Friday Roundup: Fast Start, Big Thoughts in Community to open 2015

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

2015 is off to a rip-roaring start at The Community Roundtable. In TheCR Network, the first Roundtable call of the year is in the books, the Working Out Loud threads are buzzing and interaction is everywhere.

For TheCR as a whole, the New Year has meant some thought-provoking writing from Rachel, who’s sees great opportunity for community in 2015 – “The Year Community Management Goes Mainstream.” We also kicked off what will be a series of blog posts highlighting important data from the Community Manager Salary Survey, with a look at the Director of Community role, and we continued development of our plans for Community Manager Appreciation Day 2015.

Atlanta is joining Boston, New York, Washington, Milwaukee and San Francisco as a site for our local CMAD gatherings – each site is a little different but all six promise to be interesting and fun. Learn more about the plans as they continue to evolve at bit.ly/cmad2015

And of course, we are continuing our search for THREE paid fellows – take a look in the job listings, and refer people who might be looking to break into the community space in a paid position.

Some Other Interesting Readings This Week

Why You Need to Make Community a Core Part of Your Business Philosophy – After advising, studying and working with hundreds of companies and their community strategies throughout my career, I’ve noticed one huge commonality in why many of them fail. Companies fail at community when they look at it as a tactic instead of making it a core part of their business philosophy.

Content & Community Management: The Perfect Pair – As community managers, our job is to make sure that the community dedicated to the brand or product that we represent feels satisfied, proud, and willing to spread the word. Having a suite of content specifically dedicated to community management efforts can be more useful in this area than you may imagine. I talked to a few top community managers to explore how they have integrated a content strategy with their community strategy and what they had to say was quite interesting.

Benefits of Owned Community vs. Social Networks – In recent years the realisation by later adopters that social media isn’t free, or easy, combined with rising cost barriers and noise in our most trafficked channels, has seen a renewed interest in owned community. So what are the advantages in doing it for yourself?

Customer Community Is the New Marketing: Are You Ready? – How would your company look differently if you added 150 passionate advocates to your informal sales team? That is the size of Salesforce’s MVP Program today. This subset of the 1.4 million members of their online customer community may be tiny, but it’s mighty. Erica Kuhl, Salesforce’s Senior Director of Community, has adroitly managed an increase in nearly 1 million community members since January 2014. Overall, Salesforce community members spend twice as much on products than non-members.

New Community and Social Media Jobs

Community Management Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Research Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Sales/Marketing Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Collaboration Program Manager (Sr. Business Analyst) – Advent Software, San Francisco, CA

Jive Internal Community Manager – Firmenich, Princeton, NJ

Director of Social Media – Pegasystems, Cambridge, MA

Social Media Manager – RH Children’s – Penguin Random House, New York City

Director, Social Operations – McDonalds, Oak Brook, IL

Social Media Marketing Manager – Vevo, New York City

Community Manager – Brandworkers, Long Island City, NY

Director of Customer Experience – Product Madness, San Francisco, CA