best practices Archives

Erin Winker on Transitioning into Community Management

June 30, 2015 By Jim Storer

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:

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

Episode #28, features Erin Winker, a community manager at Aetna. Podcast highlights include:

Advice for transitioning into community management from a more traditional marketing or communications role
The differences between traditional communications and community management
An overview of the power of plain language in community management

Download this podcast.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

Know someone we should have a conversation with? Let us know!

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

How Can I Use Gamification for Community Engagement?

June 3, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Gamification is a hot topic in TheCR Network, and among community managers at large. In fact, – nearly half of our surveyed communities in the State of Community Management 2014 employed some form of gamification (and more than 60% of best-in-class communities do). As gamification tools become more common, more community managers are looking to tap into gamification as part of their efforts to increase engagement. It’s more than just “turning it on.” Everything from how you structure rewards, badges and levels to general usage patterns can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your effort.

Our Community Manager Handbook provided best practices for anyone thinking about starting a gamification initiative in their community. First things first – before you launch a gamification initiative, think about more than just technology you’ll use. Ask yourself these critical questions to set yourself up for success.

What are your goals?

Be specific with the behaviors you are trying to incentivize in the community. Simply“increasing engagement” is not enough. Make sure your goals are attainable – take into account your community maturity, user profiles and current engagement patterns.

What are your levels?

Setting levels based on the business value you connect to certain actions can provide a rationale for your system. Using community members to help level set can also make sense—after all, if they are playing the game, you may want to give them a stake in the rules.

How does it fit your culture?

Will your levels, goals and point system resonate equally well throughout the community?

How will you tweak—and exit?

Every gamification effort will need tweaks and eventually a reboot or a reset. Make sure you have plenty of time during after launch to evaluable your successes and failures. Soliciting input on how a gamification program worked can even increase engagement and strength bonds with active users.

What about your data?

Gamification efforts can provide a lot of rich data on activity and interactions. What will you measure? How will you look at it? Don’t forget to plan for, collect and present the data that will highlight your program to stakeholders.

Have you had gamification success in your community? Or did your efforts fail to level up? Looking for more gamification ideas? Check out a case study on gamification strategy at UBM in The Community Manager Handbook.

Help – I’m a lone wolf community manager!

October 14, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

One of the most common frustrations we hear about from community managers is that they feel isolated from the rest of their company. Often, community managers sit on a communications or marketing team, sometimes they even reside inside an IT department – and all too often it is easy to feel like they are an island inside their organization.

Today I wanted to share some best practices for those lone wolf practitioners out there. It’s important to recognize and embrace your status as a one-person team and these strategies can help.

1. Take Time to Rest

This might seem counter-intuitive but social media professionals, especially lone wolves, must take time for themselves and disconnect from the community in order to recharge their batteries. To not take that much needed time could result in burnout. It is very healthy and very necessary to occasionally disconnect – and this time away from your community will result in both a fresh perspective when you return, and renewed energy for tackling challenges.

2. Set Up Processes to Monitor, Track Metrics and Share Your Successes

It is crucially important to keep track of community activitiy and share these findings with key stakeholders. Deciding on the metrics (which can be simple at first, especially for the lone wolf practitioner) that best reflect your objectives and then sharing those successes with executives and key lines of business is imperative. Do not be afraid to share those successes that align to organizational goals and help move the needle. The more you can show the community as being globally relevant and impactful the more your programs will gain increased internal traction and support.

3. Ask for Help

Just because you are the only person at your organization with the title “community manager” doesn’t mean you have to go it alone – asking for assistance from colleagues, executives and even outside experts can be a huge source of help for you and energy for your community. When developing new programs and projects, solicit community contributions from other staff members and be explicit about assigning ownership of tasks. Here we use the word “assign” purposely because when you ask people to do something specific, the likelihood of them saying “no” drops. Figure out what it is that people like (whether it is other staff or community members) and suggest something that matches those interests. This will increase their likelihood to participate and give you much needed help.

