#H2HChat: How to Build an Epic Online Community, Social Strategists Rachel Miller & Ryan Catherwood

Hey guys, welcome to H2H Chat. I'm Suzie McCarthy and I have some awesome guests joining me today. I have Rachel and Bryan. Uh, my— how's it going, guys?

Hello.

Good. Hey. Um, my co-host, uh, Bryan is currently winging his way from, uh, Minnesota to Boston where he's going to be speaking at Inbound, then I think he has something at Harvard. Who knows? It's it's Brian, right? He's like hither, thither, and yon. So I'm flying solo today. Welcome! You get the the redhead for the full the full amount of time. So before I introduce my guests, I want to make sure to remind you all to tweet in any questions you have for my panel using hashtag H2H. Go ahead and tweet them at me at. So as you know, the second half of the chat comes directly from those questions and I have a great panel of experts here today and I'm super excited for them to share their knowledge and they're super excited to answer your questions. So Rachel and Ryan, why don't we go ahead and take a few minutes To let you guys introduce yourself. Rachel, you want to go first?

Sure. Hey everybody, I'm Rachel Miller, super excited to be here. I'm a social business strategist. I co-host Social Business Hour, #SBSHour, every Monday at 1 PM with the amazing Bryan Fanzo. And I've been really blessed over the last 10 years to work with great brands and individuals to help build their online communities, primarily in the B2B space. So I'm Could not be more pleased to be here today and to be chatting with all of you.

Awesome. Thrilled you could make it. Alright, Ryan.

Yeah, hey everybody, my name is Ryan Catherwood and I am the Assistant Vice President of Alumni and Career Services at Longwood University. We just merged the 2 units together and really the job here at Longwood is to get alumni and students connected together in order to build an online-offline community. Prior to my role here at Longwood, where I've been for 2 months, I was Director of Digital Engagement for the Advancement Team at the University of Virginia, and prior to that at Washington and Lee University doing similar work. So I've been in the higher ed digital engagement space for quite some time.

I'm so excited to have you here. And Ryan— so everyone, a little bit of background here— Ryan was actually my supervisor supervisor early on in one of my first roles as a social strategist. I was a student at UVA, and I worked with him for about a semester, kind of your very first semester, I think, Bryan. Yeah. So when we were doing something on community, I was like, I know the guy I've got to get on. So I'm very excited to bring this into our conversation. So let's get rolling. First thing I want to talk about, I think it's always so important to, you know, get our definitions straight, right, right at the beginning. So your guys' experience, what defines or characterizes or denotes an online community? Ryan, you want to go first?

Yeah, and I think that thinking about the topic in broad terms, I liken it to the idea of a residential community where shared connection between community and its members is about keeping the community safe and open, inclusive and prosperous. And really the goal is to try to foster the growth of personal and professional success stories connected to the community and specific brand values. And I think, you know, there's, there's some differences between an online and offline community, but I think largely it's about connecting, providing a space for community members to develops a sense of activism within the community that begins with an idea for improving the community and allows for members to have the opportunity to express their opinions and effect change.

I like that. I like that a lot. Rachel, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, like Bryan, I like to keep my definition fairly broad. To me, an online community is kind of a place where people with similar interests and goals kind of come together. The beauty of it being online, especially these days, is you're not restricted by location or even time. You can tune into the conversation when it's convenient for you and keep it going. I think that's one of my most favorite things is that you don't have to be at a specific place at a specific time. You kind of just jump in when you can and find people just like you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. So what— tell me the difference between kind of an offline and an online community as you guys see it.

Well, I think that one of the— obviously the biggest differences is, and it's an area that we just— Rachel just mentioned is beginning to be blurred, is the requirement of space and time in order to participate. I think obviously it still requires, you know, the offline community requires face-to-face interactions and the formulation of perhaps more substantial interpersonal relationships between people and participants. And I think that that line is beginning to blur as well as more people are using social media to develop relationships. And of course there's lots of people who we've interacted with on social media that we've never met in person and that we feel like we have a strong bond with. But certainly place and time, and I think the ability to establish strong interpersonal relationships is one that defines the offline community.

Yeah, I would agree. I don't even think you can have a great offline community these days without an online component. I think really to keep it strong and make sure everyone's connected, you do need that interaction online. Not to say that in-person time is not super critical, maybe even more critical because we do spend so much time online, but you'd be hard-pressed to coordinate a large group of people without any sort of help from an online element these days.

That's so interesting. So I just moved into, a few months back, my husband and I moved into this great, great, great neighborhood community. But we use the social network, I think it's called Neighborhoods. I don't know if you guys have heard of it. And it's great. It's like a closed group. And I have, I've definitely found that Even though I'm kind of viewing the community from the outside, right, when I'm walking around and stuff, when I'm plugged into that online community, I'm getting that added benefit. Ryan, I want to ask you though, in your work with academia, obviously you're working with a lot of people who aren't necessarily online, right? So you still have an active offline community. How are you dealing with that?

