The Community Roundtable

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

Community Manager Appreciation Day 2015: Three things to do today

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By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Community Manager Appreciation Day is here for 2015. As this CMAD kicks into gear, we certainly have a lot of people to appreciate – with members from more than 100 organizations, we could spend a lot of time appreciating. And we will. But appreciation is just one of the ways you can make CMAD resonate both for you and for the profession.

Here are three things you can do right now:

Appreciate the unexpected: CMAD is about appreciation. It’s in the name. But if you limit yourself to a generic thanks to your community manager, you’re not taking full advantage. Don’t just walk over or send an email to your organization’s community managers – think of communities you are involved with elsewhere. Seek out those CMs and thank them, too. There are thousands of community managers out there, some of them one-person shops whose work gets noticed far less often than it should. Thank them, too.

Advance your skills: Rachel Happe is on a quest to change CMAD to Community Manager Advancement Day, and it is a good day to invest a little in yourself. A tip of the hat to the CMAD organizers, who have been working for months to create a 24-hour hangout of value to community managers, as well as coordinating and curating other events. There are dozens of great opportunities today to learn and improve your skills.

We’re big fans of the 3pm CMAD workshop on “The Power of Programs to Drive Engagement in Your Community,” moderated by TheCR Network’s Community Manager, Hillary Boucher, with Network members Kirsten Laaspere (Fidelity), Patrick Hellen (CloudLock) and Melissa Potvin (CA Technologies) along with Holly Goldin from Atlassian – and me.

But whatever fits into your schedule – dig in.

Advance the field of community management: One way to do that is to take part in the research for The State of Community Management 2015, our 6th annual examination of the growth and maturation of community management as a discipline. We want to gather hundreds of responses to our annual survey of community management practices, which helps drive much of our research during the year.

The survey opens today – and your answers will make it a stronger, more valuable piece of research. It will take 20 minutes so considering adding it to your schedule today, or later this week. You can access the survey here.

I warned you that we would have people to appreciate – and really, our list could be much longer. But we want to thank two groups today in particular – the community professionals whose stories we will tell beginning today with the pre-release of The Community Manager Handbook, and the community professionals who took on the task of championing our CMAD activities in six cities.

So with appreciation we recognize: CM Handbook interviewees Bill Johnston, Jerry Green, Maria Ogneva, Lesley Lykins, Lauren Vargas, Mike Pascucci, Christian Rubio, James LaCorte, Ted Hopton, Charissa Carnall, Matt Brown, Tracy Maurer, J.J. Lovett, Jeff Ross and Alex Blanton. You’ll be able to read their case studies and research that goes along with them when the full Handbook is released on February 4.

For a sneak peek, we have released a “teaser” featuring our own Hillary Boucher, discussing content and programs. Take a look and we’d love to have you sign up for the February 4 webinar sponsored by Higher Logic.

We also recognize our local event champions Laura Brook and Lindsay Starke (Atlanta), Luke Sinclair (New York), Ben Martin and Maddie Grant (D.C.), Heather Ausmus (Milwaukee) and Christopher Parsons and Susan Strom (San Francisco). You are making the fun part of CMAD possible, and we appreciate it

And special thanks to three people who actually are both interviewees and local champions, Eileen Foran (Milwaukee) and Patrick Hellen and Kirsten Laaspere (Boston). Kirsten and Patrick get an added star for being in our CMAD webinar, too.

We refer to the interviewees in the Handbook as “community superheroes”. We interviewed 20 of the best, but if we really wanted to capture all the people using their superpowers for good not evil in the community space, we’d add hundreds, if not thousands, of others.

So if you’re reading this on this CMAD. Take a moment to appreciate one other thing. Yourself.

Friday Roundup: Fundamental Questions about Community Value

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By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Another week in the books at The Community Roundtable – and it seems like the second week of the New Year had people thinking more about some of the fundamental questions about community value. Rachel sparked one of the bigger reactions of the week with a post in CMSWire, Customer Communities: Strategy or Tactic, which looked at the fundamental shift from building relationships with customers to building your customer base with relationships – a fundamental change in the social media era. The critical importance of shared value is not new to fans of TheCR – we have talked about it for years – but it’s great to see the theme reach new audiences, along with its companion, shared purpose.

