We will be at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week – speaking, socializing, and listening to some great case studies. But more than that, the Enterprise 2.0 conference is a great milestone for us – we launched The Community Roundtable two years ago in Boston at the event. Today, I am on the conference advisory board and there is not one but two tracks dedicated to community management. It has been an amazing two years – mostly because we have been alternately grateful, surprised, and astonished by the support we have received from various members of our network.
We envisioned and have built The Community Roundtable to be a social business from the ground up. We have many constituencies and we try to make sure that the operational model is community-based, providing more value for each group than they contribute. And it’s working:
- We love friends – some of which we know may never be members or be able to offer financial support. But they offer support in other ways that we truly appreciate.
- We have members of TheCR Network from over 70 organizations, both big and small. They support us both by membership fees and their ongoing participation. We charge a membership fee so that we are always focused on their needs first and that those needs are reinforced in our financial model. We think it’s important to generate enough value that it is worth the fee. We let our members self-identify so while we won’t name them here we could not run our organization without them!
- We have partners that have hosted us for webinars with their customers, co-hosted events with us, sponsored our research, and included our services with their offerings. We are very grateful for their support and they include: Rosetta, Powered (now part of Dachis), Acquia, Farland Group, Social Media Today, Moxie Software, Enterprise 2.0 Conference/UBM, Igloo Software, Constant Contact, NewsGator, and KickApps. We are very grateful for this support and our partners have enabled us to be a trusted, neutral source of information in the market and we hope we have provided valuable content and exposure to them in return.
- We partner with individual experts who join our group for weekly discussions. They provide wonderful perspective and resources for our members and we hope we provide them with feedback from a wide range of practitioners, our recommendation, and some exposure in return.
- Our advisory clients pay us for our time and our workshops and in return we work to help ‘infect’ their organizations with a social business perspective that takes hold and grows as they work with us.
- Other influencers and organizations in the space who ask us to write columns, do podcasts, speak, and join them for events.
- Our employees and contractors spend time working to advance the discipline of community management and facilitate its understanding for our customers and in exchange are paid. Jim & I take our payment last. Salaries support our families and allow us to do this work (and no, we won’t be able to retire any time soon!).
This business is personal for us and there are friends that have been amazingly supportive and encouraging – Adam Cohen, Mark Yolton, Dawn Lacallade, Aaron Strout, Mike Gotta, Derek Peplau, Heather Strout, Ken Burbary, Doug Haslam, Robert Collins, Jeremiah Owyang, Diane Hessan, Francois Gossieaux, Cappy Popp, David Armano, Michael Chin, Michael Troiano, Michael Pace, Megan Murray, Luis Suarez, Jamie Pappas, Claire Flanagan, Mark Sylvester, Gia Lyons, Mike Lewis, Mark Wallace, Jay Batson and among many, many others. Many of these individuals were what allowed us to see the opportunity and kept us going through the early days.
And last, but certainly not least, our families have been phenomenally supportive and patient as we have invested in and grown the business.
As we celebrate our second anniversary, we feel incredibly fortunate to work with so many people we can truly also call friends and have proved (to ourselves at least) that there is a way to build a business that leads with relationships first and recognizes all forms of support that we receive in return.