Well, I think that Rachel sort of alluded to some of the challenges, but in higher ed, I mean, the business of alumni engagement, stakeholder engagement, has really been event-based, in-person event-based since the creation of this particular aspect of our work. Reunions, nostalgia-oriented initiatives, class committees, those sorts of things that allowed groups to come together and sort of building small group committees. But I think that the challenge has been message spreading, right, how to create an opportunity for more people to see the results of these meetings, these groups, committee meetings. And so therefore the Facebook, the social sharing has allowed more people interested to participate from further away. But, you know, for instance, at the University of Virginia, the bread and butter of all the work we did is in-person events. I was on a team that did 1,300 events a year, around the world, and really the digital component of it was the marketing, trying to drive registrations to those in-person events. And some of the things we created just before we left began to think about digital engagement as a separate opportunity, a separate community, but largely it was an opportunity to drive traffic to our event-based initiatives.

That's really interesting. So Rachel, your experience has been a bit different. Would you hear about this though and think that maybe that's where things were a few years back? Or is this potentially a case of just dealing with a different type of community?

I think it is. I think anything to do with education and academia is— and also because you're your mutual goal is different. I think you're— correct me if I'm wrong— but your goal is to generate donations for the greater good of the school and institution, which is a little bit different than if you're creating a community around a SaaS product or a nonprofit, like a charitable organization. I really think it depends on your ultimate goal, and that kind of shapes how you build your community and then how you activate those members when you need them to actually do something on your behalf.

Yeah, well, I think that there's a lot of trying to figure out precisely how to measure digital engagement. I mean, it's something that's a big topic within higher education, and certainly fundraising is both a short and a long-term strategy of all engagement work, but also being able to put into our central fundraising database or database of records when someone has shared something on social media or when they've submitted an article for publication, or when they've participated in an Instagram contest, to be able to treat some of those, you know, some of those— some of the ways that we were tracking engagement individually through attendance at events, begin to think of similar constructs to be developed in the digital space as well.

Interesting. So would you say that kind of keeping with this Bryan, one thing I wanted to touch on is we are seeing all these tools develop. I just mentioned Neighborhoods, which is designed to mirror the offline community. How important, as we see some networks rise and some networks succeed, some networks fail, would you say that there's— how important it is to pay attention to that offline community and mirror that? Is that what you're seeing?

Yeah, I think that's right. I think one of the things that we really tried to do is develop the constructs of an alumni network digitally, as opposed to, say, an alumni network event, a happy hour, or some person, some event where you're meeting people in small groups face-to-face in a room. So for instance, what does that mean? Well, you might— we developed something at the University of Virginia called Whose Network, and the idea was to mirror the constructs of an in-person networking event by asking alumni to share advice about the work world, graduate school, work-life balance, fitness, wellness, anything that you can think of. And so you imagine yourself in a room talking to people. You're not necessarily going to be just talking about the university. You may touch on some of those things as an opening part of your conversation, but really where the value is in the alumni network is sharing advice about how to succeed personally and professionally. And so to mirror those goals, the idea of why you would want to put people in the same room with a sort of construct online.

I like that. I like that. So Rachel though, let's talk about the difference, because you do— the majority of what you've done has been to build communities from scratch. How do you go about doing that? How is that different?

Well, before I go there, there was a cute tweet from Warren Whitlock, and he was saying, are we still talking about Online, put it in quotations if it wasn't part of real life. I think it's actually kind of to echo what Ryan was saying, you know, you're trying to mimic real life engagement like going on a pub crawl or whatever alumni would do together naturally in an online environment. And yeah, today they're blurred. You kind of can do those things, especially with Hangouts just like we're doing now, the new Blab tool. So it's much easier to create those Real-life environments that we're all craving for online communities. Thank you, Warren, because it is one and the same these days for sure, at least in my opinion.

I love Warren. I saw that. I'm glad that you mentioned that. I think it is— actually, let's just pause. Would you agree with that, Ryan, especially seeing your difference there?

Actually, I was actually looking at the question that Dawn just submitted through Twitter. Could you tell me Could you repeat what you were asking me? Dawn had a great question and it got me thinking.

Yeah, so Warren said, are we actually still separating online and offline as something different?

Well, I mean, I think that sort of administratively and structurally we were, right? There was a team of people that were specifically deployed to put on live in-person events that really didn't have a digital component to it, and my role was really to think about mimicking those constructs on the web with sort of a completely different program with different staff. And so the line, I think, is starting to get blurred in higher ed, but I think very much it's— there's still perhaps in a way that other, you know, in the private sector, it's blurring faster. Yeah. Perhaps in higher ed, I think there's still the whole— all of our structures have been put in place around the idea of in-person events. And so I think that developing digital constructs to mirror it is very much a work in progress across the industry.

