cmgr Archives

Twitter Chats 101 – How to use twitter chats to connect with your community.

June 18, 2014 By Jim Storer

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

Image via kenshoo.com

If you’re on twitter (and who’s not?) you may have seen, or even taken part of a twitter chat. We love this medium for connecting with your community – whether it’s a community of like-minded professionals, subject matter enthusiasts or passionate fans or advocates. We wanted to learn more about some of our favorite community management focused chats, so I reached out to the leaders of a few of our favorites – #ESNChat, #CommBuild, #cmgrchat and #CMGRHangout to learn how they got started and to learn some best practices you can apply to your twitter use.

Joining our conversation was Jeff Ross, producer of #ESNchat (Thursdays at 2pm ET), Praan Misir, organizer of #CommBuild (Tuesdays at 1pm ET) Jenn Pedde producer of #cmgrchat (Wednesdays at 2pm ET) and Sherrie Rohde producer of #CMGRHangout (Fridays at 2pm ET).

First off, we love all your chats, and try to pop in every week. Tell me, how did you get started in the world of twitter chats?

Jeff: I felt like there was a void in places to gather for those with a specific interest in enterprise social networks. There were other chats for community managers or those involved in social media, but the vast majority were giving most attention to external social media rather than internal. Vendors have their own gathering places for people who use their products, but there wasn’t one open and available place for ESN practitioners to communicate with each other regardless of vendor. After researching last summer and verifying the void, I decided to take the plunge and start #ESNchat.

Praan: I first got started with #Commbuild in early April of this year. I’m new to NTEN in general, but attending the #14NTC inspired me to dive right into engaging with and learning from the network. My first participation with the group was informative, inspiring, and fun, and I’ve met some really cool community builders through this exercise.

Jenn: Kelly Lux and I were relatively new to the world of Community Building and thought we would start a Twitter Chat for Community Managers since we didn’t see one out there already. From the very first one there has consistently been 80-100 people that participate each week so we’ve kept it up and will continue to do it as long as there are people wanting to join. It’s been four years!

Sherrie: I actually got started with #CMGRHangout because I wanted to learn more about Community Management. Tim McDonald originally founded it as a Google Hangout to fill the void of a video based learning place for Community Managers. To expand the reach of those able to interact, he added in the Twitter component with #CMGRHangout.

I love all your stories – the theme of learning and connecting seems to be there for each of you. What made you want to connect with your cmgr peers via this medium, specifically?

Jenn: We had read every book out there at the time on community building and wanted to meet others who were in the same boat.Twitter is such a great medium to pull people in randomly, have a great conversation initially, and leads to a lot of great collaboration online and offline elsewhere.

Sherrie: Video is powerful. It’s face to face communication and you simply can’t replicate that with only text. Tone of voice and body language are such a big part of how we communicate. From a Twitter standpoint, it’s also just a fantastic way to discuss a topic with peers around the world. We always know it will be the same time and place every week.

Jeff: I’ve taken part in other Twitter chats and have been blown away with the ability to make excellent professional and personal connections with people around the globe. The ease of gathering and sharing info and building a personal network around a topic is inviting and effective. I’ve learned more from resources shared on Twitter over the last several years than any other single source, so I believe strongly in the medium.

How you think these kind of chats differ from other community building events online?

Sherrie: The interesting thing about Twitter chats is you can accidentally participate in them. I’m constantly getting glimpses of variousTwitter chats from those I know and follow participating in them.

Jeff: I like the ability people have to easily come and go, to take part or not without a long-term commitment, and that it’s a specific, tiny slice of time we’re asking for on a weekly basis in the case of #ESNchat. It’s narrow in its focus. My goal isn’t to actually build an ongoing community of ESN professionals, although the relationships that happen as a result contribute to that outcome. My goal is to help advance the field of enterprise social networking by providing a means of sharing combined ESN knowledge and having a repository of that for anyone interested.

Praan: I think one of the biggest differences, and strengths in my opinion, is how open conversations can be. Although twitter chats are structured around a few key questions, the chats themselves allow for the conversation to travel in several different directions and tangents almost simultaneously. You can be contributing to the main conversation, participating in a few deeper conversations with other individuals, and even chiming in on other side-chats where necessary. The openness of Twitter also means that you interact with a diverse and dynamic array of perspectives on any given topic, with community builders from across the world. Finally, as events go, participating in a twitter chat is easy to do, all you really need is access to the internet and a Twitter account.

