Author: Richard Millington

Have you noticed something interesting about most filmed interviews by non-professionals (e.g. people that do not work in the media)? The non-professionals looks terrified. They are nervous, wooden, shifty, and look scared of the camera. This undermines the entire interview.

In fact, it undermines the entire tactic… perhaps even a huge percentage of the strategy.

Can you imagine going through all this effort, only for the interview to be ruined by the presenter?

This is a skills gap. The presenter has likely never been on camera before. They do not know the best body language to adopt, where to look, how long to look at the camera, what to do if they become uncomfortable, etc. They might not know that they need to exaggerate their personality to match the setting. This results in a wooden, underwhelming interview.

Along with knowledge gaps and resource gaps, skill gaps are one of the three gaps you need to fill before you execute a tactic. Too often, people overestimate their abilities and believe they can do something they have never done before really well. This is an arrogant (and, unfortunately, common) mistake to make.

You can correct this by identifying your skill gaps and taking action to close them.

Knowledge Gaps

Now you do the same thing, but for knowledge. Looking at the tasks above, what knowledge would you need that you don’t possess today?

Knowledge is anything that can be written down or passed along in a single medium to multiple people. The nature of knowledge makes this task difficult. You might not know what you don’t know. However, this too is something you can ask and find out by asking yourself “What don’t I know which I should know?”.

Look at the tasks above again. Are there any in there which probably require knowledge?

You would probably want to know:

• How much to pay vendors
• How to hire good vendors and work with vendors
• How to entice experts to participate in interviews
• How to set up a paid advertising campaign.

Each of these is information you can acquire relatively quickly. The key step is identifying what information you need to begin with.

This is where you need to have a simple knowledge acquisition plan. You might reach out to a few people who have done this before and find out what we should pay, who is highly recommended, what kind of things we should watch out for.

Likewise, you can find a few relevant online communities (aha!) and ask in there. For the really important tactics, you want to be prepared with all the knowledge we need to make it happen.

If you looked at the image from our project plan in the last chapter, you might notice that the ‘assigned’ column is blank. You have not yet assigned a specific person to perform each step. This almost guarantees the steps will not be completed. You have to assign steps to specific people to perform on specific days.

If you’re working as a solo community manager, this stage might be easy. You have to do every step whether you like it or not. If you have a team, you should consider carefully who is the best person to complete each task.

As tempting (and as efficient) as it might be to assign work to your colleagues, it’s usually better not to drop new work and responsibilities on them without their input. This is where egos and personalities can collide with tactics and derail your lovingly crafted strategy. You don’t want people to feel forced into the project.

You want them to be motivated and eager to contribute to the project. This is a bigger topic than we can cover here. However, one key principle really matters.

Don’t tell your team what to do, let them tell you what they want to do

This is a combination of abilities and passion. The most talented person is not going to do a great job on a task they do not enjoy. This is why you need to identify who has the talent to perform each task and who has the interest in performing each task. This concept was best explained by Jenn Lopez at Moz.

At this stage, you need to convert your tactics into very specific steps you and your team can perform.

This is also where you need to make compromises in exactly how good a tactic might be.

Let’s breakdown the steps involved in executing the ‘Experts Interviews’ tactic from earlier at a world class level.

Three Quick Definitions

• Tactic = an action to fulfil your strategy. E.g. host a webinar with a guest expert.
• Task = something that executes the tactic well. E.g. Find an amazing guest.
• Step = a simple action needed to complete the tasks. E.g. Decide who qualifies as an expert.

Great Advice

The next step is to make sure the message contains the best possible advice. This might include:

4. Clarify the key points the experts will make. Undertake a pre-interview to identify the key points the expert will make.
5. Clarify questions to ensure it’s most relevant to the audience. Ask your community to submit their questions in advance and make sure you are asking the most relevant questions to the challenges your audience faces.
6. Checking timing. Check that you have enough time to ask these questions and prioritize questions by order of importance. Make sure your most important questions aren’t left out due to a lack of time. By the end of this, you should have a clear plan.

Big Audience

Finally, you need this video to reach as many of your members as possible. If it doesn’t, then everything else becomes moot. This might involve several elements.

