Community Management 101 - Be there, always

I'm not going to bother with what companies do wrong, it's just too much, instead I aim to present ways to do it right.
Saves us time and you can evaluate your support on the way.

First of all: Welcome to 2010. We've gone beyond forms and copypaste mail responses that users have to wait a week to get, again.



Everyone needs a hand to hold when it's dark

If you're going to manage a community, don't try to drag your community to your $15,000 website with forum and whatnot.
Go to your community.
Our main and only line of communication is Facebook.
We have a page there, it comes with a discussion board and a wall to post on.
Our announcements can be commented on and all our users can send me direct messages.

The reason - Almost all of our users have Facebook. It's free. And we get free PR in that all their friends can easily see that they like us, we pop up in recommendation lists and our community can just 'Share' our announcements with their friends instantly.


Also by being there, our users don't have to sign up anywhere if they want help, they don't have to find our website (We have one, but I'm sure 9/10 users don't know what the address is) and it's always there for them.
As such, they don't need it so desperate.

Think of it as a teacher in school.
She's always there if you need her, just raise your hand. If she's helping someone else, you just keep your hand up and she'll get there, no hurry, you can see she's busy right now. She'll be with you soon.
Did she miss or ignore you? OH HELL NO!!! HEY LOOK AT ME I NEED HELP HERE!!!

Remember how it was? It's the same still, people grow up but they don't stop being humans.
By being on Facebook and by only having an open support, all our users can see if their issue is already there, if I'm there at the moment and if I'm helping someone.
As such, they stay calm and wait until I'm done. If they're ignored they freak out.

For that reason, I don't ignore anyone. I always stay calm and I'm no stranger to repeating the same answer 20-30 times a day in different topics even when it's already answered somewhere.
Why? Because I'm just repeating the same thing, which is obvious to anyone who reads all the topics, because it's the same question. Yet I make every user feel appreciated by answering THEIR question in THEIR topic. Not just pointing them to SOMEONE ELSE like they're just another face in the crowd.
They are, don't get me wrong, but I'm not going to let anyone feel like it.

By doing this I've also noticed people start helping each other, answering others who have the same issues as they had, simply because they felt good about getting nice and friendly help. Thus doing half my job while I get paid.

The net profit of this is that if we have One big issue during a week, instead of having 300 mails to go through one by one, answering the same questions, repeating the same lines, I get 30 of them. As people look around for their issue first, or they get help from someone else in the community.

For this reason - Find out what the common nominator for Your community is.
Is it Facebook? Orkut? Both?
Go there, make a page, make yourself a part of it and get all the benefits of being a friend rather than a product.