Jenn: Twitter chats are quick, easy to jump in and out of, easy to connect with others on one topic or a variety of issues, and everyone participates. Other community building events online might not have the high engagement that a Twitter chat gets.

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to someone joining a twitter chat for the first time?

Jeff: Dive in and have fun. Don’t be overwhelmed by a fast-moving steam of tweets. Strike up a few conversations with others present and add them to your network. Share your thoughts by answering the questions posed. Your opinion is wanted and as valid as anyone else’s. We’re all here to learn from each other.

Praan: Be prepared to multitask. All those conversations and side conversations can get hectic and hard to follow, so you need to be prepared for at least monitoring a few conversations in real time. Although at first it can seem daunting, with the proper prep, you’ll be an expert in no time.

Jenn: Use a tool like Tweetchat or Twubs so you can see all of the tweets in one place and slow down the pace if you need to. Also, don’t lurk, jump in and start talking!

Sherrie: Make sure to introduce yourself! You’ll likely get a warm welcome if you let everyone know you’re new and checking it out.

Why would you recommend your chat (or any other twitter chat) to someone who has never taken part in one before?

Praan: Quite simply, it’s fun! I was a little nervous before my first #commbuild chat, but I ended up chatting with lots of people with great things to say about community building, and learned quite a bit. The community itself is very friendly to newcomers, and you can develop some pretty strong connections with tweeps and colleagues in this field.

Jenn: #CMGRchat is a wonderful community of brilliant people. Twitter chats exist on hundreds of topics, so they all have their own unique feel and expertise, but they’re generally a place where people go to feel connected, learn a thing or two, share their opinions, and feel like they belong. There’s not really a downside to popping into a chat every now and again except that you may become addicted to quite a few throughout the week! #Blogchat, #smmeasure, are all pretty great ones to join.

Sherrie: The moment you stop learning from those around you, life gets really, really boring. 🙂

Jeff: #ESNchat is a great conversation weekly by a group who share similar professional interests. It’s structured but informal enough to encourage friendly chatter. You’ll meet some fantastic people from around the globe that you’d never otherwise meet who will likely become your go-to people when you have questions around that topic.

This has been so great – I hope we’ve inspired all of our readers to either jump in and join a twitter chat or event get out there and start one of your own! We can’t thank Jeff, Praan, Jenn and Sherrie enough for taking the time to answer our questions and provide such great advice.

Do you have a favorite twitter chat? We’d love to hear about it!

—-
Did you know that 95% of TheCR Network members agree that the content and peer input improves the quality of their work? It’s true! Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

The End of DIY Community Management and the Rise of the Community Executive

June 16, 2014 By Rachel Happe

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

The discipline of community management is growing up. For us at The Community Roundtable it’s easy to see as the conversations have shifted from how we best execute on day-to-day community challenges to how do we transfer that knowledge and how do we integrate community processes into core business processes. But it’s also changing the role of the community manager – we see responsibilities of members of TheCR Network shifting to include more:

Internal consulting
Training/coaching
Building governance for other community managers
Program management

From my perspective this is a great thing – it means community management is extending to everyone in an organization and becoming they new approach to management. But it is also disruptive, because not all community managers understand this shift and many don’t (yet) have the skills to execute effectively on these new responsibilities. Add to this, for community managers who have been in the role for a while, they likely got started in a context where there were no formal resources or services available to them and they had to figure everything out on their own. They experience a tension between wanting to grow in the field and get more authority within their organization and still preferring to do everything themselves.

This struggle between wanting to do everything yourself and needing to scale is not uncommon – most people experience this in some form or another as they gain responsibility within their field. In order to become a director or VP, it is an absolute necessity to stop doing everything and start assembling a team of resources, both internal and external, to which you can delegate the doing. Once you do that, your responsibility is to help create a shared sense of purpose, the operations to support your point of view consistently and to mentor those who are on the front lines. Practically, that means you need:

Documented standards and playbooks
Training/Onboarding solutions that frame the challenge
A common way to assess and track performance, at various levels
Common tools and resources available to your whole team
External resources that have more cost-effective expertise or scale, to complement internal resources

In many ways, these new responsibilities fundamentally shift the day-to-day work of community management as it becomes more about assembling the right resources, managing budgets and hiring than planning community programs or moderating discussions. Not everyone wants to or needs to make the leap but it is helpful to understand the trade-off; if you want strategic authority and responsibility, you need to learn executive skills.

