How does the Spanish Red Cross apply Community Management to its Social Network?

Suzanne Livingston  March 26 2010 01:57:50 PM

The Spanish Red Cross’s slogan is “Cada vez más cerca de las personas” or translated into English “increasingly close to people”, in my opinion one of the many slogans out there that really match the philosophy behind Social Networks, connecting people with people.  This is the main reason why the Spanish Red Cross has implemented a Social Network as Lotus Connections, to connect its members, partners and volunteers all together in order to reach and collaborate with more people through social software.

Thanks to this shift, a new role has emerged inside the Spanish Red Cross: the Community Manager (CM from now on). Our first step was to define clearly the role and we came up with a definition as the following:

A Community Manager is a person who is in charge of managing a virtual community in a social software environment, he/she can manage one or more communities at the same time being his role strongly linked to the people that make up the Community and his/her main goal to keep them alive and make them progress adequately.

Bearing in mind this definition we also came up with 5 basic tasks he/she should never forget and that should be applied at all times:

1.  Listen to his users by reading their blogs, forums, wikis, etc. to discover positive and negative trends. Always available to reinforce the community’s security
2.  Share and Comment appropriately and precisely. A CM is the voice of the organization in the virtual environment and must possess and use its common sense correctly. He/she must , expressing the organizations’ opinion and must always be committed to it.
3.  Report and connect from and to the organization, forwarding the information and needs received from the Community members to the necessary departments inside the organization and vice versa. Acts as a “key stone” between both worlds.
4.  Feedback. This is the key to a good long term relationship with the community users. If their suggestions are heard by the CM and they can see a trace of work being carried out triggered by their suggestions (thanks to the feedback received), they will feel a strong sensation of belonging to the Community. Also the CM has to give feedback from the members to the organization so it understands what is going on outside its corporate firewall.
5.  Motivate, energize and innovate inside his Community. Innovation is key because a Community is evolving constantly and the Innovation will come from the motivation and energy the Community has; it’s the contribution of new ideas what drives people to do things differently. The success of a Community also depends on its energy degree that can be built using motivation strategies and techniques; in the end what a CM should try to do is make every single member feel part of the Community, a team member so they keep coming, sharing and collaborating.

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