Change is scary, but good.

I've been laying the groundwork for a couple of big announcements we'll be making over the next month around a couple of my communities.  About five years ago I embarked on my first major community project.  I'd been doing day to day site operations and community stuff for a long time at that point, but we needed to migrate to two entirely new platforms which meant not only changing everything about our community presence on the web, but also doing some transformation of data because our destination was so functionally different from what we had before. 

That summer I went to the Community Leadership Summit and asked for help - in an era when slight tweaks in UI piss of Facebook users, how do you successfully lead a few hundred thousand people through such a massive undertaking?  What does success look like in that case? 

I knew it would be ugly.  I knew people would hate the new platforms just because they were different.  I knew that my professional reputation was on the line.  If I pulled this off it would be huge - a massive, public professional accomplishment.  An accomplishment I could put dollar signs next to - moving away from our old vendors saved my company millions of dollars.  Failure could kill my career. 

It was weird for me to define success as disaster mitigation, but that's basically what we did.  The advice I got was to make sure that everything I said was backed up by being reliable, by sticking to my commitment to transparency even if it cost me something to do that.  It was terrifying, but it worked.  We had one major, public casualty.  I do have regrets, but I learned a lot and it's changed how I've handled things since. 

This time, I'm not so scared.  It's a challenge, and I'm well aware that I have no clue what is going to go wrong in the coming months, but I'm cool with that.  I don't feel bulletproof, but I feel really flexible.  It's a nice place to be. 

Punching (the right) things feels really good.

I was reminded for the first time in a long time today of the great psychological value of working out.  I spent an ungodly number of hours in bureaucratic hell at work this week, and there's no end in sight.  I'm also recovering from a big surgery and have been doing physical therapy for my chest, back, and arms twice a week for the last couple of months.  I'm finally to the point where it feels like a real workout - at 45 minutes I feel like jelly and I've managed to sweat through my clothes. 

So this morning after spending three hours chasing my tail at work, I showed up at PT, and my therapist knew something was up.  She had me throw punches while holding five pound weights, and it was the absolute best thing for me.  I walked out of there feeling better than I have in a while. 

I think that sometimes when work and life swallow us whole, the temptation to put off moving is overwhelming.   It certainly is for me.  It's nice to have such a stark reminder of how much mental and emotional value there is in exercise, beyond the physical benefits.  It's a good reminder that it's pretty rare that I don't have enough time to do this a few days a week - the time I get back in sanity and focus is so much greater. 

Why is there so much turnover in community management?

Earlier today Richard Millington wrote a series of tweets about turnover in community management and theorized why people might be leaving, and if it's a problem or opportunity.  There have been a couple of responses, and I'll be keeping an eye on it if a real conversation gets going.  I hope it does, because it's a big problem that I am wrestling with myself.  Here's a list of my thoughts, in no particular order:

• Pay is all over the map - if you look at jobs on LinkedIn you'll see pay ranges from 30k to 140k. 
• The job is not well defined and as such is a catchall bucket for things that marketing (often) doesn't know how, or want, to do. 
• The ROI when it's done right can be amazing, but it's hard to convince a company to invest, because hiring excellent communicators is expensive.  Excellent communicators who are also Subject Matter Experts even more so.
• Because companies are slow learners, the career path is short. 

I'm a prime example of that last one.  Ten years ago when I started interning for a community manager at a major silicon valley company for a major open source community, she had to explain to me what we did in my interview.  Community Management wasn't really a thing back then. 

I finished my degree in CS, she hired me as an engineer, but I ended up being an administrator and running the community a few years later, and then on through a major corporate acquisition that was really ugly for the community.  It was tough, but we grew in a huge way.  Now I've been "promoted" and I maintain the community infrastructure for the very large tech company that acquired me and try to develop guidelines and best practices for our community managers.  That's all groovy, but I'm not a community manager anymore.  I'm a project manager with a specialty in communities and a vaguely fancy title now.  And there's no place for me to go careerwise, because there are very very few D and C level community oriented positions, and almost none that I've seen outside of tech. 