Are you a lone wolf community professional? How to do maximize your impact when operating solo? We’d love to hear your best practices and advice for other individual community contributors.

—-

Need community support but operate as a lone wolf at your organization? TheCR Network provides resources, expert advice and a network of community peers that is unparalleled in the industry. Learn how TheCR Network can help you go from lost lone wolf to lean, mean community management machine today!

Infographic: Drive Success with Basic Executive Coaching

September 22, 2014 By Jim Storer

This is a guest post by Dennis Shiao, our partner at DNN Software. You can learn more about DNN here.

According to the State of Community Management 2014 report from The Community Roundtable, members are more engaged in communities with executive participation. In fact, communities with executive participation see 42% of members actively participate, while those without executive participation see only 37% active.

EXECUTIVES ARE NATURAL COMMUNICATORS

Think about typical executives: they’re transparent, they’re strong communicators and they lead by example. Sounds like a killer combination for a community member, right? Yes. That being said, just like the CEO who needs some “101 training” before she joins Twitter, executives will need coaching on rules, conventions and guidelines for online community participation.

Have your community manager(s) sit down with executives to provide coaching around the following.

1) SHARE CONTENT AND PROVIDE FEEDBACK

Executives are used to commanding the ship and speaking to large audiences. Their first inclination may be to write lengthy posts, to share their thoughts with the community. While there’s certainly a time and place for that, the first step is to navigate through the various areas of the community and provide feedback.

The analogy is the President who walks through a neighborhood and shakes everyone’s hand. Executives should actively share content they find interesting. They should also provide feedback in the form of liking posts and up-voting ideas.

2) BLEND IN WITH THE CROWD

At an in-person gathering, it may be difficult for the company CEO to blend in with the crowd. It’s easier in an online community. Executive participation is more effective when executives are perceived to be “one of us” and engage naturally and organically with other members. By engaging naturally, executives will gain the respect of community members and they’ll encourage non-active members to become active.

3) PERFORM ACTIVE LISTENING

Some executives have an open door policy. Others hold “town hall meetings” to engage with employees. Executives value employee feedback. An online community brings together the best elements of an open door policy and a town hall meeting. But for it to work well, executives need to visit the community often and do a good job of active listening.

4) PROVIDE AN OFFICIAL COMMENT WHEN NEEDED

An executive has the authority to provide an official answer (from the organization) when needed. In an employee community, perhaps there’s angst over rumored layoffs. An executive can issue an official statement about that. In a customer community, member unrest may unfold over a pricing increase. An executive can publish a blog post to explain the company’s reasoning behind the pricing change.

AN INFOGRAPHIC ON COACHING EXECUTIVES FOR ENGAGEMENT

The Community Roundtable created an infographic. It includes interesting statistics on the benefits of executive participation. You’ll also find tips on how to coach executives around online community participation.

Infographic-Executives and Online Communities_Final

This post was originally published at https://www.dnnsoftware.com/blog/executive-participation-in-online-communities-drive-success-with-basic-coaching-infographic.

How Do I Convince our Executives to Invest in Community?

September 15, 2014 By Jim Storer

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

This is a short and sweet (as in “Sweet! Best practices I can use!) post on one of the most common questions we get at TheCR: “How do I convince our executives to invest in community programs? Help!” Through the State of Community Management 2014 we identified three best practices for getting executives on-board with your community initiatives.

1. Define what success looks like.

The best way to help people see your vision is to define what success looks like. Use the State of Community Management 2014 research and the Community Maturity Model to help define which initiatives you think your community program will need to be successful. The Community Maturity Model provides the eight core maturity competencies that provide a framework to assess your strengths and weaknesses in your community program. Defining these success metrics against standard competencies helps you plan a comprehensive roadmap – and manage the expectations of your team.

2. Audit your community management capabilities.

We found through the SOCM 2014 research that overall community maturity has been evolving rapidly especially in the area of community strategy, confirming that some of the basics about what a community is and what it can do for an organization are more widely understood and accepted. There are still wide gaps in organizations’ ability to execute on community strategies with the biggest opportunities in developing content and programming approaches and in developing measurement techniques.

