 So who am I? My name is Albert. I work in the high tech space as a marketing manager for a technology consulting firm handling a lot of cloud and DevOps solutions for our company that does a lot of work for different global 2,000 Fortune 500 companies. And I'm essentially a content marketer, marketing manager, and I do a lot of that. And then on the side, I built something called Albert's List. So Albert's Job Listings and Referrals was founded in March of 2013. We have now grown to 19,400 people. And we have a sorted amount of recruiters, job seekers, service providers, and hiring managers within this group. And we've had people hired at companies like eBay, Google, Cisco, Facebook, Twitter, all the name brand companies that you can think about in the Bay Area, and a lot smaller than that. And so, yeah, and Albert's List, yeah, it's been going for a little while now. And we're getting into the point where we're also building a platform on the side so that people can further accelerate their job searches. So for the purposes of today, we're going to start by defining what community management is. And so, community management is the art and science of creating and curating engagement for a particular platform, for a particular concept, idea, or product. And for, I think, the purposes of today, as I've thought about libraries a lot more, is that I like to think about libraries as a product, right? You guys are building in some town or city. And the purpose is to help people find and curate and discover new knowledge, or to further their knowledge. And that comes in the form of books, the computer resources, the summer programs, the free pizzas once you read a lot of different books and things like that. And so, community is one piece of that, and it can be the centerpiece of how you build that whole entire product. And so, for, I think, also the purposes of today, you guys are not only community managers, but you're going to become product marketers. And so, the prevalence of social media over the last couple of years, and really just how consumer experiences have evolved, have created the need for community management and how you look at everything like a product, right? If any of you think about your favorite brands, brands that you engage with, so for example, let's talk about the San Francisco Giants, right? They're going to be in a playoff game today, Go Giants, we hope they win. And the way that you think about how your engagement with them on a day-to-day basis can occur over multiple platforms, whether it's getting an email from them telling you to purchase tickets for their post-season run in the division series and hopefully for the World Series and the National League Championship Series. The other aspect would be, the other way you might engage is through their mobile app, which is created by Major League Baseball, or another way that you do it would be through their Facebook page, their Twitter page, their Snapchat channel, and all these sorts of different third-party platforms that they've built or built a following on so that they can interact with fans such as you and I, right? And so each of these messages are different and each of these messages present something different in the whole customer experience. And as librarians today starting with communities and starting with social communities, it's going to be up to all of you to start building an experience like that so that whether I'm a parent or whether I'm a child or whether I'm somebody who is a job seeker or somebody who is looking to borrow books and learn more knowledge but can't afford them off of Amazon, that I'm able to engage with you in a variety of different channels and build out that community and build it to a way that people are interested in not only coming once but becoming a retained user and really constant user acquisition. So the final point I want to make is that community management is also offensive and it's also defensive. So the offensive aspect is going out and getting people to come to your library, to discover your library, right? You want to always have new people there instead of the same 20 to 30 to 100 people that show up on a weekly basis. And so the defensive aspect is, you know, when you manage a community and we'll talk about this in further detail later, is that you have to also be able to protect your community from the trolls and create that safe community so that your brand is protected and the product experience is something that's maintained. Okay. So community management, what it really is, it's the creation and facilitation of relationships around a certain topic. So, for example, on the Albert's List, right, it's around job hunting. For libraries, it's probably a whole lot more things, whether it's your programs, your books, and, you know, say what just came in yesterday and just who is in the community. People like to know when they go to a library who is there. Community management is an extension of a brand or experience, not a unique standalone activity, right? So in one aspect that I've learned is that social media, it was really fun when I started it in my career, but it's not a hobby and it's not a standalone experience for what you do for your organization as a whole. It has to be, like I've said earlier, an extension of all the other marketing activities that you do, whether it's email marketing, whether it's your regular social media page, your Snapchat, your Instagram, and everything more. And then community management is also about the customer and not the organization. So one thing that I figured out over the last couple of years is that when you build any community, it's never about you, right? As much as I can sometimes come back to the Bay Area from Southern California and feel like a celebrity at some of the networking events, it's never about you. And as a library, it's not really about the library either as much as it's the constituents that you serve. So if people want a specific book, if people are looking for a specific program and giving you that kind of feedback on your social channels or your community, those are things that you should take