How to Build an Engaged Online Community Around Your Business

How to Build an Engaged Online Community Around Your Business What does it take to develop and maintain a truly engaged online community around your business? What challenges are communities facing? And what skills should community managers have? We had a chat with  Richard Millington who is founder of FeverBee to get some advice on developing  a more engaged community. Listen to the interview on iTunes, SoundCloud or keep reading for a summary. And dont forget to subscribe to The Employer Branding Podcast. About  FeverBee and Richards Role: What Feverbee do: So what FeverBee does is take a lot of complicated psychology out there, a lot of sociology, a lot of proven science about how to build online communities, how to increase engagement, and distill that into simple lessons that we use for our clients, for our audience, for the people that attend our events and things like that. What weve been trying to do for the last maybe three to five years, I think, is figure out what are the proven, battle-tested ways to increase engagement. Richards role:  What my role is there is, besides running the business, is to try and figure out whats on the cutting edge of this.  So Ive got to try and figure out what works and what doesnt, and how we do that in a scientific way and how we do that in a way thats actually useful to the people that were trying to help? Which is the practitioners that are trying to get more engagement for their online communities, or their collaboration efforts, or their knowledge sharing efforts, or getting their customers to support them and give them great ideas. The  challenges that communities face: I think what weve seen for the last, maybe 10 years or so, is that for a lot of communities, the level of growth and the level of activity has gone up and up and up, and there are many reasons why that has happened. One of them is that there have been more people online than ever. The Internet speeds are getting higher and higher. People are spending more time on the Internet, which has been fantastic, but now were seeing a couple of things beginning to occur: One is that this endless supply of new people to join communities is coming to an end, and unless youre willing to increase your audience to different languages or different sectors entirely, were dealing with a plateau there. Two, is that theres more competition for limited attention. There simply arent enough people to participate in all these communities that we create today, and the failure rate, especially by communities that are created by brands, by organisations, is getting so amazingly high. Thanks to @socialmedia2day we found this cool #infographic for #CommunityManager.s! https://t.co/iiPAIeIbgF #cmmgr pic.twitter.com/qMG26oNHqi Sotrender (@sotrender) November 12, 2015 I think the third one is the value of the work that we do. Whether you work in social media or online communities, and people that work in PR and other sectors as well have the same challenge, but how do we prove the value? I think part of it is that online communities as an industry, I dont think it really exists. I think we need to figure out what industry are we really in. So are we in the collaboration industry? Is our job to help people collaborate much better with one another? Are we in the customer retention industry? Are we in the customer loyalty industry? What industry are we in and how we do we move up the value chain, how do we move up to higher levels within that? Because I think if we focus just on online communities, its a very tiny, narrow approach to achieve our goal. What is  visible engagement and valuable engagement? We began to notice that people that did engagement really, really well got a lot of clicks, they got posts, they got comments, and then later on they got likes, they got shares, they got retweets and things like that. And we looked at that and we thought, Wow, thats what a successful engagement program looks like. So what happened is that we began thinking, How do we optimise to get more clicks, to get more likes, to get more shares, and get as many comments as possible? And what happened is that we began simplifying what we asked people to do. We began making our content, our updates as entertaining as they possibly could be. And the problem with that is that whilst this gets a lot more visible engagement, we can count the clicks, likes, shares, links, whatever, it doesnt get more valuable engagement. It doesnt get engagement that changes the level of behaviour over the long term. It doesnt get the kind of engagement thats going to solicit a decent level of contribution from me. Visible engagement = making an article easier to share. Valuable engagement = making people keen to share more articles. Richard Millington (@RichMillington) January 5, 2016 What we want to be doing instead is doing deep engagement work, which is the kind of engagement work where if you have a challenge of getting people to share information, you begin by thinking, Why arent they sharing information right now? That means interviewing the people youre trying to reach. Understand is it because they dont know who to share information with, they dont know what information, they dont know how to share information, are there rivalries, and then begin stitching those relationships together: introduce them to the right people, building more of a sense of community among them. Thats doing deep engagement work that is less sexy, but lasts much, much longer than just chasing the visible metrics. Because one of the challenges we have is that a lot of people in the social media space are just jumping around from one engagement idea to the next, hoping that something is going to have a long-term impact, and thats not how