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Tomorrow morning, I fly to Seattle for this year’s MVP Summit. For the week, I will be enjoying talking with and connecting to the people I never see. Playing around with things I can’t talk about. Sharing stories. Having a blast. Exhausting myself.

The MVP Summit is sponsored by Microsoft every spring as a way to get the MVPs, the product teams, and the MVP team itself re-connected. This year over 1400 community leaders from around the world will descend on Bellevue and take over campus. Microsoft puts us up at hotels in Bellevue, we pay for the rest of our travel ourselves.

Anyone going goes through the same basic pattern of preparation:

• November: When is registration opening?
• December: What hotel are you staying at? Do you have a roommate yet?
• January: Sessions, sessions, have we got sessions yet?
• February: Who’s going to be there when? Who wants to share an airport ride?

For Bruce and I, this trip may be a scheduled event on every annual calendar, but it doesn’t mean it is stress free. For some reason known only to the monetary gods of the world, checks are always late coming in the second half of February. For some reason, my health always takes a dive during that same period. Stress city. So, Bruce and I take it out on each other. We gripe, we post about each other, we complain.

Then, the brownies happen. I start figuring out who already knows they are getting brownies and who doesn’t know yet. We have the annual fight about how to pack them.

No, I can’t just take a big pan of them in my suitcase. I need to be able to hand them out as I see people. I need to set aside some for my MVP lead, some for the PPT crew, some for the OneNote crew, some for myself, some just for. The image you see here is about half of what I will be bringing. Why? Because I can’t imagine not taking them.

So, Bruce bakes. And as we pack the brownies to go in my suitcase, we come back together. We stop not talking. We admit we will miss each other. I can relax and go. His annual contribution to the event is so much more than a couple of pans of brownies. It is the love and care he sends with them. It is the understanding that: This too will pass. This too we will survive. I always get to this point and find myself torn between “Why can’t we do this without the fights” and “How lucky am I to have someone who understands and supports me in this?”

I fly to Seattle tomorrow. Some of the crew is already there. (55 of them helped out at the local food shelter yesterday at an event called “GeekGive“.) Most of us will fly in tomorrow, and visit with each other at informal events. I want to be at all of them, but have three on my schedule: the Women in Tech Lunch, the Evangelists open house, and the PPT crew Indian dinner. Tuesday and Wednesday will be spent learning fun stuff I can’t share about PowerPoint. Thursday will be spent doing the same thing with OneNote. Evenings will be dinners and parties and conversations. Friday will close with more informal sessions, an outing of some kind, and a flight back to Phoenix.

Come Thursday night when I am fully exhausted and at the last evening’s event, I will start to miss him. I will start saying my MVP goodbyes and start looking back towards Phoenix.

Friday evening as I get on the plane coming home, I will know that another Summit cycle is over. I will be glad to see Bruce’s smiling face at the airport as I leave security.

As we get home, I will merge myself back into the everyday world. I will work as best as I can. I will wait for April to hear if I have been re-awarded and get to go through it all again. And I will know: I am blessed to be an MVP and to have so many people who understand and care.

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Every year, APCUG holds a number of contests for our member groups. This year, I have taken on the “challenge” of running the website contest. I am working on finding judges. (I have asked some MS MVPs to help out, but can’t share the names until they say yes.)

The target audience for these sites are users helping users and users needing help. Many are computer users, but not experts. A good percentage are of an age where tiny print isn’t a good idea.

While putting together the information for the contest, I realized that the fallback rules for the contest haven’t been updated in years. Each year the rules get tweaked, but it has been a while since they have been reviewed from start to finish.

One of the potential judges, Cheryl Wise looked at the existing rules and said:

“I’ve never used Dogpile and you need to add in that it is accessible, aka alt attributes.”

She’s got a point.

