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...]
Finding Time and Working Well
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...]
Hiring for Social Media: Part 1
[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...]
Cultivating the Community Managers
Recently we've been hearing from a lot of recruiters looking for social media and community professionals but more than that we're hearing from a lot of community managers who are getting laid off, leaving voluntarily, or considering making a move. While the social software market itself is going … [Read more...]
Good Resources for Helping Others
One of the primary jobs of a community manager is to help coach, train, educate, convince, and prod others in the organization to understand what this online communications environment is all about and why is should matter to them. A large part of that training covers the different tools and online … [Read more...]
Cheeseheads
One of the leading best practices for community managers is to develop a core group of enthusiastic members that emerge over time as leaders. Microsoft even spun out their 'MVPs' as a separate community. SAP calls their group 'Mentors'. We like to think of these people as a community … [Read more...]
Show & Tell: How Community Managers Use Twitter
There are Twitter users and there are Twitter users. For those of us that have been on Twitter for a while, usage has evolved as the applications and the social norms have. In a recent member roundtable with Laura Fitton, it became clear how important the use of applications, hashtags, and search … [Read more...]
A Merry Band
Growing our community has been a lot of fun. One thing that we are learning is that people in online community management have diverse backgrounds - no two career paths look similar. Some people come from marketing communications and PR, some from product marketing/management, some from IT, and … [Read more...]
