Do Startups Need Community Managers?

Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in March 26, 2012 on MarkEvansTech.com.

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Do start-ups needs community managers to operate their social media activities…and a whole lot more?

It’s an interesting question. On one hand, social media is seen as a low-cost marketing and sales channel for lean and mean start-ups. On the other, every full-time hire is a major decision so start-ups need to decide whether having a community makes sense, or whether having another developer or salesman is a more pragmatic option.

If the right person is hired, a community manager can be a valuable asset for a start-up. There are, however, several important skills a community manager needs to possess. These include:

Have in-depth knowledge of social media strategy and tactics. It’s more than knowing how to tweet or post an update. It means knowing how to execute, when to get involved in a situation and when to lie low, and how to build relationships and connections.
Excellent communication and writing skills given so much of what a community manger does is engage and talk with a variety of people in a public forum. A good community manager has the ability to prepare blog posts, presentations, case studies, and speak at conferences.
Understand and appreciate the business development process. In talking with lots of people and consuming tons of information, community managers have the ability to discover, identify and nurture prospects, which can then be passed along to the sales team.
Provide top-notch customer service. It means having the knowledge and patience to deal with all kinds of issues and problems – big and small – that emerge. Some of them can be handled online, while some needs to be tactfully taken off-line.
Sell and, even, close a deal: There are potential customers who make it clear about the products they need. A savvy community manager will be all over these opportunities with the goal to complete a sale.

Like a stellar five-tool baseball player, community managers require a variety of skills to not only be effective but provide startups with maximum bang for the buck. They need to multi-task AND be good at all of the tasks that pop up during the working day.

Community managers who have these skills can completely justify their hiring and, in the process, serve a startup in many ways to support its operations and growth.

What do you think? Is there a right time for a startup to hire a community manager?

Pre-Launch Marketing for Stealthy Startups

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 3, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.

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Some products and services don’t have a pre-launch phase. For companies where building a minimum viable product isn’t a months-long effort, it makes sense to just launch a beta and then start talking about it. For other companies however, the product might take a bit longer to develop and talking about it before it’s been released in some form could be pointless (because you don’t have a call to action yet), risky (competitors position against you or customers get confused because there aren’t enough details) or both.

One of the techniques that I’ve used in the past is to engage with the market by talking about the business problem that your product or service is going to solve, without getting into exactly how you plan on solving it. At IBM we sometimes referred to this as “market preparation”.

For larger companies this often entails spending a lot of time (and money) with industry analysts and industry leaders sharing your company’s unique point of view on the market and why it is currently being under-served. If you do this properly you’ll come to a point where your point of view starts to align well with that of the influential folks you’ve been working with. By the time you launch, these folks will be standing behind you saying that your view of the market is one customers should consider.

Pre-launch startups generally don’t have the time, clout or cash to change the way Gartner Group thinks about a market but that shouldn’t stop you from taking your message out directly to the market you care about. There’s never been a better time for startups to get the message out. Here are some considerations:

Create a clear message about your market point of view – you will need to create a set of messages that clearly illustrate what the unmet need is the in market and why that need has not been met by existing players. You can go so far as to talk about the characteristics of the needed solution (without getting into the gorey details of exactly how you plan to solve it).
Develop case studies that illustrate the pain you will be solving – Gather a set of real examples of customers you have worked with that have the problem and clearly illustrate the need for a new type of solution on the market.
Spread the word – Launch a blog, write guest posts for other blogs, comment on relevant blog posts, write articles, write an e-book, speak at conferences and events, open a Twitter account and start sharing information that illustrates your point of view. There’s no end of ways to get your message out there. Do your homework and find out where your market hangs out. What forums do they participate in? What blogs and newsletters do they read? Get your message in front of them in the places where they already are.
Engage and gather feedback – Starting a dialog with your potential customers about how you see the market gives you a chance to test your messages and see what resonates and what doesn’t. You’ve made a set of assumptions (backed up by customer research hopefully), the more folks in the market you can talk to the more you can fine-tune your market story.
Capture where you can – If it makes sense you can start capturing a list of potential beta customers or a mailing list that you can use when you launch.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 3, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.

Desperately seeking early adopters

Editors Note: This is a guest post by first-time entrepreneur Mike Potter (LinkedIn, @mike_j_potter) who previously was a Marketing Manager at Adobe, a project manager at Mozilla and an engineer at an Ottawa area startup. Mike has spent time running marketing programs for a large organization and has realized that power he held for many early-stage startups.

