Hey AI Buddy! Help Me Scale My Community’s Human Touch!

Yesterday I checked in with my good friend Bill Johnston regarding the state of AI in the Online Community space. He and his Structure3C team are the most knowledgeable about it. They have done the research: The Emerging Role of AI in Online Communities: Our 2020 Research

Many community managers are wary about Artificial Intelligence managing their beloved community. The fear of big brother and the robots taking over runs deep. 

Most likely AI or sophisticated algorithms help your community members already for example when they search and the AI serves them the most relevant content. 

I want an AI that augments my community activities so that I can scale/maximize my personal touch, helping my members to succeed and feeling truly seen. It would be cool if the AI would even coach me to better interact with my members.  

It does wonders to community engagement if you welcome every new member to your community with a personalized email. The more you know about your new members the better you can tailor that welcome message. 

There is where an AI Buddy would be really helpful. That AI buddy would use the information that a new member shared when signing up and scouts the internet for more information and puts a little profile together regarding that person. It would include pictures; latest blog posts; short bio from Twitter, LinkedIn, …; the last three posts from Twitter/LinkedIn; … 

The AI Bot would also match that profile to one of our community member personas and surfaces the most interesting content, events, discussions, for it.  

Image as the main one by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

My AI Buddy then creates a welcome message draft from that information. Something like this:  

Hi <first name>, 

Welcome to the <community name>. Hope you find it helpful. 

If I am not mistaken, your focus is <area of interest> the member <name and link to the profile of blog post writer> has recently posted the <most shared post from that area of interest> that you may like. Check out the home page of <main area of interest> for more inisghts around that topic. 

On <date + time in time-zone of new member> there is the <name of event> coming up that you may interest you. 

[if the new member doesn’t have a profile picture yet] I see you have this picture in your LinkedIn profile, is it OK if we copy that to your profile too? Manage your profile here

When you have a minute, you could introduce yourself to the community by posting a welcome message. To help you post it, we can create a little draft post from the information you shared with us. Click on this link, adjust the text to your liking and post it. 

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions. 

Welcome on board, <name of community manager> 

That is right, your AI Buddy can also help your new community members to introduce themselves.

Having such a template welcome message augmented by an AI buddy makes it really easy to personalize it, give it the human touch and make your new member feel really welcomed from day one.

Ideally, the AI Buddy learns from the changes I am making when finalizing the email. It also tracks the success rate of new members being engaged. The AI Bot will also track when it is the best time to send a personalized reminder email, again quickly fine-tuned by a community manager. 

The AI-Buddy is constantly learning from the activities of the Community Managers. Over time these insights captured will help the AI-Buddy to coach new community managers to the best community behavior.

If done right, the AI Buddy will allow you to scale your personal human touch. 

One obstacle for such a solution is how limited the information is that you are allowed to grab from the walled garden of our social platforms.

LinkedIn is notoriously stingy about the information they allow to share. I totally understand that they block a wholesale copy of large amounts of member data, but they should get more sophisticated in their approach and open up their APIs for these smaller almost surgical requests for information of one member at a time.

It would be so amazing to be able to display to a new member: “… these LinkedIn connections are on our community already… ” including their latest activity. Companies would pay good money for these kinds of API calls.

If you are building such an AI Buddy into your community platform, please reach out, I want this to exist. 

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