Community Management 102 - Never be there, ever

Continuing on Facebook as a medium, there are also a few things you should know.

Blame everyone else.
WHAT?! Yes. Most companies and products rely on other companies to function in one way or another. If your team messed up and you now have to cover for a few days while they get their act together, point the issues at something random.
Like your testers, a shipment or anything else.
This sounds mean and evil. And it is. Welcome to crowd-control. You're a CM, that's what you do.

The reason for this is that we are humans. You're a scapegoat for your company.
As the face of the company, you'll also be enjoying the tomatoes thrown at the company.
Human nature is to always blame someone. The Nazis blamed the Jews. Mothers blame videogames. Everyone blames the government. Fat people blame the food. Alcoholics blame their situation. Kids blame their parents... And so on.
Your community is no different. They're all humans. They WILL blame someone.
There's no reason to take all that blame. It drags your company image down and it drags you down. Instead, blame something. Preferably something that doesn't exist.
Your community will blame *it* and show more patience towards you, as it's no longer your fault.

However - When nothing can be blamed, take the bullet. Say "I'm sorry!" and crawl.
Be human. Your community is.


Never be there, ever

Another important thing I learned was to fire myself. The first chance I got.
WHAT?! Yes.
No, not quit my job. I just fired myself infront of the community.
This is on Facebook, remember. We all have our personal pages and it represents our private lives. That is NOT a good thing.
Instead, we hired "John" as I will call him.
"John" is named something different and doesn't exist. He's my company profile.

This way I can separate my private life from my job, even on Facebook.
The direct benefit in this is that I can live my life normally while still maintaining a "personal" profile with the community. As the community very much thinks "John" is a real person.
With this I can also keep my cool, always be friendly and never throw a tantrum infront of the community.
Even if I do on my own Facebook profile.
And if I just can't handle the stupidity some days tend to impose on me, I just log out for an hour. Our community is okay with that, because I'm just ONE person!

To sum it up this has given our company a reputation of "friendly", "caring", "personal", "engaged" and "relatable".
John will always help you. John will always be nice and he'll treat you with love.
John is very much your friend and John makes you feel happy about using the product.
(Note that you're free to add people as friends or not, John doesn't, and people are ok with that because "I have my private life too!")


Yes, this is Community Management, you lie to people, you're not real. Deal with it.
One might argue 'honesty' and 'morals' here, which is fair.
But do consider this: Is it worse than having 300 people get a copypaste mail every week without any sense of there being a human on the other side?
I prefer to make people happy. And I do so best by not being myself.
Heck I'm a rude, short-tempered cynic in private. I swear and rant about meaningless things.
Is that someone you'd like to help you?
No, you'd like someone who takes his time to talk to you, figure out what's wrong, talk it through and then solves the problem. Without making you feel like a moron.