The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

Digging in to 2016 at TheCR

By

2016 Community Management ResolutionsBy Rachel Happe, The Community Roundtable.

Wow. 2016. A fresh Moleskine for me and a blank canvas for all of us.

While I am not big on resolutions I do use the new year as an opportunity to take stock of the previous year and declare my intentions for the new year. In particular this year, I am thinking a lot about routines and how to ensure that how I spend my days aligns with the things I value. I’ve made a lot of progress on this in past years so this year it’s working to incorporate a few last pieces of the puzzle and create more stability in the routines that work, now that my daughter is in elementary school and her routines are more predictable.

The Community Roundtable is in a similar place – over the past six years we have developed a set of services and offerings that help our clients grow professionally and scale in way that works for their organizations – critical to an emerging space where budgets need to be justified and different organizations adopt new approaches in different ways.

Looking back at last year, TheCR team accomplished some amazing things:

Our portfolio now serves a range of roles with a variety of research, training and advisory solutions

TheCR Product Portfolio

More importantly, our biggest measure of success – the growth and success of clients’ programs – is telling us we are on to something. As in my personal life, we are poised to take what we’ve learned and make those services more routine – and scaling them to serve more clients.

I am fired up about 2016.

For TheCR, that will mean:

  • More listening to understand how we can help our clients where they need it most
  • More collaboration with partners to deliver unique services to different industry verticals and to support more specific community use cases
  • Larger client projects to help deliver comprehensive solutions that deliver community management maturity efficiently
  • Extending our solutions to more of the individuals involved in community programs

For the market, I think 2016 will bring the following, based on both our research and client work:

  • Bigger budgets – and with them more scrutiny of strategic metrics & objectives
  • Expansion and integration of community conversations into more business processes – this is happening already but typically in very specific areas
  • Some large organizations will begin to train all managers and leaders on the principals of community engagement and management
  • More research and experiments in applying community management in specific industries
  • Growing demand for training – but not necessarily traditional training

Most of these trends are not new but rather a deepening of impact within organizations. What is new, is the investment we are seeing from industry groups, foundations, and B2B service organizations in applying community approaches in their domains. For me, that is a big marker of progress and impact – we have moved beyond both the hype and the following ambivalence and are now seeing a commitment to execute.

Time to roll up our sleeves.

Here’s to a productive and engaged 2016!

Cynthia Fortlage on the Evolution of Internal Cultural Development

By

Welcome to the latest episode in our community podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.”

Join TheCR’s Jim Storer and Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about

  1. What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
  2. What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
  3. How can you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

Episode #36 features Cynthia Fortlage, Vice President Information Technology And Social Business Leader at GHY International. Join us as we chat about evolution of their internal cultural development, how IT and social business intersect and how community management has changed in the last six years.

—-

Subscribe to “Conversations with Community Managers” on iTunes!

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

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Best Practices for New Member Leadership Programs

By

Every online community – internal (employee community) and external (custom community) – has a handful of dedicated members who contribute more than the rest. Whether you have a formal superuser, advocacy, or membership leadership program, or informally track and interact with these members, now is a great time to show them some love.

Different communities call these super users different things, including community advocates, community leaders, power users, and more.

5 Ways to Show Super Users Love in Your Online Community:

1- Swag. Everyone loves free stuff, and it doesn’t have to be an expensive investment. A hand-written note and some stickers go a long way with your superusers.

2- Shout-Outs. Highlight these members in the online community with a quick mention. Feeling seen and appreciated by online community managers makes super users feel valued.

3- Online Badges. If your online community uses badges, create a special badge to identify your superusers. This will also highlight your superusers as a resource to new members who may not understand how to engage when they join your online community.

4- Personally thank active contributors. It seems simple, but it helps increase member satisfaction.

5- Give them a sneak peek at an upcoming program, feature, or initiative. You’ll get valuable feedback and your superusers will love feeling like they got a behind-the-scenes look at something before everyone else does.

Want more ideas for launching superuser (aka leadership) programs in your community?