My main requirements for a good user group website include:

• Ease of use (consistent interface, search button, etc.)
• Information provided (updated content, meeting information, contact information)
• Reasonable look and feel (doesn’t have to be fancy, but needs to look inviting enough that people come to visit it)
• Accessibility (especially important for older users)
• Imagination and spirit

What do you think makes a good website? Share your thoughts in the comments. Keep in mind that these sites are volunteer driven and volunteer maintained.

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In response to the post I wrote on Job Qualifications and Salaries for Community Managers, I was asked on Miio what I would recommend someone do to get started in the Community Management field. Here are some ideas to get you started.

The place you start is where the conversation is. I firmly believe that the best way to learn is to do. Find out where people are talking about what you are interested in and join the conversation.

Pick a unique name/handle for yourself. Pick something that relates to who you are. Names are great, if yours is unique. Numbers aren’t great – at least in my opinion. Be consistent in using that name across all the social sites where you create accounts. Get a great picture or avatar to go with it and use it everywhere as well. (I have two. My photo is some places and my manga style avatar is others. They look enough like me that it works to have both out there.) Put together a good story about who you are and what you do. Use that when you create profiles. (But don’t always use the exact same wording – it will make you look too much like a robot.)

Follow the best in the community management world, including:

• Connie Bensen, Alterian - http://twitter.com/cbensen
• Shashi Bellamkonda, Network Solutions – http://twitter.com/shashib
• Amber Naslund, Radian 6 – http://twitter.com/AmberCadabra
• Kristie Wells, Social Media Club – http://twitter.com/kristiewells
• Jake McKee, Ant’s Eye View – http://twitter.com/jakemckee
• Sean O’Driscoll, Ant’s Eye View – http://twitter.com/seanodmvp

Follow them on Twitter and anywhere else they are. Read everything they write. Check out the tools they use. Comment on what you read. Get involved. Don’t be a spammer about it, be real and be authentic. But do connect as best you can. Find out where they are and be there too.

Search out forums you can get involved in and start participating. Remember that a good bit of the conversation is still happening in old style forums. If you want to connect with people, create an account where your topic is being discussed. Make sure you fill in profile fields so that people find you. Answer questions. Help out. Do what you can to be a good cyber-citizen.

If you know a certain piece of software, find out where people are talking about that software and start talking. Answer questions more than you ask. Give more than you take. A good place to start is with boards where people are active. If you know Microsoft software, for example, check out the Social Answers site. You probably already have an account there, you just need to make it active.

Start creating content that helps people. Become the one that knows how to do it, then you can become the one who gets paid to do it. Whenever possible add screen shots to your answers. Create screencasts and videos to go with your content. Create a test case which you can use to document your skills. Find a project or non-profit that needs online help and volunteer.

When people ask you questions, answer as much of it publicly as you can. Yes, you CAN answer questions via email and private message. But if you answer them publicly, you help more people. Answering a question privately fixes the problem for one person. Answering it publicly answers it for everyone who has the problem.

Practice measuring and monitoring the social media presence and community presence for a product or brand you love. Check out the best of the monitoring and measurement tools. Learn everything you can about how to track information, gather data, generate graphs, etc. Write about what you learn.

Find new tools and sites for social media. Check them out. Try them out. Offer to beta test them. As you play with them, help others learn them. If you run into problems, report them. When you report the problems, be sure to tell the development team what you were doing, why you were doing it, and what you would have liked to have happened that didn’t. (Looking for a way to find the best social media tools? Ask people. Check out OneForty.com regularly for new tools and ways to use them.)

Finally, pick three of the things off the list of job qualifications that you don’t already know how to do and start learning them. Ask people to help you get better at what you are doing. Ask them how you can help. The more you learn, the more you can share. The more you share, the more likely it is that someone will see what you can do for them and ask you to help out. Every time that happens, you get one step closer to your goal of becoming a full time, paid, community manager.

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A user over on Quora recently asked about a salaries for community managers. I have posted my answer at http://qr.ae/KnS, but I want to expand  in my answer. Community Manager can mean so many things to so many people. I want to share what I believe is important when picking your Community Manager.

