The Community Roundtable

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

Recap of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

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Last week, I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference and, with Ted Hopton, chaired the Community Development and Management track. There were a several notable changes to this event – the first was that the conference was broken up into disciplines and business processes which helped bring more business owners to the conference. The second was that the newer west coast version of this conference is approaching the size of its east coast counterpart, held in June every year in Boston. In my mind, both of these signal an evolution in the market from experimental to operational and it’s a good sign. There were still a lot of new faces and balancing the needs of those attendees with the needs of E2.0 “regulars” is something that needs to be done going forward.

The community development and management track received very positive remarks (although we’ll have to wait a bit to see the tabulated feedback – please fill in an evaluation if you were at the conference). I was happy to be able to introduce Mark Yolton of SAP (slides here) and Bill Johnston of Dell to the E2.0 conference crowd and both spoke to a packed room. Bill Johnston and a panel moderated by Claire Flanagan with Erica Kuhl of Salesforce.com and Megan Murray from Booz Allen Hamilton gave the audience the fundamentals of community and community management while weaving in their own case studies.

The track then focused on specific areas of community management – engagement, collaboration & project management, governance, analytics & measurement, and building support.  One of my favorite moments from the conference was when Joe Crumpler, an IS Manager at Alcoa Aerospace, mentioned that he finally realized at the conference that there was a name for what he did – community management – and that it really represented for him a new way of managing teams. I couldn’t agree more as I think community management is both a role and a discipline or methodology of general management.

Other interesting comments/themes that I heard over the course of the event:

  • Alcoa has reduced the need for status meetings almost entirely by using social environments, which has direct cost and productivity implications. They’ve seen a 30% increase in work time for their team members. Mark Yolton from SAP chimed in and said they had reduced their status meetings to one time per month/5 minutes per project.
  • There is a big cultural change getting people comfortable with sharing ‘in process’ work vs. finalized documents. Individuals often want to perfect something before it is seen and reviewed.
  • There was a lot of discussion around finding the individuals in a network that are most capable of spreading information or spurring action and a growing realization that networks and communities must be looked at as collections of different segments/behaviors to effectively manage them. Erica Kuhl of Salesforce talked about their efforts to create the various personas that make up their community and how they think of creating effective experiences for each of those personas.
  • Many people are mis-using the ‘community’ term and often confusing it with a target audience.  The two are not the same thing.
  • Week ties are often misunderstood because they quickly can become very strong, relevant ties when the context changes.
  • Orchestrating ‘A Ha’ moments for others is less about evangelism and more about persistence and getting people to see value vs. getting excited by a shiny object

Two of the track panel moderators, Claire Flanagan and Robin Harper, created interesting and very effective panel formats, interestingly both used slides to help structure the conversation just a bit.  Claire moderated a track on community managers and their role and did a compare/contract between the different perspectives on the panel.  Robin Harper used very simple slides, some with definitions, to help guide the panel and audience through the conversation. I felt like both formats allowed room for the discussions that make panels interesting, while giving the audience a framework for putting that conversation into context so they had clear take-aways.

Finally, the best part of a conference like this is the people. Gil Yehuda wrote a nice post about the E2.0 crowd that resonated with me and the highlights of my week included dinner with Community Roundtable members, catching up with friends and colleagues, and conversations with a variety of people that are working on different challenges in this space.  If you are working on community management or social collaboration it is worth putting this conference on your radar and I’m looking forward to the next event in June in Boston.

If you are interested in sharing and collaborating with other professionals in charge of enterprise social initiatives, come explore what membership in The Community Roundtable has to offer.

Photo credit: This photo is from Alex Dunne’s excellent Flickr set “Enterprise 2.0 Conference Santa Clara 2010.”

