Chapter 15: A Peek Under the Hood: How We Manage the moz Community
Editor's Note: This post, which reveals the inner workings of the world's most vibrant—and possibly largest—inbound marketing community, was originally published January 18th, 2012, on The Moz Blog. It was completely updated for this book in March of 2013.
Have you ever been a part of a community and wondered, “How does all the magic happen?” Or maybe you've never quite understood what a community manager actually does. In the spirit of TAGFEE, I've decided to lift the Moz hood and show you how we manage our large, active community. In this chapter, you'll get a look at the who, what, when, and how of managing the Moz community. Hopefully, you'll gain some insights on how to grow your community, too.
Editor's Note: To be TAGFEE is to be as Transparent, Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional as possible. To learn more about Moz's core values, read, “What We Believe and Why: Moz's TAGFEE Tenets” (www.moz.com/blog/what-we-believe-why-seomozs-tagfee-tenets).
Who Are We?
Over the last couple of years, the community has grown rapidly. It quickly became imperative to build a team to help take care of different aspects of the community. I simply couldn't handle all the community tasks on my own anymore. So, before I jump too far into the what, when, and how of managing the Moz community, I'd like to introduce you to the “who.”
Keri Morgret
Keri is well-known in the SEO industry as one of those amazing conference live-bloggers. She is also known for her ability to remember almost all our community members. 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 as our On-Site Community Manager.
Having recently relocated to Seattle for the love of Moz, Keri also runs her business Strike Models with her husband. (Go check out the site, it's super cool—www.strikemodels.com.) She has quickly become an integral part of the team, as well as the community in general.
As the Mozzer who leads management of our user-generated content blog, YouMoz, and our Q&A forum, she interacts all day long with community members. You may not realize it, but Keri pretty much knows everything that's going on all the time in the community. You think I'm kidding … I'm not.
Not only does she spend her time managing some of the on-site areas, but Keri can jump in to help out on Twitter—or any other of our social media properties. If you're ever curious about what's going on right now within the Moz community, Keri is your woman. You can ping her @KeriMorgret on Twitter.
Erica McGillivray
When we found out that Erica was a founder of GeekGirlCon (geekgirlcon.com), 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 Social Community Manager.
A ninja in her own right, Erica can essentially do anything and everything that has to do with managing the community. Right now, Erica focuses on the management and strategy behind our social media properties (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.); community voice documentation and evolution; running our weekly Mozinar series; and organizing our annual MozCon (including wrangling speakers).
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. If you want to keep up with all of Erica's geekery, follower her on Twitter @emcgillivray.
Megan Singley
From her initial stint on our Moz customer support team, we knew we wanted Megan's expertise and ability to wow our community. As a bonus, she knows our software inside and out. As an exceptionally TAGFEE person—especially the Generous, Fun, and Empathic parts—Megan focuses on keeping the community extra happy as our Community Coordinator.
Megan regularly tweets, Facebooks, G+s, and LinkedIns to keep our community growing strong. She also can jump in at any point to help out with Q&A, blog comment moderation, and running Mozinars. If you're racking up those MozPoints, Megan's the one who makes sure you get your t-shirt, Q&A access, and more.
Megan has an uncanny ability to find out what each person loves. From celebrating community accomplishments to sending out thank you cards to amusing community members with surprises, Megan is always sharing her joy with the Moz community, including our Seattle office. With Megan around, for instance, you may come back from vacation to find your desk filled with Grumpy Cat photos. Get to know more about Megan by following her on Twitter @megansingley.
Lindsay Wassell
After her time as a Mozzer back in the day, we bribed Lindsay to return—at least for a couple hours a day—as an Associate on our community team. Lindsay is our East Coast voice. As our community grew, we realized that none of us are morning people, and we were still sleeping while many of you were tweeting from work—or, in the case of Europe, sitting down for dinner!
