YourMembership.com Blog

The following is a guest blog post from Mike Lazzara, customer support representative with YourMembership.com. Mike has been a valuable part of our team here at YM, having previously worked in the Sales and Marketing Department before moving to Customer Support in late 2011. Prior to joining YM two years ago, Mike served as Risk Manager for a yacht manufacturing company.  He approaches knowledge according to a saying his grandfather told him, “you don’t have to know everything about something, but you should try to know something about everything.”

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Putting the appropriate risk management program in place is dependent upon understanding certain aspects inherent to any risk management process. The first is defining risk management. Risk can be viewed as any potential event resulting in a physical or financial loss, such as damage to company property or legal fees associated with a lawsuit. While an event can result in a positive outcome, risk management generally deals with preventing outcomes that are viewed as negative by organizations. Management deals with planning, organizing and controlling resources to achieve given objectives. Therefore, Risk Management, and by extension risk management programs, can be viewed as a method of organizing and controlling organization resources in such a way as to minimize loss should an event with a negative outcome occur or prevent the event altogether.  Read the rest of this entry »

I was inspired this morning by a blog post from one of the writers I follow on Twitter. She suggested writing your own bad review/critique. Her point was “acknowledging your faults is the best way to overcome them.”

The same concept can be applied to community management. Visit your private online community and create a fake member. See what “their” (aka your) experience is as “they” visit for the first time. Does anyone reach out and welcome them/you? Do they receive suggestions on what groups to join or activities to undertake? Is the site intuitive or are you bombarded by so many options that they lose site of an obvious path to engagement?

Now write your own “review” of your member site. What has this experience shown you?

Even the most well-constructed car’s color will fade, exterior will rust and its mechanics will cease to work when left unattended for years. Care and maintenance is required. You have to drive it (or at least start it) on occasion.

Content is important to your community but so are connections. Give your members a place to connect and something to do there. Something they want to do, not something you think they should be doing. If you are not thinking about what your members want and how they want it, your community will fail.

content your audience wants,

in the form they want it,

at the time they need it,

with the ease to share it.

That is all.

(Thanks to C.C Chapman and Maggie Fox for today’s webinar: How Content Marketing is Changing Everything.)

The Friday Fix for last week “challenged” us to record every moment of our work day and assign it a color, by doing so we could quickly break out what is a necessity (as in job-dependent) and what we can table. Red were must-do activities, blue were things that had nothing directly to do with your work but may still be necessary such as training a new person or answering a co-worker’s question and yellow was the catch-all for everything else. (If you’re a technology person and are fascinated by graphs and charts, the same thing can be done through Excel.) After you’ve “colored” your day, you can move into the analysis phase.  Read the rest of this entry »