7 Deadly Mistakes in Selling Social Media | Altitude Branding | The cardinal sin of community management. Once you have a product launched, you will the face the joys – and the despair – of a community that grows up around it. I won’t sugar-coat this: it is one of the most difficult and frustrating aspects of building a company online. There are many articles by many experts (myself included) extolling the virtues of listening to customers. In fact, there are so many of these propaganda pieces that this question might naturally cross your mind: if listening to customers is so great, why do we need so much propaganda?
I’ll tell you the honest truth: listening to customers is gruesome, uncomfortable, and painful work. Yet few products these days can succeed without their online community, and the insight you can gain from interacting with that community is unparalleled, despite the pain. This probably sounds illogical. Let me give an especially painful example. We did not take this step lightly. Yet none of that mattered, because we violated the cardinal rule. There’s only one catch. How to deal with bad apples in your online community | Community. No online community is perfect – there will come a time (if it hasn’t happened already) when a member becomes abusive or confrontational. Dealing with these bad apples can be a challenge – they will often stir up emotions and lead to a huge spike in member engagement and discussion.
However, it’s unlikely that this is the kind of activity you want to see in your online community. Arguments and controversy The Just Chat message boards used to see more than their fair share of arguments and controversy – and it led to a great buzz in the forums. This worked for a while – however, the negative feelings soon spread back into the main forums. This was a difficult decision to make as the members that were ultimately banned were amongst the most active.
At the end of the day, less than five members were banned. The morale of the story is this – controversy and arguments create activity and engagement, but they can easily spiral out of control and poison your community. Persistence Ignore inShare0. A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media « Web Str. Update: Aug 2011, we’ve conducted a research project to analyze these social media crises, read the full report to find out what went wrong and how to prevent it. A list of companies that were blind-sided by the internet, they didn’t understand the impacts of the power shift to the participants, or how fast information would spread, or were just plain ignorant. Criteria of “Punk’d” includes a situation where the story would have not been told if social media was not available, or if social media enhanced the situation. Read my exclusive interview with Greenpeace on Forbes. This doesn’t include fake blogs, companies who deliberately tried to cheat the system get their own honorable mention.
Although this punk’d list is the one to stay off, the one you want to get on is the Groundswell awards. Update: I’ve added severity status for some of these Punk’d using the Categorization of Brand Backlash Storms) In communites, little things can mean a lot « Online Community S.