So I, yeah, and I think this is one reason I wanted to have both of you on, because I think that we are in different, different places. I think I would say kind of looking at, looking at the field, I think we're moving towards this blurring, right, more and more. But I think it's always so important to recognize that different communities are in different spaces. So let's talk about building an online community. When do you decide to build it from scratch versus tapping into an existing one? Rachel, why don't we start with you since you've done a lot of that?

Sure. I think most of my experience actually has been in building from scratch, which being kind of in I've worked with a lot of startups the last few years, and startups get to be very fluid and scrappy, so they're eager to try new things. But one fundamental, my first step always hands down is you listen, and you listen for a long time. I'm also a huge advocate for personas, and not just your customer persona, but you need to know what your advocate persona looks like, what your influencer persona looks like. They're all different, but they all kind of play together in a nice little group. So, you know, do your homework, work out who do you really want to target, and then find out what people are talking about online, because you might find out that who you think is your target persona is not actually talking about the things that you want to talk about with your community. So listen first, and tools have evolved so rapidly the last few years. You can do a lot of fun long-tail searches, hashtags obviously, and just once you find those conversations, listen, engage. Find out, you know, who's the important people having these conversations, make friends with those guys. But for me, it always starts with listening first and then finding like-minded people, and you naturally create a community. And then you use those people then to, you know, put your feelers out and amplify. And, you know, it's not an easy button. It's not like tomorrow you have a community, but it will happen at a nice organic pace.

So, so what do you do, for example, If a client wants to create a community and maybe there's just smatterings of conversation, you're trying to figure that out. Would you push back and say this isn't necessarily there, or is there a way to try and seed a community to begin with? Or would you potentially advise the client?

I would actually reach out to those people that they think are having the conversations and probably get them on the phone, like go all old school and ask them, who are you talking Do you feel like you're a part of a community? Just seeing what the people actually in it have to say. And if the answer is yes, then you go back to the client and say, yeah, you've got the makings of a community already. Let's build on it. But if the answer is no, and the conversations aren't resonating with those people they've already identified, then you kind of— I would suggest starting from scratch and kind of taking— going back a few steps and listening more.

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. It has to be there a little bit. Ryan, you've talked about this a little bit, but maybe kind of elaborate a little bit.

Yeah, well, I was just thinking, you know, so imagine you know for a fact that there are graduates of Longwood or University of Virginia living in Richmond, Virginia, and what you're trying to figure out is how to tap into it, how to grow that community So you know it exists, but what you're trying to facilitate is sort of an awareness of the opportunity to create a space where people can be heard, right, for goals, for building that network to be established, for degrees of engagement opportunities to be organized, for volunteer roles to be created in order to foster the growth of the community, the network. And so I think that you definitely can't do it without sort of developing people who are champions, right, people who are going to help seed conversations on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter, people who are digital ambassadors of some sort in terms of getting the network visible in front of the people who may love the university or whatever brand we're talking about, but may simply not realize there's an opportunity to create connections through that entity.

How do you go about identifying those people?

I think that one of the things that we've done is, hey, we've got great clues here in higher ed, right? So we have graduates who have majored in communications, journalism, marketing. We have people who are participating on volunteer boards. We have people who are entrepreneurs and who have developed strong digital brands themselves. So you've got— that's where you look first. You look for people who are digitally savvy, who are interested in developing or understand how the web works as far as personal branding, who aren't scared of participating in Hangouts like this one, and do your best you can. There's definitely low-hanging fruit, you know, people to reach out to first. And, you know, it starts as easy as going to the university page on LinkedIn and typing in social media amongst your alumni population, and you get hundreds of people who have that in their profile. So that's, you know, there's definitely places to start.

Research. Research is huge. And I think, Rachel, as a fellow data geek, you would, you'd say that as well.

Most definitely. I think you're like me. We actually live in the spider webs, those little tendrils. You find one, and then it's, who are they talking to? And then who are those people talking to? Yeah, it's data geek for sure. And tools. I'm in love with all the tools that are available right now.

Oh yeah. I think we could have, and we should have, an entire conversation based on all that, share our war stories. Let's jump into some of your case studies. Tell me about the biggest challenges that you faced when you worked on creating a community. Ideally, maybe something that surprised you. You thought it was going to go a certain way, didn't end up going that way. Rachel, you're on the hot seat.

I think scaling. I think I've been lucky that my communities actually have scaled quickly, which looks on paper like it would be an amazing thing, but there are a lot of challenges that come with scaling and scaling quickly. And a lot of it is resources. When you're not able to respond to people fast enough, they get angry. Right. Or if you're not able to maintain your message consistently enough, like if you're swapping between, you know, 2 or 3 different people, the tone's not the same, or how one person solved one problem, the same problem arose but they solved it differently. And a lot of that's just startup woes. But again, like any community, if you don't think of those things first and you scale fast, you fail publicly. Yeah. So that's been a challenge for me, is just kind of making sure everything grows nicely, but also keeping it smooth and a really amazing experience for everybody involved.

