Posted by jennita
Have you ever been a part of a community and wondered, “How does it all happen?” Well today is your lucky day! In the spirit of TAGFEE, I've decided to lift the Moz hood and show you what it takes to manage a large community. In fact, this is just the first post in a series of posts on Community Management.
Today I'll be explaining the who, what, when, where and how of how we manage the SEOmoz community. It's important to know who are the people behind the scenes, keeping the community in order and running smoothly, just as much as it is to know what exactly we consider the community to be and how we do it.
In the next posts, I'll dig deeper into subjects such as how we deal with negativity, how we gained over 100k Twitter followers and what we're planning to do for our Google+ strategy. For now, let's jump into the SEOmoz community and see how it's done.
Who Are We?
Over the last couple years, the community has grown immensely. It quickly became imperative to build a team to help take care of different aspects of the community. I simply couldn’t handle all aspects on my own anymore. So, before I jump too far into the what, why and how we manage the community, I’d like to introduce you to the “who.”
Peter Meyers (aka Dr. Pete)
Essentially Dr. Pete has been around the Moz community for about as long as Rand himself. :) No, really. He’s been an essential part of the community long before we even called it a community. Rand made the smart move long ago to bring Pete on board as an Associate.
Pete spends much of his time answering questions in Q&A (you’d be amazed at how much stuff this guy knows!) and writing on the blog. In fact he’s written some of top content on the blog for the past three years. He pretty much makes the rest of us (ok except maybe Rand) look bad at our unworthy content.
While he’s not helping manage the chaos of Q&A, writing on the blog, or being one of the funniest guys on Twitter, he runs User Effect, a successful usability and CRO company. Oh and if you’ve ever wondered if he’s a he’s a real doctor, read more here.
Casey Henry
Many of you may remember Casey from his excellent YouMoz posts that he wrote as a member of the community. The fact is, his community activity caught our eye and in 2010 we made him an Associate. At that time, he helped kill spam, answer questions in Q&A and did some dev work for us as well. It didn’t take long to realize that he was a great fit for Moz, so we hired him & moved him and his wife to Seattle.
As the resident Marketing Ninja, he manages many marketing projects as well as a number of dev responsibilities. His part within the Community Team is to help keep track of, and kill spam, spammers and scammers. Whether that’s through comments, PMs or otherwise, he’s the man on the case. He’s also quite active in Q&A and can “woot,” “whee,” and “beep” with the rest of us on the SEOmoz Twitter account.
You’ll often find him replying to Tweets to the SEOmoz account from his personal account, fixing link issues, answer questions and being an awesomely helpful guy. Aww.
Keri Morgret
Keri is well known in the industry as one of those amazing conference live-bloggers, and speaks about using negative keywords effectively for PPC. Having managed many forums and community sites in the past, including being a moderator at Sphinn, she is perfectly positioned to be a part of the Moz community team.
Currently Keri works out of her home near San Francisco as a (mostly) full-time Associate and runs her business Strike Models (go check out the site, it’s super cool) with her husband. She has quickly become an integral part of the team as well as the community in general. As the main Mozzer leading YouMoz management as well as Q&A she interacts all day long with community members. Talk about stealth, you may not realize it, but Keri pretty much knows everything that’s going on all the time. You think I’m kidding… I’m not.
Not only does she spend her time managing some of the on-site areas but she often helps out with the SEOmoz Twitter account as well. It can be a daunting task knowing that over 100k people will see your tweets (ok, in reality the number to actually see the tweets is quite less, but you get the point), but Keri jumps right in there. :) She’s also a huge help by cleaning out the Twitter “inbox” (more on that below) for me each morning.
If you’re ever curious about what’s going on at any particular time within the Moz Community, Keri is your woman.
Erica McGillivray
When we found out Erica was a founder as well as the President and Marketing Director of GeekGirlCon, we just knew she’d fit right into our community. :) With a background in SEO, Social, Email Marketing and event planning (pretty much marketing awesomeness) she easily jumped into the role of Community Attaché.
Erica can essentially do anything and everything that has to do with managing the community. A ninja in her own right. On any give day, you’ll find her managing our email marketing, answering questions in Q&A, reading through YouMoz posts, Tweeting from the Moz account, setting up webinars and organizing the upcoming MozCon.
Oh, and did I mention she’s a badass SEO? I’ve always felt strongly that you can’t manage a community unless you’re a part of the community yourself. Well Erica can talk the talk and walk the walk. Just be sure not to make her mad, she might pull these out.
Jen Lopez
Oh hi! That’s me. :) Just a quick background, I have a degree in Journalism, emphasis in Public Relations, but spent 10 years as a web developer before I turned into an SEO. Got hired as an SEO Consultant with SEOmoz in early 2009, then in January 2010 we gave up consulting. Doh! Hello Community Management. It was at that point that I created the position and over the last few years it has grown into a real job. J
So what will you find me doing on an average day? I find myself Managing Twitter, Facebook & Google+, combating spam, answering questions in Q&A (usually that Keri or Erica assign me ;)), managing the blog schedule and content, responding to help tickets as needed, commenting on community posts outside of SEOmoz, and any other random thing that comes up during the day.
The truth is, my job rocks. Sure I deal with trolls sometimes, but that’s what makes the job interesting.
Mozzers
That’s you, you and YOU. Whether it’s Gianluca responding to a Tweet about SEOmoz while us West Coasters are sleeping or Ryan answering a question in Q&A about a technical PRO issue, you guys help us every day to manage the community. This is a very important aspect of the community and one that makes people want to be a part of it. It’s not just one person managing everyone else with an iron fist (OK I admit sometimes I have dreams this will happen ;), it’s all the Moz staff and community helping each other out. Holy. geeky. happiness.
What Do We Do?
Obviously there’s no way to really describe everything that we do in one blog post. When you work with a community, your day can change in an instant. Sometimes an issue comes up and you’re helping to manage an issue since you’re the public “face” of the community on the social sites. Other times you wake up to a hashtag being created and hundreds of posts being written about you. *huge grin*
Let me take a few moments to walk you through the major aspects of managing the SEOmoz community. This really is only a high-level look at we do each day. The plan is to expand on many of these areas as separate blog posts. For now, here are the what, when how and who of what it means to manage the community.
Blog
When Rand started the SEOmoz blog years ago, I’m sure he never quite imagined that it would be the base of such an expansive and amazing community. It really has become the center of everything Moz. Think about this; an average blog post gets arou