In today’s world, it is a given that certain teams are must haves for a business to survive. You wouldn’t think about offering up a new product or site without:

• A product team to build and keep your product going and growing
• A marketing team to sell your product and get people talking about it
• A leadership team to keep the company on track
• A support team to handle and track problems

By the same token, you need a community team to keep the needs of the community in mind. You need someone whose job it is to make sure that customer stories get heard. That customers know what is coming. That the world knows you are listening to your customers and joining in the conversation.

What should you be looking for in a community manager?

You need someone to run that team, to be your face to the customers, and to be involved. A community manager isn’t just out there to make sure that forum posts are moderated, that blog comments are sane and polite. A community manager is there to make sure that your customers are heard and understood.

By the way…

That isn’t to say that every customer complaint should change the direction of your company. It is to say that your community manager is responsible for knowing when to tell the customers both:

• “Yeah – you’ve got a point. Let me raise that to the teams.”
• “I understand where you are coming from, but that isn’t something we are focusing on right now. I will make sure you know if that changes.”

Community Managers do much more than create content, browse Twitter, and talk. A good Community Manager should be able to:

• Train staff
• Manage a team
• PR your community across the social web
• Work on keeping your community feeling involved, satisfied, heard and motivated
• Measure the progress and growth of your community and its involvement
• Find and report bugs in the platform, track them, and help prioritize them
• Advocate for your community
• Represent you on the social web
• Use social monitoring tools to track the conversation where it is happening
• Create content that your community needs
• Watch for new trends in social media and community and help the other teams understand which ones matter to your company
• Create help documentation – both text based and video based
• Represent your company at events, shows, and meet ups
• Perform moderation, posting, content, and discussion duties

In other words, a great community manager should be able to do many things well so that they can help your other teams look even better. A great community manager should be a Jack or Jill of all trades. They should be outgoing and entertaining, but still focused on making your products the best they can be. They should be able to communicate in almost any medium. They should have connections to those that can help you and your customers. They should be experienced in the social world, passionate about community and connections, and passionate about your product.

What does that mean in terms of salary?

You are going to need to pay decent money – think 80-90K per year, minimum. You should also be able to offer benefits and a travel budget so that the community manager can get out there and meet your community.

Someone who has experience doing what you need done is going to cost some money. BUT they are also going to make you money. They will be able to be professional, keep your community on track, and keep the rest of your management team in the loop about what is going on.

You can get people to do the work for less. But, you are going to get what you pay for. If you are looking to low ball the salary and benefits, think about what it will cost you in the long term. Someone who doesn’t know what you need them to know, who doesn’t have the experience you need them to have could cost you big time in reputation and results.

You need to be willing to invest in your community just as you are willing to invest in your product and marketing teams. Social Media can be done cheap or it can be done well. Pick which matters to you.

Hire someone for whom the community matters as much as your product matters to you. It is worth it.

(Disclaimer: I am available. I am good. I am known. I am passionate. I know measurement and community management. I know social media. I am not, however, cheap. This is my career. And I am worth it. For more information on me, see my Visual CV at http://visualcv.com/callkathy)

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As Bruce and I have been looking for work and clients, we’ve noticed that those posting ads for social media work are changing the words they use. They ask for people who can help with Twitter accounts. For people who can create great Facebook pages. For people who can “bring the conversation to our site”. They ask for social media experience. They ask for all the right things. Many of the ads also want people to:

• Drive traffic
• Create marketing campaigns
• Write ads
• Increase sales

In other words, they want people who are into marketing. The ads are full of market speak. They are looking for a new way to do things, as long as the things that need to be done don’t change. They want you do to do what they are comfortable with, not what their customers and clients have come to expect. That’s a problem.

Because with social media, not just the words have changed. What you need your employees to do has changed. What you control has changed. What content is shared about you has changed. The real change? It is that your customers and clients now can reach out to their world and find what they need and share what they know. If you aren’t set up for them to share good stuff about you, they won’t come back. They will buy once and walk away.

