The concept of community is an evolving one and may carry a variety of responsibilities at every company, depending on size and basic organization. But by overlaying the time-tested 7 deadly sins on the most general of community management job descriptions, we can build  an initial list of “Don’ts.”

The 7 deadly sins of community

Lust

1. If you long for a vibrant, active (and straight-up conversational) community like Redhead Writing’s, remember to set the desired mood. Most of us want to dance, we’re just too self-conscious to step away from the wall until we’re invited. Go Macarena, Electric Slide or Funky Chicken. Shoo!
2. Remember to focus more on causes than counts. A large subscriber base may represent a deeper well but it doesn’t account for level of interest, likelihood of engagement, propensity to share, size of personal network, affinity or any other driver affecting distributed reach. Less can be more.

Pride

1. It’s not OK to willfully neglect the squeaky wheel, or one who needs more detailed hands-on help. How you assist these (tedious) few will be seen by the masses. Be gracious.
2. Build it assuming they should (will) come. Don’t do this.

Sloth

1. Careful not to mistake self-forming for self-sustaining. All teams need leaders. Your job is to keep things bubbling while allowing for genuine free expression.
2. Remember that others have expectations that need respecting, no matter what’s on your plate. You’re beholden to the community to resolve questions, respond to complaints, and direct them to proper resources.

Gluttony

1. Avoid force-feeding your brand’s own Kool-Aid instead of a more balanced diet. Remember the food pyramid? Share and promote smaller amounts of self-serving content (top of the pyramid) and more good stuff from other sources (body of the pyramid). Haven’t got enough material to fill an editorial calendar? Here are 34 content ideas. Boom!
2. Try not to give in to your baser instincts and forget your obligation to serve as a leader to a diverse group of people. Some people find the physical humor of America’s Funniest Videos hilarious; others not so much.

Envy

1. Like the sin of Lust, community doesn’t grow where there’s envy. If you wholly ignore what a competitor is doing right with their online engagement, it’ll show.  Don’t be afraid to give props where they’re due.
2. Yeah, if you’re reading this one then you know I ran out of juice. Come up with your own idea and share it in the comments, will you? <knuckles> I’m kind of married to this meme here.

Wrath

1. You shouldn’t take a community member’s comments personally, or react with emotions on your sleeve instead with a tempered, factual response that invites further discourse. The fathead’s comment was the event; you have to be controlled enough to dig into the issue. (OK, so maybe “fathead” isn’t kind. You’re allowed to say that in your head.)
2. When a community member finds a real flaw in your product or a burp in the process, don’t get your back up. Blocking or removal is reserved for asshats, not people with legitimate concerns. Sure, it might be a little toasty with all eyes on you. Just remember you’re charged with grace under fire, and admitting to being human (flaws and all) can win you hearts and minds.

Greed

1. Don’t move into every property, every shiny object with “land grab” mentality. That’s a knee-jerk response to the natural evolution of technology. Reserve your brand’s name if you’re concerned a competitor might squat on it, but take your time evaluating the scene before moving in.
2. Don’t ask the community to pony up time to complete surveys, reply to posts, fill out profile forms when you don’t follow up or do anything with the information you glean. One-sided relationships aren’t very fulfilling. If your brand has inspired others to join it on Facebook or Twitter, don’t leave them hanging. It’s a community, not a focus group.

As always, I’m anxious to see where you’d take issue with my points, or what you’d add to make it stronger. The comments are yours, please leave ‘em!

Image courtesy of LoveThesePics.

Author’s note:  I first published this post, titled “The 7 Deadly Sins of Community,” on the Oneforty blog July 14, 2011 as a contributing author. I’m cross-posting here so that Insights & Ingenuity readers might also learn and enjoy.

Because they’re not clustered in nice fat groups claiming a proud central space in the garden, they’re not complimented by neighbors of other carefully-groomed organic matter. They’re insubstantial, really.

These wild communities may be lone, thriving on a long-thought-dead channel with small membership numbers. It may be easy to discount the discovery of a wild community as unintentional, lacking organization (and brand stamp) and therefore, insignificant. Something that stubbornly survived the winter unprotected. But to discount the accidental community is to presume it has little merit. Unimportant. Incapable of rising tall and casting a long shadow.

That would be a mistake. If the long tail is a worthwhile SEO investment, would it not bear the same fruit for a brand community? Some companies think so, helping others walk the fringe of their community gardens to discover untapped possibilities. Information can flower into knowledge, and knowledge is power.

I get it. Budgets are tight, revenue is down and resources are scarce. Outliers, while duly noted, are the least of your worries.

