Radian6 Community Series: Goals & Purpose
Monday, April 5, 2010 | 4 Comments
Tags: Community, community series, radian6, Social Media, social media strategy
Posted in: Community, Social Media, content marketing
At Radian6, we’re often asked about how we’ve built our community team, what purpose it serves, and how we manage our tasks and workflow to do all of the listening, engagement, and content creation that’s part of our gig.
In this new series for the month of April, we’re going to look at how we’ve built and structured our team in hopes that, by using our experiences as our own case study of sorts, you’ll get a few ideas of your own for the role that community can play in your business, or how your existing roles can evolve a bit inside the world of social media.
Today, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this whole community thing in the first place.
Community Mindset
We actually built our community team before we started adding more “traditional” marketing roles to our team. In many ways, community and marketing really go hand in hand for us, so we started building the team based on what we needed to do to support our customers and community, and represent our company and brand to the outside world.
To us, our community is comprised of:
- Radian6 customers
- Our prospective customers, who are businesses and agencies learning to integrate social media
- The larger social media community
Everything we do is about delivering a platform that helps companies and agencies listen and measure their social media efforts, and engage with their customers. So our vested interest is in helping them tackle those topics for business, and understand how Radian6 can help when appropriate.
Our community and our customers are the lifeblood of our business, so our company is built with that in mind. And our community team is really the day-to-day reflection of the mindset that all of our folks really embrace, from sales to development to our technical support and executive team.
As a group, our community team represents a number of things: some customer support, a bit of sales stewardship, content creation and subject matter expertise, promotion and support of our brand and platform, and bridging between our internal teams, external community, and all the pieces in between.
Our Purpose
We’ll get a little more in depth later this month about how our team is actually structured and what our roles and responsibilities are. But generally speaking, our team is built to deliver these things on an ongoing basis:
- Listening and monitoring on behalf of our own brand, and developing protocol around that
- Listening and monitoring for larger industry discussions in key areas of interest, like social media, social CRM, content marketing, etc
- Engaging with our community online for all of the above conversations, which for us is mostly via blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and our own site.
- Measuring the impact of our efforts
- Helping our internal teams with social media subject matter expertise when needed
- Shepherding external publicity efforts for our company and products, like strategic public relations initiatives and contributing content to other sites and publications
- Creating content that helps educate our teams and our customers on key social media topics as they impact business
- Representing Radian6 in person at industry events, as speakers, sponsors, participants, or all of the above
- Supporting our prospect relationships, customer accounts, and partner relationships
Goals
Our goals are actually rather simple and straightforward. And yes, we have some measurable factors set against many of these for our own internal purposes, and you should do the same. More broadly speaking, though, a few of our goals are to:
- Build a purposeful, engaged audience around relevant content that illustrates business benefits of social media monitoring, engagement, and measurement
- Actively engage discussions of Radian6 around the social web to provide presence, accessibility, and awareness for our brand
- Participate thoughtfully in related industry discussions and events, both online and in person, in order to contribute our expertise and invest in our larger community
- Act as a resource for internal teams for social media subject matter expertise
- Establish a Radian6 user community online to support active customers and their ongoing needs
- Develop our own benchmarks for community impact metrics, accountability, and engagement protocols & guidelines
- Gather and steward active feedback from our communities to continually drive development of Radian6 capabilities
There are more and some additional layers to the above, but overall, it’s about supporting our users, stewarding our brand, and participating in the online discussions that represent the interest of both our company and our customers.
This Year
As 2010 continues to roll by, we’ve got some key initiatives going on around our community efforts as well. They’re all built on the needs of our communities, both internal and external, and we’re excited to take them on. Just a few examples to get you brain turning:
- We’re going to build both an internal community portal for sharing knowledge and resources among our teams, and and external community to help support the needs of our customers to connect with us and one another.
- Our team is refining and building our own “listening grid”, our method for integrating listening and engagement into our own business workflow, and helping our customers outline models for doing the same.
- We’re working with our training team to develop social media-specific curriculum to help deepen knowledge for all of our community members, including our own teams
- We’re building programs like our Higher Ed and charitable initiatives to give back to communities and sectors that we think can benefit from access to Radian6, and the knowledge of our teams
- Continually building and tweaking our arsenal of content to address the needs and interests of our customers and prospects, and help them continue to understand the larger social media landscape as it relates to business applications.
And much like your business, our goals and objectives are flexible as we adapt to the needs of the market, and the goals of our company overall. It’s our job to adapt our role and function within the company to support the bigger organization goals.
What Else?
In the next post a week from today, we’ll talk specifically about the people that make up the community team, and how we’ve allocated roles and responsibilities. In subsequent weeks, we’ll chat a bit about our process, workflow, and operations among the team (including a realistic look at some of the challenges), and then finally a bit about how we assess and measure the impact of our efforts overall.
We’re structured differently than lots of companies, but perhaps there are some ideas you can take away for your own business. What can we help you understand about a community-driven model like ours? Please sound off in the comments!
4 Responses to “Radian6 Community Series: Goals & Purpose”
Steph on April 7th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
You always have such thoughtful and unbelivably helpful posts. Thank you!
Steph