Creating an Activity From a Community Conversation: How Can Members Start a Conversation & How Can Managers Create Activities From Member Conversations

A conversation can only take place when there is engagement from at least two people. In the world of social media, this conversation becomes bigger and better as more and more people engage or participate. Similarly, engagement with and from employees is at the heart of a successful Employee Advocacy program. However, tracking what the employees have to say on different platforms and channels can be extremely tedious for social media managers and marketers.

In such scenarios, Gaggle Managers can benefit by adding the ‘Community Module’ to their Gaggle. This module allows Members to start conversations within the Gaggle, other Members to participate in these conversations, and Managers to create activities from these conversations. This also presents Gaggle Managers with a variety of user-generated content and fresh ideas for their social media strategy. 

Here’s how it works.

How Can Members Start a Conversation?

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From the Members dashboard, go to ‘Community’. Here they can start a conversation by either clicking on ‘Start a Conversation’ button on the top right or at the top of the content feed.

If a member clicks on the ‘Start a Conversation’ button on the top right a slider will appear or if they click on ‘Start a Conversation’ on the top of the content feed a box will appear. Both will give them the same options.

Member Options

1. Message - Simply type the message they want to share.
2. Recommend to Managers - Populating this checkbox will flag the conversation as great material to use in an Activity.  As such, it will be available to Managers on their ‘Member Ideas’ page.
3. Add media - Share Images upto 10MB in size, Videos upto 200MB in size, or links to external content such as online articles, LinkedIn posts, Twitter posts, Videos etc. by copying and pasting the link.
4. Post on personal social accounts - If members have their Twitter, LinkedIn, and/or Facebook accounts linked to their Gaggle profile, they can also post this conversation directly on their social media profiles as original content.
5. Post to specific Channels: Members can choose to only post this conversation to specific Channels.
   1. If they leave this field blank, all Members in the community will receive this conversation.
   2. If you select specific Channels, only followers of those channels will receive this conversation if the channel is private.

Once started the conversation will appear on the ’Community’ feed. If a member has chosen certain channels to post this, it will only appear in the feed of members in those channels, if the channels are private.

How Can Managers Create Activities from these Conversations?

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Gaggle Managers can find all conversations recommended by members in the ‘Member Ideas’ section under ‘Activities.'

However, if a Member starts a conversation and has not recommended it to the manager they can still find it on the ‘Dashboard’ under the ‘Community’ section and create activities out of them.

The process to create an activity for Managers is the same as both ‘Member Ideas’ or ‘Community’. For this article, we are creating an activity from the ‘Member Idea’ section. Here they can take a look at individual suggestions by the members by clicking on the activity they choose to view.

Once the Gaggle Managers click on the suggestion, a slider will appear with a preview of the recommendation. To convert the suggestion into an ‘Activity’ the manager can click on the gray button in the top right corner of the preview.

Here, the managers can select the social network on which they want to create an activity from this recommendation. Currently, the recommendations can only be converted into Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram activities.

Next, the Gaggle Manager can choose the type of activity they want to create on the social network. Once the manager chooses the type of activity they want to create they can click on ‘Activity Options’ button on the left bottom of the slider.

Here they will be presented with the options to curate the activity.

1. Post to Channels: Like the Member Groups, you can choose to only post this activity to specific Channels.
   • If you leave this field blank, all Members in your program will receive this activity.
   • If you select specific private Channels, only Subscribers of those channels will receive this activity.
2. Send to Member Groups: If you would like the activity to be sent to all Members in your Gaggle, leave this field blank. However, if you would like to position this activity to only specific Member Groups, you can choose which Member Groups will receive this activity here. An example of a Member Group might be Executive Leadership, Sales Teams, Product Managers, or many others.
   If you select both ‘Send to Member Groups’ and ‘Post to Channels,’ for a Member to see the activity, they need to be in both the Member Group and the Channel,  if the Channel is private.
   
3. Message Text: When the content is served to the Member as an activity to complete, the description will default to the content shared by your members in their recommendation to you, but you can choose to provide your own information to let the Member know why they are doing this activity. This is particularly helpful when you have members liking/sharing third-party content and the relevance may not be clear.
4. Points: Each Activity can be assigned a point value that contributes to the leaderboard and rewards (should you use rewards).
5. Start/End Time: Choose the Start and End date based on when you want your activity to be available and completed. For the start time, if you do not select a date, it will be an activity that is available to your Members within a few minutes of being created. This is denoted by the default “Starts: Now” config. Likewise, the end time is when the activity ends. At that time, the activity will expire and will no longer be displayed on the Member's activity listing or be available to complete.
   
   Note: The ‘Start’ and ‘End’ times are based on the configured time zone of the manager creating the activity at the time of creation. Other Managers and Members will see these times converted in their configured time zones.
   
   
6. Campaign: If you leverage grouping your activities into Campaigns, use the drop-down menu to select the campaign that this activity supports.
7. Other Options
   a. Allow Editing - Managers can tick the box here if they want to allow members to edit the post content.
   b. Featured - Managers can tick this box to feature the activity on top of Gaggle Member’s list of ‘Things to do.'
   c. Allow Tracking - Managers can choose if they want to track metrics for this activity or not. The metrics are included in the activity reports when a Manger ticks this box.

Example:

Managers can also directly create an activity from Members Ideas by clicking on the three dots on top right next to the activity. They will be presented with the same options as the preview process to create this activity.

 

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