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  • © 2015

The Community Manager's Playbook

How to Build Brand Awareness and Customer Engagement

Apress

Authors:

  • In The Community Manager's Playbook, digital evangelist and brand marketer Lauren Perkins provides community managers and business leaders alike with the first guide to building, nourishing, and growing online communities that naturally sync with their company's offline marketing efforts.

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  • Read on any device
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Table of contents (13 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvi
  2. Learning

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1
    2. What Is Community Management?

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 3-20
    3. Not All Communities Are Created Equal

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 21-43
    4. Hired!

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 45-68
    5. How Community Creates Business Value

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 69-94
  3. Planning

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 95-95
    2. CM Strategy Orientation and Setup

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 97-113
    3. The ABCs of Landscape Analysis

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 115-157
    4. Listening and Discovery

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 159-188
  4. Doing

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 219-219
    2. Designing Community and Social Experiments

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 221-238
    3. Performance Tracking and Measurement

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 239-250
    4. Primary Platforms

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 251-258
    5. Day-to-Day Management of Your Community

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 259-272
    6. Storytelling

      • Lauren Perkins
      Pages 273-289
  5. Back Matter

    Pages 291-297

About this book

Savvy companies recognize the value of a strong community. Think of Nike and its community of runners, Nike+, and you’ll quickly understand that creating and fostering an online community around a product or brand is a powerful way to boost marketing efforts, gain valuable insight into consumers, increase revenue, improve consumer loyalty, and enhance customer service efforts.

Companies now have the unprecedented opportunity to integrate their brand’s messaging into the everyday lives of their target audiences. But while supporting the growth of online communities should be at the top of every company’s priority list, all too often it falls by the wayside. That’s why brand strategy expert and digital marketer Lauren Perkins wrote The Community Manager’s Playbook (#CMplaybook on Twitter), a must-read guide for business and brand builders who need to strengthen their approach to online B2C community management and customer engagement.

As Perkins explains, if companies want to create thriving online communities focused on their product or brand, they must do more than simply issue a few tweets a day, create (and then abandon) a Facebook page, and blog every once in a while. Instead, organizations of all sizes must treat community management as a central component of their overall marketing strategy. When they do, they will be rewarded handsomely with greater brand awareness, increased customer use and retention, lower acquisition costs, and a tribe of consumers who can’t wait to purchase their next product.

Perkins not only teaches readers how to build an engaging community strategy from the ground up, but she also provides them with the tactical community management activities they need to acquire and retain customers, create compelling content, and track their results along the way. Distinctive in its comprehensive, step-by-step approach to creating online communities that are fully consistent with a company’s existing brand voice, The Community Manager’s Playbook:

  • Explains how excellent community management provides a competitive advantage with a large impact on sales
  • Provides an in-depth overview of brand and business alignment
  • Teaches readers how to identify their community's online target audience and influence their needs and wants
  • Details the appropriate online channels through which content should be distributed
  • Champions the use of an agile approach through repeated testing to maximize the return on every company investment
  • Discusses the many diverse metrics that can be used to measure community scope

Today, there is no brand strategy without a community strategy. Companies that are not developing communities are losing control of their brands and missing opportunities to optimize their marketing investments. With The Community Manager’s Playbook as their guide, however, marketing professionals and the companies and brands they represent will be equipped with the tools they need to manage their online marketing efforts, engage their core customers at every level, leverage community insights into the product development cycle, and ensure that their messaging is heard across all corners of the digital landscape.

About the author

Lauren Perkins is a motivational coach, digital evangelist, and brand marketer who devotes her energy to helping individuals and companies unearth and implement solutions that will make a difference in their businesses and lives. After beginning her career as a journalist at a local paper, Perkins was asked to join The Boston Globe, where she learned the necessity of asking hard-hitting questions, assessing the entire landscape, and diving deep to understand the why behind each story. That philosophical approach has endured Perkins's career shift to experiential marketing, brand management, and digital technology, topics that she consults on at Perks Consulting, which she opened in 2008 to modernize the intersection of technology and lifestyle. With the goal of providing holistic, consumer-centric strategies, Perks works closely with every client including eDiets, Laura Mercier, Cookstr, and Pfizer to align brand with business, products with platforms, and marketing with media. In addition, Perkins is a leading instructor at General Assembly, New York's largest technology and entrepreneurship campus. Currently she can be found leading classes on Community Management, User Acquisition, and Brand-centric Business Strategy.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: The Community Manager's Playbook

  • Book Subtitle: How to Build Brand Awareness and Customer Engagement

  • Authors: Lauren Perkins

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4302-4996-2

  • Publisher: Apress Berkeley, CA

  • eBook Packages: Business and Economics, Business and Management (R0), Apress Access Books

  • Copyright Information: Lauren Perkins 2015

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4302-4995-5Published: 25 December 2014

  • eBook ISBN: 978-1-4302-4996-2Published: 05 January 2015

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XII, 316

  • Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Business and Management, general

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 44.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access