The Community Manager S Playbook

Savvy companies recognize the value of a strong community. Think of Nike and its community of runners, Nike+, and you’ll quickly understand that creating and fostering an online community around a product or brand is a powerful way to boost marketing efforts, gain valuable insight into consumers, increase revenue, improve consumer loyalty, and enhance customer service efforts. Companies now have the unprecedented opportunity to integrate their brand’s messaging into the everyday lives of their target audiences. But while supporting the growth of online communities should be at the top of every company’s priority list, all too often it falls by the wayside. That’s why brand strategy expert and digital marketer Lauren Perkins wrote The Community Manager’s Playbook (#CMplaybook on Twitter), a must-read guide for business and brand builders who need to strengthen their approach to online B2C community management and customer engagement. As Perkins explains, if companies want to create thriving online communities focused on their product or brand, they must do more than simply issue a few tweets a day, create (and then abandon) a Facebook page, and blog every once in a while. Instead, organizations of all sizes must treat community management as a central component of their overall marketing strategy. When they do, they will be rewarded handsomely with greater brand awareness, increased customer use and retention, lower acquisition costs, and a tribe of consumers who can’t wait to purchase their next product. Perkins not only teaches readers how to build an engaging community strategy from the ground up, but she also provides them with the tactical community management activities they need to acquire and retain customers, create compelling content, and track their results along the way. Distinctive in its comprehensive, step-by-step approach to creating online communities that are fully consistent with a company’s existing brand voice, The Community Manager’s Playbook: Explains how excellent community management provides a competitive advantage with a large impact on sales Provides an in-depth overview of brand and business alignment Teaches readers how to identify their community's online target audience and influence their needs and wants Details the appropriate online channels through which content should be distributed Champions the use of an agile approach through repeated testing to maximize the return on every company investment Discusses the many diverse metrics that can be used to measure community scope Today, there is no brand strategy without a community strategy. Companies that are not developing communities are losing control of their brands and missing opportunities to optimize their marketing investments. With The Community Manager’s Playbook as their guide, however, marketing professionals and the companies and brands they represent will be equipped with the tools they need to manage their online marketing efforts, engage their core customers at every level, leverage community insights into the product development cycle, and ensure that their messaging is heard across all corners of the digital landscape.

Reimagining Agile for Distributed and Remote Teams Distributed work is now inevitable, but conventional agile approaches are too "synchronous" for today's remote teams. Meetings, ceremonies, and rituals can become unsustainable when teams are scattered across the globe. The result: burnout, constant interruptions, a lack of deep work, poor work-life balance, greater frustration, and workplaces with poor diversity. In The Async-First Playbook, Thoughtworks Principal Product Manager Sumeet Gayathri Moghe provides tools and techniques to embed remote-native, asynchronous practices into traditional agile methods, making remote work more efficient, inclusive, thoughtful, and fun. Drawing on extensive experience leading distributed teams, Moghe addresses the "nuts and bolts" of specific practices and the crucial "softer" elements such as culture, mindset, and leadership. Short, practical chapters show how to adapt traditional agile techniques such as sprints and pair programming for the realities of today's distributed environments. Whatever your project, you'll learn how to create asynchronous environments that promote success, improve the workplace experience, and deliver better results. Discover why asynchronous collaboration is crucial to your project's success Learn the tools, skills, and protocols you need to get right in order to go "async-first" Map current agile techniques to async-first versions that better reflect today's realities Become a more supportive and effective leader of async-first teams Anticipate, navigate, and mitigate the pitfalls of async-first distributed work Bring it all together--walk through your async-first transition Access valuable resources, examples, and hands-on templates at the companion website "This playbook will empower you to lead and build differently. All that you need is an open mind and a belief that the status quo isn't worthy of defining the future." --From the Foreword by Darren Murph Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

