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...]
2015: The Year Community Management Goes Mainstream
By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable 2014 was a great year for community management generally and for The Community Roundtable specifically. Because of that, I spared you a year-end wrap up (you are welcome), but I do think it is worth taking the opportunity a new year presents … [Read more...]
2017 Wrap-up: Communities in Transition
2017 was a year of change in the community space. Community programs received more strategic attention, there were platform and vendor disruptions, new expectations evolved for community professionals, better analytics emerged, and new strategic opportunities opened up. As expected, it has been … [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 Our Strategic Community Workshop: Community Strategy, ROI, and Business Case
Put 100 community program leaders in a room and ask them what their stakeholders most want from them – and “proof of community value” will be at the top of the list. It’s a rare organization that just “gets” that community is strategically important without numbers to back it up. Communities need … [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...]
Are Online Communities Still Important?
By Rachel Happe, Co-founder of The Community Roundtable Richard Millington recently wrote an excellent blog post titled A Hard Dose Of Data-Driven Reality About Online Communities, showing a decline in the conversation about online communities and partially attributes it to the rise of social … [Read more...]
Building Reputation: Becoming a Social Strategist
By Shannon DiGregorio, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable. For many social media and community practitioners being viewed as an expert in something that everyone thinks they are great at (social media) can be a real challenge. Just because someone loves Instagram or has 500 friends … [Read more...]
Building your Community Approach
By Shannon DiGregorio, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable. Here on The Community Roundtable blog we've decided to try something new for 2014. Each month we'll pick an aspect of community management and tackle it from many angles, providing commentary, resources and expert opinions. … [Read more...]
Communities Are A Business Priority for 2013: IDC Report and Reality
This year is off to a fast start. Last month we saw Community Manager Appreciation Day explode across social channels, in person events, blog posts and on video. Now this month we are reading about and seeing how organizations are making business communities a priority in the next 12 months. … [Read more...]
Community 101
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 it should matter to them. A large part of that training covers the different tools and online … [Read more...]
Community Management: More Than One Role, a Discipline
The Community Roundtable aims to advance the business of community. I'm going to say that again...we advance the business of community. I wanted to repeat it because I think it's an important distinction as the way we look at community management. As Jim Storer has said, everyone is a community … [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...]
Community Strategist Training Starts Tuesday
On Tuesday our latest module in the community manager training series will begin. As with all the modules it is: Taught by experienced community professionals who do the work everyday Online and recorded so if you have a conflict you can watch and learn later Includes an online community so you … [Read more...]
Complexity, Simplicity and Why Community Is Difficult for Organizations
The markets that organizations deal with daily are complex. They always have been but that complexity used to be easy to ignore. Now we can no longer ignore it because it is playing out across the Internet in real-time, many people and organizations react by retrenching and becoming even more rigid … [Read more...]
Content Marketing is Required but not Sufficient
by Rachel Happe, Co-founder of The Community Roundtable I hear the phrase 'content is king' thrown around a LOT. Great content is certainly a critical component of any digital strategy - it's a keystone of what we do at TheCR - but on its own it is insufficient. I'm always waiting for the … [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...]
Digital Culture Run Amok: The Case for Community Management
By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder and Principal of The Community Roundtable The complexity of the world is at our fingertips. It's in our faces and on our screens. We are deluged daily with information we don't have time to process. Anxiety drugs and self-medication are rampant. The political climate … [Read more...]
Do Organizations Need to Be Transparent…or Just Human?
I was discussing the troubles at the Susan G. Komen Foundation recently with a few peers. We wondered if their recent challenges were a direct result of the way they treated their community vs. other operational issues. A quick recap: In January 2013 they pulled funding for Breast Cancer … [Read more...]
Engagement and Community Architecture
By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable Most of us who drive cars stick to driving on roads. Why? They helps us get where we are going faster - even though the route is rarely a straight line between where we start and our destination. We could try and take a more direct route but … [Read more...]
Executive Engagement in Three Venn Diagrams
By Rachel Happe, Principal at TheCR I admit it, I’m a bit wonky. I really love Venn Diagrams, in part because I think most of the interesting things in life happen at intersections. When I was asked to speak to a group of women about my online presence last week, I found myself using three Venn … [Read more...]
Executive is Just Another Word for Community Manager
Executives are charged with executing on a set of goals. They all want to accomplish those goals in a way that maximizes their investments. Executives need to marshal a range of constituencies (their team, peers across the organization, customers, partners, experts, consultants) to make things … [Read more...]
