Advice for a New Community Manager

April 5, 2020June 10, 2021 | Lana

My winning submission from Khoros’ Community Manager Appreciation Day 2020 Contest.

Most community managers are on a team of one (as I am) so my advice focuses around that – especially when Community is new to one’s organization:

Don’t overwhelm yourself with tasks. Select up to 3 initiatives to focus on for that particular quarter or fiscal year. Is it growth? engagement? Your calendar and any task manager software are your friends!
Become familiar with your new organization and how it fits with your community. Go to your intranet, make a list of all of the departments and create bullet points on how they could contribute and benefit your community – tactically and strategically. This list will help you promote community internally and find allies that will help make your job easier.
Have an open-door policy to talk about Community. Find active community members (internal and external) and call them up to learn how they use community and what could be better. This information provides incredible insight into user behavior
Welcome new internal team members, introduce yourself and the Community’s value to their department. Newly hired folks need a buddy…so why not have it be you? Not only will you be their lifeline within the company, you can show them the value of Community. Similarly, newly hired folks want to be recognized and seen by their managers. Share how the Community would benefit their careers within your org (i.e. Give them something they can share on LinkedIn!)
Always think strategically. Connect with internal team members who are influential in making decisions and would encourage their department to participate more in the community. Take them to coffee or lunch to understand their current work struggles and leverage that information to demonstrate how your community will help make their jobs easier.
(Last but not least) Take that vacation…and enjoy it! Don’t feel guilty if you need to take a day off or a vacation. Come up with a process where you can casually check emails (or train a back-up) while you’re on vacation. You will be more influential and valuable when you’re refreshed and well-rested.

My First Podcast on Community Signal

March 24, 2018January 10, 2021 | Lana

I’ve always enjoyed listening to other people talk at conferences about community management and never thought that I’d be asked to actually be on a podcast…but then it happened!

Out of the blue, I received a Twitter DM from Patrick O’Keefe from Community Signal which is a bi-weekly podcast for community professionals.

I’ve heard of this podcast before and always thought that the guests were people who had done amazing things so I was definitely surprised when Patrick asked me to be a guest on his show. I was super excited about it, but also nervous because I didn’t think I had anything interesting to say.

To gauge whether or not he had a show, Patrick sent me a questionnaire and I answered it as detailed as I could because I wanted to be picked. He wrote back saying “We definitely have a show!” and we setup a time to chat.

Without giving away too much of my episode, we talked how I discovered Community Management and titled my show From Civil Engineer to Community Manager.

So without further ado, here’s my podcast episode. I hope you like it!

FAQs: Your Community's Best Friend

February 1, 2018January 10, 2021 | Lana

There’s nothing more annoying than fielding the same question…over and over again. When I was going through my Lithium training, the instructor said that the rule of thumb was that for every person who has a question, you can assume that 25 people have that same question.

That’s where FAQs in your Community help – especially with deflected tickets. When I was a Meetup forum moderator, I kept a cheat sheet of FAQs so that I could copy and paste the answer.

For the Zuora Community, nearly all of the questions are technical; customers usually search Google for their answer, which is why it’s crucial to have FAQs for error messages, security issues, “how tos” and so forth.

Customer Solutions Articles (CSAs)

Since we’re on Lithium, we have our support agents write what we call “Customer Solutions Articles” based on questions asked in their Zendesk tickets. They post the question as the original post, followed by the reply in the subsequent post. Then they mark the reply as an accepted solution. Right now, we don’t showcase our accepted solutions (I know, I know….I’ve logged that request with our IT team), but when we do, those will show up.

CSA Tracking

Each CSA is given a “Customer Solutions Article” label so that I can track the number of label views.

Quality Controlled CSAs

In our first year, we used to have a Q&A process, but that took forever to get something posted so the community would get, at most 5 CSAs posted a month, if the agents didn’t have many fires to put out. The number of views were around 1000 page views/month and the “Customer Solutions Article” label was consistently #1 – not bad for a brand new community!

The problem with this process was that there was a lot of back and forth – checking, editing, rechecking – such that the CSA queue was getting longer and longer and it wasn’t a priority.

Enter…the Kraken!

At the beginning of our 2nd year, the CSA queue got to ~60 pending articles waiting to be quality-checked. So we said “Screw it…let’s just get the articles out there for our customers!” There were some folks who were hesitant on letting incorrect information float around the Community, but my opinion was that it’ll create a great discussion; any engagement is good engagement to a Community Manager, right? 🙂

So, we released the Kraken…

Did all hell break loose? No! Our CSA views skyrocketed to around 4000 views/month!

One can easily assume that a percentage of those views resulted in a deflected ticket as many customers didn’t ask additional questions in the CSAs. We also had very few corrections.

Wait…it gets better!

Requiring CSAs Upon Ticket Closure Results in Metrics of Gold!

If agents posting CSAs at-will increased the article views 4x as much, we should require agents to write a CSA (if it makes sense) before they’re allowed to close a Zendesk ticket. Sounds evil, right?

We followed this process for a few months (no more than 2 quarters) and the Community was overflowing with CSAs. Imagine how many tickets an agent sees a week and translate those tickets into CSAs. It was awesome and the metrics supported it.

One month prior to this requirement, CSA labels were seeing an average of 4000 page views/month. The month after, CSAs skyrocketed to 7000 page views/month.

While these numbers are impressive, we found that agents were getting burnt out and a little sloppy writing their CSAs, so we went back to posting articles at-will. Still, our CSA metrics hang out around the upper 7000 page views/month.

FAQs are Your Best Friend

It takes time to build up a FAQ, but the payoff is well worth the effort. Our agents were reporting that customers were asking fewer lower-hanging fruit type of questions, which made their job more interesting and customers were getting their questions answered.

Start out with 10 FAQs and built it up from there. Remember that browsers will crawl your site when people Google their questions so keep SEO in mind.

Discovering Community Management

October 21, 2017June 11, 2021 | Lana

When I was an engineer, I started out participating in Meetup.com forums as an organizer asking a question about my group. I saw that someone wrote me back, which was so cool and that encouraged me to ask more questions until I eventually found myself answering other people’s questions too.

I suppose I was good at it because the Meetup folks asked me to become a volunteer moderator, which I LOVED doing! It was a blast and I did this in between engineering calculations, at home, on the weekends…it was just a blast. I didn’t think of this as a career option at the time, but it did stay in the back of my mind.

In 2012, I decided to leave engineering for good and ventured into becoming a freelance web designer. I fielded questions from clients and prospects a lot (much like a customer support agent) and also dabbled in social media for a few months at a web design company, which was a lot of fun, but while social media was hot, it really didn’t do it for me so I kept looking for my next career venture.

Eventually, I found a job for an internal community specialist position on CMXhub.com and got the job! My job was to send out internal communications and remind people to migrate their content by a certain deadline. I loved that job, but since it was only for 6 months, I knew I had to keep looking.

After sending out a bunch of resumes, I scored big by landing a job as a community manager at Zuora where I helped create, launch and manage the Zuora Community which is built on Lithium. I’ve been there since November 2015 and I don’t regret the career change!