advocacy Archives

5 reasons to recognize the superheroes in your online community

May 5, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

This month, our new and brilliant Community Management Fellow, Georgina Cannie, kicked off a wonderful and equally new feature of TheCR Network. Starting this month, we are recognizing members of the network as TheCR Network Superheroes, complete with badges on their network profiles. As you may have noticed, the superhero theme appears to the be the theme of 2015 for us here – we highlighted 2o Community Manager Superheroes in the recently-published Community Manager Handbook – but whatever you call the best members of your online community, recognizing their work should be a critical piece of your community management efforts.

Here are five reasons why.

Your superheroes model the best behaviors.

In communities as elsewhere, the old saying “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” often rings too true. You’re putting out fires, settling disputes, moderating touchy situations and fighting tooth and nail for resources – and your superheroes are providing value with their actions and words. Your superheroes help you tackle the headaches you have to deal with at the very least by not adding to them, and they are doing what you wish everyone would do. One of our May superheroes, Jerry Canaday of MasterCard, is a frequent answerer of questions and a provider of resources, and has led member workshops and a recent #ESNChat on ‘The Future of the Intranet.’ Who doesn’t want a member like that?

Your superheroes aren’t just your most experienced members – and that’s awesome.

Another superhero from this month, Ivonne Grantham Smith of Skillsoft, is a super example of how newer members of the community provide value. As a new community manager when she joined, Ivonne was well-suited to take advantage of the roundtables, calls and resources TheCR Network provides. She jumped in with both feet, working out loud, asking questions and providing the interaction that is the lifeblood of any community. Now, she’s giving back, sharing the resources she is developing for her own community. The student becomes the master – in a friendly, community sort of way.

Recognition highlights unseen actions.

Just as we talk about the iceberg effect of community management – where 90 percent of the real work of running a community goes unseen beneath the surface – there are members who play critical roles behind the scenes who deserve recognition for their work. Emily Wade of Market Street Solutions has been an active member and has helped organized member Roundtable calls – just the kind of work that no one would notice normally, even though they should.

Your superheroes are worthy of public praise.

We’re fortunate to have a community with a lot of Jerrys, Ivonnes and Emilys, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take every chance we can to recognize them. The public praise isn’t just a stroke of the ego – it’s an important element of raising up the expertise of the members, to get them using each other as resources and to have the opportunity to matter. That scales the community, it scales you as a community manager, and, no the good feeling it gives those who get recognized doesn’t hurt.

Recognition builds advocates.

Lastly on this list – recognition programs set the stage for building even bigger and better advocacy programs. As we have already hinted at in past posts about the State of Community Management 2015 report, strong multi-tiered advocacy programs have a remarkable effect on the vibrancy and effectiveness of communities to achieve business outcomes. Recognition is a great reward, but even more powerful when it is one level of an advocacy program that gives members a chance to generate more value from the community than they put in. This generative model is the base on which the most remarkable communities build their advocacy programs – and it is the model on which they can build their organizations.

So what are you waiting for? There are heroes out there…

Friday Roundup: The advocacy opportunity, and getting clarity in community roles

February 27, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

February is (almost) over, but we managed to pack a lot into the shortest month of the year. Our main theme of the month has been the State of Community Management 2015 survey, which officially closes today. We are setting new records for responses, which is a great situation, but we want more if we can get them. On Monday, I published a post on how your data is used to make it clear that we get that you are sharing important data and we won’t be sharing it with anyone else.

We also shared a little glimpse behind some of the early numbers on the CMX Hub blog, where we looked at some early results from the survey about advocacy and community leadership programs, and found that while a significant number of companies and organizations are recognizing and rewarding advocates, there is a lot of missed opportunity. See for yourself, and please if you haven’t, take the survey, because there can be a lot more valuable information where that came from.

Meanwhile, we also launched a new eBook this week that community managers and those who hire them may find of value. Defining Community Management Roles uses data from our Community Manager Salary Survey research to shape and clarify expectations and data for three community management roles: Community Manager, Community Strategist and Director of Community. Thanks to Jive for sponsoring this product, and we hope you’ll dig into it on Slideshare.

And if that wasn’t enough, Rachel published a new thought piece on diginomica – the first in a series she has composed. “Enterprise Communities: The New Management Imperative” traces the clear path toward community approach as the only option to succeed in a world of abundance and change, where structures that emphasize control actually cripple organizations.

Or to put it another way, if you haven’t seen our new t-shirts, control is for amateurs.

Interesting readings for the week

Enterprise Communities: The New Management Imperative – I founded The Community Roundtable in 2009 to pursue my belief in the power of communities. Fundamentally, I believe a couple of things that drive my interest in communities. I believe structure drives behavior, and I believe that if you give people access, responsibility, accountability and commensurate rewards, their potential is unlimited. I believe communities and networks are the most effective structures by which to establish this dynamic, and by employing communities, organizations can more efficiently generate value that is shared by everyone who contributes to it, in equal measure.

Making Wirearchy Operable: Questions and Suggestions -Making Wirearchy operable is hard work. Hierarchy .. clear lines and boxes showing who reports to how, with job titles that say clearly what someone is responsible for, is much easier to see, understand, figure out. But it doesn’t respond very well to constantly-changing information-saturated markets and challenges .. every-which-way flows of information about products, services, problems, capabilities and the myriad other activities that make up living in a society

Bosch: When Use Cases Support Connections – “We started in autumn 2012 with the pilot phase. From month to month, we allowed the user base to grow while implementing the use cases that early adopters were discovering when interacting on the platform.” Use cases are anecdotes that show users the steps for achieving a specific goal through the platform. In that sense they are highly educational and can help employees to get up to speed with the tool.