13. Write an email series to promote the expert. You might write an email series to solicit questions before the interview, and then promote the interview once it has been published.
14. Arrange for other sites to cover the takeaways. You might strike partnership deals with other sites to provide segments of the interview for free in exchange for referrals to the content itself. You might also check to see if there is any newsworthy material that might extend beyond the initial interview.
15. Creating a digest of key points. You might create a digest of key points and quotes which can be shared on social media platforms to promote the video once it is live. You can create a document with key quotes highlighted to be shared by others.
16. Set up a reward scheme for referrals. You might set up some form of point reward scheme for people to share the video with their friends.
17. Paid advertising. You might pay for advertising, either on social platforms or via Google on relevant keywords. This could also collect email signatures in exchange for keywords.

It’s common to dive into a tactic without considering what world-class execution of the tactic might look like.

For example, you might invite a guest speaker to fill a weekly speaking slot. To do this, you could simply send out an invite to a few people, see who is available, record the session when they are free and post it online.

Job done.

But that’s hardly world-class execution of the tactic. With the resources we have made available to ourselves, now we only care about world-class execution of our tactics. Let’s try to do the example before at a world-class level.

If you managed to get all four of these, you can be sure the execution of the tactic would be as big as it could be.

You might not be able to do each of these, as your resources are too limited. However, once you know what world-class looks like, you can begin to make compromises from there. This also helps you explain to others what any additional time or resources could be used for.

The goal of the action plan is to execute your tactics as effectively as possible.

When tactics do fail, it’s more likely to be an execution failure than selecting the wrong tactic in the first place. None of your tactics will succeed unless you truly plan out the key steps in advance and develop your plan accordingly.

It’s very easy to overlook this stage and believe that planning is an easy, low-value task. But this mentally will undermine all the hard work you have put in so far.

Fortunately, you can acquire some key skills to become better at executing really quickly.

What is Great Execution?

To be a great executor, you need to be a great project planner. Once you begin planning things in advance, you can spot potential problems and overcome them. You become adept at identifying every step required to execute your tactics extremely well.

You then need to identify how long each step will take, what resources (knowledge, time, money, permission) are required for that tactic, who has the availability and skill-set to undertake that tactic, and when that tactic will be undertaken.

Next, this means identifying the order these steps need to be performed in. Then identifying who is going to perform each step. Then finally ensuring these steps are performed in that order.

If you have a team, this is probably the level at which you can delegate to your team.

The next step is to list these tactics by order of priority and select the biggest priority tactics. You will find you will not have the time or resources to execute all of these tactics.

Instead, you look for the key few tactics which will have the biggest impact.

This stage is also important if your resources change. If you later find you do not have the time or resources to execute tactics, you can begin removing them from the bottom up.

Selecting the tactics you’re going to use is a problem-solving challenge. For example, using the resource allocation in the previous chapter, if we have 26 hours per week, $8,450 per year, 6 emails we can send out, 1 programmer for a few days, and 1 designer for a week, what is the best way to use these resources to make members feel like a superior, exclusive group of insiders?

Also, how do we ensure members still feel confident enough (safe/encouraged) to ask questions with a budget of $1,950, 6 hours per week, 1 group email per month?

(also note that we don’t have to expend every resource, as these are simply constraints to narrow the range of possible tactics).

What’s Popular vs. What Achieves Results

Too often we try to adopt a clever idea we have seen elsewhere, instead of rationally thinking through whether the tactic connects to the emotion we’re trying to provoke. For example, you might see a successful ‘ask me anything’ discussion that has proven popular in another community and decide to incorporate it into your community efforts.

But this confuses what’s popular with what is going to stimulate the kind of emotion that drives the behavior you need. Ask me anything might stimulate some short-term activity, but does it make top members feel like an exclusive group of insiders? Does it help newcomers feel safe to make their first contribution? Perhaps, but there are better tactics out there.

This happens very often. You might see a weekly working out loud discussion and incorporate the idea into your community. If you’re trying to increase self-disclosure to build a stronger sense of community, then this idea can work extremely well. If you’re not, then you have to carefully consider whether this is the best tactic for your strategy.

It can be really difficult to separate the tactics you’re used to using, and see often, from the tactics that are within your strategic framework.

Converting Situations Into Tactics

Now you can begin converting these situations into possible community tactics. This is the area where you usually need to be a little creative and test what works.

Here is an example of possible tactics to achieve a strategy.

You’re not going to implement every one of these tactics. However, this does reveal a shortlist of possible tactics you can explore shortly.