into heavy consideration. So what is community management not? So the first one I think is particularly interesting because as we talk about marketing and as I've worked in marketing over the last six years, a lot of people think that social media and social communities are a place to sell, sell, sell and sell some more. And to sum the fact, it's kind of that way because you obviously want to make money and that's in the private sector and in the library area, I'm going to assume that a lot of folks want to come into a lot of that selling aspect is more come and open a library card and get books from us and partake in our programs. But at the end of the day, it's not necessarily selling as much as it's building and cultivating those relationships. If people at the end of the day do buy something, then that's great. But it's not necessarily along the whole entire customer and buyer's journey. And with regards to the buyer's journey, you do have to sell, but it's sometime down the road, whether it's when they come into the library or whether they respond to an email that's a hard sell, things like that. And then community management is also not a short-term play, but rather the long-term game. So when I built Albert's List back in 2013, the first month I think I had 22 members join. The next month I had 10, the third month I had 86, and the fourth month I had nine. And I get those kind of numbers now on a daily basis because it's grown to a point that things accelerate. So when it comes to building anything these days, I know that especially in the Bay Area, we think about how we want to build things really fast. We want to get to 10,000 quickly. And the thing to think about that with that is that it's not so much important to be able to build it fast, but to build it right. You want to curate your membership, you want to know that the people who are joining your community are in the area and willing to come into the library or engage in some specific way. If you have 10,000 people and none of them engage, then that's probably the worst thing that you can do. So now that we've talked a little bit about what social communities are, I want to cover a little bit about how to build social communities, because I think that's all why you came here today, right? You didn't want me to just talk in front of you and discuss what social communities are without telling you how. So the building of a social community is really a journey, right? Like I mentioned a couple slides ago, it is something that took me three years to do and it's something that I'm still doing on a daily consistent basis. It requires a lot of consistency. There will be a lot of ups and downs and like Rome, your community won't be built entirely in a day. Although unlike Albert's List, many of your libraries have been here for a lot longer than three years. So having that name recognition in the community certainly helps for building your community at a much more accelerated pace. And then, yeah, community management is also an art and a science. So the art of it is being able to interact, communicate and engage with the people that are in your space, in your region, in your location. And the science of it is understanding what works and what doesn't work. So you kind of become a social scientist and understanding, okay, do I create a program based on the feedback that I'm getting here or do I remove these kind of books based on the feedback I'm getting there, sort of things like that. And then the final aspect is understanding your community as a product, right? So as product marketers, in addition to librarians, it's important to look at why people want to come into your library on a weekly basis, a daily basis, to understand your selling propositions. Are there specific kind of books? Are there specific kind of programs? You know, for example, over at Sherrill's Library in Northside in Santa Clara, there's a lot of different programs that cover a wide range of topics, from job hunting to understanding retirement to everything in between. And to be able to have that is what attracts people into the library and gets them coming back for more, because they not only know now that their library is an experience where you go and you get books, but it's a connected experience where you connect to all sorts of facets of life, including what libraries were originally intended for. So it's important to evolve, it's important to iterate, and really ideate as you build out your communities and you build out your library as a product and connecting those two. So we're going to go through a series of different steps here as we consider how communities are built. And so the first task to consider when you build your community and you build your customer experience out as a whole is leadership buy-in, right? So even today in 2016, you still have people who are wary about social media, people who are wary about leveraging technology to put themselves out there. And so before you go off and you start your pages and you create your accounts, it's important to get leadership buy-in from the people whom you report up to and who are stakeholders within your organization. One of the ways to do this is to look at your library kind of like if it were a brand. So going back to what we were talking about with the San Francisco Giants, it's kind of like thinking about how you want your organization to be perceived as something that's more than just a community organization, but as a hub where people go to for information, for a variety of experience in various things. And so once you can connect that back to why and basically what the metrics are, that's where you get a lot more of that interest and you get that buy-in. The second task is to select your community. So I know many of you here are probably thinking about things like Facebook groups and things like that. Communities can either be free or they can cost you a little bit of money. And so I think for my suggestion and for my intents and purposes today, it would be Facebook groups because Facebook groups are very easy to start and very easy to set up. And so as you look at whatever community