A Potted History of
Community Management
Robin Hamman, Director, Edelman Digital
(cc)
Bush)ck:
h,p://www.flickr.com/
photos/bush)ck/7225994354/

2
Whilst the focus of my presentation today is going to be the past, I wanted to start with a quick
introduction to the work I’m doing today. In 2010, after around a dozen years professional
experience, I joined Edelman Digital as a Director. Since then, our London practice has grown
from around 30 people to 84. Around half of our revenue comes from community management and
related activities such as strategy development, social media monitoring, content planning and
production, and measurement. The other half comes from design and build activities.
We’re the EMEA hub of a global Communications business. Our typical social media engagement
operates across multiple markets, with our colleagues in other markets delivering tactically to
their audiences.
We’re based in Victoria and are nearly always recruiting for a range of roles...

RESEARCH PLAN
• Insights & Intelligence • Social Business Planning
• Social Conversation Analysis • Organisational Design
• Influencer Identification • Policy & Governance
• Survey & Focus Groups • Technology & Workflow
ANALYSE
• Conversation Analysis TRANSFORM
• Social Media & Brand Monitoring
• Listening Programs • Strategy
OUR SERVICES
• Measurement Framework • Education & Certification
• Program Planning & Integration
CREATE & DEVELOP
COUNSEL ENGAGE • Design & Development
• Online Engagement Counsel • Community Management • Mobile/Tablet App Dev
• Issues Management • Online Influencer Engagement • Digital/Social Advertising
• Crisis Preparedness • Social Search Optimisation • Digital Creative Content
• Technical Development
We’re pleased - I’m pleased - at our ability to deliver end to end across the digital and social
media spectrum. Some of what we do is what you might expect a leading PR agency to do, some of it
perhaps unexpected.

THE DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM
Web, social, mobile, search—our philosophy is to look
at the bigger picture and how it all integrates.
Mobile
Properties Internal Properties (Intranets etc.)
CORPORATE
External Websites External Social Networks
social sharing
search engines
BRAND
WEBSITES MULTIBRAND
WEBSITES BRANDS
MULTIBRAND
BLOGGER
RICH MEDIA OUTREACH BLOGS
CORPORATE
WEBSITES PARTNERSHIPS
ADS
BANNER ADS
Owned + Paid +
Earned Earned
We take a holistic view of our client’s requirements, connecting their business strategy with
internal and external facing activities supported by processes, platforms, and tactics developed
and deployed on a case by case basis. It’s like one big puzzle that we try to understand before
piecing together a programme of activities that pull it all together.

SOCIAL BUSINESS PLANNING
Our proprietary methodology is designed to help complex
organisations navigate social at scale.
ORG & GOVERNANCE STRATEGY
Organisational Design Vision
Governance & Control Business Objectives
Culture & Leadership PLATFORMS Roadmap
PEOPLE PROCESS
ECOSYSTEM MEASUREMENT
Audience
Key Performance Indicators
Engagement
Analytics & Methodology
Risk
One area I personally find really exciting is social business planning. When I worked at the
Dachis Group, in a previous role, we actually had clients come in asking us to transform their
business using social technologies - usually a mix of internal collaborative platforms and
publicly facing initiatives. At Edelman, we tend to stumble across businesses where digital and
social media have exposed challenges caused by the siloed nature of business functions. It’s at
that point, we do what we can to fix them - from devising new processes and introducing new
platforms, to running purposeful planning exercises aimed at enabling more sweeping change. We
call that latter social business planning, and have developed a methodology for it.

GLOBAL SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE
GLOBAL MEETS LOCAL
Edelman Client
Global organisations need to Global Global
integrate social at scale both
regionally and globally.
Central
We call this “Glocal”—putting a Platform
social architecture in place that
allows a business or brand to Best Marketing
scale content and engagement Practices Assets
efforts, centralise and
coordinate calendars, and
standardise KPI’s, social
enterprise technologies etc. Local
Training Cascade Local
Markets
Modules Docs Markets
I mentioned that our typical social media engagement involves our London practice being the “hub”
with spokes in a number of markets, based on client requirements. This is a really simplified
view of what this look like. Basically, in London, we create content calendars and engagement
strategies, which are then delivered, in a coordinated way, by our people in each of the markets.
For one client that’s 45+ markets globally, whilst for others it can be a handful of markets or,
in a small number of instances, a single market.

