Best Practice Archives

Jodi Gersh on “Old School” Journalism and New Media Channels

May 20, 2010 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.

Episode #8 features Jodi Gersh, Social Media Content Manager at the Gannett Company, where she helps Gannett’s 80+ newspapers and 20+ TV stations with their social media needs and strategies.

Highlights include:

Meshing “old school” journalism with new media channels
How Gannett coordinates social media learnings and tactics among more than 100 separate entities.
The importance of internal communications in keeping employees at all levels- and in all markets- engaged in using social media, including the use of “old school” methods like email
Upcoming trends: you guessed it, location and mobile
Melding “citizen journalism” with professional investigative journalism

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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The Fish & The Sharks

May 14, 2010 By Rachel Happe

Last week was full of fascinating conversations at the Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies conference and the MarketingProfs B2B Forum and I’m just starting to digest it all but one of the concepts that really hit home for me was Adam Zawel‘s analogy for community members. He noted that in most communities there are two key groups to consider when structuring and planning the community – the fish and the sharks. Once a group of any type of people are aggregated into an active community (the fish), other groups will necessarily find that an attractive audience (the sharks). I have always considered part of the role of community management is to protect members – it’s one of the reasons I find private communities often more compelling than public ones but the fish/shark analogy helped clarify my thinking.

Recently, a few members of TheCR have been struggling with the issue of keeping internal marketing groups from pushing direct marketing at community members. They are having a hard time educating their peers that the community dynamic does not succeed if members constantly feel pursued. The internal sharks can be just as dangerous as external ones. What happens if you allow the sharks too much access is one of the following things:

Over-fishing: Fish disappear and stop engaging because they are afraid of being targeted or harassed. This pretty effectively kills the community.

Migration: Fish will go somewhere more hospitable if they feel they are at risk – this is the worst thing that can happen because you can effectively send your community members into the arms of your competitors if they have a better managed community.

Do you have this issue in your community? Who are your sharks? How do you give the sharks an appropriate level of access but keep them from sabotaging the community?

Brian Simpson on Combining Online and Offline Relations in Hospitality

May 13, 2010 By Jim Storer

Our sixth episode features Brian Simpson, Director of Social Hospitality at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City.

Highlights include:

How online extends and combines with the vital offline relations and events in the hospitality industry
A discussion of whether or not being a nimble small business is an advantage over being a big chain when it comes to using social media
How hard metrics and the more “touchy-feely” side of social media mesh
A critique of Roger Smith Life and the value of showing an off-product side of your business; “It’s got to be interesting.”

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Tim Walker on Community Manager Vs. Social Media Manager

April 8, 2010 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.

Our second episode features an interview with Tim Walker, Social Media Manager at Hoovers. From their web site:

We deliver comprehensive insight and analysis about the companies, industries and people that drive the economy, along with the powerful tools to find and connect to the right people to get business done.

Conversation highlights include:

Knowing when to use what tools… Twitter, Facebook, email, phone or a walk down the hall.
A discussion of the difference between being community manager and a social media manager.
Understanding the balance between “on-domain” and “off-domain” engagement.
What community management and The Dating Game have in common. (!!)

Download this episode.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

The State of Community Management 2010

March 1, 2010 By Rachel Happe

Community management is emerging as a critical discipline for managing social initiatives. From those focused on marketing, to those focused on support, collaboration, knowledge management, human resource development and innovation, community managers are the glue that hold it all together. Yet, most organizations are just beginning to understand how to incorporate community management into their processes and organizational structures.

The Community Roundtable was created to help companies understand and integrate the role of community management into their day-to-day processes. The State of Community Management is our groundbreaking work in aggregating the best practices and lessons learned from our members who have been leading the practice of community management in a variety of contexts – B2B, B2C, marketing, support, and employee oriented.

Our members work in over 35 companies ranging in size from SAP, PerkinElmer, Ernst & Young, Allstate, & EMC to smaller ones like TripAdvisor, SolarWinds, Immaculate Baking, and GHY – provide a rich range of experience and perspectives to share and we are grateful to them for their participation, questions, suggestions, and experience. You’ll hear their collective voice in The State of Community Management and it represents over 180+ years of community management experience.

The State of Community Management is structured around the competencies in the Community Maturity Model – a management framework that articulates the competencies required to effectively manage communities – and links high level analysis to very specific tactical lessons learned about how to execute social programs. It provides guidance that can be used to:

Improve your community management practices
Educate peers, colleagues, and stakeholders
Create a baseline for your community strategy or plans
Identify topics for further research and investigation
Find additional resources

We would like to thank our sponsors – Fuze Box, Powered and Rosetta – who have made it possible to widely distribute The State of Community Management 2010 which was written as a summary of what we learned from members of The Community Roundtable over the course of 2009.

To download the 60+ page report, please tell us a little bit about yourself:

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Best Practices in Member Engagement

February 9, 2010 By Rachel Happe

Member engagement is one of the key responsibilities of social media and community managers but it is one of the hardest responsibilities to understand and improve. There is no playbook that has the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to encourage engagement and what works for some communities is completely wrong for others. In this respect having an understanding of user experience and the psychology of engagement is incredibly useful. I particularly like BJ Fogg’s model with three primary vectors:

Motivation
Ability
Trigger

While simplified in description, understanding and affecting motivation, increasing member ability to participate, and creating effective triggers are not always easy to understand or execute but it is a really helpful model for focusing what may yield the best results. All of these aspects can be improved through community management and the user experience within a community but obviously manual, personal interactions can be adapted more quickly and adjusted for individuals. Until community management understands what works in a consistent way in a particular community, it is unwise and expensive to build those attributes into the user experience of a community site. Member engagement too is impacted to a great degree by not just what is engaging to the member but by what best encourages the outcome for which the organization desires. It will take time to understand and adjust in order to optimize that balance.

While BJ Fogg offers an academic perspective, the community managers who are members of The Community Roundtable had their own set of best practices and lessons learned, among them:

Ensuring that new members are welcomed and feel acclimated to the new community is essential.
In new communities, creating a “water cooler” environment where people can go to engage in light-hearted conversation with their peers in a non-threatening way is an important way for members to establish a comfort level with each other before broaching more sensitive topics.
Idle chit chat is a important part of a community and it will take some creative influence to help executives understand that it is a crucial facet of the business case.
Be clear on the purpose and desired response to posted content and conversations – it will help members know what is appropriate and feel comfortable contributing. Clarity of purpose will also help you track and measure results effectively.
One of the best ways to pull people into a conversation is to let them know that they have an audience. Encourage peers to respond to new content that is posted, particularly if it is posted by a newer member of the community. Responding as the community manager is OK but it is not as satisfying as a peer response and it can inadvertently halt the discussion because it is viewed as the opinion of an authority figure.
Multi-modal content is very successful at driving engagement. Build in text, image, audio, and video content that can be viewed in different ways. Consider using music alongside content or online events – it can have the same bonding and energizing effect as when it is used offline.
Lurkers have value. Even if not interacting, lurkers are consuming content which is a way of participating and being present. Lurkers may also respond to content in a different channel which is generally difficult to track. Additionally members have a wide variety of thresholds to participation – some people need to lurk longer than others.

Do you have a ‘never fail’ technique for encouraging member participation? We know others would like to hear it so please share!

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The Community Roundtable is committed to advancing the business of community. We offer a monthly subscription report, a membership based peer network, a community management training program and advisory services for corporations and individuals.