The Community Roundtable

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

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...]

Best Practices in Member Engagement

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Member engagement is one of the key responsibilities of social media and community managers but it is one of the hardest responsibilities to understand and improve.  There is no playbook that has the 'right' and 'wrong' ways to encourage engagement and what works for some communities is completely … [Read more...]

Building and Sustaining Brand Communities

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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, having a few wicked smart people take what we've done and elaborate on it is... amazing. We are always very impressed with the quality of thinking and communication done by the community management team at Radian6 - led by David Alston & Amber … [Read more...]

The Value of Community Management

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Most community managers know that the discipline has worth (i.e. significance) - our experience shows us that communities without community managers are much more likely to die off, go off track, become thorny stews, or get so insular that they can't grow or evolve. For sponsoring organizations who … [Read more...]

Community Manager Appreciation Day #CMAD

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This is not our idea but we think Jeremiah Owyang is on to something with his call for a Community Manager Appreciation Day.  Community Managers have tough and often under-appreciated responsibilities.  They are the glue that often keeps a community from going off the deep end, metaphorically … [Read more...]

Hiring A Social Media or Community Manager?

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We recently had a member call on Hiring for Community Management and also discussed the topic at last week's #TheCRLive. It's a hot topic for a variety of reasons.  There is growing interest in the field and growing demand for community managers. Our members' had some additional … [Read more...]

Looking for a Community Management Job?

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We've seen the community management discipline mature over the past year - both in terms of how well it's understood and in the recognition by companies that their social initiatives are more successful if they have a dedicated community manager.  Demand for community management skills has also … [Read more...]

What Online Communities Will Expose in 2010

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There is a lot of chatter in social media and online community circles about how social initiatives lead to increased transparency - and some of that is definitely true.  Customers and the public can find out a lot more about what others think about a company's products and service than ever before. … [Read more...]

Orchestrating Emergent Control

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I ran across this quote today and it reflects something that I've been thinking a lot about over the past few years, namely how to encourage specific activities within communities without explicitly telling people what to do. Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But … [Read more...]

Community Is A Management Approach, Not Just a Role

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The way we currently think about community management - for the most part - is a role played by someone managing a set of relationships often mediated by an online destination.  One of the reasons Jim and I started The Community Roundtable is that we saw it emerging as a career path for many and … [Read more...]