You can use the SOCM 2014 research to compare your community management capabilities against the market average and best-in-class data to demonstrate to executives where your program strengths are, where opportunities lie and why those opportunities will impact performance. (For more info download the free report and use the chart of p 67 as a starting point for plotting your current community state.)

3. Build a roadmap.

Once you’ve completed an audit or community performance benchmark you can use it to build out a community roadmap that links specific activities and initiatives to the opportunities you have identified. Use this roadmap as a discussion tool during budget and planning sessions. This can help move the conversation of ‘why should we invest’ to ‘what should we invest in’, which is a powerful change that enables you to make progress.

Do you have a best practice that has helped you secure executive investment? What challenges have you faced in getting executive buy-in?

—–

Want access to the complete archives inside TheCR Network – including resource bundles, case studies and roundtable reports from over 200 events? Join TheCR Network now!

3 Best Practices When Budgeting for Community and Social Programs

September 9, 2014 By Jim Storer

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

2015 may seem far away, but for many organizations Fall is when major planning and budgeting initiatives kick off. For many community and social teams their budget may cover everything from technology licensing, training and staff costs to paid social media advertising, personal branding in order to remain distinct from a larger parent company or consulting services. While every community’s budget is different we’ve identified three best practices to help you plan for the upcoming year.

Apply Sound Justification Principles When Budgeting for Resources

One of the most important feedback channels in any community program is the one between the community team and the executive team. It is important to continually share wins with your executive team – no matter how small the win! Most executive teams want solid statistics – it’s always a good idea to monitor agreed upon strategic metrics and tie them back to revenue. From there you can estimate how much your team could potentially generate in revenue with added content and programming. Of course, every company will be different but consistently setting metrics goals and presenting your results to your executive team sets the stage for future growth.

Budget for In-Person Events

The State of Community Management 2014 research showed that communities that host offline events have a lurker rate at 56%, and communities that host regular online events have a lurker rate of 57%. While the majority of your community programs will take place online, incorporating offline events that are linked to community initiatives can be very powerful. If there is a company initiative that needs to be celebrated or promoted, try to tie-in a community-focused event while your members are already gathered together. Don’t forget to invite your executive team or community sponsors to the event: executive modeling is a powerful community-building tool.

Consider Budgeting for Consulting or Advisory Programs

If you’re just getting started in community, or are undertaking a significant new initiative consider bringing in a consultant or advisory team to cover the basics and ensure that your team is aware of best practices that they should be performing on a regular basis. If your team is bogged down with keeping up with the day-to-day activities and not taking the time to think about longer-term projects and where they should be focusing their efforts to be most effective strategically an outside perspective can provide valuable insights and actionable plans.

Have you started planning your 2015 budget? What best practices do you recommend to get the most out of your budgeting?

Note for TheCR Network Members:

Interested in attending this annual call? We’ll announce the date for the 2015 Budgeting & Planning call soon. Looking for additional resources? Check out these reports inside the Network:

Not a member? Want access to the complete archives inside TheCR Network – including resource bundles, case studies and roundtable reports from over 200 events? Join TheCR Network now!

—–

Looking to take your career in community management to the next level? 92% of members agree that TheCR Network supports and advances their personal and professional goals. Learn how our research, access to peers and experts, targeted content and exclusive concierge service can help you achieve your goals.

3 Tips for Building Your Community and Social Media Team

August 21, 2014 By Jim Storer

This is a guest post from Sarah Price, Community and Social Media Programs Lead for Google Glass and member of TheCR Network.

Managing a community team or hoping to someday? Your community managers, forum reps and social support agents will be the face and voice of your brand. Here are a few tips for building a strong team you can trust.