I have skills, education, years and years of experience.  I'd love to mentor and strategize and be tactical at a high level.  Or be a product manager for a community platform.  I'm highly qualified to do it.  But the jobs and larger community ecosystem aren't there yet.  I think they will be as marketing is transformed by this phenomenon of connectedness.  But they aren't here now.  I'm 43, and if I want more pay, a better title, more responsibility, it seems that I either have to start being a consultant, or I have to leave community behind. 

GrowthBeat 2015, day two.

Oh, my feet hurt.  It's been a long couple of days, but I did enjoy the conference.  It's interesting to me because it's mostly about straight up marketing, which has definitely evolved from the Mad Men days, but it's not my world.  I'm a techie who got here by accident via the Java community.  Attending something like this is very educational for me, it's literally learning a new language at times.  They were talking about metrics I've never used, behaviors I've never seen.  A bunch of it literally doesn't apply to me - my company sells things, but I don't.  I don't make decisions about ad placements or large scale campaigns.  There's no shopping cart to abandon in my world.  But it's interesting to see and think about how those things can apply to the things I do. 

My favorite speaker of the day was Sid Patil, he's the senior data scientist at twitter.  He's also that guy they wrote books and movies about who counted cards playing blackjack with a group of students from MIT.  We got a little bit of those stories, but his insights about what data is useful and what isn't blew me away.  One of the biggest things marketers track on the web and mobile is where the last click came from, and they tend to target those places for ad spends, but he made a compelling case for that being shortsighted and in some cases totally wrong. 

The example he gave was about a travel company (he didn't name names, but I'm assuming something like Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity) that noticed a huge spike in purchases around 7pm.  So they went and did a huge spend on marketing appropriate to that behavior.  But it failed.  It actually tanked sales.  After deeper research they realized that customers were researching everything during the work day, and then purchasing after they got home and talked with their family. 

He also argues for picking a path supported by data when you have choices to make, even if occasionally a single transaction fails.  It will fail occasionally, but the overall strategy will win if your research is solid.  He used a 35k loss at a BlackJack table as an example, and a football story that I couldn't retell to save my life (football is even more foreign to me than old-school marketing).  But his point was solid.  Good stuff to think about. 

GrowthBeat 2015, day one.

I spent today at GrowthBeat, VentureBeat's marketing conference.  It's an interesting event.  I got an invite out of the blue to their MobileBeat conference last month and it was really good in ways I wasn't expecting. One of the things I like about both conferences is that there isn't a whole lot of time spent on one person just talking from the stage.  There are a few single presenters, and a couple of real panels, but everything else is in an interview format with a highly qualified person (usually an industry expert) interviewing the "speaker".  That conversational formula is so superior to the tech events I attend, which can be really hard to stay awake for and follow.  Even if I don't care as much about the topic, I find myself paying better attention here, and I'm learning more.  Good stuff.  I'm looking forward to tomorrow. 

The woman problem.

A few weeks ago I got into a conversation about this piece in Medium by Rachel Thomas on how the issues around recruiting and retaining women in tech go far beyond "The Pipeline Problem".   Thomas lists a bunch of great ideas about how to foster diversity and chip away at the problem from multiple angles.  The guy I was chatting with seemed to like the essay, and liked some of the solutions, but the last thing he said to me was that none of it sounded like it would be enough, so why bother? 

I hear that a lot.  I've started to wonder if part of it is this engineerish mindset that there must be A Straightforward Solution To Every Problem, and therefore if you can't come up with the straightforward solution, you're being inefficient with any small improvements and maybe it's better to wait until the straightforward solution presents itself.  And besides, nobody's house is burning down, this isn't an emergency.  No need for half measures today if we couldn't possibly fix it by tomorrow anyway. 

So this morning I was really happy to see this piece in HuffPo by Belle Beth Cooper about what real companies that you've actually heard of are doing to try to recruit and retain more women.  Cooper talks about companies that are having some success, talks about the different retention drivers for men and women, and a bunch of other good stuff.  Both are worth reading, and I'm excited to see companies take steps forward without knowing what the next iteration of improvements to support women will look like. 

