The Community Roundtable

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

Community Management Conferences and Events

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Conference season is warming up and there are a lot of community and social media events we will be participating in over the next few months.  While the events we'll be attending are in Boston the conferences will bring in experts from around the country and should be on your short list if … [Read more...]

Cindy Melzer on Starting Community Management

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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 … [Read more...]

Avoiding the Community Clique

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Finding people who share the same interests, perspectives, and passions that we do is part of the visceral power of communities. It is inherently human that we love to engage and form tight relationships with people to whom we can relate. We can congratulate ourselves if we've built a community … [Read more...]

Relationship Inflation and the Role of Communities

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Umair Haque wrote a very thought provoking post The Social Media Bubble for the Harvard Business Review where he talked about social media's inflationary effect on relationships and with it the devolution of the value we can expect from them. He argues that while we may have a lot more … [Read more...]

Community Management Advisory Services & Webinar

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While The Community Roundtable is primarily a peer and educational network for community and social media managers, we have been asked by various customers to help them with internal education, advisory services, and feedback on their social strategies.  We have provided two primary types of … [Read more...]

The State of Community Management 2010

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Community management is emerging as a critical discipline for managing social initiatives. From those focused on marketing, to those focused on support, collaboration, knowledge management, human resource development and innovation, community managers are the glue that hold it all together. Yet, … [Read more...]

The Secret Sauce of Communities

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A lot of people might say that the secret sauce of communities is conversion, lower cost of advocacy, lowered support costs, faster information discovery, etc and they would not be wrong.  Communities - done well - can drive a lot of specific business outcomes in a sustainable way while reducing the … [Read more...]

Wait for It… Emergence Happens

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One of the most enjoyable and gratifying moments of being a community manager is when members of the community start to step up, create content, proactively initiate something, build relationships with people they've discovered, and feel comfortable enough to show more of their personalities.  This … [Read more...]

Raising Good Communities

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I am not the first, nor will I be the last to equate community management to parenting.  Connie Bensen made the analogy and recently Simon Phillips wrote a post You Teach What You Accept that got at a similar behavior modeling aspect of community management.  It's a very apt analogy and it is a good … [Read more...]