We've written a lot about community management over the past year - and interviewed a lot of amazing community managers - and as often happens with blogs the content gets buried in favor of what's new and hot so we thought we would resurrect those posts that our readers have found most valuable and … [Read more...]
The State of Community Management Webinar
Last week, we presented key findings from our State of Community Management report with Natanya Anderson from Powered. We had an overflow of great questions and so much content it was hard to get everything in so I'm including the slides (the audio recording is here) and my responses to the … [Read more...]
The Fish & The Sharks
Last week was full of fascinating conversations at the Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies conference and the MarketingProfs B2B Forum and I'm just starting to digest it all but one of the concepts that really hit home for me was Adam Zawel's analogy for community members. He noted that in … [Read more...]
Avoiding the Community Clique
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...]
Wait for It… Emergence Happens
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...]
Best Practices in Member Engagement
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...]
Orchestrating Emergent Control
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
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
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
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...]