This book will help organizations evolve into a fully collaborative social business. It serves as a step by step playbook to achieve organizational change, process efficiencies and technology acumen: Proven solutions for the real people, process, and technology obstacles businesses face in using social media behind the firewall. How to have the successful internal conversations with stakeholders, partners and global teams that lead to successful external conversations with the social customer Strategies for improving organizational dynamics, collaboration, governance, training, engagement, policies, technology integration, workflows, social CRM, and metrics Many organizations today have already evolved into social brands. They may be active on Twitter and Facebook; they may have corporate blogs and communities and they are trying hard to engage effectively with the social customer. However, behind the firewall, chaos, anarchy, and conflict reign. In Smart Business, Social Business, leading enterprise social business consultant shows how to build an internal framework based on change management that will lead to success with social media: one that will make external engagement more effective, meaningful, and sustainable. Michael Brito systematically identifies the internal culture, process and technology obstacles to long-term success with social media, and offer best practice solutions. He discusses a wide spectrum of issues, offering actionable intelligence and helping decision-makers build strategies and plans that deliver value. Topics addressed include change management, organizational models and dynamics, internal communications, collaboration, governance, metrics, training, employee activation, policies, technology integration, workflows, social CRM, and much more. Drawing on his own experience working for Silicon Valley companies, HP, Yahoo! and Intel, Brito presents dozens of examples and case studies. Using this book, companies can begin to transform their organizations from just a "social brand" to a fully collaborative and dynamic "social business.”

Why do some companies have a seemingly flawless reputation while others constantly fight a losing battle? Maybe you've always kept social media at arm's length, but the thought of a crisis unfolding online keeps you awake at night. Or you are aware you should be giving clearer direction to your team in the area of reputation building, but aren’t sure what to demand or what questions to ask. If so, then the Reputation Playbook is for you. The fundamental principles of reputation-building haven't changed for decades, but the advent of social media means transparency around how a business acts has. News, good or bad, now travels at internet speed, so to protect and enhance its reputation a business needs to be prepared to respond in real time, whether to customer interaction, news stories or operational errors. And as the leader of your business, the reputation buck stops with you. Your team expects, and needs, you to take the lead. You don't need to know the how when it comes to using social media, but you do need to know why it is critical that it’s on your radar. So you won't find instructions on how to use the various social media platforms in the Reputation Playbook. You will find a lively and insightful examination of how social media affects corporate reputation-building, filled with practical advice and punctuated with real-life examples from the companies that are doing it right - and those that have got it wrong. Jennifer Janson has gathered data and thoughts from the world’s leading thinkers on corporate reputation and also provides a framework for evaluating and mitigating your business' reputational risks. Most important, the Playbook tells you what questions to ask of those around you to ensure your business is building a strong reputation, and minimising the risk of reputational damage, long before a crisis arises. It is time to think about how your business reputation is affected by social media. All you need to get you started is the Reputation Playbook.

American business is dysfunctional. Companies of all sizes follow the mistaken belief that their products and services are best sold through mega-customers with pervasive market reach, such as Amazon and Walmart. Far too many business leaders fail to realize—until it is too late—that the relentless pursuit of volume at all cost is not the key to long-term profits and success. The Customer Trap: How to Avoid the Biggest Mistake in Business is Thomas and Wilkinson’s sequel to The Distribution Trap: Keeping Your Innovations from Becoming Commodities, which won the Berry-American Marketing Association Prize for the best marketing book of 2010. The Distribution Trap contended that cracking the big-box channel is not necessarily the Holy Grail that many marketers assume it is. The Customer Trap takes this thesis to the next level by arguing that all companies, regardless of the industry there are in, should maintain control over their sales and distribution channels. Volume forgone by avoiding the mass market is more than offset by higher margins and stronger brand equity. The Customer Trap shows that giving power to a customer who violates "the ten percent rule" sets a company up for ruin. Yet, when presented with the opportunity to push more sales through large customers, most decision-makers jump at the chance. As a result, marketing has come to resemble a relentless quest for efficiency and scale. Demands from mega-customers in the form of discounts, deals, and incentives erode the integrity of the brand and what it originally stood for. Lower margins become the norm and cost-saving compromises on quality take over. In time, the brand suffers and, in some cases, fails outright. Stark examples from Oreck Vacuum Cleaners, Rubbermaid, Goodyear, Levi’s, and others illustrate the perils of falling into the "customer trap." This book demonstrates in vivid detail how to thrive by controlling your sales and distribution. The authors show how many firms, such as STIHL Inc., etailz, Apple, Red Ant Pants, and Columbia Paints & Coatings, have prospered by avoiding the "customer trap"—and how your company can have similar success.