Check out this short video from Hillary Boucher.

This content has moved inside The Network.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Community Rules of Engagement

By

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.TheCRNetwork_MondayLaunch_Image

Today is a very exciting day – TheCR Network moved to a new home. After years on the same platform our dedicated community team spent the last few months packing up the old Network, and spiffing up our new home. I know I’m biased, but I have to say – it’s lovely. Shiny, new and highly functional!

I wanted to share our community rules of engagement, because I think our community team did an amazing job of highlighting the behavior we encourage and explaining the behavior that is unacceptable to us. We are firm believers in both communication and modeling, and I think these rules paint a clear picture of the type of community we are trying to create, together.

I’d love to hear about community engagement guidelines you’ve shared with your members – please share!

TheCR Network Rules of Engagement

Every community has a culture and we feel pretty strongly about the things we encourage and the things we discourage – and they all stem from our core values:

Supportive. Fun. Respectful. Trustworthy. Transparent. Challenging.

Things we encourage and support . . .

Sharing. We want to know what you are working on, thinking about, reading or discussing. Seriously – if it’s about your work and it’s on your mind, it’s interesting to us!

Questions. We don’t think that there is any community question that is too obvious to ask. Often the simplest question is the most profound. Questions are triggers for others to share what they know – which they might not realize they know. If there is something you are curious about, pondering, don’t understand or what to hear from a peer – ask!

Ideas. Ideas are great things. Sometimes they spark intense conversations and actions. Sometime they fall flat. You never know until you share them. Go for it!

Support. Life in general and the work our members do specifically is hard. Community leaders often bear the brunt of people’s emotions, inconsistent policies and organizational mistakes. That can leave you exhausted. Additionally, because community management is an emerging discipline there is a high need to learn and we are all fumbling in certain areas. We are here to support you and we encourage you to support each other. So let someone know you appreciate them, their ideas or perspectives. That peer validation means the world to people.

Challenges. We grow and learn and do our best when people challenge us to do so – in supportive ways. That may mean sharing a difference of opinion or experience. That may mean encouraging someone to do better because they can. That may be disagreeing – respectfully – with their ideas.  You can do this in a supportive, comfortable way by prefacing an opinion with ‘In my experience…’ or ‘…  has worked well for me’ or ‘I feel like…’ which leaves room for others to have different points of view.

Participation, input and feedback. Don’t see that great blog post about strategy that you’re looking for? Think the community needs more case studies? Well don’t just stare… make it happen! While we may be the hosts of this party we are by no means the sole arbiters of what gets discussed and presented. If you feel strongly about something . . . do something about it.

Things we will discourage . . .

Attacks. We have a low tolerance for attacking or singling out people by name for criticism (whether community members or not). We’ll give you two strikes for this type of thing and then, goodbye. While we encourage challenging each other, that is best done from a supportive vs critical position.

Pitches. There can be a fine line between helping someone answer a question and pitching them on a solution, but we can all tell an obvious pitch when we see one. Don’t do it. This is a place about exploring, finding information, and understanding options.

Violating Trust. This is a private community and as such, the members have an expectation of privacy. The content and discussions within the community are intended to be kept within the community. If you would like to use someone’s case study or comments, please ask first. The Community Roundtable does summarize and anonymize the content of roundtable calls and may use that for market research products (which help support the community). If you have questions or concerns about this, please contact us directly.

Naming Names. We are here to discuss challenges and how to overcome them. To describe the challenge, it is not necessary to call out individuals involved by name. It’s bad form and typically people have valid reasons for their positions, even if it makes your job harder – so don’t expose all the identifying details, others can help you solve the problem without knowing all the gory details.

—-

Interested in learning more about TheCR Network? Join our community manager Hillary Boucher for a free webinar where she’ll share a behind the scenes look at the Network, and gives advice about best practices for member leadership programs.

