The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

  • About Us
    • Our Values
    • Our Team
    • Our Clients
      • Client Success Stories
    • Community Leadership Awards
      • Community Leadership Awards 2024
      • Community Leadership Awards 2023
      • Community Leadership Awards 2022
      • Community Leadership Awards 2021
  • Services
    • Benchmarking and Audits
      • Community Performance Benchmark
      • Community Readiness Audits
      • Community ROI Calculator
      • The Community Score
    • Models and Frameworks
      • Community Maturity Model™
      • Community Engagement Framework™
      • Community Skills Framework™
      • Community Technology Framework™
      • The Social Executive
  • Research
    • The State of Community Management
      • SOCM 2024
      • SOCM 2023
      • SOCM 2022
      • SOCM 2021
      • SOCM 2020
    • Community Careers and Compensation
    • The Community Manager Handbook
      • 2022 Edition
      • 2015 Edition
    • The Social Executive
    • Special Reports
    • Case Studies
  • Events
    • Connect
      • Connect 2024
      • Connect 2023
      • Connect 2022
    • Community Technology Summit
    • Professional Development
    • Resource Bundles
    • Upcoming Events
    • Community Manager Appreciation Day
      • Community Manager Appreciation Day 2025
      • Community Manager Appreciation Day 2024
  • I’m looking for…
    • Community Engagement Resources
    • Executive Support Resources
    • Community Reporting Resources
    • Platform and Technology Resources
    • Community Strategy Resources
    • Community Programming Resources
    • Community Career Resources
    • Something Else
      • Vendor Resource Center
      • Community FAQs
      • Community Management Podcasts
        • Community Conversations
        • Lessons From The NEW Community Manager Handbook
      • Community 101
        • Community Management Glossary
        • Community Management FAQs
      • Case Studies
      • Community Webinars
  • Community
    • The Network
      • Member Login
      • Join The Network
      • Roundtable Call Library
    • The Library
      • Subscriber Login
      • Subscribe to The Library
  • Blog

Cindy Melzer on Starting Community Management

April 9, 2010 By Rachel Happe

I had a serendipitous intro recently with a couple of different people from Isis Maternity – a local childcare retail and services company – and we got to chatting about online communities. They have operated in a community-centric way in the offline world for quite some time – bringing parents together for maternity and childcare classes and enabling relationships between parents and children. They have just started to explore extending the relationships they build with and among their customers to the online world. It clearly makes a lot of sense.

Cindy Meltzer who is now their community manager, recognized the opportunity to engage more effectively with their existing Facebook Page toward the end of last year.  Like many social initiatives, she started small with some basics and found that Isis’ latent online community was more than ready to engage. She was willing to share with me how she started out and their early results which shows a dramatic increase in members and engagement on their Facebook page as soon as she reached out in a human voice. Community management can start by simply asking questions:

Between October of 2009 and January of 2010, fans of their Facebook Page grew from 699 to 1043 – impressive but not nearly as impressive as the growth in interactions which grew from 7 to 463 per month over that short time.  Cindy and Isis graciously shared these stats to show others who are just starting out what a dramatic difference community management can have and Cindy recently sat down with me to talk a little more about her experiences as a new community manager:

Download this podcast (21 minutes/20.2mb)

Subscribe to our podcast series.

This post is a follow-up and was inspired by our post The Value of Community Management.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

https://media.blubrry.com/608862/communityroundtable.com/podcasts/cindymeltzer_final.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

About Rachel Happe

comments powered by Disqus
Community best practices

Resources for the people who build online communities.

ABOUT US
Our Values
Our Team
Our Clients
Careers

RESOURCES
Vendor Resource Center
Podcasts 
Community 101
Case Studies
Webinars

PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Benchmarking and Audits
Models and Frameworks
Research
Professional Development

QUICK LINKS
Blog
Newsletter
About The Network
About The Library
About The Academy

LOGIN
The Network
The Library
The Academy

Contact
Support
Partnership
Inquiries
Subscribe to
Our Newsletter