That is, unless there are holes in your operations and you’re deaf to customer feedback about broken old processes. Unless your service delivery people aren’t inspired to own each customer’s happiness, one call or tweet at a time. Unless you prefer 1x customers over those with strong LTV potential for your brand. In these instances, you better believe even the outliers matter because small can multiply.

Are you looking outside your carefully tilled, fertilized, and weeded patch of Facebook (or Twitter, or G+) ground for your brand’s accidental communities? What do you do when you find them?

Image courtesy of  Horia Varlan.

The story of your brand is a love story. It starts with a spark and you flirt with the idea of making into something more permanent. As the  relationship develops, you learn more about what works for your brand and what doesn’t. In the end, you and your brand become tied together in something that resembles a flourishing marriage.

But as with every marriage, it takes continuous work to build and maintain a brand. Cracks in the foundation start small. It can start with missed opportunities and develop into embarrassing, public snafus. It doesn’t help that you’re often burning the midnight oil working on your brand. Anyone can experience burnout after that kind of intense focus for any significant length of time. Sometimes you lose the passion that once fueled you. Sometimes you fall out of love in your brand while getting caught up in the millions of little things it takes to maintain every day.

So what do you do when you’ve fallen out of love with your brand? Well there’s no real easy answer. Start with remembering why you were so passionate about it in the first place. Go back to those early days and think about what you wanted to build and where you wanted to be by this time. If you have a partner, take them down memory lane with you to help you remember. Often, the loss of passion comes from straying from the core principles you built the brand upon. Sometimes you can find that loving feeling again just by identifying where you’re off track from your original goals and make moves to get back to them.

If there isn’t necessarily a break from your original vision for the brand, maybe it’s time to think about re-branding. Go over your brand with a fine tooth comb and identify the areas that aren’t working. Look for areas producing lack luster results or that have lost their shine over the years. Slash and burn the things that embarrass you or hold your brand back. Consider bringing in a third party to consult with you on where you can make thoughtful changes that deliver big impact. Once you know what to change, re-branding practically directs itself. You can schedule a relaunch of a new, improved brand you can be proud. It will have all of the bones of your old one with new life from your changes.

The third option is for those who have fallen so far out of love with their brand that there is no turning back. There maybe no straying from the original path or need for new ideas at all. Your brand may be moving along smoothly without any trouble at all. It could actually be at the top of its game. You just don’t want any part of it anymore. In that case, there’s nothing to fix. Instead, you should start looking for ways to pass on your brand to someone who is still passionate about it, whether that’s a current partner, a new partner or selling it to another party entirely.

Whichever route you choose, just remember that it’s not failure to fall out of love with your brand. It doesn’t mean your brand is worthless or that you’re doing something wrong. It just means that something isn’t working. If you can figure out what that is and how to approach it, you’re still in good shape.

Guest Post: Princess Jones is the founder of P.S. Jones Communications. She writes about entrepreneurship and branding on She’s Self-Employed, a website for women who own and operate their own businesses. For information about branding, business and passion, connect with her on Twitter.

Several high-profile brands gained attention recently as a result of social media snafus. The interwebs buzzed about Red Cross and Chrysler; the former serving as a good example of what to do when a certain type of crisis hits. In contrast, the latter spawned much negative discussion over the actions of the iconic auto maker, the agency managing its social media participation, and the person assigned to operate the Twitter account.

The Red Cross incident got us laughing. A new phrase (“getting slizzard”) was coined to describe relaxing and having an adult beverage (or two) with friends.  Handled with aplomb, grace, and self-deprecating humor, dare I say the venerable institution suffered no longer than a nanosecond in social media years due to the errant tweet.  The incident even took a positive route when citizens began donating blood to carry on the hashtag meme.

But the Chrysler debacle raised several issues for some folk:

1. Chrysler’s decision to use an external agency to tweet on behalf of the auto maker
2. The flavor of the off-brand tweet itself
3. The creator of the unfortunate tweet possibly skirting responsibility for his unfortunate actions
4. The agency’s decision to terminate the twitterer
5. A glaring paradox. Elements of the tweet (use of profanity and rude attitude to Detroit) suggest the person tweeting was unfit for the social media role and as such, poor representation of the Chrysler brand. Yet Eminem, celebrity endorser for Chrysler’s recent “Imported From Detroit” campaign, built a multi-platinum career on his misogynist attitude and profane lyrics. It might seem the commercialized,  immoral potty mouth you know is more acceptable than the blind-tweeting, angry potty mouth you don’t.

Then there are the conversations that started in the wake of these snafus which pontificated where social media should live – in marketing, corporate communications, or  shared organizational ownership – as though some other arrangement would have precluded the gaffes. As though a different nexus of control would have provided a cushiony buffer from blunders and placed its members beyond reproach.