In stepped Lindsay to fill the gap. While we're dreaming, she's answering your questions, sharing today's content across our social networks, and taking care of any immediate needs like combating spam. Not to mention, Lindsay's often the first one to notice if anything on our site's gone down or customers aren't seeing what they expect.
When Lindsay's not moonlighting as Roger, she's running her own SEO auditing and consulting company, Keyphraseology (keyphraseology.com) and running after her young twins. All from sunny Florida. Follow our own canary in the community coalmine on Twitter @lindzie.
Christy Correll
As our customer base flourished and our community built up MozPoints, we soon found ourselves needing more help with our Q&A forum. Good thing we knew Christy. Both Lindsay and I worked with Christy back in the day—way back before I was an SEO!—and I knew she was top-notch.
Christy mostly focuses on wrangling our other Associates to answer Q&A questions. She makes sure you're getting answers to your questions—and are happy with your answers. Christy pokes Associates and Mozzers (in the most TAGFEE way) when questions go too long without replies or need follow-up. Or she can assign them to someone else if a Mozzer's on holiday, for instance.
When she's not in Q&A, Christy spends her Associate time working on special content projects for Moz—like editing this book! She also owns Honey Tree Media (honeytreemedia.com), an SEO and new media consultancy. Get to know more about Christy by following her on Twitter @denverish. Especially if you're in Denver, as she's a huge advocate for her local SEO community. Make sure you ask her about her dog.
Melissa Fach
As our community exploded, so did the submissions to YouMoz. We were getting roughly nine a day—or around 60 a week! Poor Keri needed more help, and that's when we found Melissa and got her on board as an Associate. Having worked as an editor at Search Engine Journal, among other jobs in the SEO industry, Melissa knows a ton about inbound marketing and the who's who of blogging.
If you submit a YouMoz, whether we decide to publish it or reject it, you'll probably hear from Melissa. She's making sure your info's ready to be published and your screen caps are sized correctly. Melissa has quickly become an essential member of our team and an advocate for helping our YouMoz writers become even more awesome.
When she's not editing YouMoz, Melissa runs her own consulting and business training company, SEO Aware (seoaware.com). If you want to make her day, tweet Star Wars photos at her. You can find her sharing promoted YouMoz posts and Mozzy love on Twitter @SEOAware.
Miriam Ellis
You know when you meet someone and you say to yourself, “Wow, they're incredibly TAGFEE, why don't they work at Moz?” Okay, maybe you don't say that, but we do. That's Miriam. As an Associate, she helps out on YouMoz and in Q&A.
While most of our Associates and Staff in Q&A know more than a little about SEO, we often find ourselves with specific Local SEO questions. They are usually along the lines of, “Why isn't my business address updated? I stood on my head and did the hokey pokey while mailing off my postcard to Google.” While the rest of us scratch our heads, Miriam jumps in and reminds you that you need to wear purple while doing it. Which is why she's also the owner of Solas Web Design, a firm that offers optimized website design, Local SEO/SEM and copywriting services (solaswebdesign.net).
Additionally, Miriam plays a woman behind the curtain in YouMoz. She reads just about every submission and gives us her opinion on the post's quality and if she thinks it's worthy of publication. Especially when we're swamped, we build our acceptance, rejection, and “needs more editing” emails on her thoughts. She's pretty magical.
Jen Lopez
Oh, hi! Just a quick background: I have a degree in journalism with an emphasis on public relations, but spent ten years as a web developer before I turned into an SEO. Got hired as an SEO Consultant with Moz in early 2009, then in January 2010 we gave up consulting. Doh! Hello Community Management.
I started out by creating this new position and doing ALL the tasks myself. And as both the community and I have grown, I'm now Director of Community with both an in-house team and a gaggle of Associates reporting to me. Not to mention all you awesome community members that I love getting to know better!
So what will you find me doing on an average day? I manage my team, advocate for the community both inside and outside of Moz, help out where my team needs me, respond to help tickets as needed, comment on community posts outside of Moz, tweet from my personal account (@jennita), and handle any other random issues 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.
