Best practices for community managers

Planning for hosting AMA sessions

Due to the nature of AMA, it is prudent to create a dedicated place to hold the sessions. It can be a space with a category for every session. Or a space with projects to publish the questions of each session. Once you decide on the structure, you should create and configure the necessary places to hold AMA sessions and archive the questions after the sessions.

As the Ask Me Anything tile allows publishing questions to other places, you need only one (or few) places configured specifically to hold the sessions. Countdown tiles may be especially useful for marking the time before the start of a session and the duration of a session itself. You can find a possible place setup in How an AMA place may look like.

Planning a session

Choose a topic

A session may be dedicated to a specific topic, like 'Ask CEO anything about the recent policy change'. Or make it broad, about a product or company in general. The duration of the session usually depends on the topic.

Select a speaker

Usually, people get questions for senior management. Thus the choice of the speaker (Host) may dictate the topic and 'make or break' the session.

Create a blog post

Creating a blog post about the Host may be useful to introduce the Host and provide a kick start for users.

Establish the rules

Establishing and publishing the rules helps to conduct the meetings in order. This may also help you to correctly remove off-topic questions.

Decide the timing

The 'live' AMA sessions are usually planned for the time appropriate for the main audience. But keep in mind that the Host must be online during this live time period, answering questions.

Provide time to submit questions

Opening the session for submitting questions at least a week before the session is good practice. Employees will be able to think on questions and vote on the ones they like. This also allows the ones who cannot attend to participate.

Provide ways to submit questions

• A list of sample questions may be helpful for users to formulate their questions.
• Providing a way for users to publish questions anonymously, for example, by email, may be valuable for some users. You can then add these questions into the group as they come in, or possibly save some to be added as 'live' questions if the AMA session slows down.

Prepare answers

• Periodically downloading the questions and sending them to the Host should give the Host time to go through the question list and prepare answers for the most voted and the most interesting ones. Then they can copy and paste their responses and feel more in control during the session.
• Anticipate what might be asked based on common FAQs from your audience. The Host can have responses to those questions ready ahead of time. It’s also helpful to have important documentation on hand, like user guides, product info, and news bulletins that the Host can reference quickly if they don't know the answer.

Prepare rewards

Giving in the participants, both the Host and the user who asked questions, reward badges may help to recognize the active participants. This may also serve as a way to monitor participation statistically.

During the session

• Actually sticking to the 'live' time period raises the value of the 'live' time. The Host can prepare answers if they want, but answers should not be published until the actual 'live' time.
• An assistant or community manager should assist in feeding and answering the questions during the live period.
• If there are duplicate questions, the Host or a community manager can respond, but by @mentioning the other question to save time and eliminate confusion for those watching or participating at a later time.
• Consider having a community manager edit the submitted questions to ensure the question title makes sense if seen in a search box or activity stream.
• If the AMA session is held in a location where English is not the local language, consider having answers posted in English and the local language so that everyone feels included.

After the session

• Leaving the questions available allows other users may also find the answers interesting. Additionally, this helps to ensure transparency and allows non-attendees and new hires to find information later.
• Session statistics can be gathered from the place analytics, the DES Explorer, and the Cloud Analytics Reports.
• You can create content categories and automatically move questions to those categories based on tags. For more information, see Managing content categories from user interface in the Cloud Community Manager Help.