1. Think Big Picture

Despite the title of this post, don’t think of your team as “the forum team” or the “social media team.” Forums and social media are just technologies. Instead, think about how you fit into your department, and your department’s and company’s goals. Is your team part of marketing? Then you might be a retention marketing team: focused on keeping the customers you already have. Perhaps you are part of support operations? You might be a scalable support team, since community is usually more scalable than 1-to-1 phone or email.

Of course your team is likely a blend of marketing, support, PR, HR, legal, and more, but the point is not to limit yourself to the tools and platforms you use. Social media might be new to your business, but the underlying concepts, like building brand trust, aren’t. Staying focused on the big picture will help you set more meaningful business goals, such as leads generated or customer satisfaction, rather than number of likes or shares. It will also help you frame your roles, prioritize desired skills, and make hiring decisions.

2. Create Skill Synergies

Your team requires an incredible range of skills to be successful. They need to be dedicated and empathetic: if they drop the ball with the wrong customer, a PR nightmare could ensue. They need to have detailed knowledge about your industry and be oriented towards customer service, so they can solve issues. They need to be strong project managers to handle the myriad of details that go into administrating your community and social media properties. They will be writing content, so they need to have creativity and an endless pipeline of ideas and inspiration. There will be an onslaught of operational tasks to react to, which they need to balance against strategic work to take your community to the next level, requiring excellent time management, problem solving, and strategic thinking. And don’t forget about good judgment – they will be representing your brand. It is a very rare person who has all of these skills (and if you find them, send them my way! just kidding). So build your team with diversity and balance in mind.

If you have the luxury of making more than one hire, hire someone who is more creative and someone else who is more strategic; one who is a natural people person and one who is good with details. Pay close attention to team fit: will these people work well together and leverage each others’ strengths, or are they so different they will drive each other crazy? If your team is small and you are just hiring one, choose someone whose strengths are different from and complement your own and your peers’ rather than someone who is just like you. And if you’ve inherited your team, identify their complementary strengths and fit them to projects.

3. Lead with Trust

Trust is paramount. Not only do your customers need to trust your team – you, your peers, your manager, your cross-functional stakeholders, your company all need to trust them, too. Strictly require a few characteristics in every team member: willingness to get their hands dirty, a genuine love of helping others, strong writing skills, and demonstrated good judgment; they don’t have to know how to handle every situation but they need to know when they’re in over their head so they can get help. These characteristics are critical because they are the ones that build trust and allow ownership. They need to love what they do, but they also need to feel empowered. Because let’s face it, community managers face some pretty brutal stuff: trolls, flame wars, angry customers… and every mistake they make is public. Ownership will help them get through. Do quality checks, run operational metrics, hold them accountable to their goals; but don’t scrutinize every post or second-guess every decision. They’ll want to do some things differently from how you would – let them! They’ll learn from their mistakes or they’ll show you a new perspective. Of course help them prioritize against the business goals and take a stance on important issues (that’s your job as their manager and leader) but let your team take risks where the stakes are low to moderate. Put their successes above your own, show off their accomplishments, and help them build key relationships; they will have important insights to share and need cross-functional trust, too.

What are your tips for building your community or social media team and managing them to success?

About Sarah: Sarah has worked in the community and social media space since 2008, both for support operations and also for marketing. She has transitioned through several individual roles, including community manager, and now leads community and social media programs for Google Glass.

—

TheCR Network helps members like Sarah connect with peers and community experts and provides actionable templates, research and programming. Learn how TheCR Network helps community managers every day.

The Language of Engagement

June 24, 2014 By Rachel Happe

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

Having a well crafted community strategy and roadmap is critical to enabling effective outcomes, but translating that strategy into your engagement approach is equally critical and often overlooked. People tend to communicate in online communities they way they do elsewhere and that can often be the wrong approach.

What’s the problem?

In most business communications the emphasis is on being declarative and crafting a well thought-out and complete thought. Whether that is an email, a presentation or a press release, we try not to leave things unsaid or vague. But the enemy of engagement is perfection. The more complete your thought, the less other opinions and input is needed. Complete and perfect communications are a transaction, not a conversation. However, this is what is expected in traditional business communication and it creates a major barrier to collaboration.