it works. What we need here is a method, a method that lasts over the long-term, so every day when you go to work, you know exactly what the next step of that process is, because its underlined by the psychology behind what drives engagement. So valuable engagement is about doing that long-term work. The  micro skills that  community managers need: What Im talking about by micro skills is the gap between the people that are running these communities and knowing what they want to achieve. So, with the knowledge that we just talked about here, how do you actually put that into action? And one of the challenges we have is that people dont have the skills to do it. So micro skills is a term from counselling, I think, where it meant you cant be a psychologist, or you cant counsel someone, you cant help someone if you dont have these core skills. And back then, it meant skills such as looking people in the eye, building a sense of empathy and rapport with them, asking questions the right way and having the right tone of voice. What were talking about in this context is slightly similar, which is most people who are doing social media, most people who are doing any kind of online community work whatsoever, need to spend a little bit more time working on the core skills they need. By micro skills, Im talking about things like how do you write persuasively? So for example, most job descriptions say that you must be a great communicator and have good written skills, but they dont say what that means. Does that mean being able to write without making a mistake, or does it mean being able to write in a way that persuades people? And persuasion is a whole separate craft, and there are ways of doing that. There are ways of making things more visual. So it seems like  being able to write in persuasive way, encoding your messages in a way that they actually get read, and theres a lot of psychology behind that. Its about being to interact with a stranger, someone you havent met online, and turn them into a friend. And that sounds really easy, but its really difficult when you get so many emails every single day and almost every person wants you to do something that helps them. And its going to be things like how do you display the right cues that you are a credible person to listen to. If you read as many blogs as I do, if you read as many books as I do, you know that generally, its people talking about the same stuff over and over again. I think for this field to advance, for us to get much better, we need to go outside of that field. We need to bring in skills from speech writing and psychology, copywriting, and other fields that are like that, and bring them into this profession, because I think thats the way that we achieve results. How to  spot valuable engagement: What valuable engagement looks like is whatever your end result is. So its the hardest thing in the world. This is one of the reasons why we go for visible engagement instead of valuable engagement, because valuable engagement is much harder to see, because its mental. What we try to do is that if the end goal is to increase customer retention, then we measure that. If the end goal is to get your customers buying more, you can measure that. If your end goal is to improve collaboration, then there are ways of measuring that by reduced duplication of work, productivity ratios. If the end goal is knowledge sharing, then you can measure, not just the quantity, but the quality of the knowledge thats shared. Did you achieve your goals more than what you used to? The next big thing for online communities: I would predict that there will be a new, big platform that comes along and everyone says that you should join it. But heres the interesting thing about all of these platforms: what happens is that, and this is what I remember doing communities 10, 15 years ago, is that back then you had just one platform, it was a forum or whatever, and that was it, that was all you had. So you spent all your time on this one platform, making it as good as it can possibly be, and you usually did a really great job. Then came Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Foursquare, and all of a sudden, all these people came along and said, You need to be on all these platforms. And what happened is that we began driving our audience to every one of these, we began separating them, we began dividing them, and at the same time, we increased the amount of work we had to do significantly, whilst dispersing the engagement across all these channels. So Im going to predict, in the short-term, there will be a big, new thing, and that will get all the attention, but wont really change much overall. What I do think will happen, and I dont know how quickly it will happen, is online communities as a profession begins to die out. I think what will happen is that it will be assumed within broader roles. What weve noticed, and weve been tracking this on LinkedIn for a long time, how many people list themselves as a community manager and online community manager, and last year, for the first year ever, that number went down. There are less community managers today than there were a year ago.  Theyre still doing online community work, but theyre doing it either as part of a broader thing or in a related role, theyre doing it in a slightly different space, and thats really, really interesting. So what I think is going to happen is that we need to evolve with them. We need to start acquiring a broader set of skills. We need to start understanding the psychology behind why these online communities work, and then we need to begin implementing it, and we need to get very competent and very good at understanding how to convince our own organisations. Click here to  subscribe to The Employer Branding Podcast.