Community Doesn't Stop There
Community and content go together like cheese and spiral macaroni, and at Moz, one would not exist without the other. Along with our internal community team, there are a few others who make a big impact on the community by serving up hot content for our readers. Let me introduce you to the “external” members of our community team!
Ashley Tate
Ashley joined the Moz team in early 2012 after spending a few years in the startup trenches as a content manager. With a background in blogging, content strategy, and community management, she took on the role of Content Lead to help spread her obsession with actionable, delightful content to the far corners of the Interwebs.
You'll find Ashley managing the blog schedule and content, heading our overall content strategy, creating and editing content on the Moz and YouMoz blogs, and working with authors throughout the content curation process. You can also find her tweeting from her personal account, @ashletate, mostly about inbound marketing and her adorable dog, Darwin.
Peter Meyers (aka Dr. Pete)
Dr. Pete has been around the Moz community for about as long as Rand himself. He was 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, and now he's our full time Marketing Scientist.
Pete spends much of his time working on big content projects, writing on the blog, and answering questions in Q&A. (You'd be amazed at how much stuff this guy knows!) In fact, he's written some of the top content on the blog for the past three years (check out www.moz.com/users/profile/22897). He pretty much makes the rest of us look bad with our unworthy content.
When he's not helping manage the chaos of Q&A, writing on the blog, or being one of the funniest guys on Twitter (@dr_pete), he's busy being Dad to a toddler and new baby. Oh, and if you've ever wondered if he's a real doctor, he has created a web page just for you (see www.areyouarealdoctor.com.)
Mozzers
That's you, you, and YOU. Whether it's Gianluca responding to a Tweet about Moz from Italy while us West Coasters are sleeping (www.moz.com/users/profile/108403), or Ryan Kent answering a question in Q&A about a technical PRO issue (www.moz.com/users/profile/312503), you guys help us manage the community every day. 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. It's all the Moz staff and community members 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 help manage it since you're the public “face” of the community on the social sites. Other times, you wake up and find out that a hashtag has been created about you, along with hundreds of posts.
Let me take a few moments to walk you through the major aspects of managing the Moz community. This really is only a high-level look at what we do each day. Here are the what, when, and how, of what it means to manage the Moz community.
Blog
When Rand started the Moz 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 around 60 thumbs up, 70 comments, and 900+ Tweets. That's a lot to keep up with each day! Here's a post from the blog in 2013, prior to the launch of Moz.
What
You probably know that we post content not only about SEO, but about inbound marketing in general. We focus on creating actionable takeaways and look for authors who can bring something new to the community. We like to cover hot topics in the industry, but we don't necessarily cover them as “news.” We also post major new updates, improvements, or issues related to our software products on the blog as well.
When
We publish at least one new post per night, and sometimes publish a second a second one during the day (U.S. Pacific Time).
How
We use a custom blog editor to create the posts. When it comes to managing comments, we have a system that helps us moderate those that meet certain criteria. If we suspect that a comment is spam, one of us has to manually approve it for it to be published. If it is spam, it doesn't get published.
When it comes to comments, we take the community very seriously and will ban users if they don't “play by the rules.” Essentially, you're in our home and we request that you handle yourself as a professional.
Who
Ashley manages the blog schedule and makes sure we have a post going up each night. The idea is to set the schedule at least a couple weeks out, with openings here and there for hot topics or new authors we want to introduce. All of us watch for spam comments throughout the day, and our wonderful Inbound Engineering Manager, Casey Henry (www.moz.com/team/casey), set up a way to moderate and kill spam before you guys ever even see it.
The entire team helps manage the comments, detect spam, and make sure things don't get out of hand anywhere. We also might alert other Mozzers when their expertise is needed to answer a question. Sometimes a comment might require the deep technical knowledge of one of our amazing engineers, for instance.
