The Community Roundtable

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

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...]

Consistency & Translation in Community Management

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Alicia Staley (@stales) pointed me to the following post on the Wego Health community. While the topic of the post was about communicating as a community manager in a health community, the post was full of some pretty complex topics: Balancing consistency of 'voice' with the needs of various … [Read more...]

Measure, But Measure Wisely

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Two things recently got me thinking about using measurement and metrics.  The first was a post by Bertrand Duperrin who pointed out that just because we don't want to or don't measure something doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't be measured and that every business goal, hard and soft, has an … [Read more...]

Finding Time and Working Well

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I've seen a couple of blog posts recently which made the point that we should never let up and that now is the time to push harder than ever. Andrew Hemingway wrote about how community managers need to do the same thing all weekend that they do during the week and Chris Brogan talked about taking … [Read more...]

Being Thankful

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The Community Roundtable - like any good community - relies on everyone playing a part to be successful. The great thing about community networks is that very often participants get back proportionally more than they contribute and that is what makes communities sustainable. As a young community, … [Read more...]

Online Community Resources

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[This post is one in an on-going series of posts by members of The Community Roundtable, highlighting the voices of experienced community managers. It is cross-posted at Under The Hood] I believe that, although there are many commonalities between Social Media Marketing and building online … [Read more...]

Practicing What We Preach – One Tweet At A Time

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It is always much easier to say than to do and it takes time and regular recalibration to make sure you are doing what you are recommending to others. In the 'social' space particularly, a lot of the recommendations seem like good common sense: be as honest and transparent as possible, listen to … [Read more...]

Hiring for Social Media: Part 1

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[This post is the first in an on-going series of posts by a members of The Community Roundtable,  highlighting the voices of experienced community managers. It is cross-posted at Dawn's blog, Under The Hood] This is part one in a series on hiring a social media person or company. One of the … [Read more...]