Oh yeah. Yeah. No, that's awesome. Ryan, what about you?

I definitely have encountered a number of different challenges as we've tried to build digital or online communities or a digital network in general. I think one of those is that the people that I looked towards, which I talked about them in my last answer, the people who are sort of digitally savvy, have their own digital brand, who want to be known on the web, often are a lot pickier as far as whether or not they align themselves with their alma mater. Just because you attend a university you're proud of doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to help share fundraising messages on behalf of the university. Mm-hmm. a message that doesn't align specifically to what your interests are on the web or how you'd like to be known. So I feel like one of the areas I learned is that some of those people that have strong digital presences weren't in fact— you might call them influencers, weren't actually the people who were made the best community leaders. They were people who were interested in fostering personal and professional success within the network, by using their social media prowess but didn't necessarily— weren't trying to develop a digital brand for themselves per se. I thought that that was important. And I also learned that from the standpoint of like micro-volunteering, getting stakeholders to share content, provide content, seed conversations, that actually even if they said that they would participate under certain parameters, they often needed to be incentivized programs to get people to do it. Yeah. In a way that I felt like we learned that wasn't the case in terms of offline communities, right? I feel like it helps to have, you know, first 5 people to retweet this particular message get a t-shirt from your alma mater. That sort of thing seemed to help in ways that We didn't really have to struggle to find people to help put on events.

Do you think it had any type of difference with demographic, or would you pin it more to the actual mode of conversation?

I felt that maybe it was a problem of a broad strategy that, for instance, we were sharing advice about almost anything. So an article might be shared about something, you know, 5 fitness tips that you didn't know, or alongside an article that's 5 reasons to get into advertising for your career. And so the people had perhaps too much option as far as what content to share and how to participate. And maybe it was difficult to select the best ways to participate, almost too many options.

Hmm.

It was something that we were still learning a lot from, still continue to learn a lot about.

Interesting. That's totally interesting. I really, I mean, I'm like already, my brain is going, okay, different data. How do we analyze the metrics of all these different things? So one thing I wanted to, one question I wanted to kind of build off of all of this. How did you choose, in your experience, how do you choose what networks to use as you build communities? We have so many different options out there, constantly emerging as well. Rachel, social media?

Again, it comes back to listening. You want to start where people are at least kind of thinking about what your areas of interest are. You go to the top 4, whether it's Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+. Maybe not Google+ in the near term. I would always crawl the major networks first and see what's going on. Now we're so fortunate that there's Instagram and Periscope, Meerkat. It's more challenging, but at the same time you can create these really hyper-focused communication channels for your community. Maybe it's a ghost town on Twitter for you, but Facebook is super active. Right. I think it's acknowledging that. Don't force people to go just because it's where you're happiest or it's most convenient for you. You really need to kind of go where the party is already at and join it, basically. So if they are on Twitter, go to Twitter. If they are not, it's easy to identify these days.

Yeah, absolutely. So Ryan, I want to pose the same question to you, kind of with the added aspect that I would imagine there is some training that could go into it, getting people involved in digital, maybe they want to be in your type of situation. How does that work?

Well, I mean, I think, you know, a number of different challenges there. You're right, I mean, as far as platforms, I think is one of the biggest problems. I think that also the different departments that are managing those platforms is also a big department. For example, the primary university social media accounts are often almost always managed by your central communications unit, which primary role is to engage students, to be crisis control, to share news, to report on athletics. And it's not really about developing a two-way conversation with people. It's more of a loudspeaker that's about earned media placement. It's about, you know, helping to share some of the more traditional journalism aspects of from the office, whereas what's popping up are alumni associations and university advancement offices, different units around the university trying to develop their own community with audiences that are starting off with such a smaller following right off the bat than that central platform. So I think one problem universities have is sort of an alignment of departmental goals that don't sync up with each other. As far as what the outcomes are supposed to be from the digital standpoint.

So yeah, I could actually see this playing into a legacy corporation. So there are plenty of brands that have tons of different handles, and potentially on some they are very active, on others they are not, and you are trying to get alignment. How are some of the ways that you tackle that? Bryan.

Well, I mean, I think that you've got to find a different angle, right, a different reason to engage with that community and a different content strategy. And that was really what we did at Washington and Lee at UVA, and what we're working on here is we're trying to develop constructs, a community that's focused around lifelong learning that includes academic enrichment but is also about professional development and about alumni network advice. Whereas, you know, we might put on a panel discussion like this one involving alumni on a particular topic. That's not something university communications is likely to be organizing, right? They're likely to be featuring faculty, they're likely to be featuring students, but not necessarily alumni. And so I think that it's finding a new angle for a strategy and providing value. And I think it's all about asking— you have to crowdsource that from a value standpoint. For instance, I asked— I used the LinkedIn announcement tool to ask the University of Virginia alumni group if they'd be willing to write a short editorial with advice about the work world, graduate school, work-life balance, those sorts of things. I got 100 yes responses immediately as far as people willing to write not insubstantial content. Wow. 60 of those came through, right? So all of a sudden there ends up being a formula for crowdsourcing content with, you know, sort of developing a framework for it that's different, I think, is the biggest problem.

