Cooling Off Midsummer: The Iceberg Effect of Community Management

Wed Jul 15 17:00:00 UTC 2015

Despite how it appears, online community management is not just about curating content. Yes, publishing and pinging online information is important. However there is much more than meets the eye when it comes to growing and sustaining a virtual community.

In “Community Management Fundamentals,” presented by The Community Roundtable, online community expert, Rachel Happ, refers to "the iceberg effect," pointing out that for every visible task a successful CM tackles, there are one or two other equally crucial roles played behind the scene. Being adept at brandishing the soft skills of understanding people and their motivations, building and maintaining relationships, preventing conflict, and communicating values, for example, can make a successful manager and vibrant, healthy community.

Likewise, the risks of not properly navigating these waters are real, including failing to achieve a critical mass in membership, developing a large but un-engaged membership, inadvertently creating an adversarial community, or cultivating a fractured community of small cliques. Failing to understand the below-water tasks means potentially setting up short term gains while ignoring problems destined to explode in the future.

Above the Water

  • Managing content
  • Managing events
  • Welcoming new members
  • Participating in conversations
  • Reaching out to third party influencers, partners, media, etc.
  • Communicating changes to policies, tools, programming, etc.

Below the Water

  • Understanding members
  • Back-channeling
  • Building relationships with key members
  • Taking issues offline
  • Working with internal advocates
  • Program planning
  • Collaborating internally
  • Managing technology issues
  • Communicating value and benefits
  • Measuring progress

Are you minding the tasks below the surface, where online community management really matters?

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