As a community manager, you strive to make sure you integrate your users' feedback as much as possible but sometimes, the product vision needs to speed ahead of the feedback. Massive change (call it a pivot, if you want to) will delight some users and piss off others.

Here's a few things I'd love to put to the group:

* How do you manage expectations leading up to the change event?
* What strategies have CMs used to keep users from jumping ship?
* How do you balance the negative and the positive when communicating to your team?
* When do you know you need to backtrack and re-instate old features?

These are just some of the issues I'd love to discuss.

Many thanks, Evan, for putting the group together!

I've worked for several small companies as a social media strategist - a job that inevitably seems to turn into CM at some point. These companies are service-oriented, only semi technologically competent, don't realize how to create strong community from the start and are now scrambling to get goodwill back from apathy, and try to do something constructive with it. I'm good with nurture and sustenance, but how do I teach how to revive a partially-living/partially-lifeless community? This situation is pandemic with small companies, perhaps some large ones have been through it too. Would certainly be a great thing to develop white paper or process map for.