I'm like drooling, Rachel. I'm sure you are as well. Like 60 out of 100, that, you know, as far as return, and then 100 responses in general is just fantastic. So I guess another thing I would just say kind of as well, Ryan, I just want to— I'm picking on you a bit more. So in this case, If we're talking, we have a lot of entrepreneurs on this chat, a lot of people involved in different endeavors. How important is it in this case to have someone like— let's see, how do I word this? Often, let me pull back. Often a community manager, when you have the term community manager, you're thinking kind of at the very bottom, someone who's just putting out tweets, all these different things. But from what you're talking about, it sounds like it's very important to have someone in that position. able to provide direct feedback on an equal playing field with some of these kind of managerial leadership. Is that important moving forward? Am I missing something here? What do you think?

Well, I mean, I think that I understand what you're asking. I do think it's important that you have someone that is specifically employed to be developing relationships with people, with alumni, with people in general, interviewing them. One of the things I do all the time is I will ask— I'll email an alum I haven't met before with a few questions. What's it like to live where you live? What's it like to work where you work? What's it like to— find a little bit more about them. What was it like to go to graduate school where you went to school? Not only are you making connections, you're creating quick and easy content, and those people are likely to share it. I think that there's a lot of people that are interested. Oh, and by the way, in the bio of your question, it's the name of your business and a link to your website. It's your Twitter handle, it's, you know, you make a cross-marketing opportunity that is something beneficial for the alum in our case, or a stakeholder in general in order to participate.

Rachel, any thoughts? And we're going to turn to community questions. I know you've worked as a contractor a lot, and I imagine it's hard to get the ear at some point.

Yeah, I think For me, I mean, the role of community manager is really incredibly important for business success these days. And the team at MyMCRHangout.com have done a fantastic job of really differentiating between, you know, what is social media management and what is community management, because they're very distinct roles. Obviously one is dealing with outbound, the other is inbound. And community manager, your primary goal and role should be to solicit conversation. You're out there answering the unasked questions. You're out there, you know, and that's where your cool content comes from that you're going to attract even more community members. It's not just to push out tweets and send those generic thank-yous. It's to really dive deeper and solve those problems that people don't even know they have, or create opportunities that they didn't even know they wished existed. Right. And that's kind of, you know, for the— put it into an education kind of mindset, like, yeah, you want to give them a reason to be curious. Get them, you know, why should they be involved? And to me, that's why community management is so important, because you're really out there creating the buzz on a daily basis.

Right, right. And that's something that, you know, one reason I bring this up is this is something we've discussed a lot on H2H Chat with past guests, is the evolving roles that we're seeing. So a few weeks ago, it was CIO, CTO, CMO, you know, and all that. You know, it's important to think about this as well. So with that said, we are going to move on to the tough part— the questions from our community. And I have so many here. I think we're going to try and do a rapid-fire Q&A here. So we have a lot of great questions. I'm seeing a big trend here about— we have a difference. We have some tools questions. which I'll do kind of towards the end. But then we also— what I want to begin with is really how to manage a community, right? So we've talked about building it. Let's talk about managing. So first off, JS Gilbert, who is probably our most constant H2H chatter, so always got to— he's our superfan, as you'd say, advocate, right, with our community. So he says, how do you police your community? with when you're dealing with trolls, potentially competitors, right, who are jumping in. He says nuts, etc. So Rachel, what's been— what are your kind of— let's think about this from like a top tips perspective, right, your secret sauce.

Well, trolls is an interesting one. Ideally, if your community is, you know, as active as you hope it is, the trolls should be squashed by the community and not necessarily by the individual or brand who's running it. And again, if it's anything racial or politically sensitive, there are obvious reasons to be blocked or encouraged to not participate anymore. But yeah, I would really hope that the community steps up and speaks on your behalf to deal with trolls. And turn those trolls into advocates. It can be done. Ask them why are they so mean, or why are they so fired up about a particular comment. It's an educational opportunity. So instead of just being quick to block and ban, I would really get to the root of, you know, why are they causing such a fuss. And there are, you know, there are bots out there that cause fusses just for the sake of it. But, you know, if you look through and see it's an actual person, you know, I would take the 5 minutes and work out, like, can I actually help this person, or are they just being loud for the sake of being loud?

So Ryan, specifically, I'd love to hear your thoughts in terms of being in a heightened PR situation.

Well, I think that, you know, I would echo what Rachel said about hoping your community members in a robust community that's a positive experience are coming to the rescue when there are negative comments. And I think that also, you know, alumni are so passionate about their university, and often the way that it comes out isn't, isn't, you know, how they really feel. It's about the university at large, and those are people who should be reached out to individually in order to, in order to see if you can turn the tide for them and have them become an advocate as opposed to someone who's trying to be noticed for negativity.

