A lot of strategies seem to regard 'experts' as some homogenous group. In our experience, three groups contribute most knowledge
1) Partners/consultants 2) Company veterans 3) Senior-execs / VIPs
2 - Offer them what they really want.
1) Partners/consultants - want to build an audience, reputation, and relationships. 2) Company veterans - want external recognition to build internal support. 3) VIPs - want respect of their peers.
3 - Focus on reach and trust.
Different tactics appeal to different groups. Most of the time, you need to build people build reach with the many or build trust/respect with a select few.
You can see there are different tactics suitable for that.
4 - Select the right channels.
When was the last time you created a detailed guide and shared it as a forum-style post to quickly vanish?
Experts use the channels which best suit them these days. You see this below. Select the right channel for the experts you want.
5 - Make it worthwhile!
Most tactics which fail are on the wrong side of the 'Is it worth it?' line.
Increase the scarcity (prestige) or the reach and you can usually tip the balance in your favour.
To be fair, you can just pay people too. But that's rather costly.
6 - Understand what each expert can best offer.
Partners/consultants can share experiences from working with many orgs.
Company veterans can share fantastic case studies from their work.
Senior folks can best share strategic views/opinions on industry.
7 - Pull together an action plan.
Here's a simplified example - but you get the idea!
It should be clear to connect the goal > objective > Expert needed > key channel > and key benefit all together for everyone to read.
8 - Discover the tactics which have worked best for us.
2 - First, the channels you use depend upon community type. i.e. it doesn't make sense to individually invite people to a support community. But it certainly does for peer groups.
Prioritise channels with biggest source of growth (notice the difference in influence too!)
3 - Let's go through these:
Search (great for support)
> Remove/archive old content.
> Match tags to what people search for.
> Target keywords with resources.
> Reduce orphan pages.
> Rewrite post titles
> Merge duplicate posts.
> Improve site load speed (esp. mobile)
1 - Majority of members don't read more than a few words of any homepage. They jump to find a single word or phrase.
2 - Members REALLY struggle to find responses to posts they've made in the past. They forget the category and can't find it. Really frustrating for them.
3 - Members often switch to a different site rather than spending just 5 to 10 seconds trying to get your SSO / two factor auth to work.
1 - I want to share some data from a client we worked with last year where we did something that I think was a little clever to definitively prove the incredible value of their community.
2 - The client was a mature community in the tech sector. Despite the community's size and scale, the community team had been downsized the previous year and their budget was being squeezed each year because they couldn't clearly prove the value of the community.
3 - Yes, they had used the call deflection templates you can find online, but the senior execs simply didn't believe the metrics were real (I've never believed them either tbh).
It's almost impossible to prove if someone a) got an answer and b) would've called support).
2 - Back in July 2017, my colleague @ILOVETHEHAWK left her role managing the FeverBee community to take up an incredible new opportunity @discourse. For various reasons (time/money), I didn't replace her.
I removed spam/replied to a few questions, but that's been about it.
3 - Let’s start with the number of visitors. Things didn’t really change much at first. In fact, the number of visitors continued to increase significantly for the following year. The reason for this is simple; the community was still attracting growing levels of search traffic.
2 - As a result, many #CMGR folks are so busy 'doing the work' they don't realise their communities often aren't making anywhere near the progress they should be making.
They often fall far behind best practices, struggle to gain internal support, and disappoint members.
3 - Often they keep doing the same activities over and over again without any idea if a) they are the right activities and b) if they are actually working.
A consultant should be the catalyst that gets your community unstuck by facilitating a strategy/developing new processes.
1- A while back I worked with a director of community who had a simple policy; on any night out she would always pick up the food/drinks tab for company's IT team.
This wasn't cheap. It frequently ran into several hundred dollars.
It meant she could call in favours when she needed to.
It meant she could get her priorities on their agenda.
It meant she could often make progress when so many other departments were stuck waiting for updates on their systems.
3 - And it paid off too. It paid off in her hitting her performance goals, her community growing, and her community gradually getting more prominence when the roadmap is set for the IT team.