CMSS 2014 Archives

Community Career Profiles: The Director of Community Role

March 21, 2018 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Directors of community are responsible for community programs – strategy, governance, team management and budgets. Not every community has a director – instead, a functional executive often takes on these responsibilities. The director of community role is more common in mature communities, in large organizations and in organizations where the community program is central to the business model.

Directors of Community in the Organization

Directors of Community command respect in organizations, both in terms of the number of people they oversee in the organization and the place they occupy in it. 4 out of 5 of those who identify themselves as Directors of Community have direct reports, and most of those have 3 or more of them. When we think about communities being truly integrated into the business, Directors of Community sit in a place to make that happen — our research shows that 83% report to vice-presidents or higher in the organization, including 43% who report to the C-suite.

Access to top managers and connection to the business side of things comes at a small cost for Directors of Community, who are expected to be in the office, rather than work remotely. Just 1-in-5 Directors of Community in our sample works remotely most of the time, and a majority are generally found in the office on a daily basis.

Skills and Training Needs

Directors of Community don’t forget their roots — highly valuing engagement and strategic skills just as strategists and community managers do, but it’s not surprising their biggest training needs revolve around understanding, gathering data and telling the story of the community in a business context. Skills that feed into understanding the value of the community to the organization and to members are also seen as critical.

Want to be a Director of Community?

Your best opportunities may be within your current organization. About half of Directors of Community in our research say they were promoted into their community management role, and nearly two-thirds say they either defined their own position or were approached directly by the hiring manager. Just 13% of Directors of Community say an external job posting led them to their current role.

Are you a Director of Community at your organization? We’d love to hear how your responsibilities and priorities stack up against our survey participants. What is your top community focus for the coming year?

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Want to learn more about the director of community role?

Download our Community Careers and Compensation report for free.

CMSS Stats You Can Use: What’s the Best Way to Network?

March 4, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Community professionals have no shortage of resources to help them grow in their careers.

It’s an exciting time to work in the community management world. Given the rise in community management, blogs, books and other publications are in abundance for those looking to read up on good practices and trends in the field. (You can check out our recommended reading list here.)

Conferences and other networking opportunities that connect community professionals with their industry peers help them stay current with trends in a field that is growing as technology advances. We’ve found that vendor conferences can be particularly helpful when connecting you with people that are struggling with the same challenges that you face – and provide a great way to expand your understanding of the platform you use.

Through our Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 research we found that 51% of survey participants belong to a professional development group – these groups (like TheCR Network) provide an instant network of like-minded community practitioners and a 24/7 support system for often-siloed community professionals. Many cities also host community-focused meet-ups (like OcTribe in San Francisco and the Community Manager Breakfast series in Austin)- check out what is available near you or start your own group!

Community managers may want to take a look at our newest eBook, as well. Defining Community Management Roles provides you with information on salaries, experience, skills and responsibilities for three key community management roles – community manager, community strategist and director of community. Check it out now!

Friday Roundup: The advocacy opportunity, and getting clarity in community roles

February 27, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

February is (almost) over, but we managed to pack a lot into the shortest month of the year. Our main theme of the month has been the State of Community Management 2015 survey, which officially closes today. We are setting new records for responses, which is a great situation, but we want more if we can get them. On Monday, I published a post on how your data is used to make it clear that we get that you are sharing important data and we won’t be sharing it with anyone else.

We also shared a little glimpse behind some of the early numbers on the CMX Hub blog, where we looked at some early results from the survey about advocacy and community leadership programs, and found that while a significant number of companies and organizations are recognizing and rewarding advocates, there is a lot of missed opportunity. See for yourself, and please if you haven’t, take the survey, because there can be a lot more valuable information where that came from.

Meanwhile, we also launched a new eBook this week that community managers and those who hire them may find of value. Defining Community Management Roles uses data from our Community Manager Salary Survey research to shape and clarify expectations and data for three community management roles: Community Manager, Community Strategist and Director of Community. Thanks to Jive for sponsoring this product, and we hope you’ll dig into it on Slideshare.

And if that wasn’t enough, Rachel published a new thought piece on diginomica – the first in a series she has composed. “Enterprise Communities: The New Management Imperative” traces the clear path toward community approach as the only option to succeed in a world of abundance and change, where structures that emphasize control actually cripple organizations.

Or to put it another way, if you haven’t seen our new t-shirts, control is for amateurs.

Interesting readings for the week

Enterprise Communities: The New Management Imperative – I founded The Community Roundtable in 2009 to pursue my belief in the power of communities. Fundamentally, I believe a couple of things that drive my interest in communities. I believe structure drives behavior, and I believe that if you give people access, responsibility, accountability and commensurate rewards, their potential is unlimited. I believe communities and networks are the most effective structures by which to establish this dynamic, and by employing communities, organizations can more efficiently generate value that is shared by everyone who contributes to it, in equal measure.