Awesome, awesome. So let's move along, and actually this relates right to it. Tim Moran poses the question, how do you deal with the challenge of keeping community sentiment

Well, I think the key word there is sentiment, and not many communities track that. So I think it's making sure you have a tool in place that actually monitors that on your behalf. If you're doing it manually, it's incredibly difficult once your community reaches any sort of size. So I would definitely invest in a tool that can help monitor that. And again, you can use hashtags and keyword searches to make sure, you know, if they're using Sad words often in posts, you can kind of get clued in. But you should be tracking it. I think that's the first step. Make sure you can't just feel really good about it. You actually need to have some process in place to know exactly what's going on.

If you notice— pushing back slightly, and I completely agree, tools, awesome. You've got to find the right one. But what if you notice them going negative? What do you do? What's your go-to?

I'm really quick to just get people on a call, because usually there's a ringleader or there's someone who's kind of spurring those types of conversations. And it could be something as simple as they don't like the upcoming event, or they're being asked to do stuff too many times, depending on the scenario. So it's kind of quizzing a few key people and remembering that community is all about conversation. It's a two-way conversation. If you're not listening to what they're saying, then that's the cause of the negative sentiment. But I would just ask, whether you privately DM them or get them on the phone. I think it's worth the time to actually get right to the heart of the problem, and don't just ignore it because then it will blow up and you'll have a PR disaster.

Right, absolutely. Ryan, what are your thoughts?

Well, I think there's a great opportunity to try to turn something negative into a positive by taking, you know, let's say you have an alum who chimes in, I got no value from my experience in this way or that way, and you reach out to that person and find out that really what just happened is that they've lost their job for one reason or another. Yep. And what we can do with this person is not only try to connect them with the alumni network, people who can help that person move forward, but see if you can get that person to tell the story about their job loss and what they're coping with, and then with that content, with that person, you know, try to provide value to the community with their story. And I think it's about creating, in that case, a future success story, right? Someone saw that interview, someone read that content about job loss, and ultimately someone was changed in a good way. So I think there's a great opportunity to do that. to flip if you dig down a little bit deeper. And, you know, I think that a lot of positives come out of negatives. You know, they're all learning experiences.

Right, right. I absolutely love that. I'm seriously, like, mentally taking notes on this. So I have kind of 2 questions that I want to go ahead and tie together. One is from Jeremy Murphy. So he says, how can online communities handle issues like clarity, unity, cohesion, and moderation to preserve a strong bond. I want to tie this into kind of the first step from Brett Cornell who says, how do you get a community talking and interacting? So I want to look at this as when you're looking at a community, how do you, how do you make it work? Maybe we can think about that, right? Cohesion, moderation, you know, all these things. How do you make it work?

Well, I think the easiest way to get people talking and interacting is you introduce them. The cocktail analogy, cocktail party analogy works really well for online relationships. If you highlight people's similarities and give them a reason to talk, they will. Then people reciprocate, and they'll see another opportunity, they'll do that again. That's kind of the goal in the communities that I build. You want them to eventually be self-sustaining. You want to create something that's bigger than the brand, bigger than the individual, bigger than you the moderator. You want it to kind of just happily hum along whether you're there day in, day out. So people setting the right example, like introduce people, give kudos to people who, you know, whether it's they got a new job in the alumni association or, you know, create reasons to give people shoutouts and opportunities for people to say, hey, thank you, or then like, hey, let's meet for coffee, whatever it happens to be. You kind of create those opportunities for people to talk, and then eventually you see them just start happening on their own.

Bryan, what are your thoughts?

Well, one of the things that I really work towards is whether it's an online conversation or an in-person coffee date, what I really try to do is connect people in such a way that fosters an informational interview of some sort. You know, whether it's about involvement in a different community or about job hunting or about career-specific initiatives. I think that the intersection of all this is trying to get people to a place where they're interacting personally underneath the flag of the brand, right, the university. Right. But for the purpose of helping each other out. And those stories, when you can tell them when alumnus A helped student B towards an internship, or all of those things, you know, keep things positive. And so I always try to think about constantly trying to facilitate informational interviews between people.

I love it. So you're— if I can paraphrase, we're talking about creating value with the community, right? There's a reason. Yeah, and I feel like that's always so important, is there's a reason to spend your time in the community to write that post. So this goes into a great question from Aldo and I have to read his phrasing. He says, do we dare bring up ROI of online communities? I think organizations see them as interesting but are hesitant with resources. I feel like this is such a dead-on question. So how do we sell online communities, especially as, you know, we all know they take a while. You can't just go and say boom, magic sauce, right? Rachel, let's start with you.

