Community Building Secrets - Crash course for Solopreneurs and OCMs

1. Introduction to community building training: Hi. My name is Himanshu. And in this training, I'm going to teach you how to build a vibrant online community. This course is particularly useful for online community managers and also for business owners who want to leverage community in their businesses. Over the last few years, I have worked with tens of entrepreneurs to help them create their online community. And in that process, I got a chance to work with tens of community managers. I've also wrote the articles on magazines like Fbes on this particular subject. So this program is coming from my direct experience of working with communities. And I'm very excited to share all this information with you, this is not a typical course where I am going to teach you all the mechanics and how to manage the Excel sheet. We will go deeper and we will look community management from a different lens. By taking this program and by finishing all the modules, you will learn the elements that turn ordinary online groups into a space for transformation. You will become a better OCM online community manager, but also you will get the tools to create a successful community around any topic that you desire. So let me quickly go through what we are going to cover inside the training. First, we are going to talk about five pillars of a thriving online community. Once you learn this, you never see community building with the same eyes again. Then we are going to talk about the responsibilities of OCM, and it's so important to learn and have a crisp, clear idea of it whether you are applying for a job or you are hiring someone for this position. So we are going to talk about that, and then we will get into community structure and matrix. Inside this, I'm going to show you how community looks like for a company so you can see the hierarchy and where your responsibility fits. Then we are going to get into secrets of creating a vibrant online group. Here we are going to cover some engagement strategies and how you can keep the vibes in your group. Then we are going to get deeper into understanding the energetics of an online group. It is very different to build an online community from an offline community. So understanding these aspects will help you create that vibrance and keep people aligned towards your topic and your mission. Then in the end, we are going to cover crisis management. And we will look into what kind of crisis that can happen while you are managing a community and how can you manage those situations. By the end of this program, you will have a detailed blueprint for creating a thriving online community. I'm very excited to share all this knowledge with you that has changed many people's lives. And one last thing I want to mention is nothing works if you do not work. So I highly encourage you to go through the entire module and try to practice what you are learning here. If you have any doubts, make sure to reach out to me so I can personally help you. I want to make sure that you get the results that you want. With this set, let's get into. 2. 5 Pillars of a successful online community: To this module of the training that I call pillars of a successful community. Now, just like any other digital marketing aspect, building an online community relies on five important pillars. Number one is purpose, then two other reasons, energy, safety, and growth. So let's talk about the purpose first. Whether you are owner of an online community or you are a manager, you need to have a clear idea of what is the purpose behind this community. There can be many kind of purposes. It can be a customer community that is just there to offer support when somebody needs it, or it can be a community you want to monetize eventually. And without having this purpose, you will have a hard time keeping the alignment inside the community. So a clear sense of direction and purpose ensures that people have a reason to join and stay. In vague terms, it can be money, health, relationship, education, growth. You need to write this down. What is the purpose of your community? You don't need to be very specific because in general, people join online courses for learning something. But when it comes to online community, the purpose is little broader. So for example, if this is a community around a software that helps people manage their emails, just for an example. Even if the community is around email marketing or email management, the bigger purpose of that community might be to help business owners grow their business because by using this email marketing software, they are going to make more money. So by using this perspective, I want you to write down what is the purpose of your community? This is the purpose you will keep iterating inside the community. New members and for old members. And once you understand this, I want you to understand the second pillar, which is two other reasons. It's a very popular saying that people come for money, but stay for the community. I like to say people come for one reason and they stay for two other reasons. Over the few years, what I have learned is people join for the first reason. It might be the clear purpose, the reason why you started the community. But then once people are in the community, they find more reasons to stay. This pillar is even more important to understand when you manage a premium membership program, because there is a chance that people are joining for improving their health or making more money or to learn a software, anything like this. But then they might find friendship inside. They might find other business owners they are collaborating with or if this is a social community, they might find someone they can start a project together. And this becomes a side effect that even you did not think about in the beginning, and people love to stay for months and probably for years inside the community just for two other reasons that you didn't even think of in the beginning. So here is what I want you to. I want you to write down what can be two other reasons people would stay inside the community. So open your diary and write two other reasons. Take some time. And there is a worksheet attached to this training. I want you to use it. Then let's talk about the third pillar, which is energy. Now, this is something that most of the programs do not talk about. But most of the time, it is all about energy. As a community manager or a community owner, a very key aspect of this entire game is to keep the vibes. And energy is not excitement. It's not about always showing up with really high excitement and shouting out loud. And we are going to talk about this in more detail in our upcoming modules. But for now, understand