 

Community Best Practices: Creating an Action Plan

By

From values, to members, to tactics. Formulating an action plan for your community is where the rubber begins to meet the

action

road. Your action plan highlights how you are going to make this community effective on a day-to-day basis. It needs to take into account the organizational environment in which you exist, and your relative strengths and weaknesses as you begin your community journey. Among the things to consider:

  • Who are your strongest executive sponsors and where are they in the organization?
  • What is your level of funding and staffing support?
  • Where is the overall cultural level of support for community initiatives?
  • How long do you have to demonstrate community impact – how long is your runway?

These answers inform your tactics.

It’s likely that as you create an action plan, you’ll focus most on three of the eight competencies in the Community Maturity Model:

Strategy: Link your community strategy to organizational business goals

– Identify use cases and behavior change needed

– Define shared purpose and shared value

– Take on an active listening strategy

– Articulate budget and resources needed

– Collect and communicate lessons as you go

• Community management: Assign a caretaker to welcome, support and represent members

– Identify a social listener

– Hire a social media or community manager

– Create workflows and escalation plans

– Document and formalize guidelines

– Build a programming plan

• Tools: Target technologies and processes to make your collaboration and communication more efficient

– Define and deploy minimum viable solution and “must haves”

– Vet requirements with stakeholders

– Prepare your basic listening toolset

These processes will inform the size and shape of the community you start with, and how the early stages of the community will operate. It will change over time–that’s the exponential nature of community.

Are you charged with building a community? Check out the Community Manager Handbook for more community best practices, strategy ideas and case studies.

—

Want the chance to contribute to research like the Community Manager Handbook? Members of TheCR Network get exclusive professional development opportunities like this and more! Join us and let us help you grow your career as a community manager.

Community Best Practices: The Benefits of Starting Small

By

If you are starting a community today – you are both blessed and cursed by history.

Years of research and community development today offer more advice thaScreen Shot 2015-10-09 at 12.46.06 PMn ever on the best practices of community. But the growth of online communities generally can also set expectations that new communities should scale quickly and provide near-immediate ROI.

It’s a nice theory, but as our research and experience has found time and again, it’s flawed. The Community Roundtable recommends taking the long view; to generate sustainable ROI start small—then grow.

Trying to scale too quickly is perhaps the biggest, most expensive mistake a community manager can make. Even if you are working to build a community of thousands or more, we recommend you start of with a group of members that you can reasonably expect to get to know individually.

The reason is simple. You want to start as you mean to continue.

If you have defined the behaviors you wish to see and considered what the ideal engagement mix would be – the percentage of lurkers, contributors, creators and collaborators you would ideally like (our research shows the average mix to be 64%, 17%, 11% and 8% respectively)—you should work with a limited set of early members to establish that culture before inviting in more members.

By spending time with a small group to establish the community culture you want to foster—and learning more about what they want from the community—you create members who will model and set expectations for every new member going forward. New members will quickly acclimate and conform to the social and behavioral norms that have been established.

Scaling and then working to change behavior puts you against the tide of norms established without you. The community defines its own standards, which may or may not align with the behaviors and shared value you hope to achieve. Changing the behavior of thousands is a very challenging task and while it can be done, it’s not efficient to take that approach if you don’t have to.

Starting small also provides you a valuable learning opportunity—to see the community through the eyes of members. Taking the time to engage with members individually and get more personal feedback often illuminates thorny issues that could prove especially troublesome at scale. For example, user interface issues, platform issues, and other structural problems can be more easily discovered and addressed in small communities—and you have a much greater ability to constructively engage your members in the troubleshooting process.

Are you charged with building a community? Check out the Community Manager Handbook for more community best practices, strategy ideas and case studies.

—

Want the chance to contribute to research like the Community Manager Handbook? Members of TheCR Network get exclusive professional development opportunities like this and more! Join us and let us help you grow your career as a community manager.

Perfection is the Enemy of Engagement 

By

gift

By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.

How do you react when you receive a perfectly crafted report? Hear an adamant and decisive opinion from an expert? Read Ikea instructions? Watch a TV show?

