By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable
The fifth Friday of 2015 is in the books, and this one comes at the end of a jam-packed week at The Community Roundtable, where we celebrated #CMAD, postponed #CMAD, launched our landmark annual survey and released the first piece of a new and fun Community Manager Handbook.
And that was just Monday.
A good part of our focus here at TheCR is shifting this week to gathering data for the 2015 State of Community Management survey. The 20-minute survey delves into a wide range of topics relating to communities and community management, and we have some goals in mind. We want data that helps us see where community maturity connects with desirable business outcomes – you know, the ROI question.
But we also want to gain insights from a broader range of communities. If you know people in the nonprofit space, or if you know media community managers, or have friends who manage communities in more “traditional” industries like manufacturing, encourage them to join the survey. As Rachel Happe put it in her post Now Open: 2015 State of Community Management Survey, “We need you to help us help you.”
So please, take the survey and spread the word. As a reward, at the end of your survey you get a free assessment of where your answers place you on the scales of the Community Maturity Model, which we hope gives you some insights into your own work. Your data will also be a part of the broader research, which will come out this spring, and have an impact on the future of community management.
While we open another SOCM chapter, we’re about to put a new research project out – The Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes. The Handbook will be released next Wednesday, after a webinar hosted by Higher Logic at 2pm ET. Sign up here! The Handbook is a series of 20 case studies of common issues community professionals face in their community life cycles. It’s unlike any other research we have ever released, both in approach and editorial tone.
We want to thank all those who came to our CMAD events in San Francisco, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Washington, DC on Monday. Mother Nature had other plans for us Monday night in Boston and New York, but as the old saying goes, “When life gives you blizzards, make 216 more hours of Community Manager Appreciation.” We postponed our CMAD events in Boston and New York to February 4, and while we couldn’t convince the CMAD organizers to fill 240 hours of hangouts until the 4th, we would love to see you there! Sign up for the CMAD: Post-Snowpacalypse Editions on our Eventbrite.
Oh, and we gave the CMSS poster treatment to some key facts about the role of community manager.
Some Other Interesting Readings This Week:
Why Online Community Managers Don’t Get the Respect They Deserve (And What You Can Do About It): It is important to point out that no one is denying the enormous impact having a community manager in place has on creating healthy and growing online communities. In their annual report on “The State of Community Management,” The Community Roundtable found that having a dedicated community manager clearly led to higher community maturity. So, in an age when community managers are growing in demand, how can you prove your value?
Community Management Realized: (This week), many will celebrate the role of community manager. I have never been a fan of this event. Perhaps this is because I have avoided the limelight. My job is to let others shine, realize their potential, and share their stories. A community manager is never alone in their job. There are times when one may feel the burden of being the sole spokesperson and storyteller of the community, but a community exists through reciprocal relationships and transcends the individual.
If You Build an Online Community, Will They Come?: “If you build it, they will come.” This worked for Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams,” but when it comes to creating an online community to drive better engagement with your customers, it’s not that simple. Building the community is only about one tenths of the work that needs to happen to not only get them there, but what’s more important, to make them stay.
How digital collaboration will evolve in 2015: Information technology typically changes in leaps and bounds, and for collaboration in digital channels, those changes have been rather turbulent over the last decade. While the most significant overall trend during this time has been the strategic up-leveling of corporate engagement using the social business model to foster large-scale, high impact corporate communities, the pendulum of innovation has recently swung back to more intimate and close quarters.
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
Social Media Community Manager – Commune Hotels and Resorts, San Francisco, CA
Technical Community Manager – The Optical Society, Washington, DC
Community Engagement Manager – itBit, New York, NY
Community Manager – Codeacademy, New York, NY
Community Manager – Nitro, San Francisco, CA
Social Media Community Manager – Walt Disney Co., Celebration, FL
Alphaworks – Community Manager – Betaworks, New York, NY
Community Manager – Data & Society, New York, NY
Community & Content Manager – Spredfast, Austin, TX