this. If you will create the right energy in your community, the space will open for people to be vulnerable. And when that happens, it creates a bond that is really strong because inside the community, you want to create this peer to peer relationship. And this aspect leads us to the next pillar, which is safety. Space of safety inside your community allows people to open and to share vulnerably. Most of the time, I have seen that community managers or community owners keep talking inside their and that kind of creates a space where people might feel reluctant to share anything from their side. And it is important to understand that people in the community are not just here to learn from the owner. They are also here to express, and they're also here to learn from other people. So as a facilitator, your biggest responsibility is to create the space where people can openly share. And this takes us to the last pillar, which is growth. Sense of growth is a primal desire of soul. We all want to and people keep coming to the places where they feel that they are growing. They are learning. If there is no growth inside your community, people will stop coming back. And I have seen a lot of communities dying because they are stagnant and because people stop feeling like they are growing inside the community. So I want you to take this perspective. What are the kind of activities that you can start inside the community that give a sense of growth to your members. 3. Responsibilities of a community manager: Welcome to this module. Let's talk about the responsibilities of OCM. So there are five main responsibilities of community manager. One is ensuring smooth on boarding. Second is sparking new conversations. Third is managing the energy. Fourth is escalating issues and keeping professional communication. And last one is collecting and analyzing the feedback. So let's talk about it one by one. Ensuring smooth on boarding. When new people are coming, then they are completely alien to this new environment. They are also not feeling they belong here. So as a community manager, it is important to break the ice and get them talking. More they will feel comfortable to talk, higher the chances that they are going to stay for long. Then second is sparking new conversations. So as a community manager, one of your responsibilities is to create events and activities that can create a space of new engagement, and people feel excited to engage. For example, you can start asking questions or you can share something that is trending in your industry. One of the things that I do personally in my community is I ask people what are their biggest challenges. And at the same time, I tell other people who have figured out the solutions of those challenges to answer people in the comments. So some people who are facing the challenge, they write their problems and other people start giving solutions. So you see in that way I am not directly giving solutions from my side. One of the things I have learned is magic is in the room. So you need to discover that magic from the room itself. This is one of the ways. I want you to be creative. And one of the best idea would be to write down all these creative, interesting strategies that you can apply in your community. Then the third and very important responsibility of a community manager is managing the energy. Now, there is a chance that you are managing a community where people love to be vulnerable and people are sharing from their heart. At that time, it is important that you understand how everything is going on. Even if you are not directly engaging and participating in the conversation, you can ensure that it is aligned and there is no scammer or a spammer who is trying to take advantage and trying to invade the conversation. So understanding these small aspects will help you become better than average community manager. Then the fourth responsibility that most of the people talk about is the mechanics, which is escalating issues and keeping professional communication. I have seen most of the community management programs are around this topic itself. But this is just one aspect of it. And yes, a very important aspect. So a lot of times, you might be in the situation where nothing is in your control. You might face a crisis that I'm going to talk about in the last module. It is important that you are escalating issues fast in those times and you are keeping the professional conversation. Understand that you are representing a brand. So even if you have a bad day, it should not reflect on your work. You need to maintain a communication that is aligned with company's goals, and that leads us to the last responsibility, collecting and analyzing the feedback. So as a community manager, you will see that a lot of people are offering you feedback that might be related to the product, the way you are managing the community, and other different aspects depending on which community you are managing. Your responsibility is to collect all those feedbacks, analyzing which ones keep coming back so you can work on them. And you can also forward this to the team that is responsible. For example, if you are managing community for a software firm. It might be a software issue that people keep talking about, or it might be a good product feedback. You need to ensure that you are escalating it to the right team. These are the five responsibilities of a community manager. Now, here's the task for you for this module. What are the questions that you can ask in the community that will spark peer to peer conversation? I want you to come up with three to four questions like 4. Community Hierarchy and Metrics to measure: Congratulations for reaching this par. Most of the people have not reached this, and this is a state of most of the courses. If you are still watching, then this is really a time to give yourself Pat on the back. In this module, let's talk about community structure, how it looks like in this entire online business or offline business game. And also, what kind of matrix that you need to keep in mind when you are managing it. So starting with community structure, in my perspective, here is how a community looks like. First of all, comes a brand, and inside a brand, there is a community. It can be a community of customers. It can be a community of prospects or leads, or it can also be a community around a specific topic. For a yoga institute, there can be a community of yoga teachers, and it can also be a community of yoga practitioners. So, you see, there are different communities that can come under one brand. And under a community, there are different community admins. If you are the owner of your community, you are by default an admin. But also you can hire other community admins to manage