February 7, 2010

We’re Crossing the Pond. Meet Us in London February 17th

We’re going to London, and we’d love to meet up! We’ll be speaking at the Parature Customer Experience Seminar, a free event at The Cumberland hotel in London on February 17th. Want to attend? Just register here. Thor will be presenting “Customer Service Is the New Marketing” at 11:30 a.m., and we’ll be hosting our own meet-up at the hotel.

If you’re not familiar with Parature, they offer on-demand, customer-service software (customer portals, knowledgebases, trouble-ticketing software systems, and live chat, among others). They integrate very well with Get Satisfaction. Serious Business (maker of Friends for Sale and other high-traffic Facebook games) uses Parature for help-desk tickets and Get Satisfaction for community crowd-sourcing. It’s a great combination that allows them to harness the knowledge of the huge number of people who play their Facebook games. All those customers have great ideas to share and advice to give to their fellow gamers. When they need to offer those customers one-on-one help, they can move a Get Satisfaction topic directly into their Parature system to resolve specific issues.

If you’ll be in or around London, joins us. Drop us a line if you want to meet and greet while we’re in London — or if you have questions about Parature integration.

By Amy Muller | Posted in appearances, conferences, news, partnerships | Comments (0)
February 5, 2010

The Last Words of a Community Manager

What happens when a community manager leaves their community? The simple answer is that someone takes their place. The more complicated answer: perhaps something new and unexpected happens.

I’ve been pondering this question because I’m departing my job as community manager at Get Satisfaction. Today is my last day. I’m off to help steward a new community where I’ll do my best to help people and drive participation for a whole new network of people. It’s a new challenge for me, and I’m excited at what I’ll learn and experience. A lot. I’m sure of it.

People know me here. They come back and look for me. Some of them consistently rely on me to help them get answers to questions they have about Get Satisfaction. Some have become virtual acquaintances, and a few have even connected with me on a more personal level. Heck, I’ve made a lot of friends here. I want to keep helping Get Satisfaction succeed — I know it will. I still want to be part of it in some way.

So when I hear someone reaching out for help, you might hear me answering. After all, I’m still a customer on Get Satisfaction. I follow a lot of conversations! To date, I’ve offered up 7,455 replies on Get Satisfaction. I’ve been given 675 stars! That’s a lot of participation. I’ll do my best to keep helping.

You’ll have plenty of other help. In addition to Amy, who most of you know as our organizer of all things community, we recently added two new people to our customer-facing team: Ginevra and Morgan. While it’s hard to unplug from the responsibility I feel for all the customers who use and have championed Get Satisfaction since we began, I’ll be able to do it because of them. They’re very talented, and just as friendly and approachable as everyone else at Get Satisfaction.

My parting thought — here in this last blog post where I indulge myself and think out loud — is this: The job of community manager seems different from other roles because you can’t really divorce yourself from the community. My online participation is recorded, part of history, yet still accessible and useful for future visitors. I like this feeling of being connected in this unique way, and I like the fact that I can continue to be part of the conversation. I can’t say that about any other job I’ve ever had. I’ve always had the desire to keep being a part of a group I’ve left, but I’ve never really had the hooks that kept my voice visible and influential.

I’ll miss my cohorts at Get Satisfaction, but again, we’re still connected. I owe all of the people here — and all of the people I’ve interacted with on Get Satisfaction — a huge debt of gratitude. You’ve taught me a lot. Thank you for letting me help you, for helping me along the way, and for providing me with some stellar conversation and insight over the past few years.

Let’s keep the conversation going.

E

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Want to keep in touch? Follow me on Twitter (@supereric) or subscribe to my blog, where I occasionally write about community management (as well as less serious stuff).

By Eric Suesz | Posted in community, team | Comments (2)
January 29, 2010

A New Role at Get Satisfaction: Community Education Specialist

2010 is already shaping up to be a great year. Change seems to be in the air everywhere, including here at Get Satisfaction. We’re growing, and fast. We have so many exciting developments in store!

We’ve added a number of new people to our crew, in areas like engineering, sales, marketing, user experience, customer outreach, community management, and support.