2.5M
FANS
12MFANS
9M
FANS
LYNX SHELL PUMA
10M 250K
MOBILE APP
250K
FANS
FANS DOWNLOADS
We’ve had huge success in developing and implementing social media strategies for our clients -
the numbers here are a few months old, with some of these tallies having doubled since we created
the original graphic. We’ve also got a lot better at measurement and reporting - gone are the
days when clients are impressed with fans and followers alone. Now they want to understand
trends, know whether fans and followers are worth more than non-fans in terms of revenue over
time, whether they’ve achieved cost reductions by deflecting customer care inquiries, whether
they’ve been able to identify and recruit a high value candidate through social media, etc.
We’ve come, and the community management industry has come, a very very long way...

(cc) Crazybarefootpoet:
The Electronic Frontier http://www.flickr.com/photos/15198978@N04/7974395358/
Then along came the internet - the Electronic Frontier. Described by some as the modern day Wild
West: full of opportunity, but also largely lawless, unregulated, and uncontrollable... their
words, not mine.

PRE-INTERNET OF THE 80’S
M1
ATD (attention, tone, dial) 6929348
CONNECT 1200
Login:
>Cybersoc
Password:
>******
Welcome to Koala Country!!!!!
There’s no doubt we’ve come a LONG way. In 1985, as a 12 year old who lived at the back of a corn
field, I set up my first BBS. Back then there was, fairly obviously, no internet. New BBS
services were advertised in computing magazines, on notes pinned to bulletin boards at computer
retailers, at computer clubs, and of course on other BBS’s.
My Apple IIe had two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, one for the OS and the other for any programmes I
might have wanted to run. If you took a hole punch to the edge of the disk, you could use both
sides.
To gain access to a BBS, you connected your phone line to a modem, entered a set of command line
instructions, and waited to be prompted for a password. Some of the services required payment -
which, back then, meant sending a cheque by post to the owner’s home and waiting for it to clear
the bank.
My BBS mostly contained “cracked” versions of software for download, but users could also create
a profile (a few lines of text), leave messages in each other’s mailboxes, and post public
messages on a sort of message board.

THE INTERNET 1995
In 1991, I went away to university where, in my dorm room and at computer labs sprinkled around
campus, I could access the internet. Back then, it was largely a text based experience.
Shown here is an IRC chat interface and a newsgroup. There were, along with these and text based
web pages - the Lynx browser had recently been developed - a number of universities offering
bulletin board like systems.
My friends and I quickly found a use for these services - finding people who could make, or were
interested in buying, fake ID cards to get into bars around campus. We didn’t make much money,
and the risk was enormous - I count myself lucky we didn’t get caught.

WALLED GARDENS: MID-90’S
The Autumn of 1995 was when online community became a significant part of my life again. I used
the University of Essex campus network to Telnet into AOL and, during it’s short life, eWorld
(Apple’s first stab at creating a branded online community, which had a more graphically based
interface than any proceeding service).
As a student of Sociology, I realised that this new world, which at the time had not attracted
much social scientific scrutiny, was a fascinating mirror of the offline world. People created
identities, trust was formed despite the lack of visual or audible queues, connections blossomed
into meaningful friendships, and built communities were built not based on the accidents of
location and time, but around specific interests.
There was a strong split amongst the academic community as to whether this was a positive or
negative development.
On the pro-side were people like Howard Rheingold, Sandy Stone, Barry Wellman, Stewart Brand...
who enthused about the way that “virtual communities” enabled participants to find meaning and a
sense of belonging in spaces that transcended the barriers of distance and time. Many, but not
all, of these people had played a role in The Well, a community I dabbled in myself at some
stage.
There were many on the negative side, including a group of researchers in Pittsburgh who, with
much fanfare, published the results of a study suggesting that use of the internet makes people
feel sad and lonely.

EARLY DAYS AT THE BBC
Lizzie Jackson
By 1998, I’d become friends with Howard Rheingold who, when invited to give a talk about online
community at the BBC, got me invited along as his guest. At the end of his presentation, a senior
editor asked, “This all sounds great in a sort of left coast liberal World, but would something
like this work here in the much more reserved UK and, if so, where would we find someone to help
us do this?”. Howard pointed to me, sitting in the front row, probably wearing a hastily
purchased and poorly fitting suit for the first time in my life, and recommended they speak to
me. At the end of the event, Lizzie Jackson, a former radio producer who had been working for a
few month’s on the BBC’s message board (I think The Archers and EastEnders were the only one’s at
the time), walked up and invited me to come to Bush House the following week to begin work as the
BBC’s first Community Producer.

