By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder & Principal of The Community Roundtable Communities sit at the intersection of a number of trends; social media, digital transformation, a generational shift to prioritize purposeful work, change management, leadership and social learning. They are both complex … [Read more...]
A Need For Social Architecture
Last week, Mark Bonchek, senior vice president of communities and networks at Sears Holdings, led a roundtable discussion with TheCR Network members on using the principles of network-centric warfare to steer large-scale change in community management. At first glance, it seems like a big leap from … [Read more...]
Announcing the 2012 State of Community Management Report
We are very pleased to announce our third annual State of Community Management report. We started our annual report as a means to achieve our mission of advancing the business of community - making what we know collectively about community building more visible and accessible to everyone. The … [Read more...]
Announcing The 2013 State of Community Management Research
For the last few years, TheCR has been publishing an annual State of Community Management report, compiling and organizing the best of what we learn from our work with over 90 companies. This year we felt the time was right to extend that research into quantitative data that community teams could … [Read more...]
Building Your Own Support Network: Why Everyone is a Community Manager
By Rachel Happe Principal and Co-Founder, The Community Roundtable Success requires relationships. Whether you measure your success by happiness, wealth, family or some other measure, relationships figure prominently. There is emerging research to suggest that lack of relationships and connection … [Read more...]
Check Out Our New Look
We are very excited to introduce our new and improved website! While putting on a little make up and freshening up content is always a good idea, we wanted to rethink everything. Our goal with the new web site is to help visitors: Understand where they are on their journey to adopt social … [Read more...]
Communities and the Value of Answering Unarticulated Needs
We had an excellent member call late last year with John Stepper of Deustche Bank who is working on a training course to help employees manage their reputation inside the organization. This conversation about influence and reputation is very active on the social web but taking that inside the … [Read more...]
Community Managers are Human Experience (HX) Professionals
Over the last decade we've all learned how important the user experience (UX) of software is to how well it performs. If features are hard to use and the interface looks stale, it's less compelling to the user. The UX is particularly important in communications and social technologies because there … [Read more...]
Coverage of The 2011 State of Community Management
We have been pleased that initial reaction to our annual report on The State of Community Management has been so positive and that so many people we respect have taken the time to cover the report and provide their perspective. One of the things I love is to see is what resonates with different … [Read more...]
Danger: Community/Social Strategist Shortage Ahead
I've been thinking about this post for a long time. It started some time last fall when I was talking with a member of TheCR Network about how they should approach building out their social media/community team. In the course of the conversation, my recommendation boiled down to this... "hire the … [Read more...]
Developing The Social Executive
One of the hardest things that community leaders do is to help executives within their organization understand the value of communities and how to effectively participate themselves. It's not that executives can't learn but they are faced with unique challenges: Booked Solid: Executives have very … [Read more...]
Getting Executives to Say Yes to Social
There are many executives who are curious and interested in this whole social business phenomenon. They want workers to try it, test it and see what it can do for the business bottom line...but what about participating? That is often where the process slows down or comes to a screeching halt and … [Read more...]
How a Community Management Approach Helps Performance In a Time of Crisis
Last week our team watched horrific events unfold in the community that most of us live, work and play in. After a shocking week we are starting to come out of our fog and return to what now accounts for normal. And while this event is still very personal for us, among the many articles we read … [Read more...]
Improving Community Sentiment: Taking a Community from Hostile to Happy
By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable When community sentiment is good, it often gets taken for granted. When it's bad, it's clear that it is one of the biggest barriers to success and value. What's not always clear is this: you CAN create the community environment you want. The … [Read more...]
Interesting New Report – Social Business: Shifting Out of First Gear
This post by Rachel Happe was originally published in our monthly newsletter. To get TheCR News delivered to your inbox each month, subscribe today. Deloitte University Press Released a report earlier this month that echoes much of what we are seeing in the marketplace and is consistent with our … [Read more...]
Introducing TheCR Focus: Your Guide to The Business of Community
When Rachel and I started building The Community Roundtable in 2009, we had a decision to make. Who to serve? We agreed it was hard to build a truly customer-focused business if you tried to serve too many constituents. In the end, we agreed to focus on the people we thought really needed help... … [Read more...]
Is Your Business/Community Ready for The Collaborative Economy?
We are pleased to start our fall programming off with a bang in September as Jeremiah Owyang joins us to talk both with TheCR Network members and our greater community on his recent research into The Collaborative Economy, exploring what it means for organizations, their community managers and their … [Read more...]
Lost in Translation: The Business of Community
We love our new tag line. We think it epitomizes what we do. But we also realize you may not get it. Thus our 2nd installment of Lost in Translation. When The Community Roundtable was started we had a theory that humanizing a business and making real relationships with people was a better way to … [Read more...]
My community is great! Why is it failing?
One possible reason? Because you're working in isolation. Learn to connect your community with your organization with Community Program Essentials! By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training, The Community Roundtable You’ve probably been there at some point. You run (or are a member of) … [Read more...]