Facebook Pages and How Social Networks Lost Their Way
By Rachel Happe, Principal & Co-Founder, The Community Roundtable I have long thought that Facebook has been on a slippery path, because while it revolutionized the communications and engagement model from a linear transaction to a networked flow, Facebook's founders built a traditional, … [Read more...]
Fighting the sophomore slump in your community planning
By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable Welcome to the second full week of 2015. Remember the vim and vigor with which you sat down at your desk last week? The whole year was ahead of you. A clean slate. You laid out a dozen priorities for the year and… haven’t started any of them. Last week … [Read more...]
Friday Roundup: Building Reputation
By Shannon DiGregorio, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable. Build Month at The Community Roundtable continued this week with a look at how you can build reputation in social and community initiatives. Whether you're focused on becoming a social strategist or augmenting your skills … [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 Community Management is Like Personal Finance
Would you invest your money without the support of someone who understands the current marketplace, knows where trends seem to be heading and what strategy will be best to maximize that investment? Many of us wouldn't. And yet companies are often throwing open the door to community initiatives … [Read more...]
I need to build a community strategy. Where do I start?
By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable. Whether you are starting from scratch with a new community, or taking over an existing community that could use some love there is a good chance you'll be tasked with building a community strategy. This can be both … [Read more...]
Informed Storytelling: The View From This Research Fellow
Welcome Maggie Tunning, the newest member of TheCR team and of course she has been peer pressured into blogging. Please make her feel welcome. She has great experience and enthusiasm that is already shining through in our The Social Executive Research. Here’s why: One of the things that interests … [Read more...]
Inside TheCR Network: Outsourcing Community Management
Today we welcome Rick Allen who will be a frequent contributor to The Community Roundtable blog. With a background in writing, publishing, and technology innovation—and a passion for the web—Rick strives to improve online user experiences through content strategy. He writes and speaks often on web … [Read more...]
Inside TheCR Network: Storytelling and the Power of Why
Recently, Michael Margolis of The Reinvention Summit and Get Storied joined members of TheCR Network to discuss the art of storytelling. As described on his website, "Storytelling is the most important skill you didn’t learn in school. But it’s the foundation for everything." For businesses, this … [Read more...]
Is Community Management Strategic?
If you have been doing community management for a few years chances are you think that it is or should be strategic. If you are a CEO chances are you haven't even heard of community management let alone prioritized it as strategically imperative. And there is the rub. The role of community manager … [Read more...]
Is Your Community Approach a Hollow Bunny?
By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable Yesterday was Easter and for many kids, that means lots of candy. But when I was a kid, I remember the disappointment of certain candy too. The biggest one? That big, delicious looking chocolate bunny in the basket wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. … [Read more...]
Is Your Social Initiative the Chicken, or the Egg?
Communities are funny, organic, and slightly unpredictable organisms. When they are robust and successful, they are amazingly powerful ways to communicate, collaborate, and produce results that can change the fundamental economic dynamics of a company and a market. Why? Communities incorporate … [Read more...]
Jillian Bejtlich Joins The Community Roundtable
It is with great pleasure that we announce that Jillian Bejtlich has joined The Community Roundtable. She comes to us with strong experience and skills from her work as a community manager at Autodesk. We first met Jillian in TheCR Network, where she participated enthusiastically and expertly in … [Read more...]
Last Call For Community Management Research
Our TheCR Network members are the best! When we came to them and said we think having you involved in shaping the direction of our The State of Community Management 2013 is important, they stepped up. And once they realized the potential of gathering relevant data and analyzing it for their … [Read more...]
Leadership and Cultural Traits for Social Business Success
(originally published on IBM Social Business Insights) Becoming a social business is all the rage. Executives are drinking the Kool-Aid, organizing teams to explore the use of social tools and networks to aid marketing, customer support, product innovation, employee retention and more. And these … [Read more...]
Lessons and Reminders from Hurricane Sandy
We hope this post finds you well, but understand many are still struggling to put the pieces back together after Hurricane Sandy. Along with everyone else, we watched the devastation wrought by Sandy with feelings of sadness, horror and appreciation. Sadness and horror for our friends that were … [Read more...]
Lost in Translation: From Social Media to Social Business
At The Community Roundtable we've been talking about social media and online communities for a long time. So long that sometimes we forget how fast business is moving and how many different stages of understanding this still emergent industry is in. I was reminded of this while watching the live … [Read more...]
Making it Difficult to Join: The Case for Barriers to Participation
There are a lot of posts about reducing the barriers to engagement and participation in online communities so that you attract more members. There is nothing inherently wrong with that statement - it is a great goal. However, how you set up your participation and membership process (or if you have a … [Read more...]