When you communicate in a community, everything you thought you knew about communication is often wrong. The people who tend to get the most engagement use a writing style that is modest, imperfect, inquisitive, solicitous and often vulnerable. This approach tends to make people with a business or management background squeamish. The other challenge community managers have is that these attributes can, when used the wrong way, lead to a passive tone. This is also not good because the organization’s perspective and voice is lost and the community could move in a direction that is no longer productive to the business.

If this sounds a bit like a catch-22, it’s because it is. One of the skills of a great community manager is riding the fine line between being solicitous in general interactions and firm when it comes to the community boundary conditions.

Here are some of our recommendations on how to shape your language of engagement:

Be careful about using absolutes – always, never, no, yes.
When expressing an opinion (which I think is important because differences are where innovation and change come from), use phrases like ‘In my experience’, ‘I have found’, ‘I think’ and ‘From my perspective’, which allow an opening for others and encourages others to share their experience and perspectives.
Use ‘but’ and ‘should’ sparingly. ‘But’ arrests a conversation and takes it in a different direction, implicitly judging another comment as incomplete or misdirected. ‘Should’ is often used when telling someone else what you think they ought to do, which is a dynamic of control vs. engagement.
Use ‘you’ and ‘we’ carefully for similar reasons – they can subtly indicate control over ideas and people.
Be curious and ask a lot of questions, even if you think someone’s question has been answered. There is often more to the story that leads to better understanding and sometimes, a different answer.
Consider using emoticons – not necessarily all over and not 10 in a row – because online it is hard to decipher when a comment is meant in a friendly or a confrontational way, and emoticons help establish tone. The same goes for exclamation points.
Be aware of digital body language – both your own and others. Pam Moore has a great list of ways you can indicate or decipher intent.
Be careful about validating or spreading either a good or bad rumor before it can be confirmed. This can get you into trouble very quickly and it is a human instinct to want to solve problems and spread good news, so it’s particularly important to be aware that as a community manager you are an authority figure that adds fuel to a fire. Use that power carefully.

What would you add to this list? What do you avoid? What do you actively try to do more of?

Do you disagree with anything on this list? Please share in the comments.

—

Defining Community Requirements that Scale, Part 1

June 10, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Jim Storer, Co-Founder and Pricipal of the Community Roundtable

Community is subject to the old adage, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” But simply planning isn’t enough. We often discuss that simply building a community is not enough – sadly, the average community is not the Field of Dreams. To define community requirements that scale, organizations need to examine their user segments and account for the external factors which affect community development, both of which influence the optimal design of their communities. If you can successfully understand both your organization’s and your users’ needs in terms of these areas, you can offer the right tools to ensure successful launch and adoption for the long term.

COMPLEX HUMAN SOCIAL INTERACTIONS ARE NOT EASILY CAPTURED IN SOFTWARE

In the early stages of community (the first six to twelve months), users’ requirements are relatively simple; throwing a kitchen sink of features at them when they first join will put off most people because of the complexity and your adoption will flag. But within that first year, most organizations will graduate to what The Community Roundtable refers to as the “One Year Club” (Thomas Vander Wal coined the term), where simplicity is no longer enough, as the community’s requirements will evolve rapidly once it begins its adoption and engagement ramp, and different user types begin to emerge. Start by understanding your four main user types:

Pointer/Gatherers – These users point and link to areas outside of the community, gathering information and bringing it into the community for others to benefit from. This might be anyone from an employee who shares the weekly corporate softball team schedule, to a member you can count on to share interesting and relevant news stories.

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) – These are your community’s experts whose insights are rebroadcast by the community. SMEs rarely engage with the social tools outside of the organization because they already feel overwhelmed and don’t want to add to their workload.

Gardeners – Some curators “garden” by discovering information, insights and content and then “plant” it where it will be most likely to be easily located by those who will benefit most from it. These members also tend to be good connectors – both of people and of ideas.

