[Build Backlinks Online] Meet Your Community-Building Team

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Meet Your Community-Building
Team'


Posted by Mackenzie Fogelson
Building a community around your brand isn't just about the strength of your
social media presence. Its not about how you manage your social media outlets or
whether youre on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter. Its not about how many blog
posts you write or how often you use video or email marketing.
Its about building a company.
A thriving community one that brings visibility, targeted traffic, trust,
credibility, conversions, customers, and ultimately revenue is built upon a
solid business that is investing tirelessly in its products, its services, and
improving the experience it provides for its customers.
If you want to build your business and a community around your brand, you've got
to provide value. Youve got to create the right content. You've got to
effectively integrate SEO. And, most importantly, you've got to have the right
team.
And Im not just talking about your marketing team.

Time to drop the silos

If you want your team to be successful at building your community and your
business, youve got to think differently. And youve got to drop the silos.



Your team's specific jobs and designations are important to the day-to-day
running of your company's business (otherwise I wouldn't have bothered writing
this post). But there is one big overarching truth for each and every person
associated with the company: In the broad scope, it doesn't matter what your job
title is, what department youre in, or what your job description is. Your role
is to do whatever it takes to make the company thrive.
Everyone who works in your company is on the same team: the team that wants to
accomplish the stuff that matters and will make your business a success.
So whos gonna do the work?
As weve worked with companies (in many different industries and all with unique
challenges) to build their communities and their businesses, weve been asked to
help them understand the roles that are involved and also provide guidance as to
best structure their team.



In our experience, what follows are some of the roles that are necessary to have
on your community- and business-building team.
But before we get into that, please note:

Im not suggesting that you hire one person for each of these roles. Depending on
the size (and the goals) of your company you may have many people doing many
things. This is simply a rundown based on our experience with both small and
large companies who have embarked on this community-building extravaganza. My
intention is to provide some general guidance that you can then apply to your
unique situation.â¨

Theres a whole bunch of stuff that surrounds building your community and your
business that goes way beyond defining roles and team infrastructure like
earning buy-in, defining goals, developing strategy, execution and testing, and
evaluating and adjusting. You can get more information about all that good stuff
in my SearchLove slide deck. â¨â¨
Today, Im going to focus specifically on the roles of the team.


Now, back to our regularly scheduled program.
Allow me to introduce you to your community building team:
Project managementâ¨
Whos responsible
Someone to keep the entire team on schedule and on task. Even if youre working
with an external team (agency or other partners) who will take the lead on this
role, you need to have someone inside your company who is responsible for being
the internal project manager.
Whats required
Although this person may not be the one doing the daily nitty-gritty client
work, they will interface with all of your internal and external teams on an
ongoing basis to ensure that whatever needs to get done actually gets done, and
that everyone is working toward the same goals and off of the same creative
strategy. â¨â¨Ideally, when bringing in an outside agency,
you want to work together to clearly define the expectations for this role, how
it relates to communication, and who specifically is being held responsible for
getting stuff done.

Community managementâ¨
Whos responsible

Someone who can represent your brand on social media, as well as monitor and
manage the rest of your team's social media activity.
Depending on your goals, your community manager will most likely assume two
identities: one as your brand (your logo is their face):
And one for their own individual presence under your brand:



Whats required
Because this role is so demanding, I would highly recommend (especially for you
smaller companies out there) that its not filled by your CEO or someone who
cannot commit their attention on a daily basis. And, please, for the love of Dr.
Pete, dont assign this role to an intern.
Community management is a lot of hard work (I repeat: A LOT). Especially if you
already have a thriving community, managing it requires a great deal of
attention, engagement, and consistency on a daily basis. Your community manager
is on a podium every day representing your brand, so be sure to choose the
person for this role very wisely.
In addition to the normal stuff like sharing value (and not just your own), your
community manager will be responsible for communicating whats going on with your
company, like events and products or service stuff. They will take the lead on
engaging and answering questions that may arise (with customer or product
support). Even more important is facilitating social monitoring and listening
(which is imperative) and probably (depending on size) handling some reputation
management.
If thats not enough, there will always be opportunities (things that they
observe that could contribute to the growth of your business, or simply to
building relationships) that arise in their interaction in and among the
community that will require further investigation. Thats a lot of load to carry
so your community manager needs to be one amazing (and capable) person.
Hands down, youll want to have an excellent communicator in this position as
they are the social face of your company. â¨â¨If youre
working with an agency to assist with community management, you can share the
load, but be sure to work together as a team to develop a plan for how
management will work. Be present and involved with strategy, execution,
engagement, and ensure whatever is being done is whats best for your company and
is working toward the goals that have been set.