Joining the Customer Journey Using Online Communities – Every marketer from Boston to Bejing seems to be focused on something called the “customer journey.” A Google search on this two-word phrase returns over 627,000 results. It’s one of those “Eureka!” moments – organizations realize buyers start researching a firm’s products and services long before they reach the point of purchase. These firms are now scrambling to find and engage with those customers while they are still on the move and before they arrive at a sales destination decision. But I gotta tell you, this is not news to those of us in the online community world.

Ecosystem, Network or Community: It is the Future of Work – In my book SHIFT I spend a lot of time talking about disruption. The book traces disruptive forces as one old form of economy, dominated by companies, gives way to another, dominated by platforms and ecosystems. This, I believe is the key shift in the economy. It is a disruption with broad consequences for how we work. Also for the opportunity, or life chances, that lie ahead of us. This last point though is the most important. We think of this shift with different terms in mind – ecosystems, networks, community. Regardless of your choice, each speaks to the same future work experience.

New Community and Social Media Jobs

Advertise Your Opening on TheCR Job Board!

Enterprise Community Manager – Akamai, Cambridge, MA

Director, Social Media Strategy – Manulife Financial, Toronto, ON

Director of Global Communications – Social Media – TripAdvisor, Newton, MA

Community Manager – Women Who Code, San Francisco, CA

Social Media Community Specialist – MCP: Faith, Pompano Beach, FL

Communications and Community Manager – New York Univ. – Entrepreneurial Institute, New York, NY

Repository Community Manager – Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL

Community Manager, EA Mobile – EA Sports, Salt Lake City, UT

Social Media Executive Director – JPMorgan, Columbus, OH

Digital Coordinator – Tribeca Film Institute, New York, NY

Community Manager – Bit9 + Carbon Black, Waltham, MA

Community Manager – ThredUp, San Francisco, CA

Knowledge Communities Manager – HP Enterprise Services, Plano, TX

Community Manager, Social Media – Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY

Community Manager – Williams-Sonoma, San Francisco, CA

Magneto Community Manager – Magneto, Los Angeles, CA

Community Manager – Cyanogen, Seattle, WA or Palo Alto, CA

Community Manager – Houzz, Palo Alto, CA

Community Strategist – Context Partners, Washington, DC

Wash-Rinse-Repeat

October 15, 2009 By Rachel Happe

One of the topics that has come up recently with our members is the topic of building social media and community advocates within their organization. Some of them are lucky in that they were hired to do community management and therefore have a sponsor above them but some of our members are their organization’s vanguards, actively pushing for a more community-based approach but without much air cover. Amber Naslund talked about the importance of being an internal change agent quite eloquently. She is right on in that the goal of community building is to be a more social and humane organization but getting from A to Z is a long circuitous route and often organizations start with social media simply because that is how their customers are interacting but find pretty quickly that to do it well, it requires so much more than that.

We have a number of members who likely spend the majority of their time evangelizing and training – over and over and over – internally. They are making huge strides but the individuals that are good at internal advocacy may or may not be the same people that are good at external advocacy. Typically, many of the external advocates are people who love wearing many hats, creating content, getting in to the mix of things, and having something different to do every day. What’s often needed internally is doing the same thing, repeatedly, with lots of different teams. It can be alternately interesting, frustrating, boring, and occasionally maddening. Changing culture and getting people to do things in different ways takes a very long time and a lot of patience – and that is with executive leadership.

So what are some of the best practices in getting people to think differently and use a new set of tools?

Informal training – lunch & learns, coffee klatches, un-advisory groups, and office hours on a vast array of topics for people to learn about what social media is and what it means to their job and your organization.

Exposure – customer blog posts and tweets on the bathroom walls, team or executive emails celebrating small successes, and continuous recognition of people who are starting to get it (Bob’s first blog post! Emily’s first reply from a major customer! Wow – we resolved a problem in 2.9 seconds because Harry saw it and took the initiative to reply! Yay!) It can seem horribly trite to keep at this but critically important. Take the idea of ambient intimacy that Twitters creates between two people and use it to familiarize people, in small digestible chunks, with social media’s influence.

One-on-One Training – While this is impossible to do with everyone, it is immensely valuable to schedule a meeting slot and sit down with someone to walk them through how a tool, process or application works. And no, a webcast is not enough, they will never look at it. Spending the time to show them how you use something and how they might is really critical.

Understanding – Is your boss still not really getting why you think this is all so important? Do you know what their hot button items are? Can you go and demonstrate how those concerns might be better addressed with new tools or processes? This requires slowing down, understanding their context, and thinking creatively about the use cases that might peak their interest.

Templates – templates can be a really great way of reducing peoples intimidation of new tools. Blogs, wikis, and a Twitter box all stare blankly back at people who don’t know what the heck to do with it. Give people explicit things to try. i.e. Tweet once a day about the most interesting thing you heard or read. Write a blog post once a week about something you saw in the organization that you would like to encourage. Keep a wiki page of all the links that you find pertaining to your latest project.

Innocuous Topics – start with topics that people are interested in but are not threatening to anyone in the organization. Ideas for cutting expenses, holiday party plans, ideas for topics at company meetings, the best dishes in the cafeteria… whatever it is, get people motivated to learn a tool by finding something that people care about to some degree but one that won’t make people nervous.

It’s a daily chore. Not so dissimilar to washing your hair.