The Community Roundtable

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

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...]

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...]