If you’re struggling with the shared value discussion, you may want to connect your audience with our Community Fundamentals deck. We gave it a little polishing up in 2014.

Within TheCR Network, a couple of blog posts elsewhere have sparked thoughtful discussions on some of the basics of community, and a number of members had their minds opened (or blown) by Peter Gloor of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Any one sentence summary I tried to give of the presentation wouldn’t do it justice – so I’ll just recommend you look at his books, or better yet, sign up for TheCR Network and read the Roundtable summary notes when they become available. (Did you know that one of the valuable assets of the Network is that all our programming is summarized for you to digest at your convenience or when you need it most?)

Looking ahead – we are just a little over a week from CMAD on Monday, January 26, and we have our locations set for all six of our CMAD events with Higher Logic. There’s still time to sign up to join us for food, drinks and discussion in Boston, New York, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Washington, DC on the 26th. However, there’s apparently no such thing as a free lunch in San Francisco, where tickets for our free lunch were snapped up in record time.

CMAD will also be the day we kick off our survey for our most established research, the 6th annual State of Community Management. SOCM 2015 is only as good as the data you provide, so we hope you’ll take the time to fill out the SOCM survey, and spread the word with your fellow community professionals when the survey link goes live.

Lastly, we shared a couple of other pieces on the blog this week. Shannon noted that there is one way for you to stand out from the crowd when applying for community manager positions, and I suggested a practical strategy for taking those big ideas for your community in 2015 to fruition.

Now on to some other good reads!

Some Other Interesting Readings This Week

It’s Time to Flip the Social Media & Community ROI Equation on its Head: It’s no secret that many Brands realize tremendous value from their social media and online community efforts. Value in the form of cost-reduction for support and service, ideas for and feedback on products, product and brand advocacy… the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, there is also a problem with the current approach Brands take: it’s unsustainable – unsustainable because it is predicated on Customers doing valuable work for free.

Facebook Where? The Enterprise Reacts To Facebook At Work: Enterprise Social as a category has been with us for almost a decade, with companies like Jive, Yammer (now part of Microsoft) and Socialcast (now part of VMware) trying hard to get organizations to embrace social tools — often being sold ironically as “Facebook for the enterprise.” Facebook is jumping feet-first into this existing market with all of its baggage and trying to show it can make the transition to a business product and all that entails. While the Facebook enterprise product has many advantages, there are also many unanswered questions.

Internal communications predictions for 2015: For its part, 2014 was a growth year for internal collaboration, as the platforms matured and companies continued to deploy new and updated tools, usually with a special emphasis on social and mobile collaboration. The good news: Overall, growth in newer forms of internal collaboration tools continued on a double digit year-over-year pace according to market research firms. This growth trend will actually ramp up into 2015 as organizations get more proactive about getting ahead of digital workplace change.

New Community and Social Media Jobs

Community Management Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Research Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Sales/Marketing Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Community Manager — i2Coalition, Washington, DC

Zoe Community Manager — HTC, Seattle, WA

US Digital Social Engagement Lead – McDonalds, Oak Brook, IL

North American Gaming Community Manager – Nvidia, Santa Clara, CA

Online Community Coordinator – Melanoma Research Foundation, Washington, DC

Manager, Community Management – Ignite Social Media, Birmingham, MI or Cary, NC

Content and Online Community Manager – ANZ, Melbourne, Australia

Community Manger (bilingual) – Wanderu, Boston, MA

Digital Client Engagement Strategist – Fleishman Hillard, Dallas, TX

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Looking to break new ground in your community in 2015. Maybe one of our community toolkits could help! They provide information and strategic guidance for starting, building and improving your community.

2015: The Year Community Management Goes Mainstream

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By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable

2014 was a great year for community management generally and for The Community Roundtable specifically. Because of that, I spared you a year-end wrap up (you are welcome), but I do think it is worth taking the opportunity a new year presents to pause, reflect and set intentions for the new year amidst the whirlwind of other activities.