you begin, it's important to understand what the features and what features are within each of the platforms that you use. And understanding also group functionality. So at the end of the day, it may not be you that's managing the community, but somebody who might report up to you or a group of people. And in that kitsch situation, it's important to know how the responsibilities are distributed among everyone, as well as a whole host of other things, such as posting content, using video like Facebook Live or just video in general, images, and more things like that. Yeah. The third task that I consider probably the most important is community moderation and management. So we like to think that everybody out there in this world is a good person, but it's not necessarily the case. I have people who come into Albert's List all the time and create spammy content and we pretty much delete it on contact. And so as a person who manages your own community and your own domain, it's important to learn how to tend to the garden. And that's creating moderation guidelines. And moderation guidelines include everything from who can join the community to how you handle people promoting themselves, to how you handle people getting warned, and then eventually who gets banned from the community. And then in addition to that, it's also monitoring how users engage with each other. So we live in a time where political issues are very heated right now, for example. And so if you decide to say something within your community that is very riling up of everybody, it's important to be able to moderate those comments and moderate that approach as well. And so those are rules that you create throughout your community and update and manage as you go along. Because you never know what people will say and as a community gets bigger, these challenges also become different because you might have to manage multiple pieces of content and multiple engagements at once. Task number four is content. So content is also a very important aspect next to community management and moderation because that's how you keep your community fresh. While the moderation aspect is tending to the garden, the content aspect is planting that garden. And so this is an area where you have an opportunity to get really creative. This is everything from posting things like your Book of the Week to a program that's upcoming to maybe a featured member of the library. On my own page for Albert's List on a weekly basis, it's things like motivation Monday, wisdom Wednesday, follow Friday. Activities that get maybe even the person who is not necessarily engaged in my community, engaged or motivated to understand that their job search is an evolving challenge and that there are people there to help them and that there are stories to learn from. And so for content as well, there's also the ability to create events within that group and it's also important to be able to get creative and bold because that gets people's attention. And especially in a world where you have a lot of noise and a lot of social media channels that people engage on, having that bold creative content will get people to notice you more and also come back. In addition, it's also important to be human too because people like authenticity and the more authentic you are about your experience, the better your outcome will be. The fifth area is that of metrics. So once you've done your moderation, created your content, selected your platform and gotten leadership buy-in, it's important to be able to measure how well your content is doing or measure the growth of your community. I have a complicated Excel spreadsheet, for example, for Albert's List. And Facebook unfortunately doesn't do metrics for groups that come out of the box, so you have to do this manually. And you can measure this however way you want, whether it's using an Excel spreadsheet to measure how well the posts are engaging or how many members have joined the group. Either way, it's a way to keep tabs for your stakeholders on how well your community has grown and whether a community is something that is in the long-term interest of your organization. And as we said earlier, right, a community is important for long-term play because communities don't just put up a sign telling patrons while they are checking out books or on the computer that you have a community that they can join and giving them that step-by-step process so that they know they can be more involved in their community. In the post-launch, it's all about keeping the community fresh in the previous section where we talked about content. Having a content calendar is important, so knowing how you measure and create your content throughout an entire calendar month or even looking at how a particular area focuses with, I guess, the calendars of the year. So, for example, we're coming up on Halloween, so there's always a theme around that. Then there's Thanksgiving, and then there's the holiday season. And then there's the new year, right? So there's a bunch of different campaigns that you can put around with regards to the year-by-year and how people can perceive each of these. And then if you realize a year, two years, three years down the road, there's also community retirement. So it's kind of the same thing with regards to launching a community that you have to be able to understand why your community is not working, be able to look at the metrics, have leadership understand maybe why it didn't work, see where your content didn't go right, see where your moderation didn't go right, and then eventually retire the community. And that should be a discussion that is also very thorough in addition to when you launch one. So I thought I'd take an opportunity to actually turn some of what I said above into visuals. And so this first one is actually with regards to your content. So this is what I call the social media ecosystem or the community management ecosystem. And so what we do here is you lead with content you and content leads to engagement. And enough of that leads to opportunity in the middle. So the way I've seen this within my social media, digital