cmgt Archives

CMGT 101: The Power of Smart Communication

June 27, 2018 By Jim Storer

Note: This content appears in a slightly different form in our ebook: CMGT 101: 17 CommunityLeaders Share Their Secrets for Success.CMGT 101 is packed with engagement ideas, governance tips, career advice, and more from community leaders working at innovative organizations like CA Technologies, Aetna, Electronic Arts, SAP, Pearson, Akamai, and Atlassian.

Download the ebook here for free.

Jerry Janda, our Community MVP 2017 shares best practices for smart communications.

Engagement builds trust with members. Without this trust, you can lose support for the community — especially during times of change. Communicating is the core of engagement (and a key component of change management), so community success is dependent upon effective communications.

DO LISTEN AND PARTICIPATE

Make a daily habit of checking member comments and feedback — and not just their responses to whatever news you share. You can get a feeling for general sentiment by following the chatter in forums and other community conversations.

DO BE OPEN, HONEST, TRANSPARENT

Anything that affects members requires change management, and anything requiring change management is something that members need to know NOW. Withholding information is one of the quickest ways to lose trust.

DON’T IGNORE THE BAD

Few people welcome confrontation, so it’s very tempting to ignore negative community comments or exclude painful truths from communications. Don’t fall into that trap. Remember that even harsh criticism can provide an opportunity for positive engagement.

PRO TIP

Communicate early and often and through every channel you have available. Come up with a plan that includes cadence, key messaging, and desired outcomes. And watch community reaction, respond accordingly (and quickly!), and revise your communications plan as appropriate.

CMGT 101: The Power of Engaging Community Programming

June 13, 2018 By Jim Storer

Download the ebook here for free.

Lori Harrison-Smith is a Community Strategist at Steelcase and has worked in community management for six years. Her community has ~8,000 members. She shared her best practices for creating engaging programming in CMGT 101.

We use a question of the week to successfully engage our members. Posting a weekly question in your community can help to spur some of your hesitant users to get engaged. It’s a simple, low-effort way for users to participate and get to know each other – around business or personal topics. And from there it will become a habit to interact.

DO KEEP THINGS SIMPLE

Questions shouldn’t require a novella to answer. This is important, especially in the beginning. One of the first questions asked in our campaign was “Where are you from?” It was super easy for people to jump into the conversation.

DO GET USERS INVOLVED

We reached out to some of our power users with some sample questions and had them start the conversations. That way it didn’t come across as a “planned” promotion, but instead seemed more organic.

DON’T LEAVE THE QUESTION ASKER HANGING

Some questions are easier to jump into than others. If we noticed a question was sitting without a response for a few hours, we would reach out to some of our users behind the scenes and ask if they would help generate some interest.

PRO TIP

Come up with a wide list of questions beforehand so you can carry out the campaign for a while. We then built a “calendar” with people who agreed to participate and had them post their questions each Monday.

Download the CMGT 101 ebook and learn more!

CMGT 101: Best Practices for Member Retention

June 6, 2018 By Jim Storer

Download the ebook here for free.

Marjorie Anderson is a Community Engagement Specialist at Project Management Institute. She has worked in community management for almost five years and her community has one million registered users! She measures her success by the level of trust instilled in her to help make decisions that will, not only move the community forward but the organization forward.

DO BUILD A RELATIONSHIP

Welcome people into your community. Once they come, don’t let that be the last time they interact with you. This isn’t a transaction. It’s the process of beginning to build a trusting relationship which leads to members sticking around.

DO SPEAK TO YOUR MEMBERS’ NEEDS

If you see a specific topic gaining traction in your community, build content around it using subject matter experts from the community. This could be anything from an AMA to a webinar.

DON’T BRUSH OFF MEMBER FEEDBACK

It’s not always easy to hear that your brilliant idea to make the community better wasn’t all that brilliant, but your members provide feedback because they care. Brushing them off will turn them away.

PRO TIP

If you’re struggling with member retention, talk to your members and do a really honest evaluation of the value your community is adding to those who join. Sometimes we do all the things that our training and books tell us to do, but we can’t seem to gain any ground. Figure out what YOUR members need and how to deliver it to them in a way that works for them – and then keep evaluating that on a regular basis.

Preview of Preliminary 2014 State of Community Management Results

February 11, 2014 By Maggie Tunning

By Maggie Tunning, Learning and Culture Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Fun fact: this is actually a picture of our team tabulating results. (No. Not it's not.)

Fun fact: this is actually a picture of our team tabulating results. (No. No, it’s not.)

We launched the 2014 State of Community Management survey a few weeks ago and can’t help ourselves to start sifting through the results. Last week we hosted a workshop for members of TheCR Network’s Community Maturity Assessment Working Group to talk about what’s interesting and/or surprising about the early data set, as well as how we want to approach segmenting and presenting it later.

A few highlights about what we’re learning and thinking about:

Community leader/advocate programs: About 34 percent of communities have formal advocate programs (with a defined application and renewal process), and 39 percent have informal programs. What can we learn from the more mature communities to strengthen the informal programs and build new ones?

Community culture: When looking at the traits of communities surveyed, they’re on average balanced between content and conversation, formal and user-generated content and being reactive and proactive to issues. Do these traits change when the data set is segmented by types of communities (the categories of internal and external communities profiled)?

Community management: About 75 percent of communities surveyed have at least one full-time community manager on staff. Almost 29 percent have more than one full-time community manager. Does the number of community management resources affect the development of other community maturity indicators – like community playbooks, editorial calendars, crisis plans?

Interested in being a part of this research? There’s still time to participate — take the survey here through the end of February. As a thank you, we’re offering a discount off a new individual membership in TheCR Network (that includes the opportunity to collaborate with our smart working group members) – so if you’re thinking about joining now is the time!

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