Broaden-and-Build

While trying to find ways of explaining admin roles/ community managers work in Social Media, I stumbled upon a psychology theory, brought to my attention by Costin Jelea. Broaden-and-build, the theory of positive emotions. In one sentence if people are experiencing positive emotions, they become more creative, wiser, socially integrated and thus happier.

A community manager always has to stay positive an keep the answers for the members of the community assertive and favorable to the brand. This is rule number one. In Social Media you never fight. But the interesting question is what happens between admins and the people they answer for or get engaged to, on long term?

If the relation between the psychologist and his patient is meant to cure the patient and methods of broaden-and-build theory can do this, what happens between the admin and brand advocates?

First of all, let's define the therapy roles. The admin is the brand social media psychologist. Brand advocates are the people who are most present in the community/page, comment and interact with the brand often. They are those who need counseling from the brand. The reasons for which they come to "therapy" are different, depending first on the category and second on the conversation pattern. They come for beauty advices in case of cosmetics and end up talking also about self confidence. They come for entrepreneur advices and start talking about community issues.

Just like in any therapy interaction, admins and brand advocates get attached. The admin raises a question or launches a discussion on a social network and he is the first one to give the answer or guide it. If the admin respects the first rule, he will have a crowd to talk to and guide it further. The brand content has to raise positive feelings. (second rule of social media). I'm not talking about posting funny cats or comedy movies/illustration. I'm talking about generating good content, educational or entertaining, that follows brand equity and values. This is how the transfer of emotions begins, from the admin, towards the brand advocates, by starting a conversation that enables people to write positive stuff.

The second step for the admin, when transfer happens, is to become friends with the advocates and educate them to create more valuable content. They are sharing same values, so why should't they become friends? The reason behind this is to generate the milestone of online communication - WOM, to have more people taking the message further, but also to generate duplication of content.