marketing activities that I've done in the past with both Albert's List and within my own career is that when you put yourself out there and you create the necessary content that brings value to other people, such as job posts or technical guides or blog posts that you write for your career, it leads to engagement, whether it's from your audience, other professionals, people you've never met, things like that. And with enough of that, it leads to opportunity. Opportunity can include everything from your ability to go to a speaking engagement or people getting hired or you getting hired at your next job. And so this done enough over a long period of time, six months to a year, can get you a lot of benefits for what you're trying to do. And people are always thirsty, looking for good content, looking for good guidance online. And so the more opportunity that you can do to create that content that facilitates that opportunity, that facilitates that engagement, it'll lead you to the right opportunities. And that opportunity is to grow your community and get more people to come through your doors at your library. And then this one is basically the step-by-step process that we went through, one through six. And so, yeah, it basically is also its own little ecosystem to where it goes in circles. So feel free to jump in any place. So we're going to end this presentation with a couple of quick case studies about some of the work that I've done in the past that looks over some of the communities that I've managed. So this is Albert's List. Albert's List, as I mentioned earlier, is a social community now with 19,400 people. And we have over 60 recruiters in this community, along with numerous job seekers and hiring managers and talent consultants. And so I built this community back in 2013. And I really built it actually out of the fact that I was getting a lot of job opportunities and I already had my own job. And I wanted to help other people with their job search because I know that as a new grad from college, it's really tough to find work. And I was tired of putting job postings that I received as status updates on Facebook. And so I said, okay, I'm going to go ahead and create a group around this. And we've grown it quite tremendously. It covers, this one specifically covers Northern and Southern California. And we've gotten people hired at a variety of different companies, both in the Bay Area and in Southern California. And so, yeah, these are the numbers I just mentioned here. And so the first aspect that I want to talk about are meltdowns and moderation. So moderation, as you'll discover, is one of the most difficult things and one of the most rewarding parts of managing your community. And so the story I'd like to tell goes back to May of 2015. We had a recruiter who decided to go crazy on us. And in this situation, he had posted to complain about how candidates were acting. One in particular who had been really early to an interview, actually, because they had taken public transportation. And the community moderators, and I thought that this was kind of a funny post to make, but we let it slide. And it was okay until maybe about 30 or 40 comments in when we had some job candidates, some candidates in the group get really, really angry. Because they thought that they were being singled out and that they thought that they weren't being understood, because some people do have to take public transportation due to the lack of a car. And this blew up into something that was like 100 or 120 comments long, where it dove into people insulting each other, people attacking each other, and we eventually deleted that post. The problem was the second aspect is promotions. So anytime you have a 19,000-member community, it becomes very, very tempting for people who are outside of your community to see that big number and want to promote things to your group. And so in the case of mine, I get hit up multiple times a week to promote somebody's webinar or somebody's product or somebody's event that's upcoming. And as a manager of your own community, you have to learn how to protect your members and protecting your members means knowing how this serves what their needs are. So whenever I talk to someone, it's always about the job hunting angle. It's always about seeing how it can help a job seeker in the end of the day. And my question to people is always, okay, if a job seeker showed up to your event, your webinar, your promotional activity here, whether it's a product or whichever, how will it help them get closer to finding a job? And sometimes people can't answer this question, and that's what I say I think will pass for now. And the same has to go for the libraries that you run, as while it's a much broader area, it's also important that you try to see how inclusive you are, whether the event that is being promoted to you can include everyone, or whether the product that's promoted to you can be afforded by everyone. Small questions and things like that that's important to consider. And then finally, it's creating community and culture, like I said, in creating your moderation guidelines. It's important to create that safe space where people feel like they can be vulnerable and where people feel like they can say what they need to say without being critiqued really harshly or even fearing for their standing among other community members. The second case with Albert's List is driving connection. So a lot of people know me as a master connector and that's the thing that I've used really this Facebook group for a lot is because in my understanding of job hunting it's not necessarily the job hunting itself that scares people, it's the ability to connect yourself to a variety of resources that make your job hunt a lot less scary. And so in this group we do a lot of tagging of names when it comes to job hunting, when it comes to events that are upcoming or when it comes to people who introduce themselves. And this comes from getting to know your audience over a fair amount of time. Now while on the top of my head I'm not going to remember 19,400 names it's enough to get people started in terms of getting