If you follow me on Twitter, you likely know my stream gets a little more active on Saturdays during the fall. I’m a big college football fan. It definitely doesn’t hurt that my alma mater (M-I-Z!) is in the top 10 of the BCS standings right now.
What most people may not realize is that you can learn a lot of community management best practices from the teams you watch on ESPN every Saturday. Here’s three big lessons.
Team-building matters
While cliche, it takes a team to build a community just like it takes a team to win the big games. You wouldn’t send the water boy out to be your quarterback, and expect a good outcome. Just like you shouldn’t have an “intern” send out a few tweets and Facebook posts and “auto-magically’ think you can build a healthy, engaged online community.
Building a community- ideally one that isn’t just on Facebook (although that’s another post all together) requires buy-in from all key stakeholders in the company. Just like in football, all the pieces have to “gel together” in order to have the best chance for success.
Embrace the fundamentals
Whether it’s 2-a-days or learning how to tackle properly (Something that a lot of college defenses are lacking nowadays. But, I digress), there’s a lot of discipline and skill-building that needs to happen before a player can be a successful college athlete. It all comes down to mastering the fundamentals.
The fundamentals are just as important if not more so when it comes to building a scalable and sustainable community. It comes down to seeding content, moderating the community effectively, adding value, creating brand/community advocates, etc. This all revolves around the cycle of listening–> creating value —> then measuring the impact. Repeat the cycle accordingly.
Sometimes you just need a “Hail Mary”
Finally, building a community is hard work. Results don’t just happen auto-magically (my new favorite, made up word). When everything seems to be going in the wrong direction, sometimes you need to “throw out that Hail Mary.” Just like in football, it won’t always work, but when it does it ignites a huge spark.
If it’s getting the luckiest break in college football, like this game-winning, incredible touchdown on 4th and 18th to beat Georgia or running a last-ditch marketing campaign hoping to finally drive awareness and spark action. Sometimes, you need that backs up against the wall, all or nothing feeling to get you to focus and deliver that strike that you were missing from the get-go.
http://youtu.be/XkpDz8YyVD8