Doubters – These members are always questioning and challenging assumptions of the community. They are particularly useful in innovation systems as they are adept at identifying capability gaps.

Make sure the structure you create balances those who do the questioning with those who contribute. The framework should be designed with an understanding of the different stages at which these groups interact; don’t try to force-fit the community to the tool. Don’t forget though: individuals may play one role in one group and a different role in a different group. Make sure they have the capabilities available to them to switch between roles as needed.

In addition to these roles, users will also come in at varying depths of use and contribution:

Outsider with no accountability –lurkers who consume the content generated by the community but don’t contribute. Once they create a profile or account they transition from a non-contributing user to a non-contributing member and begin developing an understanding of the breadth of offerings of the service.

Realizing the service has a selective interface – At this stage, users see that they can self-select a way to consume the content in the community and explore their areas of interest.

Light Contributor – This phase begins with high-level contributions to the community such as commenting. Users in this stage are not yet contributing content to the community, but rather are responding to content posted by others.

Heavy contributor – At this stage, the person actively curates content from the outside to share with the community.

A well-designed community will help people feel comfortable moving along the journey from anonymous lurker to full heavy-contributor. The more users you can get to graduate to the sharing and curation stage, the more likely you will realize your ultimate goal of a vibrant, self-sustaining community that benefits both your organization and your users.

How far along the path to maturity is your community? Have you run into similar challenges as a member of the One Year Club or are you still in the initial or planning stage? We’d love to hear about your successes and struggles in mapping out your own requirements for a successful community.

—–

Note: Check out Part Two of this post over on Enterprise Hive’s blog. There we discuss two other critical factors for designing communities that scale: the importance of outside influences and mapping community to your organization’s culture.

The Link Between Communities and Innovation

March 18, 2014 By Jim Storer

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

Innovation is always a hot-button topic in the technology world – but what about in community management? Besides the use of an innovative technology how can community managers and social business strategists help their organizations to be more innovative?

Last week we shared this presentation, focused on how communities can be powerful tools for product teams in driving innovation.

Communities for Innovation from The Community Roundtable

In addition to some of the great advice contained above I wanted to share some articles we’ve seen recently that provide insight on how to be make innovation part of your daily routine – not just something you think about at a company retreat or during your annual review.

This post by Haydn Shaughnessy is titled “How to Measure Innovation” but really does a great job outlining the idea of defining appropriate metrics and skills that lead to innovative outputs. He highlights community and social business as one of these main skill sets, saying, “To be good at innovation a company needs more than social media presence – it needs to be good at bringing customers into a collaborative relationship and keeping them there”.

Another great post for framing innovation for community managers is from Forbes: “6 Tips On Driving Innovation – Even If You Think Your Boss Will Say No.” The author outlines six ways to get started innovating at large companies. They may seem fairly obvious as you read them: de-risk your ideas, get out of the office, don’t expect everyone to say yes – but they provide a great checklist to review from time to time. Innovation can happen in small ways everyday and taking the advice to heart can help you re-shape the way you think about innovating and make it a daily practice.

Finally, I wanted to share a post that I find helpful in both self-evaluation and in brainstorming effectively. To be a true driver of innovation you must do more than just think innovative thoughts. These five questions to build an innovative culture are a great exercise to complete alone, or with your community team. The seven-step program for innovating right now that Tim includes at the end is a great framework for strength-testing ideas for wider consumption and acceptance and is a helpful jumping off point for anyone that wants to be more innovative, but isn’t sure how.

Have you been thinking about how to be more innovative with your community programs? Have a great innovation resource I missed? I’d love to hear how you’re approaching being a more innovative community manager – and to hear examples the innovative ways you’re connecting with you communities.

——–
Looking to take your career in community management to the next level? 92% of members agree that TheCR Network supports and advances their personal and professional goals. Learn how our research, access to peers and experts, targeted content and exclusive concierge service can help you achieve your goals.