Embracing Your Community Both Online and Off with Erica McGillivray

“It doesn’t matter where you interact with us — you’re part of our community.” Being on the community team at SEO software giant Moz isn’t just focusing on social media. As senior community manager, Erica McGillivray interacts with the brand’s community both online and off. As you’ll learn, Erica also has a formidable comic book collection. We talked about all of this and more on this week’s On Brand podcast.

About Erica McGillivray

Erica McGillivray spends a ridiculous amount of time being geeky, both professionally and personally. At Moz, she’s the senior community manager, wrangling 500,000+ people and co-running their annual conference MozCon. Erica also is a founder of GeekGirlCon, is a published author, and has a comic book collection that’s an earthquake hazard. Follow her at @emcgillivray.

Episode Highlights

How does community management work at Moz? Erica is a part of a six person team charged with the three aspects of community management at Moz — social media, onsite Q & A/forums, and live events including MozCon and MozTalks.

A powerful benefit of hosting live events? “People have created friendships with each other at our events.” Being that convener of both value, support, and friendship is a powerful role for a brand to play.

What about brand advocacy? “We actually have been lucky because we haven’t had to do a lot of purposeful brand advocacy. We help our community, we answer questions, we host great events.” All of this has helped Moz create a brand rich with advocates simply by being helpful and providing value.

Erica loves comic books. I love comic books. How can we make this episode about comic books … We sure tried! Actually we had a very on brand  discussion on the state of comic books. While the blockbusters from Marvel and DC get a lot of attention they don’t always connect the dots as effectively as they could on the related books. Erica gave us some great inside information on the role of distribution in the equation.

What comic book would Erica recommend? “The Midnighter series. He’s basically the gay Batman. And he kills people a lot more.” Sounds awesome! Check it out now.

What brand has made Erica smile recently? “Herschel bags.” Erica had a great customer service experience via Twitter when a borrowed bag broke. “They saved me from being the bad guy who broke the bag!”

To learn more about Erica, you can follow her on Twitter, check out the Moz blog, and her comic book review site sliverofice.com.

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