Well, I think people create online communities with different goals, and I think it's really important to know what your ultimate goal is before you create your community, because if your community is designed to be an educational resource You can't flip it 2 years later and say, now you're lead gen and you need to buy something. That's not cool. Right. But if your goal initially is to, hey, we want to create a place where potential customers are going to come and hang out and have conversations, we can eventually shift them into our product— completely different strategy. So I think it's important to know what it is, because yes, everything is trackable these days. You may not see ROI tomorrow, but you'll definitely see it within, you know, 6 to 9 months. So it's important to know What your goal is. And yeah, there's definitely ROI, but it might not be monetary. You really have to know what your goal is. Right. Because whether it's you want people to produce content because it's an educational resource, yes. How many blog posts do you want created a month? There's your ROI. If you are truly selling something in a SaaS environment, you know, how many subscriptions, how many trials do you need people to sign up for? All of it can be tracked, but you just need to know from the get-go What is the goal of your community? And then you proceed.

So you have to have clear upfront goals that you say, if you're signing up on this, this is where it's going to go. Love it. Bryan, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, well, I think that, you know, if you're thinking from a philosophical standpoint, and not everyone in higher ed thinks this, that the goal of alumni engagement, the reason we're doing what we're doing, is both to fundraise over the short term, right, and to develop donors over the long term. So if you buy into that, then you must measure ROI in a couple different ways. One might be to use your central fundraising database and begin to add to it people who have contributed content, and that's easy enough to do by adding various attributes to their, to their to their record in the profile. But then you're able to pull out over time whether or not the digital interactions led to someone attending an event for the first time. Right. Or led to someone giving a gift for the first time. And we were able to begin to determine some of the correlation between engagement and giving over time. It was particularly strong amongst the young alumni demographic. But then I also think that beyond that, there's another ROI that you could begin to create, and that is by thinking about content marketing and cross-promoting various other initiatives in the sidebar inside the content, just like you would a for-profit. So if an alum shares an article about 5 reasons to get into— to be a pilot, you know, then, you know, and that alum is a graduate of the School of Engineering, then you've You add your fundraising ads for the School of Engineering in the sidebar. And so you can begin to then associate content and who wrote it and then drive, you know, look at click-through rates on those ads and things like that.

Wow, wow, I love it. So we're talking about— so what I'm hearing here, right, is we're talking about a very established formalized process. So if you're going to do online community, you need to invest. an online community. Would you say this, it needs to be a total commitment?

Absolutely needs to be a total commitment. I think that you've got to have someone that's deployed doing live digital events, right? One of the first things I did when I arrived at Longwood was to specifically orient one of my team members to— and her title is Assistant Director of Live Digital Events. Nice. It's a good title, it is a little on the long side. But yeah, but it's specifically to think about the web as a medium for engagement and community building, and with specific focus on it.

What do you think, Rachel?

Yeah, I think people go wrong initially because they don't allocate enough time. It's not necessarily money. I mean, obviously you're paying an employee to dedicate most of their time to building your community, but it's really just Yeah, time, energy, a lot of heart. You need to really jump in the deep end if you're going to make it successful. You can't phone it in because people will know, and if you don't care, why should they care? And I think that's at the end of the day, you know, you have to give them a reason to pay attention and want to engage, and you set that tone. So you definitely have to allocate the time.

Yeah, and I think right there you hit the nail on the head. You have to really be invested and you have to have that sense. This ties into kind of— once again, I'm going to tie 2 questions together. My goal this time is to get through all of them and oh man, we have tons. I want to tie in Don's question, Ryan, that you mentioned early on, which I think is excellent, with then a question from Joey Lopez. He's a great community manager here at PeerMatter. Hi, Joey. So Dawn's question is specific. She's asking, how are you tracking digital behaviors? Joey says, for those starting off, what are some tools that help with listening to community conversations? So what I want to turn this into is basically tell me what your go-to tools are, database, where you start, where you begin. Walk me through kind of your secret mixes that you guys as community manager experts— I'm going to call you both that— have kind of amassed and learned over the years. Bryan, let's start.

Okay, well, I think the first challenge is from a platform standpoint is it has to connect with the ultimate goal, right? If the ultimate goal is, is dollars from donors, then you're going to be using some of the more traditional higher ed specific fundraising tools like Raiser's Edge by Blackbaud, or AdvancedWeb, or even Salesforce is getting more popular amongst our institutions. And so, but one of the other challenges is that as you're coding your data all over the world really, people have been just thinking about engagement as event registrations or event attendance.

Hmm.

And so it's using tools that have created, that are sort of limited in thinking about digital and coming up with ways to measure it like it's an event. So it could be registration for a live web event, but it also could be score, you know, just adding into those fields the event fields, like all your digital contributors from quarter 1 is an event. And just so that you are able to compare apples to apples when you are reporting out, at least when you are thinking, trying to connect engagement and giving over time. And then, you know, there are other platforms that make more sense when it depends on the situation. For example, there is a tool called Gradue, and again, it's another alum You know, engagement-specific tool that allows a social login, allows for profiles to be created through LinkedIn data. It also allows people to self-select on their profile whether they're happy to be contacted by a student, for example, and offer them advice. So there are specific tools that are trying to get to the heart of this informational interview type of idea as it relates to combining alumni and career services. I have to admit my social listening tools are somewhat more basic. I use TweetDeck and the analytics associated with some of the easier tools. I think Rachel is probably a better, a more elaborate social measuring system.