Do you jump in and edit it or immediately mash it up into something different? Unless you are unusual you accept it or reject it but you probably don’t engage deeply with it and make it your own. It’s not structured for interaction. The subtext is that the work is done, the messiness has been cleaned up and it has been delivered to you in a perfect state. It is a product, not a discussion – take it or leave it.

But this zeal for perfection might just be our undoing. It is certainly part of what steals our joy as individuals. I think it is where a lot of our education, processes and perspectives go wrong. Instead of including the recipient of our work in the process we try to craft something perfect to give to them. We have the arrogance to think this is even possible. But no matter how well-crafted, something given to someone else is something open to rejection. It’s a transaction.

At the Business Innovation Factory Summit listening to Barry Svigal, the architect of the rebuilt Sandy Hook Elementary school, this hit home in a visceral way. Any architectural firm could have built a fine school but those kids were scared and scarred. Any school would not do. They needed a school where they felt safe and comfortable in their environment so they could heal. The process was as important as the outcome. Barry’s Svigal’s team included the whole community in envisioning and building the school. Being part of the solution gave the community a vital sense of control over their destiny, which had been ripped away.

Most CRM, customer experience and employee experience approaches try to envision and deliver a ‘perfect’ solution – completely missing the opportunity to collaborate. We miss this opportunity when building products. We miss this opportunity when we market and sell. We miss this opportunity in employee on-boarding and training processes. We miss this opportunity in children’s education and sports. We attempt to be smarter than the people we deliver solutions to and, in so doing, deliver transactions and not shared experiences. Theses solutions can be easily accepted or rejected – or accepted and then rejected later. They are nicely packaged gifts, not a journey requiring the investment of time and energy – the building blocks of establishing trust and shared ownership.

This perfection is the enemy of engagement – but we are too scared to offer partial answers because we fear being seen as incompetent. We risk being seen as incompetent when we don’t have a trusting relationship. Poor engagement is a symptom. Poor relationships are the cause.

Poor relationships also leads to critique and judgement in response to delivered solutions or information and reinforces a transnational dynamic; one side delivering the other side critiquing in a never ending game of ping pong.

Mentoring children in my 20s helped me see the problem with this – critical feedback is both ineffective and harmful if children don’t believe you love them and have their best interest at heart.  This is true of adults too – leading with criticism makes people ignore you or defend themselves, neither of which leads to constructive collaboration, change or trust.

When you trust the person you are trying to help and vise versa there is room for incomplete thoughts and critical feedback. You can also throw a lot of half-a**ed ideas around, which is often what triggers playing with new ideas, joyful riffing off of each other and the generation of something interesting and valuable out of something very rough. It is where the magic of innovation happens. It’s messy process that in the beginning seems like a waste of time because it is not predictable and not linear.

In our organizations we try to be relentlessly efficient regarding day-to-day activities – but that leaves us wholly inefficient at evolving in meaningful ways that address rapidly changing markets. People are not explicitly given time to play with ideas or to build the trusting relationships required to really innovate. Why? We don’t budget for it.

Our culture tends to reward the perception of perfection. It often disappoints. We need to learn how to appreciate the process and reward those who can help us connect to others who matter to the problems we are trying to solve – if we don’t we may find that we very efficiently become obsolete.

Introducing the Updated Community Skills Framework

By

By Ted McEnroe, Head of Research, The Community Roundtable

What do you say when you’re asked to describe what you do as a community professional? I’m betting it’s not an easy question to answer – particularly when it comes from Aunt Betty at the Thanksgiving table. What about when you try to explain how overwhelmed you are to your manager – or your HR department?

Without a frame of reference, it is all to easy to struggle with explaining what you can and cannot accomplish given your skills, experience and time limitations.

We’ve also found that community job descriptions can be all over the map – often expecting one person to address a huge range of diverse responsibilities.

Our mission at The Community Roundtable is to listen, synthesize and distill the practice of community management in a way that is easy to understand and communicate. We do this through our models and research. Last year, we published our first iteration of the Community Skills Framework as well as part of the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 – and we learned a lot in the process.