that conversation going and also encouraging other people to follow your lead in connecting other people. In any community setting you're going to have people who are looking for things who are trying to figure out what they can do next whether it's their job search whether it's finding that resource or finding that event that will help them get further in their life or in their career. And I would say as librarians because you're so central to the community being able to connect other members, other citizens in your area to the resources that they're looking for or even outside the area is important for being able to get those conversations started. And I think that even though we have a lot of different technology today that connects us all social media and emails and all of that stuff we feel disconnected because we're still not sure where to begin. And as a person who manages your own community being able to connect A to B, B to C, A to C all of that is critical I think for growing your community because people will see you as somebody who is the hub of all these resources and is able to make those connections and make those connections last. So the other case study that I'd like to mention before we conclude with Q&A is sort of borrowing from high tech. So before the company that I worked at now I worked at Cisco. So they're that small technology company down the road in Silicon Valley. And so I was a community manager for them from 2012 to 2013 on their social community which was called Cisco Communities and had 150,000 people within it. And these are people who were looking for solutions around Cisco's various networking and unified communications products. And so with this community being so new I helped them write a community's playbook that you can actually get on SlideShare today if you wanted to because we uploaded a public clean version to the website. And in this entire playbook we kind of cover what I went through here earlier in this presentation. We also cover off on deeper dives into how communities are managed how to retire one, how to build one and how to maintain one. And I think the thing that probably came out of this that was most important was the notion that community is a program, right? So you can take your social communities and you can build it out into and you're whole connected and experienced into its own little thing where in addition to what people experience with your library offline they can also experience to some degree online in addition to the website that you've built. And that allows people to always be top of always allows you to be always top of mind for the various things that you're putting out there. Because after all, right, you know we're all bombarded by noise on a daily basis and your ability to keep in touch with someone and your ability to make sure that you're always there and you're always creating something is going to keep people interested and coming back for more. The other aspect is community driven leadership and so in the community driven leadership aspect that's pretty much what we mentioned earlier with being able to get to know your audience and connect people with each other. In the high tech world it's about connecting to subject matter experts and having people really understand okay, this person knows a thing or two about in this case networking or unified communications and has worked on solutions like this before for this particular sector. Within the library world it's like okay you're looking for maybe somebody who is really passionate about fiction or nonfiction or fantasy type books and who in your community knows a lot about that that can maybe lead a talk or lead a conversation or who in your community knows a lot about that and can go ahead and help somebody out to find their next favorite book and so that's the whole notion of community driven leadership. Finally, yeah, connected experience which is the theme that we've been talking about through this entire conversation is that you have to be able to build up of mine. I guess I can't emphasize this enough in that the more that you show up into your constituents' lives your customers' lives the more that they will know you and once you build that then they come to you. In building Albert's List even though we have 19,000 members we're actually not the biggest jobs community that even I'm a part of on Facebook but the way that we differentiate ourselves is how personable we are and the advice that we offer and the jobs that we offer and the fact that people who are in our group have experienced success based on the advice that they've picked up and so if you can develop a connected experience like that with a lot of the examples that I've mentioned already then that's a great way to get people engaged and keep them engaged and then of course with a company like Cisco you have a lot of metrics in the tech world thrive and drink and eat metrics all day long and I think that those are good but not necessarily the whole thing but being able to prove your numbers and show that your numbers work is probably one of the most important parts of justifying that your community should keep going. So just some closing thoughts I think that as I think about community management it's very much a whole unified experience in building my own communities over the last couple of years I've had the opportunity to meet people from my own community and really help them out and one of the most fulfilling aspects is seeing someone being able to get a job or getting connected and even though I live in Southern California it's actually also a great way to keep in touch with people in Northern California simply because I may move back up here someday due to family and a whole host of other things but being able to build a community for you I think is going to be a very similar experience because it's fulfilling to know that people are being helped and finding the resources that they need so hopefully I was able to give you a really good high level on how to build a community and how it's been beneficial across a variety of different industries so with that I think we'll conclude.