your community. Then inside administrators or admins, there are community managers. And in some communities, there can also be different ambassadors that come after community managers. These are volunteers who want to support the community. This can happen in some cases, but most likely after community managers come community members. And this is how the hierarchy of a community looks like. Now, this can be a very valuable information to understand where you fit in this entire game. And the next thing to understand is what are the kind of matrix that we use in online community management. So let's talk about this. First is LTV or lifetime value. If you are managing community for a brand or a business, then this particular term will keep coming back. What is the LTV of a member? So lifetime value of a member from business perspective is how much money customer is going to spend in his entire lifetime of the association with the brand. So on an average, if the customer spends 12 months in your community and he's spending $100 in that one then the lifetime value of that customer is $100. So this is one thing to understand. And second is DAU or daily active user. This is another important KPI or key performance indicator to track as OCM. How many people are coming to your community on daily basis? And third matrix to understand is MAU, that is most active users. And I'm going to talk about this in more detail because this is a very key aspect. So over the period of time, you will see that some people are engaging more than others. And in fact, in my experience, I have seen that most of the community engagement comes 5-10% of people in the community. So it is very important that you keep track of your most active users because they are your allys in this job. And the fourth matrix to measure is churn rate or drop rate. This is a term to describe how many people are leaving your community on monthly basis. This can be measured by dividing the number of people who are leaving the community from the total number of people that are in the community right now. Most of the community management platforms give you this rate by themselves. So you do not need to worry about calculating it on daily basis. And the last matrix to understand is conversion rate. It can be about how many people are visiting the community and who are actually being the member, or it can also be the conversion rate of going from being a free community member to a paid community member, people who are upgrading. It may or may not be useful as community manager, but the better knowledge you will have, you will have more chances of improving your career because this is one aspect that every business owner will keep track of. So in this module, we covered the hierarchy of a community and also some matrix that you need to measure. So here's the exercise for you from this module. I want you to write down what do you understand from MAU? Can you describe this in your terms? Because that will help me understand we are on the same page so far. In the next module, we are going to talk about community engagement secrets. Let's get 5. Community Engagement and Welcome Message: Come to the section of community engagement. A key element of being a successful OCM is understanding how can you spark engagement in the community. This is one of the expectations that every community owner is going to have from their admins and from their managers. If you want to scale in your career, you need to learn how to spark engagement in your online community. Let's understand this. In fact, let's begin with the first aspect that is on boarding and welcome message. There are a few aspect of this. Number one is creating the icebreaker. So whenever someone is joining the community, it is a very good idea to leave them a message or having some kind of space where they can start introducing themselves. One of the things that I do in my community and I recommend all community managers to do is create a thread where people can talk about themselves. This gives them a sense of safety and that opens people up. A crucial part of your welcome message is maintaining the alignment, why they have joined, and just giving a quick recap of why they are there. So even if it is a customer community, you can quickly tell them if you need any help, I'm here to help you. This is a simple one sentence, but it ensures that they are in alignment and they know why they are there. Third one is the vision. This is more for the communities that are around a bigger topic, a bigger purpose. You need to offer them a vision, just remind them once again and then the new identity. A part of building a community is giving a sense of tribe, giving a sense of belongingness and that happens when you give them a new identity. This is one of the very creative ways of bringing excitement and creating energy in the group. For example, I was creating a community for brand ambassadors for one of the company. And we started calling them Knights. They had this new identity of the Knight and their responsibilities as a night was to create content around the company. You can give them the name like Knight or ambassadors or um, Army or Squad, something like this, that creates a sense of group, a sense of tribe and you will see that people feel more excited and they feel more belong in this community. Now, as a community manager, this might not be that relevant. But as you upgrade in your career, if you become a community admin, this might be very useful. Then the last thing that you need to do is you need to offer them the next step. You need to open a loop for them. Do not just leave them with gratitude. Do not stop your message by saying, thank you for being here. Give them something to do as the next step as they have entered in the community. Now what I have done is along with this train I have given my personal welcome message template that you can use if you find it relevant. But you can also create your own. If you find it interesting, I want you to it. 6. MAU Most Active Users: Online community management can also be challenging because there are a lot of people who will start DMing you or they will start having expectation that you will answer everything in the community. And practically, it is not possible. And this is why understanding this one key element of MAU or HEM, highly engaged members or most active users is very important. So let's understand how you can leverage most active users. Most active users are your alloys in community management. They are the people who feel more aligned towards the mission of the community, or they can be the people who are getting the results and they want to share. Some people just love sharing. You can identify them by going to their profile and seeing their contribution