This year, we’ve evolved both the research and the framework and have recently launched the Community Careers and Compensation 2015 survey, which is now open.

The updated Community Skills Framework includes five skill families with ten skills in each family, prioritized based on what we learned from our 2014 research.

A draft of the Community Skills Framework in the Community Careers and Compensation survey

A draft of the Community Skills Framework in the Community Careers and Compensation survey

How Does This Help You?

First, when Aunt Betty asks you what community management is you can say, “It’s a mix of engagement, content, technical, business and strategy responsibilities.” This may or may not mean anything to her but it adds enough detail about your job without being verbose – and in plain language.

Second, and more importantly, it frames the conversation with your stakeholders about the scope of your role, its priorities, what is reasonable for one person to do and where your strengths and weaknesses are… incredibly helpful as you look to navigate your career and where you want to head next.

At The Community Roundtable, we use the Community Skills Framework to:

  • Scope our research and report on what skills are priorities for different community roles (moderation, specialist, manager, strategist and director roles).
  • Identify and report on those skills seen as consistent blind spots – areas where community professionals need the most training and resources.
  • Prioritize programming in TheCR Network, identify where training would be valuable and determine areas to dig deeper on with our research.

If you’re a community professional, we hope the survey sparks ideas and gives you a better understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses.

Take the survey now!

Lori Harrison-Smith on the Challenges of Managing a Diverse and Dispersed Workforce

By

Welcome to the latest episode in our community podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.”

Join TheCR’s Jim Storer and Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about their community journey. They ask the community questions you want to know the answers to, including:

  1. Lori Harrison-Smith Project Leader & Enterprise Community Manager at SteelcaseWhat’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
  2. What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
  3. How would you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

Episode #30 features Lori Harrison-Smith, Project Leader & Enterprise Community Manager at Steelcase. Listen in as we chat about the challenges of managing a diverse and dispersed workforce, the power of empathy and a really great recipe for angel food cake!

 

 

Don’t miss the whole series of Conversations with Community Managers featuring community professionals from GM, Sony, Mastercard and more!

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

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Best Practices for Selecting a Community Platform

By

Q: What’s the difference between buying a new home and selecting a community platform?

A: One is a major expense, fills you with angst and forces you to move all your stuff. The other changes your address.

Joking aside, we tend to approach the selection of a new platform like we would a new home. We research. We draw up lists of features we want. We work to see through the sales pitches and spot anything they are trying to conceal. We consult trusted friends and seek their counsel. But in each case, the most important questions may be the ones we ask ourselves about what we want and need.

Platform questions are common in TheCR Network — and through the Community Manager Handbook we explored best practices for selecting a new community platform with TheCR Network member Maria Ogneva, who lived through the process most recently in her community role at the ridesharing startup Sidecar. Among the tips:

Advice from Maria Ogneva, Sidecar on Selecting a Community PlatformStart with behaviors, not features: Just as you should start your community strategy with the behavior change you want to drive, start your platform selection thinking about behaviors, not bells and whistles.

Think about your technical prowess: A custom community might be able to check all your community boxes, but what happens when there is a problem or you need to make a change? Without the right people, the wrong platform can become a burden.

An eye toward the present, an eye toward the future: Pick a platform that can handle your expected growth, but not at the expense of your present-day needs

The most important thing to remember is that different types of community structures will have very different platform requirements – there is no one size fits all vendor or solution. Think about your community – its size, purpose, technical abilities, support and security needs – and yes, your budget – plus any other special factors that should play a role in your choice. By starting with your needs, you’ll uncover the platform that can best serve them.

After all, in the end it’s not about choosing the best platform. It’s about choosing the best platform for your community.

Are you charged with selecting a community platform? Check out the Community Manager Handbook for more best practices, strategy ideas and a case study with advice from Maria Ogneva.

—

Want the chance to contribute to research like the Community Manager Handbook? Members of TheCR Network get exclusive professional development opportunities like this and more! Join us and let us help you grow your career as a community manager.