You use the stuff that matches. I mean, I'm the biggest advocate or huge advocate I mean, they've done a really great job. And Facebook Pages, I mean, you can get a lot of stuff there. So I have to say, no shame in that. That's great. Rachel, talk to me.

So my number 1 tip for anybody who is in the early stages of building a community or just got that twinkle in your eye like you think you want to start one, lists. It's segmentation. No matter what platform you're on, you can be Twitter lists, Google+ circles, Facebook lists, LinkedIn contact lists, segments, and it's much easier to moderate and track not only your existing community members but potentials. I think that's key. Finding people who eventually will become community members or advocates within your community Put them in a separate list so you know what they're talking about really easily. And you can, if you want to get fancier, you can import them into your TweetDeck or your HootSuite or your tool dashboard of your choice. But it really comes down to that first step of segmentation. And you can use something like If This Then That to automate it eventually. But even that manual in the very beginning, it just takes a few minutes a day to drop people into a list as they come across your stream. And then going forward, that's going to make your job of listening and moderating immensely That would be my tip. Lists.

Love that. Love that. You start with that and that's where you go. Do you use a backend database at all to keep track of that? Depending on the list, I actually do.

With If This Then That, you can push a Twitter list to a Google Sheet, which is really cool for segmentation. If you really want to get granular and fancy, that's a whole other conversation. You can do a lot of really cool things once it's in a spreadsheet. As far as location-based, specifically for events, if you want to plan offline events, knowing exactly where people are really quickly and then sending them an invite, whether it's on LinkedIn or Facebook, becomes a really small task versus an arduous task like going through one by one to work out where everybody is.

Right, right.

Very, very short.

Yeah, yeah. And seriously, a plug for anyone out there, if you haven't checked out If This Then That, You are missing out on just a mind-blowing experience. You will get addicted and start doing all sorts of crazy things.

Yeah, it's a dumb toy. I have a friend that I won't name who sometimes they'll hook up their Twitter mentions to lights so it will flash like a dance party. You can do some really ridiculous things with If This Then That if you have a few minutes.

Oh yeah, I love some of the tracks. for Fitbit. You can publicly shame yourself if you haven't made your goal. So I want to end on just a personal note for both of you guys. What is the most rewarding experience, that one experience where you are like, I am so happy that I have my job, I'm a community manager, and I've— that really special moment?

Yeah. When I first started trying to create advice-based content at the University of Virginia, I interviewed a young alumni who was living over in Dubai. And we filmed sort of the webcam to webcam through Hangouts when she was sitting in a coffee shop. And she was answering questions about what's it like to live there, and if a student wanted to come and be an intern over there, what should they do, what should they be thinking about. And it was actually 6 months later, a student contacted me and said, hey, I would really love to learn more about getting an internship over in Dubai. I saw your content, it was really powerful for me, and I'd like to contact the person who I interviewed. So I connected the two of them together, and she ended up helping the student use her network over in Dubai. Wow. Still the UVA network, and helped that student secure an internship, and that's just kind of when all the pieces come together and you're just like, wow, that's what I was trying to do.

Right, right. Oh my God, I love that. I'm like getting shivers. That's what you want. Rachel?

Mine is kind of the same. Like, I really just get this incredible high when I see people helping each other, and I know that they're members of, you know, one of my communities, and that's how they initially connected. And whether it's, you know, across town, across the US, the globe. It's really cool when people come together for that greater good and help each other out and then collaborate, work on future projects. It creates this whole incredible cycle of good things. That makes me super happy and excited to wake up every day.

I love that. I love that. That's what it's all about. It's building that community. Thank you guys so much. I am just I'm completely thrilled that both of you could join me here today. I have to say, I did not make my goal of getting through every single question. If you guys have a chance, I know Rachel, you're about to hop off to Espy's Hour. Plugging that, by the way. Oh no, you don't have that. Next week. Not today, no. I was going to plug No Kid Hungry, #NoKidHungry. Follow Rachel and Bryan Fanzo. They're doing some awesome stuff. But if you have a chance to, both of you check out the #H2Hchat hashtag. There are some great conversations and questions. I know our community would love more interaction. Before I end, I want to go ahead and give a shout out and big thanks to sponsors of today's chat, Neustar, IBM, Cisco, Cox, Little Bird. MasterCard, Freshdesk, Mutual Mind, Influitive, Hootsuite, and Speakeasy. Thank you so much for sponsoring this special Shareology edition of H2H Chat. It has been absolutely great. Until next time, guys, peace out. Have a great Tuesday.

Thanks, Suzy. Appreciate it.

Bye, guys.