By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable
Executive engagement is always a popular topic in community – and sometimes divisive. “You must get the CEO involved,” says one camp. “Don’t waste your time with hesitant executives,” suggests another. Of course, the research demonstrates it’s not as simple as that – but there is no doubt that a socially-engaged C-suite is helpful for growing your community effort.
We took a look at one strategy for increasing stakeholder support in your community efforts in the Community Manager Handbook. What we found was that the best strategy for getting executives on board doesn’t just include the executives, but also includes others throughout the organization. The Handbook is a great resource – and expect to hear more about executive engagement in our State of Community Management research and some other products we are working on that we will get to tell you about later.
We also threw the topic doors open for #ESNChat, the weekly Twitter chat we host on Tuesdays at 2pm. If you have been a past visitor to #ESNChat, or haven’t but work on internal community, we’d love to hear from you about the topics you’d like to cover in the coming weeks. We have Storified a number of recent chats, too, providing resources and insights for internal community professionals.
Now on to other items from the week.
What we are reading this week
Solving the Inception Paradox – Communities are made of passion, energy, relationships and knowledge. Human beings are the main ingredient. Their inner dynamics are not deterministic, nonlinear and very hard to predict. They are often invisible to organizations as they don’t fit into the neat, hierarchical and transactional mechanisms that have been designed to get work done. Even worse, crucial cultivation, engagement, measurement and change management skills are clearly missing in most large corporations today on the market. Without such competencies and sensitivity, organizations are simply not equipped to recognize communities, to understand them or to see their amazing role in business outcomes.
How the Millennial Workforce is Changing Business – Millennials are entering young adulthood at a unique point in our history, where society is poised for a tectonic shift, particularly around business, leadership, and management. There is a “perfect storm” of trends converging in a way that will generate an actual revolution in business, affecting organizations of all shapes and sizes. Yes, a revolution.
How Smart CEOs Use Social Tools to Their Advantage – Empowerment—in whatever form—requires alignment around purpose, strategic intent and the boundaries within which decisions can be made. Otherwise, it could result in confusion, contradictory behaviors and chaos. Savvy CEOs use fire to fight fire, effectively employing digital media inside their organizations to create the kind of alignment and shared purpose they need.
Are We Asking the Right Questions of the Digital Workplace? – Questions like “where do intranets fit with ESN platforms” serve as yet one more reminder of how deeply stuck we are in technology-centric thinking. The conversation needs to turn to what digital services do people need to get their work done, and how do we design these tools to fit people’s work styles and working conditions. If we start with the employee in mind, we get a clearer view of how the capabilities both intranets and ESN platforms bring can help people work smarter together. People usually need a mix of both.
When Your Intranet and Enterprise Social Network Get Married – Pop the champagne and get ready to celebrate: your Intranet and Enterprise Social Network are getting married! As we prepare to toast this joyous integration, remember that the Intranet and the ESN are strong, independent entities with many individual merits. As in any marriage, each partner must remain unique with its own purpose. By tying the knot, however, the Intranet and the ESN will complement each other’s strengths (and minimize their weaknesses), improving the overall employee communication experience.
Jobs in community and social media this week:
Community and Growth Manager, Project Ignite – Autodesk, San Francisco, CA
Community Associate – Sidecar, San Francisco, CA
Senior Producer, Social Publishing – CNN, Atlanta, GA or New York, NY
Social Media Specialist – Mariano’s, Chicago, IL
Social Media Community Manager – ITR, Knoxville, TN
Community Manager – Shapeways, New York, NY
Community Manager – Amazon Game Studios, Seattle, WA
Senior Manager, Real-Time Content and Community Management – Capital One, McLean, VA
Community Manager – ChAIR/Epic Games, Salt Lake City, UT
Community Manager – Toca Boca, San Francisco, CA