We introduced our two new Customer Support and Community Management team members to you here in our blog over the past couple of weeks — the very experienced, whip-smart, and outgoing Morgan Sherwood and Ginevra Kirkland. Give them a shout-out if you get a chance.

We’re all thrilled to have these outstanding women on our team, and I’m specifically thrilled because this will allow me to step into a new role, too. I’ll be supporting Get Satisfaction’s education-based initiatives. As more and more companies adopt a community-based approach to customer service, we’re increasingly asked to guide and counsel organizations on how, exactly, to do community management and find the best ways to use our product to achieve optimum value. I’ll be helping out on that front by leading product training sessions, best practice Webcasts, and meetings; building out additional help resources; and a host of other education-based projects.

On a personal note, this also allows me to shift my work schedule to spend more time at home with my kids, 7-year-old Quinn and 2-year-old Tesla — born nearly the same time we were launching Get Satisfaction!

After being on the front lines of our Get Satisfaction community for such a long time, it’s hard to unplug completely from all of the great conversation that happens. But now that these brilliant and capable people have joined our community team, I feel comfortable stepping out of the day-to-day and am excited to give more of myself to these education initiatives as well as to my little human start-ups.

You’ll still see me popping up in the community from time to time, though. And if your team is in need of some Get Satisfaction product training or Community Management best practices, please get in touch with us at education@getsatisfaction.com to discuss our education packages.

By Amy Muller | Posted in community, company, team | Comments (3)
January 25, 2010

Today Is Community Manager Day: Let’s Hug It Out!

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A journey of a thousand steps begins with… a tweet?

Last week, Jeremiah Owyang sent out a simple query: Is there a Community Manager Day? If not, why not? This sparked a lot of discussion across the Web and the Twitterverse and all the places where people who do community management get together to share ideas. Everyone seemed to agree: There should be.

So, now there is. Welcome to Community Manager Day. Every fourth Monday of January, as Jeremiah said, “Let’s take the time to pause, recognize, and celebrate the efforts community managers around the world are doing.”

Jeremiah’s initiative got us to thinking about where community management has been and where it’s going.

Our own community management team is made up of myself, Eric Suesz, and Ginevra Kirkland. Even our Customer Support Manager, Morgan Sherwood, has a background in community management and pops into our community to interact with our customers on the front lines. We’ve been fortunate enough at Get Satisfaction to recruit great talent, and I want to take this opportunity to exclaim how much I love working with these people. Every day, they handle their roles with graciousness, patience, kindness, and humor. Yes, there are challenging moments in community management, but the rewarding ones far outweigh the hard ones, and these folks always make it look easy.

The role of community manager has been expanding quickly. This year, many organizations will hire their first community manager, and the number of people filling that role is bound to increase dramatically in the coming years. So, who are they hiring?

Each particular community is different, of course. Some companies need people who can monitor the Web and reach out to customers. Some need strong communicators with public relations skills. Some need people with marketing savvy to help grow participation. Many organizations need someone with a combination of these skills.

Some companies — in particular larger ones — need community managers who are very focused on customer service and helping customers. That’s probably going to be the big growth of community management over the next few years. The job title of community manager will undoubtedly be handed out to front-line customer-service representatives who’ve been given special training and a mandate to solve a particular problem or help customers out with one specific product.

In general, the role of community manager is poised for huge growth, and smart companies are already beginning to realize they can offer their customer-service employees new tools to reach out proactively to help — and engage with — customers. They can turn what can sometimes be a one-sided, frustrating, phone-based job into an exciting, research-based, Web-surfing, ambassadorial role.

As the ranks of community managers rapidly grow, the key to the perception and understanding of what community management is really all about is to make sure the people we are assigning the role of community manager to are up to speed and up to the task. It will require all of us to share our best practices, as well as our best strategies, so we can get the word out about what works — and what doesn’t.

To that end, at Get Satisfaction we are working diligently on new ways to show companies, regardless of the size of their community, what they can do to build community. Some of what we’ve done can be found here in our blog, in our webcasts on GetSatisfaction.tv and even in our own community. We’re going to be doing even more this year to show companies exactly “how to be social.” We’ll review the tools you should be using, we’ll be writing about the strategies you should employ, and we’ll be supporting the people across the Web who are voicing important things about community management — like Jeremiah did today.