It has been 5 months since I left my job at Adobe and started my own company, Arkli. We are building software to help create and measure integrated marketing campaigns. If I’d known how little it takes to help a startup, I would have tried to do far more when I was Adobe. It has been the experience of starting my own business, and demonstrating customer traction to potential investors and potential customers that I’ve come to realize how important 1 or 2 early customers like Adobe can be for a startup.

Traction is the new black

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Demonstrating customer traction even in small numbers (particularly for enterprise or B2B startups) is the thing that helps you get the next meeting, the next introduction or the conversation that can really help your startup. For example, we’ve been in business for less than 7 months and we have 2 customers. When I was at Adobe, I would have said only 2 customers – that’s all you have? We had tens of thousands of customers. It was unclear that 2 customers could matter on the scale and scope of Adobe. Now running a startup, I look at it and say “wow, 2 customers, that’s great!” Investors say the same thing. Someone recently commented, “I’m impressed you’ve gotten customers without outside investment.” And it’s not just me, a panelist on BNN’s The Pitch congratulate Dalia Asterbadi (LinkedIn, @d_asterra) of realSociable on her partners and her user numbers. The best part is RealSociable hasn’t launched yet!

The reality is that getting customers to pay for something is really hard. Which is why when you’re starting out, everyone says going to take twice as long and cost twice as much as what you think. And it does, because its really hard to get early adopters. Silicon Valley is full of early adopters who help give traction startups. We need more of them in Canada.

Getting to the chasm

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I really believe that the best thing a community can do to help local economy is to support local businesses and startups. We can argue about how much companies like RIM matter to startups. But it doesn’t have to be all mergers, acquisitions and corporate venture capital funds. It is not about new headcount or stock price. It’s about curiosity to seek out new solutions to your existing business problems.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in startups. Are you a founder? Do you work for a startup? Are you working for a larger organization? Here’s how you can help:

Taking selfish advantage of an economic situation

Look at your everyday problems. Are you struggling with accounting software, check out WaveAccounting. Everybody hates HR, have you checked out TribeHR? Can’t get your kids to do their chores, maybe HighScoreHouse can help make chores a game. Did you experience downtime because EC2 was offline for 5 days, maybe VMFarms can support you local and on EC2. There are a ton of startups with solutions to consumer and enterprise problems. It can be a struggle as a startup to raise your awareness event with early adopters. [Editor’s Note: There were 42 submissions and 5 accepted demos at the most recent DemoCamp. You can tune into the startup news sources like StartupNorth, NextMontreal, TechVibes and others. It can be a challenge but we’re working on better ways to discover Canadian startups. You can find early access to our redesigned StartupNorth Index of companies. It is currently running on our staging server, but the data model is solid an we’ll move all entered data to the production instance in the coming weeks.]

We need to build and embrace a culture of early adopters. Look at your business operations, where are things not working as smoothly as you’d like. This is where you might be able to find a startup that you can take a flier on to help you improve the broken process. This is a chance to help an early stage startup.

Become an early adopter of a startups product. Use it for 6 months and give it a shot. When you’re working for a fairly large company (employs more than 10 or so), you’ve got nothing to lose. [Editor’s note: Nothing to lose, other than your job ;-)]. Hopefully you will have found a product that makes you day-to-day responsibilities easier, smarter, faster, more enjoyable. You get to go home at the end of the day with a pay cheque, and hopefully fixed a broken part of your job with very little risk or cost.

And you might have helped seed a startup. It takes so very little to help a startup demonstrate traction. A few customers which can lead to new investors which can lead into job creation in the community. It’s a cycle of early adoption in that we desperately need to start in Canada.

Embrace your role as an early adopter

Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. This might be true. But you’ll be giving a lifeline and valuable feedback to an entrepreneur by choosing their products. One of the great thing about being a startup is that many of us are innovators and early adopters. Our mail has been in the cloud since 2005, when we embraced GMail (for the massive storage). The iPhone seemed like the best way to stop carrying an iPod and a Blackberry in 2007. We constantly seek out new and improved technology products. We need to embrace the same eagerness to try personal technologies in our organizations. Whether it’s new technology like Node.js or Cassandra, or a new way to track real-time team performance (looking at your Rypple).

For startups traction is the new black. And it’s up us as middle managers and executives to seek out novel solutions. And in becoming a customer you might have just helped the next Facebook/Google/Oracle/Microsoft/Apple/etc.

What new products are you using that are reshaping your business?