5 Awesome Ideas for Community Engagement from Burr Settles

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Don’t know Burr Settles? He’s the force behind February Album Writing Month, otherwise know as FAWM. Like many community managers, he stumbled into the role because of his passion for independent music and an inspiration from National Novel Writing Month. What started as a fun thing to do in 2004 among a few friends has grown into a community of over 3,000 people who create, collaborate, and publish together.  We had Burr join us for a member call this week to discuss the FAWM project and what he had learned about community management over the years. Burr has four best practices that guide him:

  • Don’t Promote
  • Embrace Constraints
  • Keep it Ripe
  • Communication Over Aggregation

There is a great write up about those concepts here.  What I found to be one of the more interesting parts of our conversation with Burr was around the topic of constraints and how to use them creatively to drive engagement. Rather than lock people down, constraints offer a spark and a jumping off point for people to innovate and create. Burr talked about different ways constraints were created – centrally, self-imposed, and community generated – which all took the form of creative challenges.  My 5 favorite ideas were:

    1. Feasting – have people create as much as you can in one sitting (1-5 hours)
    2. Skirmishes – provide a topic/title/concept at a given time every week and give everyone one hour to complete the task
    3. Concept challenges – use an existing sets of things to inspire responses (U.S. presidents, periodic table of elements, deck of cards, etc)
    4. Daily/weekly inspiration – select a word, phrase, or piece of content for members to riff off of
    5. Brainstorming tools – Burr created these and I’ve used these in the past

      When you think about your community programming, consider incorporating some of these ideas – it will change things up, add an element of fun and competition, and get people talking.  At The Community Roundtable we’re running TheCR Summer Camp for our members – a fun way to learn more about social tools and methods while getting to know each other. It offers a different type of programming than we do the rest of the year, which breaks things up and offers some variety… plus it’s fun for us and that rubs off.

      Also, I hear from SchneiderMike (who recommended we have Burr in to speak as well – thanks Mike!) that the FAWM compilation CDs are excellent – check them out here.

      Interested in joining us for conversations like this one?  Find out more about membership in TheCR here.

      Practicing What We Preach – One Tweet At A Time

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      It is always much easier to say than to do and it takes time and regular recalibration to make sure you are doing what you are recommending to others. In the ‘social’ space particularly, a lot of the recommendations seem like good common sense: be as honest and transparent as possible, listen to your customers, don’t ‘manage’ people, and be modest. Pretty easy to understand and recommend to others. Harder to do especially in a world where the speed of information is increasing because all of those things take thoughtfulness which requires us to pause and think.  The other issue with it is there is no ‘right’ answer with regards to how to execute any of these recommendations – they are almost all judgment calls.

      One of this things we believe is that business systems are complex as is the environment of any person in the system. Each person’s environment looks quite different depending on their choices of how they spend their time and resources. In our case by defining our audience as community and social media managers, we know that the networks of our customers and prospects probably overlap a lot on the work/business elements.  That audience likely shares many of the same influencers, the same collection of tools and vendors that they consider, the same information sources and thought leaders. To the extent that our audience thinks of The Community Roundtable, it is only one piece of that complex web.  That networked thinking informs how we do business. Instead of creating our own island we partner, share, and converse broadly. We do add our own thoughts and information to the mix but consider it only one part of what our audience might wish to consume.

      This is the perspective that informs how we use Twitter.  Instead of using it as a feed of just our own blog posts and activities (which we do include), we spend time finding and forwarding information from other thought leaders that we think our audience will be interested in. We try to promote people we think have something valuable to say – regardless of our relationship with them. We also often add a ‘voice’ to our tweets and interact like we would from our own personal accounts. We are clear about who is tweeting from the account.

      We were asked recently to present how we used Twitter for B2B marketing and what results we were getting. We think it might be useful to those of you either considering using Twitter for business or those of you who may be looking to get a little more traction from your Twitter presence because our Twitter results represent a fairly compact period of time – six months. While we could always do better we are pretty happy with the results given it is only one of the many things we are responsible for every day.

      Using Twitter For B2B

      View more presentations from Rachel Happe.

      What are your tips and tricks? What are you hoping to do with your Twitter account? What metrics do you use to track that? Please share!