Managing your company’s community, blog or social networking page can be a daunting task.  As a community manager, you’re often responsible for balancing the needs of your members or subscribers with those of your organization, providing a consistent user experience, monitoring news and trends, posting engaging content, moderating content from others, measuring progress… The list goes on and on.  Here are a few tips, with thought-provoking questions below them, that should help you think through your community management strategy:

Define Roles and Responsibilities

• How does having a community, blog or social networking page fit within or help advance your company’s strategic business goals?
• Do you have the time, talent and resources to manage your community well?
• What behaviors do you want members or subscribers to exhibit, and what can you do to help them get there?
• How are you measuring success?

Be Consistent, but Add Value

• Does your community offer a similar user experience with your website, collateral and other materials?
• Is the tone and voice in your messages consistent?
• What are you doing to add value and encourage a two-way dialogue instead of just posting one-way marketing messages?

Identify and Leverage Community Leaders

• How often do you just say “thank you” to your members or subscribers?
• What’s the best way to incentivize increased engagement?
• How are you positioning your community as a resource?

Nuffer, Smith, Tucker has been managing communities for more than a decade, before the term “social media” was coined.  While we may not have all the answers to these questions without getting to know your organization and its key stakeholders first, we’d be happy to share our insights and ideas and work with you to make your community the best it can be.

“I live a charmed life … I try to honor it by reaching out to people who don’t live the life I live,” said Kim Bond, president of Mental Health Systems (MHS), at a recent LEAD San Diego IMPACT session dedicated to health and human services. I reflected back on the LEAD session recently when I received an email from a commercial tenant in my condo complex seeking solutions to the “homeless problems” in the building.

While reading the email – which noted the “problem” erodes our enjoyment of our properties and property value – I couldn’t help but feel compassion for those homeless individuals who end up sleeping in our building’s stairwells or commercial parking spaces. I took off my hat of condo owner and dutiful HOA-dues payer, and instead wore one of concerned community member, and thought back to the discussion recently facilitated through LEAD.

The LEAD session centered mainly around “behavioral health,” a term that, according to MHS, includes both mental illnesses and challenges, and substance abuse disorders – things that are common in our community. Some estimates say as many as one out of every four people suffer from some form of mental illness, which – like substance abuse – can happen on a continuum and includes everything from anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder to depression and schizophrenia.

“What does mental health issues look like?,” said James Lepanto, senor vice president, mental health division of MHS. “Hold up a mirror. That’s what it looks like. We often think of it as ‘other’ people, but it’s not. It’s us. It’s our community.”

The LEAD cohort discussed not only how behavioral health issues affect individuals and families, but also the impact to the workforce, economy and quality of life through problems such as homelessness and strains placed on our health care and incarceration systems.

So what do we do?  LEAD attendees were reminded of the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Ways you can help include:

• Get educated. Aspects of behavioral health issues are preventable and treatable.
• Talk about behavioral health with friends, family, colleagues or others.
• Advocate on behalf of programs that provide solutions and address behavioral health issues head on.
• Be empathetic.
• Volunteer your time and talent.

By doing these things, we are playing a role in the solution, and removing the stigma around mental illness. According to MHS, every day in San Diego someone commits suicide. Others who suffer from behavioral health issues sleep in our public spaces and on our streets. We can’t – and shouldn’t – ignore the issue.

Our team has been talking with potential panelists for a few months now, and each conversation gets us more pumped for the diversity and dialogue we’re going to have at the San Diego Social Media Symposium.

We’ve talked to so many inspiring and knowledgeable individuals, that we’re announcing a fourth panel “Best Practices: Social Media Case Studies.” The addition will give attendees even more first-hand stories, experiences and learning moments from the folks with their boots on the ground.

In addition to adding a fourth panel (don’t worry, we’ll still wrap things up by 4:30 p.m.), we’ve secured panelists from companies such as Cisco Systems, FIJI Water, JustFab.com, Social Control and Realtor.com. We’ll be hearing their perspectives in addition to our keynote speaker Jason Falls and lunch speaker Gary Kim.

Checkout the full agenda and panelist line up, and start formulating your questions for our social media specialists.

Register online at www.sandiegosocialmediasymposium.com.