The tasks listed above aren’t bad things to have people do for your company. In fact, each of those things can be good and should be done. They just aren’t all that needs to be done anymore. You need to be willing to set the expectation that you want to do the best possible for your clients and customers. You want to be the place people do business with over and over.

Many of the companies running these old style ads seem to want someone to do all of this for little or no money with overnight results. Let me tell you, that doesn’t happen. Overnight successes take a long time to make happen. They take energy and effort. They take work.

If you want to get the conversation going, think about these ideas:

• Traffic alone won’t help. If 100,000 people visit your site, but none stay longer than 10 seconds, you won’t gain anything. If none of those visitors come back, you aren’t much further than you were when you started. If none of them have a great story to share, you won’t stick in their mind the next time they need your product or service.
• Creating a marketing campaign can be a good thing. Don’t plan in how to tell the story and how to connect with those you market the products to and you will never know if it worked. You can’t just tell people something anymore. You have to join the conversation and listen to what they have to say as well.
• Writing ads is something that is never going to go away as a required skill. I know that. BUT what if instead of writing “ads”, we asked people to share what they think. If instead of sharing marketing speak, we listened to what they want and what they need. If we actually found out how they are going to use our products, why they are going to come to our restaurants, etc. What if we actually listened to what they want from us, instead of telling them all the great things we offer them.
• Increasing sales – oh, that’s a good one too. Everyone needs to increase sales. That’s a given. But, what sales do you want to increase? Do you want someone who will bring in 600 people over the course of a year, but never bring any of them back? Or, do you want someone who will over that same year give you a way for those 600 people to talk about your product and share how wonderful your service is? Take the second approach and you have 600 sales people out there as well as 600 buyers. Makes more sense to me, doesn’t it to you?

If you want people to be interested in what you are doing, do it right. Let them find you because someone told them how great you are, not because you told them how great you are. Give the customers you have a way (and a reason) to talk about how great your team is. Give them something to pull them and their friends back to your business. Make it possible to sell once and have the customer buy many times.

Easy to say, harder to do, right? Well, let’s look at what you could do today to start the process:

• If your business has a location, get out there and claim it on Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Google Places, and all the other geolocation tools out there. Make it easy for your customers to check in when they walk in the door. Make it worth their time to check in. Reward your mayors, etc., yes. But also reward the average user as well. Put up tips that tell the world why they should come to you instead of your competition.
• Do something with your Twitter account. Don’t just post links and what you are doing. Talk to people. Find out who is talking about your industry or your business. Talk with them about who you are and what you do. Get involved in issues that matter to your customers. Do the right things and do them now. Really want to make an impact? Don’t just run a one time campaign to gather followers. Make it worth their time to read what you share. Pick a follower every week to praise and reward.
• Make your Facebook page a destination people want to visit. Add a game. Let people talk. (Yes, that means you have to monitor the conversation. Being big enough for the trolls to notice is a good problem to have. Especially if you go into it with the approach that you will reward content and conversation, but ignore the trolls.) Give people a reason to come back regularly. Send out updates to those who like your page.
• Join the communities that your customers belong to. If you sell art supplies, find an online community for artists and join in the conversation. (Ever been to DeviantArt? Check it out. Great place. Etsy is another one every art supply company should check out.)
• Run contests. Not just one time things, but contests that make it worth people’s time to come back again and again. Always give a prize that brings people to your business. And then, surprise the winners by asking who else you should reward. Ask people to share pictures of your products in use. Ask them to share advice they got from your store. Have them share content for your site or blog.

I hear you: You don’t have time or money to do all this stuff. You have a business to run. I get that. That’s where the true beauty of a social media consultant should come in. I am not here to run your business. I am here to help you run it better. To learn what your customers want. To share with you how to reach them and bring them back. I am here to be your voice to them and their voice to you.

None of this is going to cause overnight growth. What it will cause is a steady increase in interest. And if your customers are interested, they will come back. They will share. They will talk about you.  They will spend money on your products and services.