are used to a delay.

Horror stories:

 * Maria had someone commenting negatively everywhere she commented and eventually impersonating her
 * Riccardo had had catfights amongst users
 * Jenna had users telling her "don't make videos when you could be working on feature x
 * John has had to talk down a woman using vulgar language on a family site

Solution:

 * Everyone agrees that this is just something you have to learn to slough off
 * Maria: Don't take it personal. Bitch to your friends and your husband, have a beer.
 * Riccardo: Be waterproof. Put on the iron man armor and let things bounce off of you

Horror stories:

 * Evan: spending hours on a post and getting 10 pageviews and no comments
 * Riccardo: Nobody responds to a post I put my soul into, but when I ask what kind of chocolate they like, they go wild

Solutions:

 * John: Great posts require time to write, and people have ADD. Don't expect as much engagement on those posts.
 * Evan: Fight the above issue by being concise and/or breaking your posts into multiple posts. Nobody is going to accuse you of stretching out the content because they're not paying for it, and they may actually engage with it.
 * Riccardo: ask questions of your audience. Yes/No-ish questions seem to work best, because people don't have time for a long comment.