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Top 10 Talent Competitive Countries and Cities in 2017

Top 10 Talent Competitive Countries and Cities in 2017 Our friends at INSEAD, The Adecco Group, and Singapore’s Human Capital Leadership Institute have published the fourth edition of their Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI). The GTCI measures the ability of countries to grow, attract and retain talent, and provides a tool-kit for countries and companies to design talent strategies and tackle crucial challenges like unemployment and skills shortages. In 2017, the partners also launched the 1st edition of the Global Cities Talent Competitiveness Index (GCTCI), a talent competitiveness ranking of a global sample of 46 cities. Talent and technology The 2017 GTCI study focuses on how technology is affecting talent competitiveness and the nature of work. Automation, artificial intelligence and the sharing economy are transforming jobs and creating new ones. In parallel, economic volatility, coupled with demographic, sociological and technological factors, are disrupting working norms. Combined, these trends give rise to a more independent and dispersed workforce. While technology can augment productivity and ultimately increase employment, getting there is challenging, given that the new jobs and working norms require skills that are not widely available yet. These include hard, technology skills, as well as people and project skills, given that collaboration and communication are increasingly required in professional settings. Top ranking countries in GTCI are those that have been more successful in preparing for these transformations, and have identified the talent needed to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the 4t h industrial revolution. Which countries and cities rank best? Switzerland, Singapore and the UK lead the 2017 ranking, with the USA in 4th position and the Nordics in the top 10. All share innovative education systems that focus on meeting business needs by developing employable skills and providing young people with work experience. Key are also active employment policies, which provide flexible labour markets that also guarantee social protection. Such policies focus on retraining and mobility in response to market needs. Just take Denmark’s respected ‘Flexicurity’ system, where lean regulation benefits both companies and employees. Moreover, GTCI talent champion countries share strong cooperation between their governments, businesses and institutions of education. Connectedness also turns cities into talent magnets, as shown by the GCTCI, where Copenhagen, Zurich, Helsinki and San Francisco lead the way. Top cities show a combination of strong infrastructure and information connectivity, investment in knowledge hubs and the presence of international companies, resulting in a ‘best of both worlds’ with high quality of life and career opportunities. Top 10 countries Switzerland Singapore United Kingdom United States Sweden Australia Luxembourg Denmark Finland Norway Top 10 cities Copenhagen Zurich Helsinki San Francisco Gothenburg Madrid Paris Los Angeles Eindhoven Dublin Specific recommendations: employment and education policies are key GTCI and GCTCI point to several steps that governments and businesses can take to create an environment in which technology boosts economic growth and employment, rather than acting as a stumbling block. Most of these best practices centre around education and employment policies that impart the skills and experience required to prosper in the modern-day world of work. Education systems must provide employable skills Too many of our education systems remains rooted in the industrial age. 21st century jobs require STEM skills. But in addition to hard skills, given the fast-paced and unpredictable nature of our world, people must embrace creativity, problem solving, collaboration and communication skills, and be committed to lifelong learning. Specifically, private-public partnership are urgently needed to reform education systems so that they are able to provide experiential and project based training. These include work-based training schemes, such as the apprenticeship systems that have proven so successful in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Flexible labour markets coupled with social protection Many countries that are successful at attracting and retaining talent offer flexible, business-friendly labour markets, while simultaneously guaranteeing social protection. Denmark and Switzerland stand out on this front. In addition, in view of the growing importance of the sharing economy, to ensure a level playing field for all forms of employment, the same rules must apply to everyone. Ideal social protection measures include incentives to retraining and mobility in response to market needs. A solution for mobility could be ‘individual security accounts’ that permit benefit portability (unemployment insurance, health insurance, disability and injury insurance) as workers move between jobs and, potentially, countries. Businesses play a key role Business leaders have a major role to play in talent competitiveness. As the importance of collaboration and innovation grow, and workers become more independent, organisations need to become flatter, and need to encourage horizontal networks over traditional top-down management and authority. Moreover, they must be part of the process of lifelong learning through investment in training to drive constant upskilling. Finally, they must collaborate with governments to provide young people with more hands-on experience, through work experience schemes and apprenticeships. Full report available at www.gtci2017.com.