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...]
Why Conversations Matter And How Things Need to Change to Support Them
I was very fortunate to both be asked by Gilbane to moderate a panel on conversations and to have a group of really experienced community managers participate in the panel. I was joined on the panel by Chris Howe, Director of Global Online Marketing at Avid; Naomi Marr, until recently Director of … [Read more...]
Practicing What We Preach – One Tweet At A Time
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...]
Wash-Rinse-Repeat
One of the topics that has come up recently with our members is the topic of building social media and community advocates within their organization. Some of them are lucky in that they were hired to do community management and therefore have a sponsor above them but some of our members are their … [Read more...]
You might be a community manager if…
...communications is an integral part of your job ...you work with a dispersed group of constituents ...you are responsible for building & growing relationships That covers a lot of ground - PR/communications, marketing, sales, any management position, HR, product management, knowledge … [Read more...]
A Community? A Network? An Audience?
We have a lot of semantic issues in the social media/online space. The term community is particularly problematic because people tend to throw it around for any online group that interacts with content. The problem for me is that communities are not about content, they are about relationships. … [Read more...]
The Iceberg Effect of Community Management
Starting The Community Roundtable has been a great way to understand better the day to day issues of community managers in a wide array of organizations. There are a few things that come up somewhat regularly: Community managers are under pressure to justify what they do to peers and bosses … [Read more...]
