Hello. My name is Hillary Boucher and I am the community manager of TheCR Network – our private peer network of the smartest social business and community professionals. And I kid you not — every day I am honored to work with the intelligent, savvy and experienced community professionals in our network.
I know there are many people who want to know what membership is like, and so every month I’m going to be giving a sneak peek into what we’ve been up to inside the network. Ready? Here we go!
Nerdy Valentine’s Day card by Stephanie Evergreen
Last month in TheCR Network…
February is for lovers. Community lovers that is.
It might have been a cold and snowy month for most of our team, but with 95+ companies represented and globally located we were able to live vicariously through our members located in warmer climates.
Member Questions & Discussions
Inside TheCR Network members have access to groups and forums based on their work and priorities. Here, they can ask questions for other members to answer or report on their own insights and experiences. Some of the hot topics this month were:
- How do you get members over the “it’s a stupid question so I won’t ask” hump?
- What are some best practices around community approvals?
- Do you have different tiers for your MVP/super user program?
New Resources
TheCR Network members have access to TheCR Library, which includes an archive of Roundtable Reports, TheCR Research, Resource Bundles organized by use case, member case studies and more.
- Community Maturity Model Resource Bundle. This month we revamped and re-released our Community Maturity Model Resource Bundle to include new resources our members co-created with our team.
- New crowdsourced conference guide. It’s a common challenge to keep track of industry appropriate events so we decided to take the challenge on as a network. The collaborative document is filling up fast with helpful info and insights about various conferences and events that might be helpful to members.
- Advocacy Program Quick Case. Every week we host two virtual Happy Hour chats for our team to connect with other members around work and personal interests. It was one of those beautiful community moments. Two members bumped into each other in Happy Hour chat. After some casual introductions, one member mentioned she was researching how to launch an advocacy program and another member replied that she had just been there and launched a program last year. A case study was shared right there in Happy Hour and with their permission we grabbed the most helpful parts of their conversation, reformatted it and released it as a quick case so other members could benefit from the information exchange.
- Four new Roundtable reports. We create reports from every single Roundtable call. In February we released four new reports filled with best practices and lessons learned on a variety of topics including: 2014 trends for social business, State of Community Management research overview, how to manage up in a networked world, and how gamification can drive business objectives in your community.
Roundtable Calls and Member Events
Roundtable calls are the heartbeat of our programming. Every week we host a live, interactive call with expert facilitators covering various topics and case studies that are important and supportive to our members’ work. Here are the discussions we hosted this month:
Social Business and Transparency
This was a well attended Roundtable call hosted by one of our members from a large, financial institution. She shared an inspiring case study and best practices on transparency and engagement in enterprise social networks.
Community Maturity Workshop
As you know we’ve been collecting survey data for our 2014 State of Community Management Research both inside the network and with our extended network of friends. (Have you taken the survey yet? It closes Friday and we would love to have you included!) What you might not know is that inside the network we have an active Community Maturity Assessment Working Group who has been collaborating with our team and building maturity assessment tools. Their work informed our survey creation and this month we gathered for a workshop, facilitated by Maggie Tunning, to take a peek at the early results and discuss insights.
How Do you Measure the Success of Community Managers?
This is a hot topic for members and the second time in six months we’ve gathered to discuss. We heard from experienced team leaders on how they assess the success of the community managers on their teams, and we also heard from individual community professionals on how they measure their own success.
Crowdsourcing and Collaborating with Consumers: Understanding the Difference
For this discussion we brought in an external expert, Julie Wittes Schlack who is the VP of Innovation at Communispace, to take a detailed look at best practices for collaborating and crowdsourcing with consumers.
Book Club: The Circle by Dave Eggers
Is sharing really caring? Are you spooked by the public’s disregard for privacy? No? Then you haven’t read The Circle by Dave Eggers yet. It’s a novel that takes a very interesting look at where society could be heading with its technology and the slippery slope of privacy and transparency. It’s not as far fetched as you might think and it’s particularly interesting to discuss with others who work is the social and community space. Our team gathered with members for a book club chat and decided that the book affirms that the conversation at hand is not just about technology — but the intent of the people who yield it.
Alumni Series: 20 Questions w/ Claire Flanagan
We gathered for a small and intimate discussion with longtime TheCR member, Claire Flanagan to discuss her career journey in the community space. Along with Claire’s perspectives, members weighed in with their own thoughts on what they’ve learned over the past five years, where the career path of a community manager can lead, and the current trends that are affecting and shaping the way they approach their community work.
Want to join the conversation?
What do you think? Enough for one month? I’ve only just highlighted some of our more prevalent discussions. There have been many more questions and discussions, high quality content curated and archived for future research needs, and many peer-to-peer introductions made by our team as part of our concierge service we provide members. If you are interested in being a part of TheCR Network you can learn more about membership here. I’d love to help you get started!
See you next month!
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Do you manage a community? Take the 15 minute State of Community Management survey and save $500 on individual membership through Friday, February 28th.
