Managing communities & Burger King's rebrand
Managing communities & Burger King's rebrand
A chat with Madeline Lucas and some excellent links
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For the first interview of the year, I spoke to Madeline Lucas from Small Giants. This interview is from late last year, which is also when Madeline gave her top tips for internal communication for a Perkbox (my day job) blog, which you can read here.
Madeline’s specialty is community management, which often falls into the marketing bucket, despite how nuanced and different that position can be business to business. There’s definitely misconceptions about it, and really it needs to be defined and limitations put in place so that the job can be done effectively. For example, does your community manager cover customer engagement campaigns? Case studies? Customer service? These are definitely ducks that need to be put in a row, and if you find yourself crossing over multiple role definitions, it might be time to ask for a role review, and raise this as an issue!
If you read last week’s issue, you’ll know that this year I’m focusing on being ‘selfish’ at work, so that’s why I’m encouraging you to set boundaries at work if you find yourself needing them!
It’s also a perfect segue to plug that you can now make donations if you find Mehdeeka useful, or sign up to Buy Me A Coffee for your own projects, both through the link below;
Onto the interview!
Kayla: What is a common misconception about community management? What do you enjoy about it?
Madeline: That Community Management is a social media job, I don’t do any social media for our organisation, or for my life and I’d like to keep it that way. I enjoy that it has people at the core of the work. That’s what brings me the most joy, developing and nurturing relationships. It feels like a very big blessing to be able to do a job that requires me to be completely myself doing what I love the most, connecting with the people.
K: You started at Dumbo Feather and then moved to Small Giants, do you find many differences between B2C and B2B-ish communities?
M: I haven’t noticed the difference so much – perhaps in the mediums of communicating and physical ways of convening with people is different.
Though the similarity, that we are a community of values-aligned humans who are here to create the world we want to live in, far outweighs any differences. That which connects us is a much stronger force.
K: What do you think sets apart a ‘great’ community manager from a ‘good’ community manager?
M: It’s about what you’re prepared to give. I’ve found I’m at my best and achieving the most success when I am wholeheartedly all in. When I’m open, vulnerable, honest and most myself is when I’m doing my best work. People respond to someone they can see is a human being. In the business context, it can be quite disarming and I’ve always experienced that as an advantage. Another thing that seems to work well for me is that there’s no deviation between my work-self and my life-self. I’m the same in all contexts, I manage community at work and I do it for my personal life, because it comes naturally to me and I love it. Some great advice a teacher gave me back in secondary school was “do what you love and what you’re good at” – I must have taken that to heart!
Linky dinks
Ok I’ve got a bit to get through. The first link is a long read by Anne Helen Peterson (who I also linked to last week) titled ‘How to work through a coup’, and it really raises the question of is there an emergency big enough to stop us from working? I try my best to keep this substack AU focused, so replace coup with ‘climate emergency’, ‘political corruption’, and the ever present ‘coronavirus’.
A Rolling Stones feature on how gatekeeping in the music industry is breaking down and independent artists are popping up in the mainstream more than ever.
A recount of how the founder of Story Creator app got to the number 1 position on Product Hunt.
How to run remote workshops, from a UX research company.
Social advocacy in sports has been a big topic in recent years, and now Louis Vuitton has partnered with Naomi Osaka. Luxury brands have followed on from Nike and Kapernick!
And finally, this has already become old news but Burger King rebranded. I know there’s been both criticisms and praise for it, but can we just appreciate the cohesion? The amount of people involved in this, the clean roll out, the coverage of all assets and packaging, now there’s a successful rebrand! Congrats to anyone who worked on this because I’m sure it was a biiiiiiig project. You can read some insights into what they were going for with the rebrand here and here.
And of course, the new and already much beloved BK icon:
Next week
In the first 3-parter of 2021 I’m covering product marketing! I’ve got interviews lined up but haven’t conducted any just yet so if you have a question you’d like the answer to, please do leave it as a comment!