Strategy, creativity, analysis, and directionâ¨
Whos responsible
Someone (or a few someones) who will develop and facilitate the direction of
your web marketing and community building efforts. If youre working with an
agency, you cancertainlylean on them to lead this piece with your direct
involvement.
Whats required
The most important part of this role is to ensure that all teams (both internal
and external) are working together to align all efforts with the goals that have
been set for your whole business (not just for SEO, social, and content).
Remember all of those departments I talked about above that are part of your
whole team? This is where they can play a role and contribute to strategy and
direction (and certainly creativity).
Its important that this role has worked with all of your teams to break those
goals downinto measurable KPIs that inform the creative campaigns that will
accomplish these objectives.
Of course, your efforts dont mean much if youre not measuring and analyzing
whats working and whats not. The person (or people) who are in the
strategy/creativity/analysis/direction role need to provide strategic guidance
based on actual data so that you can have confidence that youre moving in the
right direction.
Many of our clients also work with additional partnering agencies that drive
offline or PR efforts (more on this below). If thats the case for you, make sure
that all teams and partners are on the same page, working toward the same goals
and being extra careful to maintain the consistency and integrity of the brand.

Designâ¨
Whos responsible
Someone who can create any graphic assets that you need (and make you look
really, really good). This can be an internal designer or your partnering
agency. If youre working with an external team, again, ensure that youre
maintaining the consistency and integrity of the brand.
Whats required
Your designer is going to be responsible for designing and styling things like
blog posts and infographics, social media assets, email marketing templates,
banners and headers, and probably even landing pages.
The deal with the design role is just like every other role on this team. Dont
silo. Your designer is more of a production person who would probably rather be
doing the work than dictating strategy, but they still have creative ideas and
valuable feedback that would be worth hearing in the initial planning stages.
Dont be lame. Make them a part of the entire process.

Content

Whos responsible

Someone who can write a variety of content like their life depended on it,
because as you know, content is not just blog posts. Well just call this genius
the content strategist.
Whats required
Your content strategist needs to be able to adapt to the context thats
necessitating the content. And above all, the content they develop needs to be
driven by the overarching goals and strategy set forth for the business.
You want a content strategist who can be creative and, well, strategic. Its
important that this person is thoughtful not only about audience but also about
how to balance creativity and conversion.
Outreach is going to be a big part of your content strategists job, both pre-
and post-launch (more on this below). The person whos creating your content
needs to think about whos going to care about that content before they even
write it (Paddy Moogans rule. If you havent, you should read his book). They
also need to be connecting with the SEO in the early planning stages in order to
determine how this piece of content will be optimized, as well as determining if
its been done before (and, in that case, how it can be done different/better).
If you dont have the resources in-house to develop the content you need, you can
outsource this role to an agency. And yes, they can assist you in creating
strong, quality content that effectively represents your brand, but this takes a
lot of work and collaboration;you need to be present and a part of the process.
You will want that agency to understand your business, so let them ask a lot of
questions. If youre too busy to answer their questions in an email, grant them
aphoneinterview or allow them to sit in front of the CEO (or whoever else they
need information from who may not be readily available) so they can extract
exactly what they need to produce stellar content on your behalf. Then, of
course, provide your input and revisions once youve seen a draft.
Like any member of your team, your content strategist cant work in a silo.
Content plays an enormous role in accomplishing the goals you have set for your
business, so make your content strategist a part of the entire process from the
very beginning (starting with goals and strategy development) so that they fully
understand the bigger picture of why this content needs to exist.
After the content they've created has been released into the world, be sure to
provide them with access to the data so that they can determine how well it
performed and what could be done differently the next time around.

SEO

Whos responsible
Someone who loves research, analysis, keywords, and probably Google so that they
can properly and effectively manage and lead the optimization of all the stuff.
Ideally, you also want this person to have more than a passing knowledge of
strategy.
Whats required
The most important thing to note with the SEO role (I've said it before, and
I'll say it again) is that no man is an island. You need an advanced SEO who
will contribute as one of the most powerful players on your team.
Like all the other roles on your community building team, the SEO needs to be
involved right from the beginning. If you have the right SEO on your team, their
ginormous analytical brain will be contributing to strategy. Not just SEO
strategy, but the strategy youre using to drive your whole business. They can be
relied upon to provide some left-brain steadiness to your presumably
right-brained creatives.
And dont forget content, outreach, creativity, and direction, too.
The best thing about your SEO is that they can provide you with the information
you need to make data driven decisions about your business, but they cant do
that if theyre sitting in the corner building links all day long. Whoever ends
up playing this role for you, give them the credit they deserve and know theyre
capable of a whole lot more than keywords.