Within a year, together we were able to work our way around a range of editorial policy and legal
issues, put professional moderation in place, and develop and roll out a message board training
session. In late 1999, I led the launch of the BBC’s first web chat - for which we invited Howard
Rheingold and the newly appointed “E-Minister”, Patricia Hewitt, as our guests.

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT AS A
SPECIALITY
(cc)TerryGeorge: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30974608@N02/7804685482/
Getting message boards and chat through editorial policy was a daunting task. At the time, very
few editors felt comfortable with the idea of audiences members, who may or may not be using
their real names, posting their comments on bbc.co.uk.
One of their first concerns was as to whether the use of usernames would somehow “cheapen” the
BBC’s content. On radio and television, whenever an audience member was invited on air, their
identity was verified and their full real name used in the broadcast. Editorial Policy initially
wanted us to have the same policy online, with postal verification that users were actually who
they said, and lived at the physical address they’d used during sign up. It took weeks of
meetings to sort that one out - our argument was that although a screen name might not be the
same as a user’s legal identity, it was something they invested time and effort in building a
reputation for, and therefore was just as “real” as their given name.
We had to work closely with the legal department to work through many of the potential issues -
not just libel, copyright and data protection, but also the duty of care potentially owed to
those with vulnerabilities, harassment, the legal requirement to “remain neutral” during an
election, and other issues.
To manage the BBC’s communities, we came up with two distinctly different roles - moderators, who
police the community, and “hosts”, who were there to build engaging discussions. Our first
moderation team was in the basement of Bush House, in a department called Information and
Archives. Basically, staff were on a rota to moderate in between servicing requests for programme
material and research insights. Hosts were almost exclusively editorial staff, either from a
programme brand website or the programme itself.
We developed a comprehensive training course for moderators and hosts, and rolled that out across
the Corporation as more and more programmes launched message boards. We also developed a training
course for web chats - some of which were essential audience interviews with an expert or

1ST MULTI-DOMAIN MODERATION TOOL?
I left the BBC for a while and joined Granada Broadband, ITV’s digital operation. Jasmine Malik,
one of the founders of Tempero, was already there, growing audience communities for Coronation
Street, Emmerdale, ITV Football, and the first edition of PopStars (won that year by Hear Say).
Dominic Sparkes, the other founder of Tempero, became our boss at some point in time.
Although we’d been quite successful at building up a moderation team - mostly mothers who wanted
to stay at home to raise their kids, teachers, and postgraduate students - we began looking for
efficiencies and found one with the conceptualisation and build of what may very well have been
the first multi-domain community management tool, the “super moderation tool”, which allowed us
to basically hoover up the moderation queues of multiple message boards, across multiple sites,
for a single view. The tool also allowed us to allow moderators to rota on and off certain
communities when and as required.
Once we’d built the tool, we realised we had around 50% more capacity than before, so began
selling community management services to partners (Boots, for example) and third parties.

“TWITTER” IN 2001
/join #soho
/nick Cybersoc
/list
/me waves hello
After a couple years at Granada, I took a gamble and joined TalkCast, which was essentially an
online niche publishing start-up that had been created by former bosses of the Sun’s free ISP,
CurrantBun.net. We reportedly blew through over £45 million - and this is a company that never
employed more than 140 people - in 15 months. Amongst our services were blogs - although we
didn’t call them that - that focused on specific target audiences including ex-pats from
Australia and the Gay community.
We also launched what may very well have been the first true multi-platform mobile chat service,
Textr. The service was essentially an SMS gateway bolted onto a customised IRC server. Users
could participate via text message (£2.50 per message), WAP or a web based java interface.
Although we had high hopes for the service, end of the month bill shock meant we had horrific
user churn. The top use case, we found in our analysis of the chat logs, was hooking up on Friday
night when bars shut.

