The social media and community space is transitioning from a nice thing to do to an operational discipline across teams/groups/the organization. That transition is actually pretty difficult and disruptive because it requires cultural, leadership, strategy, workflow, and operational changes. However, it is critical if organizations don’t want to have their social efforts isolated from everything else, which doesn’t work very well anyway. The other thing that this transition requires is a common framework for the different competencies involved to give everyone has a common taxonomy and visual for thinking about all the issues included in being ‘social’.
I developed the Community Maturity Model to help people and organizations make sense of the complexity of what socializing their organization means. This model is the basis for how Jim Storer and I are categorizing content and conversations at The Community Roundtable. It’s a good tool to discuss the issues related to community management, a good structure for benchmarking and tracking operational improvements, and a great framework for training or certification.The competencies laid out in the model are:
- Strategy
- Leadership
- Culture
- Community Management
- Content & Programming
- Policy & Governance
- Tools
- Measurement
Michael Chin (who, as an aside, really gets the culture of the social media world) from KickApps invited me to share my thinking today in a webinar – I’m grateful for his support but also for getting me to put my thinking together in a cogent slide deck. You can find the recording at the KickApps blog but the slides are below.
Cross-posted from The Social Organization