Email marketing⨠(and other stuff, too)

Whos responsible
Someone who can design, develop, and coordinate email marketing campaigns to
deliver the value your team is creating in relationship to your strategy (in
other words, someone who will know how to effectively use email marketing to
build relationships and grow your business).
Whats required
Email marketing is a great way to build community with the people who want to be
a part of it as well as those who already are. Your existing customers are your
best brand advocates, so youll want to make sure that youve got email marketing
covered somewhere among the members of your team.
And wait for it dont silo this role either. Because email marketing can be
used to accomplish many goals, this role requires big-picture thinking right
from the beginning, so dont leave this person out.
Certainly there will be other tools that youll need your team to use besides
email marketing (Im sure Phil Nottingham is wondering when the heck Im going to
talk about video). Whatever vehicles youll be using to execute your strategy,
make sure youve designated someone on your team to fully embrace this
responsibility so it can be used to build your community and reach the goals
youve set for your business.

Reading and learning
â¨Whos responsible
Several people who are continually reading and learning about your industry,
looking for the good stuff to send along to your community and any innovative or
creative ideas that might just grow your business.
This role is up to everyone whos on your team.
But thats not to say that everyone on your team needs to be on social media. You
can involve everyone in the company in the knowledge seeking and soaking
portion, and then select specific people (like your community manager and others
who want to work with social media) to be the face of your brand and share that
information on your social media outlets.
Whats required
A whole lot of reading, learning, and sharing. Internally at Mack Web we use a
Google Spreadsheet that allows everyone on the team to contribute to the
knowledge that is shared with our community. This not only builds the strength
of our team, but also provides our community with a lot of variety.



We each focus on a specific subject about which were passionate (content,
operations, design, business, marketing, etc.) so that were not all reading the
same stuff. Each day we put at least one post into the queue for our community
manager to use.
I dont have to tell you that reading and learning is imperative to the success
of your business and the development of your team. Its also integral to the
growth of your community.When youre sharing other peoples useful content, youre
providing your followers with something of value and also opening the door to a
relationship with the people generating the content.
If youre working with an agency, they can help you identify what you can readand
share (as well as who you can follow) in order to build your community.
Ideally, your agency partners should be reading all of these things, too, and
bringing opportunities to your attention. If youve got everyone on your entire
team contributing with knowledge, your company will be unstoppable.
Reading and learning is probably the most important of all the roles, and can
dramatically accelerate the growth of your business and your community.

Outreachâ¨
Whos responsible
Several people who are developing relationships and helping to keep those people
and the rest of your community involved in what youre doing, so that they can
partake in it and benefit from it. Call it link building or relationship
building, outreach is something that your entire team can do.

Whats required
Outreach is so much more than getting a link, and it needs to be done all the
time,not just online or via email, (and not just when you want to ask someone
for a favor).
Everyone can do parts of outreach. Sales can work the in-person and the online
relationships. Marketing can do its part to determine where the team is going to
earn links with the amazing creative content they're developing. The best people
on your team for outreach are the ones that love combining the digital world
with the face-to-face, because thats where the magic happens.
Because the role of outreach really falls on everyone, find the people who are
passionate about people, and teach them authentic ways to make it part of their
natural routine at work and throughout each day.
Website stuffâ¨
Whos responsible
Someone who is committed to executing changeson thewebsite. Like everyone on
your team, make sure whoever is responsible for this role understands the goals
of the company and is part of strategy execution so that theyre able to
prioritize. There are always a lot of shiny things (new plugins, new
applications, other fancy new doodads) that come in the form of tiny little
emergencies. Involving your webmaster with goals and creative strategy will keep
things running smoothly.
Whats required
Website work could be anything from revamping the navigation and implementing
user experience changes to integrating a blog and executing on-page SEO.
If youre working with an agency to lead your community building and web
marketing efforts, they will most likely provide your internal team or another
partnering agency with all of the instructions for what needs to be implemented.


Offline stuffâ¨
Whos responsible
The people who are handling all of the offline stuff like print collateral,
events, and maybe PR.
What's required

Offline stuff often affects the online stuff. Things like events, conferences,
and product launches. Its imperative that internal and external teams work
together (and with the direction of the project manager) in order to ensure that
everyone is effectively leveraging all efforts and working toward the same
goals.

Now go on, you go build your team

Im sure theres a role Ive missed, perhaps one imperative to the specific goals
of your business. This is just a start. It may be what what works for a little
while until your business undergoes a change. At that point, youll need to
reassess and reconfigure the roles of your team into what works for you.
The biggest thing I can leave you with is this: Think differently about your
team and the roles everyone plays. Expand your understanding of what each and
every person and department can contribute to your digital marketing. Theres a
lot more involved in building your community than managing your social media. By
now you know thats because its not just a community youre building. Its your
business.
If you want all of the benefits that a thriving community brings, focus on
building the best company you can possibly build. Move beyond marketing
initiatives and focus on your vision. Understand your customers better, and
learn what they need to make their lives better. Let the passion and drive for
what you do transform your company and your community, and put the right team in
place to do it.
Looking forward to your thoughts below.
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