BBC INVESTS HEAVILY IN COMMUNITY
Tayfun King - “iPresenter” BBCi Studio, Bush House, 2002 Jordan Launches BBCi Studio
· first purpose built live chat studio in the UK open to public interaction
· is one of very few buildings in the UK to have interactivity built into the architecture via
"thru glass" technology.
· will initially run up to 12 Live Chats and 12 Chatrooms each week
· 2.5 miles of video and audio cables, 250 inches of state of the art plasma screens
· encompasses the record breaking Live Chat team which recently logged 14,000 unique users for
a single event featuring Louis Theroux
The role of the BBC in laying the foundations for the UK’s online community industry really can’t
be under-stated.
We were the first major international broadcaster to invest significantly in developing and
delivering community management training, and about the only one in the UK doing it.
We created, in the form of our moderation contract, which was re-tendered every two to three
years, the cash cow account that furthered the fortunes of a number of UK based moderation
providers.
And we invested heavily in services and technologies that pushed the boundaries of what we could
do - the BBCi Chat Studio, which was rumoured at the time to have cost well over £1 million, was
just one example of this. A year before that, I had access to two “streaming boxes”, stripped down
Windows NT machines that could stream live video during web chats and which cost, I was told,
around £35,000 each.
We also had developers working on next generation community management tools - message board
software that allowed us to identify new users, or past trouble makers, for further scrutiny, for
example, whilst allowing trusted users to publish live to the website without interruption.
BBC Press Release, Sept. 2002: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2002/09_september/05/
studio_fastfacts.shtml

“JOINING THE CONVERSATION”
18
In 2007, the BBC started to pay attention to what bloggers had to say - primarily, that our acts
of content and engagement were not isolated events that only took place on BBC.co.uk, but that
there were similar conversations we should be a part of on third party social networking and
content sharing websites. Ben Hammersley was sent off to Turkey to blog, flickr, youtube and tweet
his away across the country as is voted in elections.
Jeff Jarvis, and others, were invited in for talks....

OPENING THE FLOODGATES
At first, Editorial Policy was nervous. Managing online communities on third party services
seemed risky, and brands - and the moderation industry - we’re only just beginning to do this.
I recall one discussion with Editorial Policy in which they told us that we couldn’t possibly
embed flickr images and YouTube videos on BBC.co.uk due to copyright reasons. I came up with the
argument that the embed code simply created windows on content elsewhere, a bit like knocking a
whole in the wall to get a better view. Much to my surprise, this argument won the day, and we
were allowed to take baby steps into the world of managing communities on third party services.

(cc) Acrib (Original by Monocle)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrerib/3276544494/
Now, back to the present... and a quick look at the future.

BEING STRATEGIC
http://www.toprankblog.com/2012/08/optimize-b2b-content-across-the-sales-cycle/
Community Management is now an understood necessity: An industry that de-risks social
communications for brands and organisations, whilst helping ensure that, through building
audience engagement and participation, there’s demonstrable ROI...

DEMONSTRATING ROI
driving awareness employee engagement
increasing share of voice in search results
using insights to improve delivery
engaging partners
reducing costs deflecting customer care inquiries
enhancing loyalty
building trust
increasing sales conversations nurturing advocacy
managing risk increasing click throughs
And now that we’re a grown up industry, we need to get grown up about the metrics we report to
clients. We must move beyond mere tally’s of fans and followers, retweets and likes, and look for
other measurable outcomes - tied to strategic business objectives - where we can demonstrate the
value of our activities.

EMERGING COMPETITION?
There may be, however, new competition in a business that we’ve had pretty much to ourselves for
some time: the Advertising industry is bound to start taking notice of brand spending in social
media.
Research suggests that social advertising works - with one analysis showing USD $3 revenue for
every $1 spent on Facebook based campaigns: http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10000872396390443862604578029450918199258.html
Research by WeAreSocial and SocialBakers has, worryingly for the community management industry,
suggested that as few as 12% of a brand’s Facebook fans will see an particular update in their
activity feed: http://wearesocial.net/blog/2012/10/react-halved-reach-facebook/
What does this mean for the community management industry? Ads are set to play a much more
important role in building fan bases and engagement. Where Facebook goes, others are likely to
follow.
Infographic: http://editorial.designtaxi.com/news-socialspend2809/2.jpg

Robin Hamman
Director
Edelman Digital
robin.hamman@edelman.com http://www.edelman.co.uk
http://www.linkedin.com/in/
@Cybersoc
robinhamman
http://www.cybersoc.com ???
I’m convinced that there are many great opportunities for community managers - not just to toil
away, pushing content and building engagement, but also at making their capabilities as
communicators and connectors essential to clients and employers.
It’s an exciting time to be involved in the industry.