YouMoz
Any member can create a blog post using our blog editor and submit it to be read by our editors. If it's approved, it gets published to the YouMoz blog, shown here in a screenshot from March, 2013. Writing a post for YouMoz is a great way to get your name out in the community. Plus, you get a nice link. YouMoz publishes posts by anyone in our community who has creative ideas or deep insights to share, whether you've been around the industry forever—or are just starting your career.
What
Similar to posts on the main blog, the community loves to read actionable posts. However, in YouMoz, we do have a little more leeway than we do on the main blog. We'll publish posts on topics that we don't normally cover on the blog. The best part about that is if the post does really well in YouMoz and gets promoted to the main blog, we see more diversity in the subjects and voices.
When
We try to post at least one YouMoz submission per day, and some days, we even have two. It used to take four to eight weeks to get through the queue, but now it's only two weeks—and we're always working towards making it even faster.
How
As mentioned, any community member can create a blog post and submit it. We also provide a “Read Me First” page that has helped us to get higher quality posts submitted (see www.moz.com/posts/ugc_guidelines). It provides style guidelines, detailed information about what we're looking for, and practical tips like image width. If your post is approved, it gets published to the YouMoz blog. But more often than not, we tend to work with authors whose posts show promise, but may need more fine tuning—which is why that queue gets so long.
Who
Keri and Melissa are the main points of contact when it comes to YouMoz. They both work hard on cleaning up the queue and making it easier and quicker for authors to get their posts published. Miriam also reviews posts and leaves us great thoughts what we should do with them. Whenever necessary, Erica, Megan, and I also jump in and help out by editing and approving content, declining posts, etc. We also may need to pull in an expert, like Pete, to check on the technical merits of a post.
When it comes to promoting YouMoz posts to the main blog, it's a team decision. Usually Ashley or Keri recommend the post and the rest of us chime in. There is no “golden rule” to follow in order get a YouMoz post promoted, and it sometimes depends on whether or not there's a spot open on the main blog. When it's good and the community likes it, though, it will get promoted.
Q&A
As Moz moved away from the consulting business model, we realized that our community still had questions about inbound marketing. We also realized that our community, in addition to us Mozzers, wanted to help answer those questions. Thus, our Q&A forum was born. We were pleasantly surprised to see how much people love to both ask and answer questions, as you can see in this post from March, 2013.
What
You'll find pretty much any and every kind of question related (sometimes barely related) to Internet marketing in Q&A. Since this feature is for subscribers only, and blatant spammers don't like to pay money, it's fairly easy to keep spam in check. So we spend most of our time here making sure questions get answered and people keep in line with our Community Guidelines and TAGFEE principles.
When
Twenty-four hours a day, our community asks and answers questions. Thankfully, we're lucky enough to have many Associates helping out on the forum, including some who live in London and other cites “across the pond.” This means we're able to have coverage all day long. Whee!
How
This all happens through our own proprietary Q&A system. We get asked quite often if we built this ourselves or used an out-of-box solution. This is a 100% homegrown system, which does have its own set of bugs. In fact, we've completely rebuilt the backend twice to make it faster and easier for you to use.
Who
Keri heads our Q&A efforts by monitoring activity and making sure things are up and running. If there is an issue, she works with our technical project manager Jamie Seefurth (www.moz.com/team/jamies) to get our engineers on the problem. On the public side, Keri and Christy try to make sure no question is left behind by assigning some to our team of Staff and Associate experts. Dr. Pete, Megan, Erica, and myself also hop in and help out when we can, which in Dr. Pete's case means he's answered over 1,000 questions! Many of our Associates play a role in Q&A, and you'll see a number of them answering questions and endorsing answers every day. Even Rand goes in quite often and replies to questions personally.
Social Community
With the help of social media sites, our community has grown by leaps and bounds the last couple of years. You may have noticed that we engage with users quite frequently on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn, while slowly branching out into Pinterest and YouTube, and maintaining a Twitter account for Followerwonk. It's not that we've ignored other sites; we just tend to focus our energies on these first four as that's where the bulk of our community is.