A unique approach to today's hottest new job in social media Today's social community managers use social media platforms and act as brand evangelists and community advocates. From creating viral content to crisis communication to leveraging community content, social managers manage online social communities and deal with what comes. Luckily, The Complete Social Media Community Manager's Guide: Essential Tools and Tactics for Business Success is the perfect resource for how to do this increasingly high-profile and crucial job. The book features proven tactics and techniques for effective management and includes more than 40 field-tested tools and templates. If you're a social community manager, learn how to grow a community and achieve the results you need. Topics include a detailed guide to today's social media platforms, how to organize and successfully share content, using metrics and reporting, and more. Helps social media community managers develop, cultivate, and convert their social media communities Does a deep dive into today's crucial social media platforms Provides a complete toolkit of over 40 field-tested tools and templates on everything from how to craft a plan to developing an editorial calendar, tracking results, and more Explains how you can organize and successfully share content among your target community and how to leverage that content to further amplify your message The Complete Social Media Community Manager's Guide: Essential Tools and Tactics for Business Success is a must-have resource for one of the hottest new careers in today's social world.

Digital Pharma Marketing Playbook is a first-of-its-kind-of book. It is the first and only book that presents 101 cases in digital pharma marketing. These cases show how some of the leading pharmaceutical companies across the world have used digital and social media channels. They are also excellent learning opportunities to all pharma marketing and brand managers, and students of pharmaceutical marketing. Digital transformation is sweeping the world around us. Everything these days has become digital. The ever-increasing rate of adoption of wearable devices and the advent of the internet of things are digitizing more and more of our experience. At the same time, healthcare in general, and the pharmaceutical industry, in particular, have been lagging in adapting to a digital strategy. It is not that the pharma is new to multichannel marketing. The pharmaceutical industry traditionally has been following a multichannel marketing strategy, where most of the channels have been static rather than dynamic. The number of channels has increased significantly due to the internet explosion. Pharma is moving to a multi-stakeholder world, a world in which stakeholders beyond the prescriber are gaining importance. These new influencer groups such as patients, nurses, payers, and regulators are increasingly turning to digital channels for their information needs regarding healthcare. Digital, therefore, plays a vital role in reaching these new audiences. If you want to maximize the impact of your marketing communications, can you afford to ignore the channels that your stakeholders are frequently using? Of course, not. Therefore, the question is not, to digitize or not to digitize, but how soon and how effectively? Why a Digital Pharma Marketing Playbook? Because, a playbook is a one-stop-read or single-source resource for all the essential information that you need on a given sport — in our case, Digital Pharma Marketing. If you can make work more fun and enjoyable it is play! Moreover, when work becomes play, there are no goals that you cannot score!Contents: 1. Challenging Times! Changing Rules! 2. Digital Revolution 3. Digital Pharma Marketing 4. Social Media Marketing and Pharma 5. Digital Transformation

Brand marketers are still taking their first steps into the digital world by migrating their traditional mindset into the new communication channels they have at hand. Traditional branding, being strongly based on reach & frequency, is being copied to digital branding initiatives, thus ignoring the great opportunity digital media provides, as a two-way communication channel, to further engage with their audiences.The book proposes a comprehensive measurement framework to help shape the mindset of the next generation of digital brand marketers and enable them to focus not only on brand exposure and its impact on sales, but also on the brand experience they can now create using digital media, and its impact on long term profitability.It guides you on a step by step through the five stages of the framework:1. Expose your brand2. Attract people to your brand territory3. Engage providing valuable experiences4. Retain attention over the long term5. Influence perception, intent or behaviorWe also provide the set of KPIs that need to be measured at each of the stages. KPIs are designed to fulfill two different needs: the need to optimize efforts on a day-by-day basis, and the need to assess high-level success at each of the stages of the framework. Finally, we'll help you bring accountability by surfacing the link between your online branding efforts and the most important outcomes expected from any branding campaign: to drive sales and to grow loyalty.