to the community. They might be the people who are creating most valuable posts. They might also be the people who are commenting and encouraging other people when they are posting something. Now, here is what you can do with them. Time by time, you can comment on their post by yourself. Or you can also ask them how you can be more helpful to them. If they are facing any troubles, you can directly reach out to them in their DMs and you can ask if they need any personal assistance. But at the same time, this is what you do not want to do. You do not want to create a space of partiality. It is very important that you are not offering them favors because this will discourage other people who are just entering and who are just new in the community from sharing their post. The goal as a community manager is to use your most active users to support the rest of the members. And I want you to do something as an exercise of this module. Can you give me a few ideas from your perspective? What can be a way to identify the most active users? Think about this and write it down. I would love to know what are the other creative ideas you can find. 7. Energetics of the community: Awesome. Welcome to this module. And here, let's talk about the energetics of a community. Now, most of the people, when it comes to online community, they do not understand this one subject. That is, how do you manage the vibrant. The whole game of community management in my perspective, is maintaining the energy. When it comes to energy, it's not about having excitement all the time, as I talked in the beginning. It's also about how do you show up. And basically, there are four elements of maintaining energy in the community. One is leadership, Second is investment. Third is emotions, and fourth is protection. So let's talk about the leadership. As a community manager, in a way, people also see you as the leader in the community. You will be expected to answer and you'll be expected to show up. This is more important when you are running a community of your own. So time by time, it's your responsibility to give them the updates about the things that are happening in the community and in the brand in the company. And this will create the expectation, and it will encourage them to stay in the community. Leadership is a key element of managing the community. Second is investment. You need to learn this one simple principle. That is people do not stay in the communities they do not feel invested in. So it's not about your investment as an admin or as a manager. How can you make them invested as a part of community? Can you invite them to invest their energy, their time, and sometimes money into doing something for the community? People come in the community for many reasons. But one of the reasons they are going to stay is the community itself. And to make that happen, you need to ensure that they are investing in the community. So it can be their time they are to create a very valuable post, or it can be a fundraising campaign that you are organizing and other people are participating in. It can also be a live event that they need to participate in if they want. You see more opportunities you will create for investment, people will feel the deeper sense of belongingness. And this leads me to the third part, which is emotions. So you see we humans are emotional creatures. We take decisions by emotions and then justify with logic. And in community management, it is important that you are creating a space for different types of emotions. It can be suspense. It can be fun. It can be vulnerability. It can be a laughter. It can be something, some kind of emotional response. Better you are with creating these emotional responses, more engaged your community will be. This can be done by sharing some activities or sharing some personal stories. One of the best things to do is by creating videos. Video has something that text doesn't have. So if you are managing an online community and you have an opportunity, you can start creating a video or you can start sharing the video of the founder or the leader of the community. This is completely optional, and it really depends on the context of the community. But it's a good thing to know. And the last thing is protection. There is a very popular story in ancient Indian scriptures. It's about the king who protects the sages when they were worshipping and when they were meditating from the devil. The saying goes like this. Kill the evil so saints can meditate. I'm sharing this to make you understand how important it is to protect your community members from the forces of evil. You need to ensure that you are identifying spammers, scammers and all other types of evil creatures and you are warning them or you are banning them from the community. So other people find it safe to stay in the community. And when you do that, you are truly managing the energetics of the community. You will see that you do not need to force yourself to create engagement in the community when you are doing it and when everything is in alignment, people start engaging by themselves. 8. Crisis management: Awesome. Welcome to the last part of the training that I call crisis management. And inside, we are going to talk about two things. What are the kind of crisis that you can face when you are managing a community? And second is, how do you handle them. But before I move ahead, if you have enjoyed this training so far, I highly encourage you to give me a review. And what do you think about this? Are you enjoying this? And look, your review matters a lot. So if there is any private feedback that you can offer that would be very useful. And when you are writing the review, I would love to know what is your biggest takeaway so far from the training. And with this set, let's get into the training. So let's understand what kind of crisis you can face when you are managing the community. In my experience, one of the biggest headache is spammers. There are a lot of people who will join the community and they will start spamming with all kinds of things. And this is very troubling for the members of the community. They might start reporting you if they are spamming and if it is too much, then they will stop coming back to the community. This is very common with WhatsApp groups and Telegram groups. If you have a dedicated community management platform, then you might have dedicated tools to manage this. But if you do not have, then you need to do this manually. But spammers are going to be the headaches, so keep a check on them. And second type of crisis can be scammers. A lot of people join other communities to start scamming people. This can be very dangerous. It can be a direct threat to the safety of your members. Third type of crisis that you