Oh, I’m thinking Google Analytics in general (if that’s something your community uses), GA4 and GTM. But indeed, where to start?
A few key components are, in my opinion:
Market research: Regularly check for new insights, shifts in user demands, relevant global statistics, scientific research, new social media (and/or social customer) platforms and other information regarding the customers’ needs and preferences.
Analytics: The expanding shift towards better customer privacy makes it harder to monitor user behaviour on your platform. So on the one hand it’s important to know the services that can provide the best monitoring and data analytics tools (which kind of also belongs to market research), and on the other hand it’s important to know how to gather, understand, interpret and use the data that is available.
Web development: Every person who is in charge of running a web based platform should know the basics of web development. It makes knowing what’s possible and what’s not possible much easier, it makes dealing with software providers easier, it makes dealing with tech agencies easier.
Communication: It’s good to be a nerd (meaning: having a great level of skill in a specific technical field). It’s better to be able to get across that knowledge to people who don’t have that skill. I’ve sat through many meeting in my life where managers (without basic web development skills) and programmers (without good communication skills) weren’t able to properly talk to and understand each other and therefore a lot of time got wasted and a lot of potential was lost.
Super answer this one, @bjoern_schulze - thanks!
Market research: Regularly check for new insights, shifts in user demands, relevant global statistics, scientific research, new social media (and/or social customer) platforms and other information regarding the customers’ needs and preferences.
I agree with this one. Community Round Table, Feverbee, and some online conferences and webinars make up the bulk of this, resource wise. If anyone can recommend other sources, please share.
Analytics: The expanding shift towards better customer privacy makes it harder to monitor user behaviour on your platform. So on the one hand it’s important to know the services that can provide the best monitoring and data analytics tools (which kind of also belongs to market research), and on the other hand it’s important to know how to gather, understand, interpret and use the data that is available.
Super important to be ahead of the curve both on analytical tools (any recommendations? Is Mix Panel better then GAs for example?), and data handling and deletion policy. A big area this one!
Web development: Every person who is in charge of running a web based platform should know the basics of web development. It makes knowing what’s possible and what’s not possible much easier, it makes dealing with software providers easier, it makes dealing with tech agencies easier.
Yep this makes a lot of sense. Some basic HTML and CSS understanding actually doesn’t take that long to acquire. But I guess it’s subjective what one defines as ‘basic’. This is an area that may also see technological disruption, with code writing code and user friendly interfaces. Or maybe that’s the wishful thinking of a lazy novice…..?
Communication: It’s good to be a nerd (meaning: having a great level of skill in a specific technical field). It’s better to be able to get across that knowledge to people who don’t have that skill. I’ve sat through many meeting in my life where managers (without basic web development skills) and programmers (without good communication skills) weren’t able to properly talk to and understand each other and therefore a lot of time got wasted and a lot of potential was lost.
People are still key. Humans and human contact, relationships and meaningful interactions. The original skillset of a community manager was surely based on this. It’s good to hear this hasn’t gone away.
Hey @timcavey we had a similar conversation a few years back, some of that is still relevant, so I’ll throw a link here for anyone curious:
With regards to future proofing our work, I think being aware of what is going on in the general world of social media and forums is useful. Find a few thought leaders that you resonate with and read up on their thinking (and find a few that you think are wildly off track, too, just to challenge your own thinking). You don’t need to do everything they do, but often times you’ll find some interesting tidbits of information that you can leverage on your own platform.
What do you need to be good at? In my opinion you won’t get far without knowing how to leverage your data, and finding inspiration on how to get -new- data. Analysing your community from a numbers perspective will often give you some insights that you can’t get from just reading the content. And try to find some new and interesting data points to follow and study. I’ve been working with @Kenneth R to segment our topic content in some new buckets that he’s been thinking about. This has resulted in some really exciting data that we wouldn’t have found without Kenneth’s idea, my willingness to try it, and some dedicated manual work by the Sonos mods. That insight wouldn’t have been evident through the usual analytics either.
So I guess the good old cliché of thinking outside the box and not being afraid to try some new stuff is a good way to future proof :)