Open Leadership and Coaching Executives
By Rachel Happe, Co-founder of The Community Roundtable Over the last few years, as social business and networked communications environments have become more pervasive, executives increasingly became pockets of inertia due to their more traditional modes of communicating and managing. But … [Read more...]
Review: Social Readiness – How Advanced Companies Prepare Internally
Altimeter Group published an excellent report today called Social Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare Internally. It is chock full of great information - collected from a range of companies - on how to set up internal governance processes and provides a rich analysis of social media crisis. … [Read more...]
Thanking it Forward – Fostering an Attitude of Gratitude
By Rachel Happe, Co-founder of The Community Roundtable At The Community Roundtable we like to celebrate Thanksgiving instead of other end of the year celebrations. It both fits our ethos of articulating our thanks and it better fosters a sense of community than any gift ever could. We've been … [Read more...]
The best community managers share leadership of community programs: SOCM2016 Fact #8
By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training You start a community. It's awesome. People engage, share ideas and provide value. You moderate, plan, provide tech support, train, encourage, goad, scold, backchannel and do about 37 other things, and that's just before lunch. And it … [Read more...]
The Community Strategist Squeeze
It would be too hyperbolic to say there is a crisis in community and social business staffing, but there are definitely some big problems, particularly at the senior and strategic levels. Most people in the space know that experienced community managers are hard to come by generally and if you want … [Read more...]
The Language of Engagement
By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable. Having a well crafted community strategy and roadmap is critical to enabling effective outcomes, but translating that strategy into your engagement approach is equally critical and often overlooked. People tend to communicate in online … [Read more...]
The Link Between Communities and Culture Change
By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder, The Community Roundtable This month, at JiveWorld, I presented Becoming a Community Ninja: 5 Secrets of Community Black Ops. One of those secrets was using communities to create culture change. Most organizations do not understand the how powerful communities can … [Read more...]
The People You’ll Meet in Community Management Training
It's an exciting time of year. Kids are headed back to school, offices are buzzing again with an increased workload and manager's thoughts turn to productivity. Those interested in bettering their social media and community management team's engagement skills are gathering together online starting … [Read more...]
The Social Executive Toolkit: Coaching Tools to Help Executives Use Social Media
Over the past year we have compiled The Social Executive research which has produced deep insights into why and how executives adopt social tools and management approaches.We pursued this research because executive support is an increasing barrier to move organizations forward to the next stage of … [Read more...]
The Social Executive: The Imperative to Succeed in Social Business
When I was at IDC and newly researching the social media space, I reported on a world of possibility that was opening up to us and radically changing the way we communicated and the way we organized ourselves for collaboration. But connecting dots in a theoretical way and actually working in a new … [Read more...]
The Value of Community Management by the Numbers (Infographic)
One of the best parts of this year’s State of Community Management: The Value of Community Management report was that for the first time we were able to pull together quantitative data from community managers. It’s a great way to understand what is happening in the discipline of community … [Read more...]
Throwback Thursday – Building Your Community
By Amy Turner, The Community Roundtable A community is only as successful and effective as the people who are part of it. When first starting out, or perhaps re-energizing and re-building a stale community, how do you build a strategy and lay the foundation for a successful one? We've compiled … [Read more...]
Truth, Innovation and Communities
We often see truth as an absolute but the reality is that our communities define our truth. Even scientific truths like the existence of gravity as a physical force would not be the accepted truth if everyone in the community thought instead that fairies were responsible for snatching items from … [Read more...]
View from the Top: Executive Perspectives on Community
By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder and Principal, The Community Roundtable. Our research shows that communities are becoming more strategic. C-level executives are often the ones approving budgets and receiving progress reports. This is fantastic progress of which all of us who work in the community … [Read more...]
WestJet’s Christmas Miracle & The Power of Authenticity
By Shannon DiGregorio, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable Our watercooler was abuzz with conversations about the WestJet "Christmas Miracle" video. In addition to all admitting it got pretty dusty at our desks we marveled in the time and effort it took to pull of such a … [Read more...]
What Comes After Gratitude
By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable If you've been following our Twitter handle you already know that we've been thinking a lot about reciprocity and going beyond the thank you. What happens next? How do you keep the momentum of gratitude and sharing moving … [Read more...]
What Is a Social Executive?
We've been interviewing senior executives at organizations like SAP, JP Morgan Chase, Del Monte, Alcoa, Axa, Deutsche Bank, the U.S. State Department, the Transportation Security Administration, Aetna, UBM, Ford and more to try and understand how they view and use social technologies and approaches. … [Read more...]
Working in the Social World: Complex Adaptive Systems
Last week I had the honor and fun of keynoting at Defrag. It was my first Defrag conference and I was not entirely sure what to expect aside from knowing it was a forum for deeper thinking about enterprise technologies. I was pleasantly surprised that both presenters and attendees were talking about … [Read more...]