The other challenge for community managers who do make the transition to senior roles have is a hesitation to ask for and spend money – they are so used to operating in a context of scarcity that they assume they have to do everything themselves. We see this all the time with TheCR Network membership fees – when we talk to executives, membership for their community team is an easy and obvious yes but community managers themselves often assume they don’t have budget before they even ask.

Times have changed – community programs are now much more strategic, we have data and case studies that demonstrate community effectiveness and the role of community management is much more well understood. However, community managers still often fail to recognize that:

If you have built a reasonable and itemized roadmap that is tied to business outcomes, you are likely get at least some of what you ask for but do not limit your asking to your direct supervisor – you may need to go up a couple of levels.
You cannot scale without spending money and it’s not about the money per se, it’s about scaling your impact. If you do not build a roadmap, ask for budget and bring on resources that help you extend your reach, you will hamper your ability to grow your community program and its impact. If the community is effective, that harms the organization as a whole.

Growing up is a bumpy process and different people like different stages of maturity better than others. It’s worth really thinking about which part of the process and work you love – and seeking out opportunities that are weighted toward those responsibilities. The tide of community management is rising and bringing all of us along with it – enjoy the ride!

—-

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.

Interview with a Community Veteran – Michael Pace

April 15, 2014 By Jim Storer

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

Our last interview with a community veteran is with one of our earliest members and most vocal supporters – Michael Pace. Michael has worked tirelessly to advance the ideas and practice of community customer support and has been a great leader in and out of TheCR Network.

You can connect with Michael on twitter, or follow him on his blog: thepaceofservice.com.

1. How have you seen the community management space evolve over the past five years?

Interesting question. Oddly, I feel I have seen two separate paths for community management over the last five years. Path #1: I call this the status quo path. People who still preach and practice exactly the same way they did 3,4,5 years ago. They seem to be adding very little to the conversation, and continually regurgitate the same old same old spiel. Many of them do not believe you should or could quantify the value of your community, and believe in many of the original “isms” of yesteryear. Path #2: I call this the edge of the box path. This is the true evolution of community management. They look at how to leverage the skills, competencies, and tools to push our thought on what can be done. Folks interested in social business have moved down this path, because it is bigger and immensely more valuable than just social media networks. They have operationalized social, their communities, and tools to distill the insights necessary to move forward.

2. What are some of the biggest differences from when you first started out in community management?

The biggest difference (for me) from when I first started is the incorporation of customer service into the social space. In ’09 it was still all Marketing and PR, except for Frank Eliason at Comcast. Finding others interested in social/community management for customer service was very scarce. In a lot ways I appreciate that open range today, because I may have fallen lock step with the crowd if it wasn’t so scarce. It pushed me to find ways to make social work for customer service.

3. What would you do differently in your first community management role knowing what you know now?

Executive champions, executive champions, executive champions! Did I mention executive champions? Without executive championship, you are going to be Sisyphus pushing your rock up the hill each day. I had relatively strong executive championship, but if I was to do it again, I would have made it bigger and more pronounced.

4. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Five years from now, I see myself with my own customer service shop/contact center. But it wouldn’t be your father’s contact center. It was be rich with efficient communication and collaboration.

5. Did you have any community management mentors along the way? Any specific advice they gave you that stood out to you?

Not just saying this for the purposes of this questionnaire, but Rachel and Jim were my primary local mentors. I had a Facebook page to keep track of idiots I didn’t like in high school, and a LinkedIn page to source job opportunities. Beyond that no social training what so ever. They helped me ramp up so quickly that I was speaking about social customer service in front of audiences within a few months. Best advice came from Rachel. She told me my Twitter stream was boring. “Who wants to only hear about email marketing all day. Show your personality. If I am interested in you, I’ll be interested in what you share.” Three months later, I was making Movember shower videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glPko3I-EHc&list=UUZLGMCmn9LcpxOaRwm8vIow

6. What would you tell someone who has made the career leap and is in the early stages of their career in community or social business?