can face is copycats and competitors. Now, business can be highly competitive. And what I have seen is sometimes other competitors start coming to the community and they start spamming or they start creating wrong kind of conversations. Now, this is very rare, but it still happens. So as a community manager, you need to keep this in your awareness that it happens. And also the copycats, if you have a digital product, then you might face some people who are trying to steal your information and they start selling it to other members. This also means that selling your intellectual property illegally. And fifth one is angry and dissatisfied customers. There is something going on with the product itself or the platform itself, then you might face a lot of people, sometimes the flood of people who are angry and dissatisfied. Six kind of crisis can be technical issues that are beyond your capacity to handle. And the last one can be zombie apocalypse. And what do I mean by that is anything that you do not expect? As a community manager, it is important to be ready to face the kind of situation that you did not expect. If your community is more vibrant and it is getting bigger, then it is more likely to happen. But there is nothing that you cannot manage. In the next module, I will talk about how can you handle the crisis. 9. How to handle the crisis: All the communities and their situations are different, there are a few principles that I have learned in my experience that worked in all the types of crisis. So in this module, let's understand how do you handle bad, worse and worst situations in the community. First of all, you need to stay professional. Now, understand that you are representing a brand, regardless of what situation you are in and what situation community is you need to stay professional and you need to keep the communication light. For the members of the community, you and the brand are no different. You are representing the brand, so you are part of the company. And second is, you need to set the clear rules. If you do not create the rules, then people create their own rules. So most of the time, I keep a separate section for community rules. And every time I see a new situation and I can see that that can be added in the rules, I add it. These rules create a boundary for your community members. Here is an example of the rule. If someone is sming you will warn them twice, and if they keep doing it on the third time, you will ban them. This is a simple rule, but this ensures that you gave people enough chance and you also avoided any mistakes from your side. And remember that it's important that you are consulting with your senior if there is any. If you are a community manager, then you might be working under a senior representative. So before you communicate anything, if you are not aware of it, make sure you are consulting with the senior. This will minimize the chance of miscommunication and further escalation of the issue. And fourth thing is starting with empathy. A lot of problems can be solved by starting the conversation I understand. It's a very simple thing. If someone is facing the problem with their software, then you can say I understand the situation. Let me help you. This is a very simple line to write, but this will calm people down, and this will give you enough time to look into the matter. Fifth thing that you can do is take time. Just say let me get back to it, even if it is just 5 minutes. This will give you enough time to look into the issue, and at the same time, if they have to share something else that is critical, they can do it. I have seen a lot of times that people come with an issue. I tell them, let me take 5 minutes to get back on this, and within 5 minutes, they have solved their issue by themselves. So this also is going to save a lot of time for you and a lot of hassle for you. And next is always close the loops. So as a community representative, you need to ensure that any loop, any communication that you are opening, you are closing it, and double check if the issue has been resolved or not. And another thing that you need to do to handle such situations is escalating queries quickly and keep the customer updated. So a lot of times there will be issues that are beyond your capacity. For example, if it is a technical bug in the software or some specific part of the product itself, in that situation, you can't directly solve the problem by yourself. In that case, escalate the queries quickly and just tell them, I have escalated your query, and I will get back to you soon. And remember the last one, close the loop when it is done. And here's the bonus part. Document everything. This can be a lifesaver as a community manager. Every time you are in the crisis, understand that it can happen again. So all the responses that are working and all the things that are happening. You need to ensure that you are documenting. So next time, the problems will be solved quickly, and you are going to save yourself a lot of hassle and time. So this is how you manage the crisis in the community. Now, my task for you for this module is this. What are the top three rules that you think are most important for an online community? From your perspective, write this down. I would love to know how are you thinking about this? 10. Quick final thoughts: Awesome. Congratulations for finishing the training. If you have reached this far and if you have watched all the modules, then you are already better than 99% people because most of the time people never finish what they start. So take some time and appreciate yourself for doing this. Now, I understand that no course is perfect. I'm sure there are plenty of things that you might want to learn, but I did not cover in this training. If there is any feedback that you want to offer me, please send me an email. I will love to improve this training to make it the best training on community building and growth. And second thing I want you to do is give me your biggest takeaway in the review. Give me the stars, depending on how much value you got from this training, and give me one big takeaway that you are going to apply right away from this training. I help business owners create their community, and I also work with other community managers. So if I can be helpful anywhere, don't hesitate to ask me anything. On the screen, you will find all the important links that you can use to connect with me, explore more of my work. You can also search my name on Google, and probably you will find my website where you can connect with me, and that's it. This is pretty much. I wish you all the best whether you are a business owner, creating a community or you are an OCM, I wish you all the best. This is one amazing thing that you are doing. Keep it up.