We have said for a long time that the future of all management is community management and 2014 was the year we started to see that transition begin to happen. We think 2015 will be the year it becomes more widely acknowledged.

Ironically, at the same time there has been a good deal of discussion about the end of the social media era, capped off by confirmation from Fred Wilson, a well known VC. However, what that means is that the end of social media adoption is over – growth is no longer primarily going to come from new users or a new social network that is significantly better than what is available today, which means investors are no longer as interested in the space. The prices of many social media stocks are slumping and I think this is reflective of this trend. In the early days, social networks could justify their value through growth. Now that social media adoption is fairly saturated, they are going to have to dig deeper and think about how the tools support more complex behavior change – and in so doing, generate value not possible through traditional channels.

Despite this – or maybe because of it – I think we are just entering the era of social media value creation where value is not achieved by adoption or growth, but by using the new tools effectively to create value in new ways.  Given this dynamic, there is renewed and increased focus on the role of community management. It’s clear that the tools alone do not reliably produce value because their primarily emphasis to date has been on ease of adoption and use, not reinforcement of behavior change or rich collaboration.

We see this change in emphasis directly from our members and clients who are increasing the size of community teams, investing in internal community management consulting and creating internal community management centers of excellence as they start to realize that all of their management and leadership need to understand and use the principles of community management. It’s an exciting time for us and for community management, even if this trend has gone largely unnoticed by analysts and media because it does not generate the hype that technical innovation tends to – but it’s innovation nonetheless.

What this all means for The Community Roundtable is that we have evolved to not only serve individual community managers but also enable enterprises – through training assets, benchmarking, content and advisory services.

2014 was a great year, including:

  • Growth and strategic attention for many of our clients’ community teams (we love seeing our members’ teams grow and succeed!).
  • Expansion of TheCR Network membership to include Pegasystems, Schneider-Electric, Bit9, IEEE, DirectTV, Oracle, EY, Akamai, Lenovo, Skillsoft, Steelcase, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Baxter, MasterCard, Cox Automotive, and Applause among others.
  • Publication of our 5th State of Community Management research, which identified objective measures of community management maturity developed in conjunction with TheCR Network members.
  • Launch of Community Performance Benchmarking, a service which allows us to consistently assess and make recommendations to community teams regarding their progress and their opportunities.
  • Announcement of our first TheCR Network Champions, a program that highlights experts who help us lead interest groups within TheCR Network.
  • Delivery of internal and external community management training assets to partners, which include on demand videos and worksheets that enable participants to complete a community strategy and plan.
  • Publication of the first report from a new research platform – the Community Management Salary Survey

It was a heck of a year and what encouraged us the most is the progress our members have made in their own programs – and the support they are getting from senior executives to extend their work.

Looking forward, we are excited to dig in and extend the way we collaborate with clients to demonstrate the value of community management. For us, 2015 includes:

  • Kicking off with CMAD (Community Manager Appreciation Day… or as we like to refer to it, Community Management Advancement Day) in collaboration with Higher Logic with events in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Milwaukee and the launch of the Community Manager Handbook, which will profile some of our community management superheroes. Sign up here!
  • The 2015 State of Community Management, which we will refine based on what we learned last year especially from our benchmarking projects where we were able to dig in and see where organizations were most in need of guidance so that community management processes result in reliable value creation.
  • New training assets for advanced community management topics.
  • Content to help executives understand the language of engagement and how they can get value out of participating in communities.
  • Making our training assets available to individuals as well as to enterprise clients and partners.
  • Enabling community management centers of excellence through our content, training assets and advisory services.
  • The 2015 Community Manager Salary Survey. We learned a lot in the first year of this research, which we’ll incorporate into next year’s research while keeping some longitudinal data consistent so we can report on trends.

As it is every year, our focus will be on making our clients and members successful by continuing to demonstrate the value of community management generally and their value specifically.

I would love to hear your thoughts on community management – do you see things the same way I do or do you think community management is like social media and its heyday has passed?

 

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