Since many of our members follow us on these sites in addition to the blog, we had to figure out a way to be somewhat unique in all areas. Nothing worse than content overkill. Here's a quick walkthrough of how we manage the big four social media sites here at Moz.
Twitter is a bit of a “catch-all” platform for us, and is the social media site where we have the most followers (well over 200k). As expected, we use this channel for many different activities, including providing customer service, offering SEO and online marketing advice, and promoting content.
What
We tweet about Moz content and events, product upgrades and improvements, subscriber perks, site outages, tool issues, YouMoz posts, and anything else related to the Moz community. Additionally, you'll see a ton of replies to customer service type inquiries, issues, problems, questions, kudos, high-fives, and kitten photos.
We keep the tone of the tweets as Mozzy as possible, and speak on behalf of Roger. It makes my day when someone tweets, “Hey Roger, thanks for great app,” or something along those lines. It's all about Roger!
When
Our community is very international, so we can't just tweet from 9am to 5pm Pacific time. We need to be available as often as possible to respond to questions, requests, and such. While we do need to sleep at some point, you'll notice that we have people covering Twitter from about 4am until around 11pm Pacific.
Lindsay jumps on in the early morning, which isn't so early for our Florida office, a.k.a. her home. She usually spends an hour so responding to urgent issues, handing out some high fives, and making sure everything's starting out on the right foot. Then Erica and Megan jump on when they get into the office. They typically trade off days where one's in charge in the morning and the other in the afternoon. I help out if they need extra coverage.
We also schedule some of our tweets in advance. While we don't schedule tweets that specifically ask for user engagement, we do need to schedule them to promote our content during our international community's “on” hours. (On a side note, our most popular tweets are usually retweeted between 2am and 4am Pacific Time.)
How
We use CoTweet to manage Twitter, which allows multiple users to manage multiple accounts. It makes it easy to assign tweets to others; plus, you can tag tweets and set up extensive searches. We also like CoTweet because it acts like an inbox, letting us reach the illustrious “inbox zero” multiple times a day, ensuring that don't miss any activity in our community.
Editor's Note: CoTweet is now SocialEngage, and is part of ExactTarget's suite of premium marketing products and services (see http://mz.cm/138Ftxx).
Who
While Erica's the main person managing the account, at any time throughout the day you may find Megan, Keri, Lindsay, or me tweeting as well.
I also encourage staff to reply to tweets if they see them and simply cc: @moz so we know it's been handled. For example, Rand will often do this. He'll see a tweet before we do and will respond. It's a great way to give people direct interaction with every Mozzer!
As I mentioned before, we wanted to figure out a different approach to using Facebook. So we decided to make Facebook the “face” of Moz.
What
Yes, we do post all of our content on Facebook, the same as we do on Twitter, but we also post fun facts about the company and event photos to Facebook. One thing I enjoy doing is posting photos from a Meetup or conference to Facebook. We find we get a boost in “likes” each time someone is tagged in our photos. Our community loves to see our Mozzy culture.
Additionally, I often ask the community questions here. People love to share their opinions, and Facebook is a simple and easy way to do it. With so many people logged in all day, it's very easy to get people's attention on Facebook.
We also love to change Roger's outfit and add some “life” to him.
We manage comments and wall posts on Facebook just as we would manage comments on our site. If it's spam, we remove it; if it's obscene or someone cusses, we remove it; and if you need help or have something cool to share, we'll respond. Essentially, as long as you're on-topic and not a jerk, we keep your posts.
When
The timeframe for when we use Facebook is similar to the one for Twitter. However, we don't schedule Facebook posts in advance. We haven't quite nailed down when the best times for us to post are, but it's something we're slowly figuring out.
How
Although I could use an outside app to manage Facebook, I choose not to. Posts made from outside apps don't seem to show up in people's feeds as often as posts made directly from Facebook do. I want us to show up in those feeds as often as possible, so I don't use outside apps for Moz. Plus, I like knowing that what I'm seeing on our wall is what our fans are seeing on our wall.
