My small big win this week
I put together an Open House for Community Managers. Ramblings that follow. 🗣📝
In the first week of March, I spoke to Katie McCauley about creating a community for Community Managers in Bangalore.
But hey, that’s what CMX does! This, timed perfectly with the launch of the CMX Series program, got me thinking that this was actually possible to pull off. Before heading out for my vacation, I put together a list of topics that we could talk about at the meetup. After getting back, slowly things started shaping up and the announcement went out! We had a fairly good number of people showing interest for the event.
This also included going around and meeting other community managers. Oh, and don’t be misguided by the place- Tea Brew, my coffee mates. I’ve sworn my allegiance to coffee☕️ and that shall remain forever. If you must know, I had cold coffee.
But it was also amazing to meet others and realize that you had so much in common.
“Do you watch football?⚽”
“Yes!”
“Cool! What team do you support?”
“Manchester United”
On the day of the event, we had some common questions prepared for the panel. After the common questions, we moved to individual questions specific to the communities they’ve built and this was followed by an open discussion.
This was probably the first time I was sitting in a room filled with community professionals in Bangalore and the very thought of that made my happy.
Some of the key points that stood during the discussions was-
Communities build around individual glory die
Transfer of ownership is extremely important and if that doesn’t happen, eventually the community would die. The key factor here is trust. The ability to loosen your grip from the community and realize that everything be fine and not worrying about “What might be happening now”.
Communities should undergo reformation or change
A community can’t remain the same for many years. It has to evolve. Successful communities are the ones who tolerate internal dissent. The dissenters are the next generation of leaders/owners. If you don’t tolerate that, they go ahead to start their own community.
For the people who conducted offline events and meetups for their communities, sourcing content and speakers was the primary a huge challenge.
One of the most interesting conversation on Friday was about introducing money💲 in communities. This was particularly fascinating, given that Jeevan, who ran the AWS Bangalore community, was a volunteer and ran the sake of sharing knowledge. He was of the opinion that introducing money spoils the spirit of a community. On the other side, we also had Kiran, who initiated the Barcamp Bangalore community, which evolved into HasGeek, thereby building a business around communities.
The conclusion of the discussion was that communities need money to thrive and for money, there should be a model in place. Community managers sometimes don’t understand why people participate in their community and hence, when money is introduced, it is done in a wrong way. This came out from something that actually happened-
When they initially started the community, the first 2 events were hosted at some company. This meant that both these times, the lunch for the attendees were covered by that company. The next time they were planning for the event, they were forced to look out for sponsors to cover the attendees lunch. This time, a company A came in and told them that they would give X Rupees for the event. This sounded great because they didn’t have any money at all. Then came company B that agreed to give Y Rupees for the event(where X>>Y). On the day of the event, they put our banner with both A & B’s logos. Now A came back saying why did you put B’s name on the same banner when X>>Y? So next time, we’ll also pay just Y Rupees.
Online communities on the other hand, work on the basis of reputation based gift economy. Over the last couple of years, the entire landscape of online communities have changed tremendously and yet, the value of meeting offline is still very much present.
Dealing with Burnout
Community managers are usually the face of the company or the community. They have task of putting a smile on their face even if things aren’t going particularly well with them. Let’s face it- we all have our down days.
It’s a good idea to have more than one person on your team so that you are not managing everything yourself.
Jeevan, from the AWS Bangalore community told that he and his co-organizer takes turns in becoming the face of the community every month. One of them logs out every month and the other person takes charge of the community.
When you build a successful community, reputation becomes the currency. Once your reputation builds, you can no longer afford to make mistakes.
I thoroughly enjoyed putting together and participating in this event. Until next time…
This blog is a part of my “One Blog Per Week” resolution. Contains random rambling, learning and experience. If you have any inputs/thoughts, shout out to me at @dun3buggi3.
