CommBuild Recap: Insights from the SOCM 2014

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Last week we were lucky enough to guest host the weekly CommBuild twitter chat. If you aren’t familiar with twitter chats you can check out our overview here, and learn more about CommBuild in particular here. Hosting our first twitter chat was both exciting and terrifying – what if no one showed up? Thankfully, our fears were unfounded – there was a great group of folks chatting with us and sharing community management best practices.

The chat flew by and we only got to cover seven of our planned 11 questions (maybe we were being too ambitious!). We paired each question with an insight from the State of Community Management 2014 and an accompanying graphic. We asked:

Q1. How do executives participate in your community?

Did you know: 58% of best-in-class communities have CEO participation vs. average CEO participation rates of 36%.

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Q2. How does your community use formal (or informal) community leadership or advocate programs?

Did you know: ​33% of communities without any leadership opportunities can measure value, that rate jumps to 71% for those with formal advocacy programs.

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Q3. Do you have a community playbook? What’s an essential element that you already have or would like add?

Did you know: 85% of best-in-class communities have playbooks vs. 41% of average communities.

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Q4. What content and programs are most successful in your community?

Did you know: Communities that host offline events have 56% lurkers & ones that host regular online events have 57% lurkers.

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Q5. What would you do if you had more community manager resources to share responsibilities? What project or task would you tackle?

Community managers wear many hats. This image (below right) shows some of the most common CMGR responsibilities.  (Green=average, Blue=best-in-class)

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Q6. What’s your best tip for community managers coaching executives?

Did you know: In 58% of communities surveyed in the SOCM 2014 community managers are responsible for coaching executives.

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Q7. Can you measure the value of your community? If so, what metrics and reporting methods do you find most helpful for tracking?

Did you know: Mature communities are almost twice as likely to be able to measure value.

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We had such a fun, fast-paced and insightful conversation that we couldn’t pick just a few of the participants’ responses to share here – so we’ve captured them all in a Storify! Check out the Storify below for a complete recap of the event.