Who
Again, Erica and Megan are the main people managing our Facebook page. However, Lindsay, myself, and quite a few others who are not officially part of the Community team also have admin rights.
Google+
As soon as Google+ brand pages came out, we jumped right on it. It took us a couple months to shake the bones out and figure out a strategy, but I think we're going on a nice track now.
What
In order to not seem like drones who publish the exact same content over and over, on our Google+ page we not only promote our own content, but other's as well. This is also a great place for us to introduce our readers to hot topics that we think they'd be interested in.
However, the hottest content on our Google+ page, we've found, is our very own Whiteboard+ video series. Whiteboard+ video is essentially a Whiteboard Friday video, but it is only posted to Google+. We'll keep testing this and see what works best, so you might find some new content on there soon.
When
Right now, we generally have at least one post in the early morning and then another post sometime during the day. But we're always testing and refining how we manage our Google+ account. One weekend, we posted a special Whiteboard+ video on Friday at 8 pm Pacific, and it went crazy! It had 353 pluses, 382 shares, and 101 comments. And most of this happened over the weekend! I think we may be onto something here.
How
We prefer to stay logged into Google+ all day long and use its interface to manage our account. I'm very happy that it now shows alerts when we get a new follower, comment, plus, etc. This makes it easier to manage the page, as opposed to hitting refresh and scanning the page for updates like I did previously. (Although I wish it would turn off those community invites!) The Google+ search is also really helpful for finding people who aren't tagging us in their posts.
Who
Erica and Megan do most of the daily management, with Lindsay jumping in early in the morning to post recent content. While G+ is pretty chill, either Keri or myself can hop in as needed.
Ahh, LinkedIn, the stepchild of our social efforts for far too long! Luckily, we've made it part of our main strategy, because so many people from the community are there. We mostly focus on growing our Group, and use our Company Page for content updates and recruiting.
What
Initially, we tried to set up RSS feeds of our content to go to our Group, and then manually posted updates to our Company Page. However, LinkedIn's feeds were a bit buggy, so we now manually post in the Group, too. We also make sure to promote updates to our tools, upcoming Mozinars, special events, and other information we think the Group may be interested in. LinkedIn is a great place to share content from others, too.
We also manage who joins the group. As with our other social media accounts, we manage comments and posts the same way we manage them on our own blog. We spend time trashing spam and sales pitches, too.
We're also trying new things on LinkedIn, like creating a book club.
When
While we usually update LinkedIn during “regular business hours” on the West Coast, we do find ourselves peeking in on the weekend, too. Unlike other social networks, we find that our community is pretty active here on the weekends; that's probably when people are taking time to look for new jobs, update their personal portfolios, and do other professional leveling up.
How
Unlike other social networks, LinkedIn posts made in our Group come directly from the individual community manager, not Roger. We always make sure we're maintaining our Mozziness, and if we need to put on a moderator hat, we make sure that we identify ourselves as such. Roger does update our Company Page, though, on LinkedIn.
Unfortunately, we've found that LinkedIn attracts a lot of spammers. This means that our team, mostly Megan and Erica, manually approve new members and reach out, in a Mozzy way, to double-check we're not dealing with spambots.
We also manage posts, the moderation queue (only approved members can post in the Group), and any other issues that come up. All this happens directly through LinkedIn's user interface.
Who
Erica and Megan manage the LinkedIn Company Page and Group. Others on the team have admin access, though, and can jump in at any time. But honestly, they do such a great job, we haven't really had to!
Whew.
Whether you're a member of the Moz community or you manage a community of your own, I hope you've found this post insightful and that you now have a better understanding of our community management process. Honestly, this barely scratches the surface of what happens behind the scenes in the Moz community. There's a lot to learn and change happens all the time, but our community is amazing. We couldn't imagine not spending our days with you!
Oh and around here, our motto is: “If all else fails, eat ice cream.”