If someone was making the career leap over to social and community management, I would tell them regardless of what you believe this role will entail, you should continue to focus on core business competencies, as well as social networking skills. Core business competencies should include (but might not be limited to) communication, influencing others, analyzing data, teamwork, customer focus, results focus (getting things done efficiently), and people development and management. Odds are is your community management role will be cross functional, and you will need to (continue to) learn how to develop these competencies in order to effectively advocate for funding/people, deliver on cross functional goals, communication activity and vision, and gain insight.

7. If you could go back and give yourself advice five years ago what would you say?

“Hey this Facebook and Twitter thing may actually take off, go get yourself involved.”

—–

Did you know that TheCR Network members work with all kinds of communities? In fact, about 25% work in either internal or external communities and 50% work with both! No matter what kind of community you work with membership in TheCR Network will save you time and improve the quality of your work by connecting you with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

Interview with a Community Veteran – Nigel Fortlage

April 8, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable

Today I’m excited to share another veteran community professional’s thoughts on the last five years in the community world. Nigel Fortlage has been a member of TheCR Network since 2009 – and has provided invaluable support and leadership along the way. Nigel is the Vice President, Information Technology (CIO) at GHY International and has the very special distinction of being our very first international member in TheCR Network!

1. If you could go back and give yourself advice five years ago what would you say?

Trust your instinct, it is a better judge than that of a paid consultant who doesn’t know my business.
Learn from everyone, and share with just as many, by sharing your learn more.
Value relationships of all kinds, connect with everyone, you never know where the next great answer will come from.
Follow Matthew McConaughey’s advice, find someone to look up to, look forward to, and to chase.

2. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Given what I see today, I believe that the future for me may lie in a combination CIO/CMO role within our organization. The emergence of community/social business is escalating and reaffirms that we are on the right directions in developing our business. I also see synergy with a combined role as many aspects that are respectful of the other can be helpful and what a better way for IT to add value than through the eyes of our clients. Developing community and marketing skills allows me to see the clients view on things that are resulting in better delivery of initiatives.

3. Did you have any community management mentors along the way? Any specific advice they gave you that stood out to you?

I have had a few coaches that have helped me and are helping me. I have SEO specialists helping under the science behind SEO and being found online. I have marketing leaders who have helped me understand the language. I have business mentors who continue to help shape my view on the lifetime value of a client. Last but not least is the innocent relationship that began with a tweet and a response from Rachel that lead to me becoming an early member of The CR, where through Jim and Rachel’s advice I have gained understanding and application knowledge that still serves me today. I look forward to evolving my role through continued learning and participation with TheCR members.

—–

Recap: Community Manager Spotlight Webinar with J.J. Lovett, CA Technologies

March 5, 2014 By Jim Storer

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

JJ Lovett - Community Manager Spotlight

In February, Jim chatted with J.J. Lovett, Director, Online Communities at CA Technologies as part of our ongoing Community Manager Spotlight webinar series. We are always amazed at the different paths that lead our members to community management – and J.J. is the perfect example. A retired US Marine, J.J. joined CA Technologies nine years ago and now is confident he has the best job in the world. He recently published a book titled “Developing B2B Social Communities: Keys to Growth, Innovation, and Customer Loyalty” – which explains how B2B organizations can use a robust online community strategy to survive and flourish in today’s changing economy.

Watch the video below to learn more about CA Technologies’ customer engagement evolution and how J.J. and his team have received an honorary minor in platform management through numerous changes over the past few years. The audience asked a lot of great questions, so many in fact that we didn’t have time for them all. J.J. has kindly sent answers to the questions we didn’t get to and I’ve included them below. Have a question for J.J. on his journey? You can connect with him on Twitter or leave them in the comments below.

1. What was the main driver to move to JIVE as your platform? Also, how does this integrate with your companies social listening initiative?

We had been developing our own social collaboration tool in-house on an open source platform. Given that it was not our core business, we saw an opportunity to move to a best of breed solution which would accelerate our roadmap by 12-18 months and allow us to shift from a focus on platform management and get more time back to major in community & content management.

