By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable
We’re always all about community management here at The Community Roundtable. But recently, we’ve also been all about The State of Community Management survey. As we close in on the end of the month, we need your help to make the survey responses as complete as possible. We’ve been getting the word out in numerous places, including Maddie Grant’s well-read Socialfish blog, numerous mentions from our friends on social media, and a great piece on the history and impact of the State of Community Management report from Siobhan Fagan at CMSWire.
I draw your attention to that last piece because it connects with a group whose responses have been slower than we might like. Managers of more mature, developed communities. Many of you are people who took the survey in past years. You’ve used the results in your strategy, and together we have been able to advance the field of community over the years.
But we need to know where you are now! Each year’s survey is a snapshot of the field – and with you out of the picture, it’s less complete. It also makes it harder for all of us, including you, to make the case for the power of community. Your lessons learned, objectives achieved and use cases built are a critical part of this effort, and without your voice, our chorus is incomplete.
Mature communities are also seeing the value of benchmarking, and as the only community-wide survey in the field, The State of Community Management is a powerful tool for that. You get a score based on your survey results of where you stand on the Community Maturity Model competencies, and you’ll be able to compare your data to the aggregate of communities when the report comes out. Of course, your individual community data submission is confidential – but it adds to the research database in a critical way.
We know you’re busier than ever. But the 20 minutes you spend on the survey will give you knowledge and information you won’t be able to get anywhere else. So carve out some time in your schedule. To make it easier for those of you who need it, we created a Google calendar full of appointment slots so you can grab one for yourself and book the time in just a click!
Now on to other things.
I also talked to Maggie Tunning about her fellowship experience at The Community Roundtable – she must have liked it, she stayed – and had her give 5 reasons you should be a Research Fellow at TheCR. Apply now for that job or either of our other fellowships in community management or sales and marketing today! We’ve started the interview process!
And keep an eye out on Tuesday – we give you a sneak peek at a preliminary SOCM data set and some ideas for strengthening advocacy programs in your community – on the CMXHub blog!
Interesting Items We Are Reading This Week
The State of the State of Community Management Report – The Community Roundtable released its first State of Community Management (SoCM) report in 2010. And in the ensuing five years, the report (and the discipline that it covers) has matured from a collection of disparate practices to a set of measurable competencies with proven business value. While many community managers still face challenges identified early on — most notably underfunding of projects — they now have a set of tools and benchmarks by which to gauge progress, set goals and measure success.
In Europe’s Biggest Firms, Social Business Is All Grown Up – In Paris last week at Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT 2015, it was shortly after the CIO of one of the world’s largest organizations began walking through the progress of social business within her organization, that the realization hit: The leading edge companies are not really talking about adoption any more, that part is largely done, though plenty of work certainly remains. Instead, the half dozen case studies from some of the largest firms in the world made it clear that leading organizations are now making advanced use of social tools in the way that they work.
We Need a Measure for Customer Effort – The way people understand what is on a page is colored by the type of task they want to complete. They scan the environment constantly seeking clues that will get them on the right path for task completion. If there is a link called “Solutions” then people who are doing troubleshooting will often click it because they want a solution to their problems. They won’t find a solution. What they will find is lots of marketing and selling and that just frustrates them.
The Future of Marketing is Community – Communities today are created more deliberately than they were in the past. As a result, communities have the potential to be much more engaging, because they are based on how people identify themselves, not who sits in the cubicle next to them. There are few things that people are more attached to than the fundamental ways they identify themselves: father, daughter, writer, marketer, baseball fan, and so on.
New Community and Social Media Jobs
Collaboration Program Manager – Advent Software, San Francisco, CA
Jive Internal Community Manager – Firmenich, Princeton, NJ
Enterprise Community Manager – Akamai, Cambridge, MA
Community Manager – Yelp, Madison, WI
Community Manager – Social Media Exchange – Ipsos, Culver City, CA
Community Manager – BrainStation, New York, NY
Online Community Manager – PETCO, San Diego, CA
North America Community Manager – Brooks Sports, Seattle, WA
Community Marketing Manager – Sumo Logic, Redwood City, CA
Community and Culture Manager – Spring, Vancouver, BC
