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Tools for Community Management

January 27th, 2011 Melle Gloerich 3 comments

Tools (by S. Svadilfari)

There seem to be lots and lots of tools for social media professionals, but as community managers what kind of tools are essential? We need different kinds of tools, or maybe we do need tools in different way. What tools do you use every day? Do you make use of some special features not many people know?

By no means is this list complete, but it works for me! I greatly appreciate new suggestions.

Telephone

There’s just no way you can do your job without one.

Google Reader

You need to stay in touch what’s happing on many sites about the subject of your community. Google Reader is perfect to read hundreds of sites, get recommendations about articles of friends or community members and just one click away from sharing nice articles via twitter and your website (you need to add a clip to your site (via shared items, sharing settings). You can see my shared items here.

Google Analytics

You do need to know what your members and readers (potential new members) are looking at on your website or forum. It is very cool to see how people formulate what they are looking for at Google and thus via what kinds of keywords people find you. Google Analytics is, to my knowledge, one of the most easy and advanced tools for webanalytics.

Google keyword tool

Especially when your new to the subject of your community, the Google Keyworld Tool is easy way to learn about words that are used by people like the people in your community.

Twitter Search

Who’s talking about the topics your community is about? Use the Advanced Twitter Search feature if your community is local or in a language other than english. Search only for tweets in an area, for example if you’re looking for people in The Netherlands: search within 130 miles of Utrecht. You can adjust the distance to your exact wishes in the url after your first search with a distance.

Google Alert

Google Alerts you when the name of your community is mentioned anywhere on the internet, so you can act upon it. You might use this for competing communities as well, just to know where people are who you might want in your community.

Datumprikker (‘pick a date’)

‘Pick a date’ or Datumprikker, you can use this dutch tool with english settings. It does exactly what you think it does, it makes it easy to find a pick a date if you’re going to meet up with several people. Something which no community can do without.

Google Groups

You might want to create small groups of experts of a different topics. It’s very important for teambuilding that a group can easily reach one another without sending a message to someone specific. I’m slowly starting to get annoyed by too much strange behaviour, chaotic UI and requirements of Google Groups. What do you use for mailinglists?

Tweetdeck

Sure, everybody uses Twitter, but keeping a good view on what’s happening in your community and in the rest of the world on the subject of you community is something else. Tweetdeck is constantly improving and has a lot of advanced features (ie. filter Foursquare out of your timeline) and You can use Tweetdeck with multiple Twitter-accounts, which is nice if you have a personal and a community-account. Also, having specific twitter searches in a column allows you to monitor discussions and topics.

SnagIt

Easy screencapture application that just does what you expect it does.

Google docs (and forms)

If you want to create a quick poll or form and have it online in one click, this is the easiest way to do it. Open Google Docs and click on ‘create new’ -> form. Easy as that. When you copy the layout and questions from a previous poll, remember to not only clear the answers in the spreadsheet but also to delete the rows entirely. Otherwise Google doesn’t see the spreadsheet as empty and will use previous answers to the summery of a new form.

dlvr.it

You probably know twitterfeed.com as a service for automatically sharing new blogposts or articles posted in your community via twitter. dlvr.it is much more reliable and shares new posts much faster.

bit.ly

You want to know how many people share your links on twitter and how many people click in those links. This is the tool for it. The best part of it, it is highly automated: To automatically shorten links and link them to your bit.ly account to get a nice overview of the click statistics copy the bit.ly API Key from the settings to Tweetdeck (settings -> services). To shorten everything you share via dlvr.it copy the same bit.ly API Key to dlvr.it (settings -> short links -> add shortener -> bit.ly -> make default)

Yammer

The jury is not out on whether Yammer is the next big thing for communities or just another platform you need to monitor and manage. It basically is Facebook for communities or companies

What else?

I’m sure I forgot a whole bunch of tools that I use on a less regular basis. What kind of tools do you use?

Categories: Community Tags: applications, Community, community management, community managers, Google, google keyword tool, Reader, telephone, Tools, Twitter

Creating Buzz In Your Linkedin Group

August 28th, 2010 Melle Gloerich No comments

One of the trickiest parts of setting up a LinkedIn-group is getting enough traction within a group. Too bad you can’t force members to be active… but you can be active yourself. Creating one discussion after another is not the way to go though, it’s doing the opposite of what you think it does: it depletes the group of spontaneity. After someone is starting subject after subject, who dares standing up and initiating something as well?

But if you can’t force other people and you can’t start discussions yourself, what other options are left?

News items

They don’t have as big a footprint as discussions do and that’s exactly what you want. The barrier to post a news-item is really low, literally just copy/paste. People can adjust some fields, but that isn’t even necessary. There’s no need to follow a news-item or responding to comments. They can, but they don’t have to. But the best part is that even if you post several news-items a day, it doesn’t feel like interrupting to someone when they post something as well. So you can go right ahead and start posting interesting articles. At least something is happening and there’s value being created in this group. Also important to know

But there’s more – RSS

Posting news-items is a feature that is greatly undervalued. Why? Because you don’t need to be logged in to LinkedIn to share news-items.

As a group manager you can access a special tab in your group called ‘Manage’. One of the options that shows up in that tab is ‘selecting news-feeds’. If you want to automatically post items that you or other people write on a (group-)weblog enter the RSS-feed of that weblog inhere. When a blogpost is posted a an hour ago or so it shows up at ‘news’ in your LinkedIn-group. Especially with the new look of Linkedin with Discussions and News mixed in with eachother is really valuable.

Still a little bit more – Shared items

If you read your daily news mainly via Google Reader, and I suggest you do, you can share interesting articles by just clicking ‘share’ when you read it. The webpage where these items are posted to are something along the lines of www.google.com/reader/user/name . Check your sharing settings to be sure of that page. That page has an RSS-feed. And you know what to do with RSS feeds and LinkedIn by now. So even when you are checking Google Reader on your mobile while waiting for the menu in a restaurant it is really easy to share items which get syndicated to LinkedIn.

Categories: Community, media Tags: discussion, Google, group, LinkedIn, Reader, RSS, RSS-feed

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