I had a serendipitous intro recently with a couple of different people from Isis Maternity – a local childcare retail and services company – and we got to chatting about online communities. They have operated in a community-centric way in the offline world for quite some time – bringing parents together for maternity and childcare classes and enabling relationships between parents and children. They have just started to explore extending the relationships they build with and among their customers to the online world. It clearly makes a lot of sense.
Cindy Meltzer who is now their community manager, recognized the opportunity to engage more effectively with their existing Facebook Page toward the end of last year. Like many social initiatives, she started small with some basics and found that Isis’ latent online community was more than ready to engage. She was willing to share with me how she started out and their early results which shows a dramatic increase in members and engagement on their Facebook page as soon as she reached out in a human voice. Community management can start by simply asking questions:
Between October of 2009 and January of 2010, fans of their Facebook Page grew from 699 to 1043 – impressive but not nearly as impressive as the growth in interactions which grew from 7 to 463 per month over that short time. Cindy and Isis graciously shared these stats to show others who are just starting out what a dramatic difference community management can have and Cindy recently sat down with me to talk a little more about her experiences as a new community manager:
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This post is a follow-up and was inspired by our post The Value of Community Management.
About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.
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