We are in the early stages of integrating the communities into our social listening efforts – more to follow on this post-implementation in a follow on phase.

2. Regarding internal collaboration, what company cultural challenges have you come across, and how have you addressed those?

Our team is not the primary team responsible for internal collaboration efforts including community (we work with our company’s external communities). Getting people comfortable with a new way of doing business and engaging beyond the realm of entitled customers to a larger audience has been a primary goal for us. So, we work with the internal community and social media teams to educate on collaboration overall so people are ready, (more) willing and able to go out into the public domain and engage with our customers and prospects. In that regard, it takes a ton of collaboration with internal champions, legal teams, communications and so on to ensure that everyone is armed and ready to head outside of the firewall and engage. We’ve done this primarily by designing content initiatives by internal role/persona and doing proof-of-concept projects and then advertising the successes & benefits attained while formalizing the activity and then rolling it out to other teams within the business.

3. How has executive support has evolved?

Executive support has evolved over time and it has evolved greatly for the mutual benefit of the company and customer alike. For the online communities, historically we have had one or two executives interested in trying to help the communities along. With the rise of social engagement and the standardization of community interaction enabling software development company innovation efforts, the interest has become more widespread where we can certainly work with executives throughout the organization to work top-down as well as bottom-up to meet in the middle for success and advancement. Combine this with some new executives who have joined the company from other companies who leveraged communities for development, innovation, support, marketing, etc. and it becomes a convergence that has allowed us to advance community efforts within the company greatly.

4. How have you calibrated between content and people interaction? What predominates?

Early on we are content predominant – providing content for people to come consume and then also to interact on. When we start a community, we generally average around 70% company provided content with 30% then provided or contributed by the external membership. It takes a while (and a bit of refinement on the content) to achieve 50/50 parity for what we as a company contribute and what the membership posts/contributes. Once we achieve parity though, it is a rather quick swing on the other side to get to 70% externally contributed content. So the goal is to have engagement/interaction as the goal but it may take varying amounts of time depending on the maturity and stage in the lifecycle for the product/topic we are focusing on, the familiarity of the customer base with social engagement, and so on.

———————————————-

TheCR Network is a membership network that provides strategic, tactical and professional development programming for community and social business leaders. We connect clients with the people and ideas that help them build and grow successful communities with their customers, employees, and partners.

Think of TheCR Network as a hidden coach who makes you smarter and provides you with regular reinforcement as you do the hard work of helping your organization change. It’s likely not many people internally understand what you are trying to do – but your peers in TheCR Network do and they’ll make sure you know if you are on the right track or might be expecting too much.

TheCR Network helps members:

Innovate more quickly
Save time and money
Perform better

TheCR Network is the place to learn from social business practitioners. Join today.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Call for Research Participants: 2014 State of Community Management

January 21, 2014 By Maggie Tunning

It’s that time of year again! Today we’re excited to kick off the 2014 State of Community Management research – our annual research initiative which focuses on community maturity assessment and will explore the questions:

How are communities performing?
What are the standards and strengths of online communities today?
What opportunities should community managers focus on to grow their programs?

This year’s research was developed in collaboration with TheCR Network’s Community Maturity Assessment Working Group, a set of experienced community managers and practitioners. Data will determine how communities are performing in the eight competencies in TheCR’s Community Maturity Model.

The 2014 SOCM is designed to help participants and Community Audit clients build roadmaps like the one below. Framing current and desired performance by competency enables constructive dialog with stakeholders about strategic, budget and resource decisions – and helps you gain the support and resources you need to be successful.

Want to participate? We’re looking for community managers, community strategists, community program leaders and volunteers who have community management responsibilities to tell us more about their communities in this online survey through February 28, 2014. The survey will take you 15-20 minutes to complete.

We are interested in learning more about communities at all levels of maturity, so your response is important to us even if your community is in the early stages of development.

As a thank you for participating, you will receive a promotion code for a discount of $500 that you can apply to a new individual membership in TheCR Network in 2014. We’re also launching a new Community Audit service and offering special pricing to the first five interested participants.

Click here to take the survey now!