I Fail, You Fail

I call B.S. Here’s the thing I think almost everyone’s forgetting – we all make mistakes. And sometimes we even have inadvertent help in our failings. Those T-Rex size errors can cause significant damage to timelines, relationships, or budgets.  And as damaging as they may be, I think what we should be doing is looking at root cause, not last-man attribution.  So yeah, the youngling made a really stupid tweet. He exercised poor judgement, probably fresh from a frustrating ride into work. But did anyone stop to look at how the pivotal moment when he clicked the “tweet” button came to be? Until those steps are examined, this type of snafu will continue to happen. Social media governance will only get stronger when we bake learings from these “a ha!” moments into our guidelines.

Brand Immersion

I don’t know anything about Chrysler’s social media policy, New Media Labs’ training protocols, or the tools and methods employed with their client accounts. That said, I’m betting that hands-on employees (like the 25-year old who made the career-altering tweet about Detroit) receive little by way of brand immersion when they’re handed the keys to the accounts. At best, they may get some type of dry brand standards manual that does little to help them inculcate and absorb key brand values.  We remember best that which we experience with all of our senses – these people should be touring factories, examining auto spec sheets, reading customer survey feedback, test driving vehicles, interviewing sales people, and anything else necessary to successfully represent the brand online.

I wonder what information may have been shared with the rank-and-file with regard to Chrysler’s “Imported From Detroit” campaign. Did they see the final polished spot on the big screen, same as the rest of us? To someone unfamiliar with the fundamentals of brand positioning and core messaging, the long-term strategic objective, that commercial may have simply been a hot ad. In the absence of knowledge about what made Eminem so significant (to Chrysler), someone might have mistaken the celebrity endorsement as tacit permission to carve a more raw edge with tweets and updates.  See what I mean about having  inadvertent help when we fail?

Everyone Needs The Knowledge

Bottom line? If a branding idea is important enough to warrant a series of briefs and months of creative development, then consider the ways the idea will touch every employee and agency partner. Better yet, develop agency partnerships built on mutual respect, trust, and a shared set of objectives. Invest in the relationship with 360 degree brand immersion. Have the frickin’ conversation about what it means to represent your brand!

Remember ~ Brand stewards don’t always carry employee badges; sometimes they sign the visitors log.

What’s your opinion – did the right thing happen when the young man was fired? Was it enough? Too much? What could or should have happened differently?

Make Your Community Character Count

Make good choices.  Set the standard.

Coaching community members to abide by codes of conduct may be a bit more challenging than censoring your own behavior as a manager. After all, it’s your job to moderate what goes on.  You’re the eye in the sky.  Set a tone and religiously maintain it.  Most participants will understand where the boundaries lay and abide by them.

Offer Your Letterman’s Jacket

People want to belong.  It’s part of our makeup to mingle with others who share like interests or idea nuggets.  We’re each unique birds but enjoy some commonalities – that’s why the community offers appeal.  It’s a place where we can relate, be understood, speak a shared language.

Reward those who want to stay close to your community. They’re you’re forward infantry.

Offer participants a widget they can place on their blog.  Send new members a coupon in the mail.  Drop handwritten postcards to randomly selected members each week just to touch base (or develop a retention strategy and use the postcards to reconnect with laggards). Send a T-shirt with a smart ass slogan to a select group of members during their birth month.

Hell, hold a monthly quiz then send a koozie to those who have the correct answer.  Later in the year challenge all koozie owners to a photo contest and award a big prize.  The point is to say “Hey, thanks for hanging out with us” and motivate them to continue demonstrating their community love.

Whatever you do, make sure it fits in line with the overarching objectives for the community.  Then do those things consistently.

Build Experiences Worth Sharing

It’s a community, not a podium.  Community implies acting selflessly and giving generously – resources, perspectives, information, ideas.  Myopia will not win you any friends, and it certainly won’t grow your base of influencers.

Instead, think about the spectrum of topics that might interest members.  Better yet, create a mind map to help push your thinking innew ways.  Develop a survey to discover precisely which subjects members would like covered.  Tap into the thoughts of the most active users with a deeper dive online focus group.  Stay true to the objectives, just remember there’s a wide margin around your brand the community can – and probably should – incorporate.

Open Your Playbook

These are your basic operating procedures, how your community rolls.  Get it out there so people can read it and live it.

Internally that may mean to formalize processes like editorial guidelines, style guides or a social media policy for brand contributors. It could be your crisis response plan.  Externally, that may mean making sure members know what to expect.  How do they get in touch with ______ about ______? What happens when______?  This becomes infinitely more complex when structured rewards programs are in place.

