Being Small and Managing Communities

How do small and medium-sized companies utilize communities to communicate successfully to their consumers? SMEs need to deal with community management just as much as large enterprises, if not more. Unfortunately, it is very difficult for small companies' executives to find community management researchers designed for their specific business size. In this thesis, we will propose guidelines for SMEs in order to build their community management strategy effectively working with both the Internet and local communities. These guidelines will be devided into two main strategic steps: (1) A strategic step, where we will propose ways for companies to define their goals, targets, the means they will invest and which tools they will use to deal with community management. (2) An operational step, focusing on the creation and the management of communities.