Thank you, Jeremiah, for getting us all to step up, take a bow, and raise the awareness of all the things community managers do every day. And thanks to all the other sponsors of this inaugural event, Bill Johnston, Connie Benson, Rachel Happe, Jake McKee, Sean O’Driscoll, and Dawn Foster.

By Amy Muller | Posted in community, customer service, philosophy | Comments (1)
January 21, 2010

Introducing: Our New Community Team Member Ginevra Kirkland

We hired a bunch of new people! Lots of growth going on around our new 2010 initiatives. (Pssst: Stay tuned for a big announcement in the coming weeks.)

We’re formally — in an informal way — introducing you to all of the awesome new people who have been joining the Get Satisfaction team. Last week, we told you about our new service and support manager, Morgan Sherwood. This week: another superb addition to our community management crew: Ginevra Kirkland, joining us as Community & Account Manager.

Q&A time!

Eric: How did you find yourself here at Get Satisfaction? How did you make your way toward community management, and how long have you been doing it?

Ginevra: I started doing community management in 2004 as the community and account manager for Six Apart, supporting Movable Type. I moved around to sales and account management for a while, and then sauntered my way back to community management for TypePad. Almost six years.

E: How did community management work at Six Apart? Was it different for different product groups?

G: Well, sure. With Livejournal, for example, there was a lot of team effort to help out as community members, which really reflected that culture. There wasn’t assignment of tasks so much as everyone pitching in from personal accounts. Whereas TypePad, since there’s paid support, uses a support team with a ticketing system, as well as Get Satisfaction, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

We were an early adopter of using the social web for customer service, so it’s fascinating to see how that’s evolved as a customer-service channel. People were initially surprised that a company would respond in real-time. There was a middle phase of “Twustomer Service” *groan* that had growing pains on both sides: figuring out the best ways to both get attention and get in touch without yelling into the void. Now, it seems people are self-regulating and starting to understand that we all have to be nice to each other.

E: Great point. People do seem to have calmed down with the extreme ranting. I remember seeing your many responses on Get Satisfaction when you were the Six Apart community manager. The Six Apart team was one of our earliest customers, and a pretty great model of how to do it. What about before? I don’t think the job title of community manager even existed before you worked at Six Apart.

G: I was the first person at Six Apart to officially have the title of community manager. Before that, I worked with SEVEN Networks, a mobile tech company in Silicon Valley. The title was project manager, but basically, they brought me on board because I was the only person there that really lived and loved social media.

E: A term that wasn’t in currency yet, of course.

G: Right. Or to put it another way, I was the only one there who had a blog and was on Friendster, and I knew a lot about music, so I was their “cool young person” demo and smart enough to work there. I was there for about a year – it was how my current blog got its name, actually, because I would dream up Very Amazing And Important Blog Posts during the commute.

E: And before that?

G: Before that I was the “webmistress” at a dance music record label/shop in Washington, D.C. called Yoshitoshi. I was their first hire for anything Web-related. This was before Beatport and Amazon.com, of course. We wanted to be an online record shop, and we were pretty successful at it. Bricks and mortar! Sticky eyeballs!

E: Okay, what about your first job ever?

G: Clown.

E: Get out!

G: My dad was a musician who started his own agency, and someone called him up asking for a clown for a kid’s birthday party. I was 16. I was a clown, a pink Power Ranger, did face painting. I had a book of magic tricks I was terrible at. I even did singing telegrams. It paid great!

E: That’s incredible! I think you may have already won our contest for most interesting first job. I’m thrilled you’re here to put all of your talent toward helping us at Get Satisfaction. We’re growing fast, and your skills are going to fit in perfectly.

G: I’m so glad to be here. Get Satisfaction feels like going from JV to varsity in a way. I particularly like the focus on not just one set of customers, but on a whole network of organizations. I also like the chance to lead by example, and to help other community managers find their own voice.

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Ginevra Kirkland writes a blog about how wonderful San Francisco can be called n-judah love song.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in team | Comments (5)