Remember that those who guide your community must be accessible if they’re to be responsive and supportive.  Institutionalize contact numbers, email addresses and social networks throughout your web site.  BizSugar has a pretty good example on their FAQ page.

These two posts have covered several pieces of the community-centric pie.  What pieces would you add?

Today is the first day of the work week and as usual we ended the day with our company meeting.  There’s only a small number of us, so we can be efficient with the 45 minutes we’ve allotted.

As usual, each team member spent a few minutes touching on the more complex, urgent, or higher-profile tasks facing them this week. Sometimes they relate those tasks to specific goals, be it client service, operations, marketing or sales goals. It’s nice to tie the daily transactions in with the bigger tickets.

I coordinate these meetings and generally steer conversation along. One of my goals for our time together is to review a topic or issue that’s a bit to the left or right of daily production but nonetheless part of the framework of our company.  Deeper stuff.  Like how sometimes short-term sacrifices have to be made in order to reach long-term success.

The Brand Embodies The Culture

We’re in the process of re-branding the company. We’ve evaluated the marketplace, reviewed the competition, discussed visions and opportunities, determined our value proposition and have crystalized our position, promise, and essence. We’ve created a new brand identity that’s synergistic with our offering, contemporary, and flexible.  For these and a number of other reasons, our small company is on the precipice of a great, roaring forward movement that’s very exciting. Now is the time to talk about culture. What it means to each of us as individuals, as a cohesive unit working in synchronicity, and its’ impact on the business and the brand.

So some of today’s “deeper stuff” was focused on strong culture, and the value an environment of shared principles and standards can bring to a growing organization.  A few excerpts from my handout:

Culture Equals =

• An integrated set of beliefs, knowledge, rituals, and traditions.
• The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.
• Values that give life to a business.

If we embody our culture and thread it into every customer, prospect, vendor touch point, then we will give all of them reasons to believe our brand promise:

Only Ovation Interactive provides complete digital signage solutions that help businesses build relationships and influence customers’ decisions.

We’re not yet at the point where we can articulate the culture, or even all of our values. Our vision exists but remains a little nebulous (no succinct elevator pitch yet). These facets are all incredibly important, and I’m personally very thrilled to be part of shaping a living, breathing organization in a high-growth industry offering a great product and conscientious value-added support. We have a lot of positives to draw on, and we’ll work through fleshing out those cornerstones together.

The Cobbler’s Children Hath No Shoes

It happens.  The reality of running hard and fast in pursuit of new business, good business that could potentially do wonders for your company, you loose your perspective to see yourself.  Your comapny.  As others–potential investors, potential clients, potential employees, and general audiences–might see you.

Check Your Image

I’m of the opinion that there’s no advertising or promotional substitute for the type of positive, influential impression you [your company] might make than your image.  The personality you project, the values that personality implies.  Goodness knows, a lot of companies have had image and little else, and managed to do some sizeable business nonetheless.  The fact that those types were short or relatively short-lived is immaterial because they exemplify my point:  by putting your best foot forward, everywhere and always, you project an image that says “Look at me.  Listen to me.  I have important things to say.”

Substance is a Given

Assuming that indeed, you have important, valuable things to say (and deliver), then your product/service will solidify that image.  Promises Kept. (that happens to be the tagline of a well-respected higher education marketing firm; I’m not copping it but rather paying homage–it’s a powerful commitment.)

Time for the Overhaul

In case you haven’t looked through a different pair of lenses lately, here are a few suggestions for taking some stock in your image.  Think of it as “What Not To Wear” or “Eye for the Straight Guy” kind of tough love–you may not want to take a look, but once you  listen to the professionals and put a leg in the right pant, you feel like a new person.  And voila! Goodbye “We’re doing okay,” Hello “Our people will get in touch with your people.” (who knew it only took the right fit and a good cut?)

1. Where do you see yourself in three years?  Physically, financially, developmentally, competitively, logistically?  Are your touchpoints synnergistic with that vision?  Essentially, do they reflect a credible evolution to that goal?
2. Outward-facing touchpoints (collateral, Web presence, templates, business cards, signage, etc.) are important, but inward-facing ones are, too.  Are your employees and vendors or suppliers familiar with your plans?  Seems each plays a role in achieving those goals.  If you can’t or won’t articulate to them the type of goals you have, are you potentially losing out on passion and drive–resources that could help propel your business forward?  People typically want to do good work.  Sometimes you just gotta tell them how they fit and what you hope they can do.
3. Recognize that by surrounding yourself–infusing your business–with smart, savvy, determined people, you’re priming the pump.  Good for you!  Now just be sure to trust your instincts and decisions, guide those rockstars, and empower them to lead.  Their methods may not be yours, and you may have to give some thought to how you feel about that.  But remember, you already said in #1 that you want to be There, right?
4. There’s bound to be some casualties.  It’s a given when there’s a vision, a group of pioneers, and a goal.  Remember:  what got you here may not get you there.

