Update: The SOCM 2018 is now availble for download
Next month we will publish our ninth edition of the State of Community Management (SOCM).
When we released the first SOCM in 2010 community management was largely an undocumented niche role to a strategic professio
n and a recognized discipline of leadership in a digitally connected world. We’ve had a front row seat to watch the profession “grow up” and become recognized as a critical emerging field.
We have always prioritized the advancement of the industry, as we believe it critical to both the long-term success of management as a whole, and the success and happiness of the amazing practitioners driving community forward. The State of Community Management research has evolved with the industry, moving from qualitative to quantitative.
Initially, the research focused on the practices and tactics of community management (from 2011-2013). In 2014 we started quantifying those practices and then by 2015 we could benchmark the operational approaches needed to do community management well – and critically, calculate community ROI. Because if that work, what community management is and how it is effectively executed have now largely been documented. This key milestone helped grow the discipline of community management and help it get recognition from senior executives. As those operational metrics have matured, we felt the time was right to reimagine the SOCM research yet again to keep up with the rapid changes we see in how organizations are applying community approaches.
The SOCM 2018 has been reimagined for an executive audience.
Unlike years past, the SOCM 2018 focuses more on strategy and how communities are impacting organizations today and less on tactics and operational benchmarks, making the 2018 report an excellent resource to share with your stakeholders, executives, and wider organizational decision-makers.
The key themes we explored in 2018 include:
- Do community programs have the potential to be change agents?
- Can community programs create transformational value for an organization?
- How is the role of community professionals evolving?
Communities are impacting every facet of organizational life, from empowering individuals to generating strategic value, and the SOCM 2018 backs up the widely accepted ‘theory of communities’ with proof that communities are the way that organizations are making learning, adaptation, and influence into core competencies and the means to integrating these competencies into core workflows.