You also need to create similar tactic lists for your other strategic objectives (below):

Finally, you need to shortlist possible tactics for the final strategic objective.

Your list might be far more extensive than this. At this stage, you simply want to draw up the biggest possible shortlist of tactics you might use based upon situations that have been shown to provoke that emotion in your audience. You are not deciding your tactics now, instead you are shortlisting possible tactics.

By now, you have a shortlist of possible tactics to stimulate the emotion you want to amplify. The next step is to figure out which of these tactics we should execute. To do this, we need to prioritize these tactics by their level of impact.

Tactics are the specific actions you take to implement the strategy.

Tactics are what you plan to do to amplify the emotion you’re trying to provoke. For example, building a stronger sense of community to reduce loneliness is a strategy, but initiating discussions about how people got into the field to increase self-disclosure is a tactic (a good one, too).

Tactics can fall within several categories of the community management framework. These might be based around growth, content, moderation, participation, events and activities, user experience (or technology), and business integration (anything internal):

In the last chapter, we reviewed the specific strategies we intend to pursue and what resources we have available for each. This should narrow down possible tactics we can implement to fulfil our strategies.

Stop Doing Tactics Which Are Not Strategic

If the strategy is to make top members feel like a superior, exclusive group of insiders, while ensuring regular members still feel confident to ask questions and respected when they do so. Any tactic which does not match this strategy can be removed.

This might mean cutting the regular newsletters, stopping individual welcomes for every member, stop prompting members to participate. At this stage, we make a lot of very critical decisions about what we will no longer do to focus on the few very big things which have the major impacts.

At this stage, we need to decide exactly what tactics we’re going to use that will have the biggest impact.

A good strategy should make you feel uncomfortable.

Your instinct is going to tell you not to take the risk. Your instinct will be to keep doing what you’re doing, or simply try to do everything better. This ‘do everything better’ approach is the worst possible thing you can do.

Trying harder or working better is not a strategy. It might help, to some small degree, but it’s not a strategy. At best, it’s a collection of tactical optimizations. It is more likely to be a continuation of what you’re doing now, not a new strategic direction. This completely fails to achieve the aims of a strategy.

This is where you have to make tough decisions. This is going to make you feel very uncomfortable. You’re not alone here. Everyone who has ever developed a good strategy also needs to make the very same decisions about where to expend limited resources to have the biggest impact.

You will need to stop doing things that seem successful (that you’re used to doing) in order for this strategy to work. The discomfort you feel comes from the very real possibility of making the wrong decisions and pursuing the wrong strategy. This is an unavoidable risk. The best consolation is that this is probably what you are doing today.

You can, however, mitigate this risk by undertaking proper research. Make sure your strategy is not based upon hunches, but upon visible data you have collected. There are no certainties your strategy will work. However, you can ensure you are pursuing the strategy which will allow you the biggest possible odds of success.
Every strategy inherently incurs a risk. But the purpose of a strategy is to embrace this risk, make decisions with the risk in mind, and allocate resources to achieve the biggest impact.

Allocating resources is where you will start to feel the pain of trade-offs. As we noted before, you need to prepare yourself and your stakeholders for what happens when you reallocate your resources.

You’re going to see a drop in some metrics we’re tracking in favor of the metrics that matter. This is to be expected and it is part of the strategy process. You should expect to lose the battles which do not matter much to you. The drop in one or more metrics should be acceptable due to the overwhelming gains in the more critical behavior metric.

Be decisive but not absolutist

The Art Of Strategy

A general doesn’t spread his troops evenly across every battlefield. He decides which battles are worth fighting and allocates his resources to win those battles decisively.

However, a general doesn’t send all his troops onto the battlefield. There is still plenty of other work that needs to be done and positions defended.

While you need to decisively reallocate our resources in favor of your strategy, you still need to keep the community running. Or, more simply, while a strategy should be decisive in nature, it shouldn’t be absolutist in implementation. You still have other work that needs to be done to make it possible to achieve strategic objectives.

For example, it’s great to focus on the super users, but if you allocate 100% of our resources towards them, you will stop attracting newcomers to replace the natural churn of current members.

You might not be helping the regular members who still have simple questions to answer. Likewise, it would be pointless to spend all your time growing the community if there is no-one to answer their questions when they do join.

That would be a sure-fire way to burn through new members.