I had a notion strike me, likely spurred by my informaniac-like consumption of written material (articles, reports, posts, papers, editorials, presentations, webinars, books, cereal boxes, the list goes on.  It’s like a compulsion).  Lately I’ve been pondering the aggregated net effect of one’s involvement (commitment is implied) and participation in UGC (user generated content).

Where does it get you?  What does it give you?  Maybe moreover, What does it create? What does that mean for your brand, and the appeal it might have to others?

We’re familiar with “Google Juice” and the concept that algorithms are a strange, tantalizing, and sometimes elusive gossamer veil that can surround your digital presence (assume it starts with a blog or site) and make faerie magic happen. Throw in analytics-a mind-numbing if thrilling cloud of pixie dust–and you now know the “how” and “where” (and maybe some idea of the “who,”  and “when,” too).  Still pining for the “what.”

By extrapolation, when other “connector pieces” like Twitter, Facebook, Social Vibe, Flickr, Slideshare, StumbleUpon, etc. are factored in, the picture in my mind starts to resemble a Tinkertoy creation.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Now we’re mixing juices, pomegranate+cherry.  Cranapple+grape.  Strawberry+raspberry+pineapple.  De.lic.ious. and Digg.

Less Nutritious Alternatives?

What are the implictions when your UGC or social media reach is, say, a 3-Tinkertoy creation instead of a 9-Tinkerytoy creation.  There’s less to work with.  Is your involvement–or lack of, maybe more accurately–hampering your brand appeal?  Not available, findable, “in the stream”? Think what it might mean in traditional marketing  sense–fewer spots, infrequent rotation,  restricted print runs.  What might this mean to your reach, impressions, or message reinforcement?

For certain it means one message, fewer connectors/channels in which to mirror the rosy glow you had going on.

If your expectations are in line, then I say not attempting to go full-bore is just fine.  I believe you’ll get out of online branding what you put into it.  And once the resources or time are in place, then those efforts can always be stepped up (you def don’t want to step down, could cause some bad feelings).  I’ll bet in a short while, you’ll start seeing the fruits of your labor (sorry for the pun).  I know I did–Just by participating in some Q&A’s on LinkedIn that interested me, and Twittering more often, I saw about a 50% increase in traffic to my blog.  Now my bounce rate is higher than I’d like, but since the magical calculation doesn’t handle blog landing pages very well (those where stories are laid out in continuous timeline on a single page), I’ll balance that with some of the other criteria points.

Daily Supply of Vitamins

To get back to the question on hand–what does your conversation participation create?  What does it do?  What does it mean for your brand?  The answer is simple, really, and already outlined above.

Vitamins are not a substitute for good nutrition.  They are called “supplements” for a reason.  And I believe that one Tinkertoy connection supplements–compliments–another.  The more connectors you have, the greater the exposure points to potentially great people, resources, companies, ideas, and news.

So do a little, do a lot.  Be a joiner or a follower (def don’t be a lurker) or even a leader! Build your creation in any fashion you want to.  Just do it with passion, enthusiasm, an eye for detail, and  a vision in your mind.

Your personal brand will be strongest when you’re participating (or leading) consistently and authentically.

So by now, after a few decades of television spots, radio commercials, mail directed to “Or Current Resident,” outdoor boards, and the like, we pretty much know when we’re being played. We hear you, but we’re not really listening. We can make up our own mind without you, Thank You Very Much.

Enter the genius of brand experience. I mean, it’s an easy concept to get (duh, think Target vs. Wal-Mart or Publix over Aldi) but frankly it’s like being sprinkled with pixie dust. You find a happy place where somewhere in the background is some subtle relaxing music, you see cool things merchandised in ways that make you think you, too, can have a totally feng shui living room and chairs are superfluous.

That’s because brand experiences (like Target), whether physical or virtual, can convert prospects into customers and customers into card-carrying (literally!) brand evangelists. These experiences are by definition interactive, encouraging dialogue and ideally an intimate and unforgettable dance between brand and consumer.

When brands create experiences that create real value, the brand pulls customers into it, rather than pushing a message out at them. The natural entanglement deepens the relationship with existing customers, forms strong bonds with new ones, and helps generate favorable viral contagion.

The experience must derive from a strategic insight relevant to the brand.