Many of TheCR Network members and the organizations we work with struggle with some of the following questions:
- What is the benefit of a community strategy?
- When should I expect to see those benefits at a meaningful scale?
- What difference does community management make?
- What are the standard roles and responsibilities of community managers?
- How does the performance of internal communities differ from external communities?
- How big should I expect my community program budget to be?
All of this information would be helpful to community program owners but there is little aggregate data available to assist in answering these questions despite some excellent research at the strategic level like McKinsey’s The Social Economy study, which suggests there is $1.3 trillion in optimization to be gained by using social network approaches. With the 2013 State of Community Management we aim to help answer the next question which is, how do we optimize our organizations to take advantage of these opportunities.
Our annual State of Community Management has covered qualitative best practices over the years – in 2011 the SOCM covered practices related to the competencies of the community management discipline and in 2012 the SOCM covered how organizations mature with the common initiatives and milestones organizations take in each stage. This year we are looking for organizations willing to help us understand the underlying performance data from their community initiatives. Does this describe you?
- Your organization has been working to develop a social or community competency for over a year.
- Your organization has the ambition to have an enterprise wide approach to how it coordinates and manages its communities, both internal and external.
The 2013 SOCM survey is now open for the month of March. This research is made up of four segments:
- Organizational demographics
- Community program profile
- Community management profile
- Profile of the performance of one specific community
The survey is likely to require some coordination across your organization with HR, finance and IT. We have created a workbook to help gather this data before submission. We expect the data submission to take between 30-60 minutes depending on how much data you have readily available vs. estimates required. Because this is an emerging discipline we do expect every organization to have to make some estimates when filling out this survey.
We will select three participants to receive a custom research presentation that includes performance benchmarks for their organization, worth $7,500 each.
Are you ready to help move the industry forward? Do you want to know where you stand? Are you game for the challenge? We want you!
First: Download the 2013 SOCM Workbook
Second: Complete the online 2013 SOCM Survey