There's a bridge between you and that guy.

The best kind of bridge burning is when the person holding the torch is completely unaware of the conflagration.  Well, I guess it's only the best if you are annoyed with the torch bearer and don't care about the bridge. 

Otherwise, it's pretty awful to watch.  I don't know why it still shocks me when I see people make very short sighted bottom line decisions that will cost them exponentially more time and money in the future.  But it does still shock me, because while mistakes are inevitable in life (and work), short sighted mistakes are not.  It's bad business. 

Workers may be interchangeable in general - I have no fantasies that my employer couldn't replace me with somebody with a similar skill set and experience when they need to - but in the short term, they're not.  When there's only one guy who knows how your system works, and you need your system to work next month, you need that guy.  Often, you need that guy a lot more than that guy needs you.  Programs, businesses, communities live and die around that guy.  He's more important than you think. 

Listening is half the conversation.

The strongest evidence of the power of community in marketing and brand awareness comes when companies fumble it.  Social media meltdowns of all kinds are common.  We see it when celebrities and politicians who don't really know their audience do an AMA and get skewered.  We see it when corporate messaging goes off the rails.  We see it when people make silly mistakes on twitter.  

Social media and the communities that exist around it are all bound up in conversations, and a conversation is half listening.  Companies fumble when they forget that part.  You can't put something out in the world and then build a wall around yourself when you're criticized for it.  You lose the trust of your community.  And if your community is a very large group of people who you are literally trying to sell something to?  You're screwed. Because even if they aren't talking to you anymore, they are talking to each other. 

The best community marketing and social media practices are intertwined, transparent, and have a built-in way to accept criticism with grace and own up to mistakes.  If you can't do that, the conversation can't continue. Offending your community and walking away does a lot more damage than a mistake followed up by a an honest apology ever could. 

Doing the hard stuff.

What's the hard stuff day to day?  For a lot people, me included, it's being accountable and following up.  Meetings are easy.  Sometimes they are boring as hell, but they are easy.  Brainstorming ideas, solving problems, that's the fun part.  Getting back to somebody when you said you'd get back to them?  That's the hard part for me.  It's so easy to let that stuff slide into the next day, and the next week, and then into forever.  And if you don't need the recipient to trust you, I guess that's a valid choice to make. 

It strikes me as funny that I'd never in a million years think it was acceptable to just be an hour or a day late to meet a person in the real world.  So now I'm trying to think of my boring followup as the shortest coffee dates ever.  Will it make it easier to get there on time?  We'll see.   

books - Show Your Work, Austin Kleon

A few days ago I received a box of books from the folks at altMBA, and this is the first one I picked up.  Show Your Work is a solid little manifesto about how sharing what you're working on can be vital to improving the quality and quantity of your production, regardless of what you produce.  In my case, it's usually words.  I've been blogging on a few different platforms, for a few different purposes for about 15 years now, and I've been doing what I do professionally for 10-15 years now, depending on how you count.

I firmly believe that the most important skill for online community managers is writing.  When I'm hiring new people I look for people who have a clear personality that is immediately apparent in their writing.  I want a community member to know who the writer is by the end of the second sentence of any blog or message board post without looking at the byline. 

A while ago I was looking over the site created by a small startup and talking to the CMO about what they could do to launch a community.  One of their founders had an established blog, and I knew as soon as I read it that the blogger was Russian.  His language and communication of the concepts he was sharing was clear, but it was also clear from his word choice and grammar that English is not his native language.  The CMO was worried about that and was thinking of hiring someone to clean up his blogs.  I voted no on that one - the minute I met the man in person I knew it was his blog - same grammar, same voice.  Same personality.  We can't really connect in any context if both sides don't feel human.  His blog connected. 

So, back to Show Your Work - here I am, showing my work.  It'll be interesting to see where this one goes. Right now I think it's about community and how to build a good one, but it might evolve into something different over time.