Making Wirearchy Operable: Questions and Suggestions -Making Wirearchy operable is hard work. Hierarchy .. clear lines and boxes showing who reports to how, with job titles that say clearly what someone is responsible for, is much easier to see, understand, figure out. But it doesn’t respond very well to constantly-changing information-saturated markets and challenges .. every-which-way flows of information about products, services, problems, capabilities and the myriad other activities that make up living in a society

Bosch: When Use Cases Support Connections – “We started in autumn 2012 with the pilot phase. From month to month, we allowed the user base to grow while implementing the use cases that early adopters were discovering when interacting on the platform.” Use cases are anecdotes that show users the steps for achieving a specific goal through the platform. In that sense they are highly educational and can help employees to get up to speed with the tool.

Joining the Customer Journey Using Online Communities – Every marketer from Boston to Bejing seems to be focused on something called the “customer journey.” A Google search on this two-word phrase returns over 627,000 results. It’s one of those “Eureka!” moments – organizations realize buyers start researching a firm’s products and services long before they reach the point of purchase. These firms are now scrambling to find and engage with those customers while they are still on the move and before they arrive at a sales destination decision. But I gotta tell you, this is not news to those of us in the online community world.

Ecosystem, Network or Community: It is the Future of Work – In my book SHIFT I spend a lot of time talking about disruption. The book traces disruptive forces as one old form of economy, dominated by companies, gives way to another, dominated by platforms and ecosystems. This, I believe is the key shift in the economy. It is a disruption with broad consequences for how we work. Also for the opportunity, or life chances, that lie ahead of us. This last point though is the most important. We think of this shift with different terms in mind – ecosystems, networks, community. Regardless of your choice, each speaks to the same future work experience.

New Community and Social Media Jobs

Advertise Your Opening on TheCR Job Board!

Enterprise Community Manager – Akamai, Cambridge, MA

Director, Social Media Strategy – Manulife Financial, Toronto, ON

Director of Global Communications – Social Media – TripAdvisor, Newton, MA

Community Manager – Women Who Code, San Francisco, CA

Social Media Community Specialist – MCP: Faith, Pompano Beach, FL

Communications and Community Manager – New York Univ. – Entrepreneurial Institute, New York, NY

Repository Community Manager – Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL

Community Manager, EA Mobile – EA Sports, Salt Lake City, UT

Social Media Executive Director – JPMorgan, Columbus, OH

Digital Coordinator – Tribeca Film Institute, New York, NY

Community Manager – Bit9 + Carbon Black, Waltham, MA

Community Manager – ThredUp, San Francisco, CA

Knowledge Communities Manager – HP Enterprise Services, Plano, TX

Community Manager, Social Media – Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY

Community Manager – Williams-Sonoma, San Francisco, CA

Magneto Community Manager – Magneto, Los Angeles, CA

Community Manager – Cyanogen, Seattle, WA or Palo Alto, CA

Community Manager – Houzz, Palo Alto, CA

Community Strategist – Context Partners, Washington, DC

Community Career Profiles: All About Community Strategists

February 12, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Engagement and people skills rank as most important skill set for a successful community strategist, but strategic and business skills were most important to nearly 20 percent of those in this role. Strategists also have the highest technical skills among the three job profiles in this research.

External strategists have a wider range of responsibilities than internal strategists profiled and are more likely to be responsible for overall program management. Internal strategists’ top priorities include building the community strategy and roadmap, measurement, internal consulting, advocating for the community, training and consulting with IT on platform integration.

The poster below shares some of the most interesting findings from the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 in regards to the Community Manager Role.

The average salary for a Community Strategist is $85,075
The average Community Strategist has 14.3 years of work experience
38% of external Community Strategists have been promoted

Top three responsibilities for Community Strategists:

Monitoring activity & listening
Developing the community strategy
Measuring and reporting community performance

Top three priorities for Community Strategists:

Specific business outcomes
Activity rates
Membership growth

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Have you filled out the 2015 State of Community Management survey yet? The findings help shape the dialogue about community management and this year, upon completing the survey you can see how your community sits within TheCR’s Community Maturity Model. Learn more at https://the.cr/socm2015survey.

The Community Manager Handbook hits the streets

February 6, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

It’s been a big week (again) at The Community Roundtable, with a brand new publication hitting the streets – The Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes. The Handbook was a labor of love for us, because it gave us a chance to work closely with former and current members of TheCR Network, gather their wisdom and turn it into what we think is an inspiring and fun compilation of strategic lessons and research for communities at all levels of maturity.

