… a few things really quickly about Community Management (and why it drives my social management strategy)

Since I started my career as an intern with The UpTake eons ago, community management has been a gigantic part of all of my social media roles. Through a decade of experience, I’ve learned that if you’re going to be extra successful, especially with fraught conversations, the key is listening. Sometimes you can’t do anything actionable or help someone having a very bad day. But, I’ve found that if you show them that you hear that this is frustrating and they are valid, it goes a very long way. It truly moves mountains and softens hardened hearts.

Another key to amazing community management? Noticing trends and patterns. If you see a thread running through five-star reviews, or negative comments and you can connect the dots, that’s actual gold for a marketer. When you’re doing your daily inbound community management, firing up the social listening tools, or just searching your saved hashtags/keywords, you should notice the rumblings of a problem or the joys of a group of happy users. These things make for great crisis communication plans, or new content that can speak to potential new customers.

And now: Actual Examples of Community Management

Below you’ll find actual snippets of community management and FAQ matrices (that’s just a fancy word for elaborate spreadsheets) I’ve created, maintained, and managed of behalf of several clients. While this isn’t an exhaustive list of all of the clients I’ve managed these for, the following clients often had heavy customer service needs that were best addressed with issue tracking and FAQ response databases.

See also: my outbound community management/engagement strategy with Drumstick as Dr. Umstick here.