Last weekend’s blog reading brought me to this post. Someone has a new role as a community manager. That’s exciting! And he also asked some questions.

I’m cool with this new role and loving the challenge but I’m having a hard time learning how to quantify my efforts and set goals. I’m sure I can come up with some simple goals to start such as:

  • # tweets per month
  • # blogs per week
  • # comments on other blogs/communities per week
  • increase site traffic to # by some date

These are goals I can set and I know I can hit, but what about goals for internal efforts?

Those are the ones I want to determine but I can’t seem to wrap my head around it.
Should my internal goals be on getting employees to blog? to answer questions in the industry? Or should they be focused on more internal culture building?

Those are some great questions! I think that too often people assume that there is nothing to do internally. They do their job with the customers externally & all is well.

There is so much that can be done internally. And if it’s done well it will make the community manager role that much more effective.

Here are my suggestions for goals in regard to working internally:

  • meet with managers from cust. service, marketing, dev’t, qa, etc
    • talk about what your plans are & ask if they have ideas & questions?
    • encourage an open dialogue in the future
    • as you identify issues (or have) – suggest & establish procedures
  • informally survey your co-workers to find out what their knowledge is of social media tools & how you’re using them
    • share your ideas & be a proponent for your own job internally
    • dispel their wondering about what you really do
    • encourage them to share their ideas
  • help establish internal communication efforts
    • does your organization have a collaborate space?
    • do they have an intranet? how can that be improved?
    • join efforts that are cross-functional
  • identify colleagues that are interested in blogging & your social media efforts
    • invite them to guest blog
    • teach them about your tools (Twitter, blogging, etc)

So just as much as their are many PR activities that can be done in the community & beyond, treat your internal staff as a community too. Identify what their needs are & then address them. The return is that management will support your efforts. You’ll also have greater job satisfaction because then the position has truly become a team effort.

What would your goals be internally?