This is a publication with themes we will be regularly revisiting, and we hope you’ll head over to download the full report from our friends at Higher Logic and check it out.

In conjunction with the release of the Handbook (and the New England Patriots’ Super Bowl XLIX win), we held our long-overdue CMAD Happy Hour Wednesday evening as well, at the Asgard in Cambridge, Mass. Thanks to all those who attended, and again thanks to all those TheCR Network members who helped make all of our CMAD events happen – those who championed the live events and those who joined us in our CMAD webinar last week.

Elsewhere on the blog, we released another of our posters from the Community Manager Salary Survey, this time a closer examination of the Director of Community role. And Shannon shared some insights on developing advocacy programs from two people who know the subject as well as anyone, Erica Kuhl and Matt Brown of Salesforce. Matt, by the way, discusses the same issue in his case study within The Community Manager Handbook. You can see the full list of profiles here – and did I mention you can get the Handbook now from Higher Logic?

And an important reminder: We need you to fill out the State of Community Management 2015 survey! In exchange for 20 minutes of your time, you get a free report of where your answers put you on the Community Maturity Model, and you contribute to research that gets “under the hood” of community management and provides insights you won’t find anywhere else.

Just do it.

Some Other Interesting Readings This Week:

The Strategic Value of Social Business: What We’ve Learned – Recently, I had the need to gather our latest research from research, clients, and case studies on the established performance of social business for the Future of Work master class I delivered in Paris at Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT 2015 this week. The intent was to answer this question: What specifically is the business value in social-based ways of working today and tomorrow?

This is the Content and Community Strategy OurCrowd Used to Get 7,000 People to Invest over $100 Million – According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, our trust in the financial sector reached an all-time low in 2014. Of course, our lack of trust in longstanding financial institutions does not inspire us to delve deeper. The OurCrowd team in Jerusalem is working to fight that erosion of trust. In less than two years, the OurCrowd community has grown from a nascent idea to over 7,000 investing global members. How have they accomplished such a feat? Content and community. In the simplest of terms, their model for success looks like this: Content creates trust. Trust creates community.

Innovation or Creativity – Working with a client late last year, I finally zeroed-in on why the senior leadership team of a B2B solution provider to the oil and gas industry was struggling to foster innovation. They were misapplying the label of “innovation” when what they really wanted was the appearance of “creativity”. It seemed that they did not have the patience or commitment to building the processes and systems to support innovation in the enterprise, especially as what they really wanted to see was new, unique and surprising outputs in and around existing parts of the business.

Announcing Structure3C – Strategies for the Collaborative Economy – It is becoming clear that a new wave of activity, the Collaborative Economy, is poised to have a large impact on global markets. Many organizations are not prepared for the coming shift, and given my experience with and passion for online community, crowdsourcing and collaboration, I see a huge opportunity to help.

New Community and Social Media Jobs

Online Content and Community Manager, The Library of America, New York, NY

Community Mgmt and Social Engagement Associate, Capital One, McLean, VA

Director of Multimedia, Angie’s List, Indianapolis, IN

Community Manager – EA Mobile, Electronic Arts, Salt Lake City, UT

Associate Community Manager, SEP Media (SABEResPODER), Los Angeles, CA

Social Content Editor, Electronic Arts, Redwood City, CA

Social Media Community Manager, IHE, San Juan, PR

Social Media Manager, Hershey Entertainment and Resorts, Hershey, PA

Community Manager, Marketwired, Toronto, ON

Social Community Manager, Visit Florida, Tallahassee, FL

Community Manager, Codeacademy, New York, NY

Community Manager, Latergramme, Vancouver, BC

CMSS Stats You Can Use: All About Directors of Community

February 4, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Directors of community bring a community management skillset – strong engagement skills, a knack for contentdevelopment – to the table, but spend most of their time on strategic and business objectives. While similar in skill profile to strategists, directors of community spend a great deal of their time advocating for the community, managing the program and managing team members.

Interestingly and despite the fact that it is the bulk of their work, only 33 percent rank strategic and business skills as most important to their role. This suggests that while the business skills are important, a firm grounding in day-to-day community management is critical, and the responsibilities of the role cannot be fulfilled without that grounding.

The poster below shares some of the most interesting findings from the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 in regards to the Director of Community Role. Namely:

The average salary for a Director of Community is $106, 356
The average Director of Community has 16.2 years of work experience
65% of Directors of Community have been promoted

Top three responsibilities for Directors of Community:

Developing the community strategy
Advocating for the community
Developing community policies and guidelines

Top three priorities for Directors of Community:

Activity rates
Specific business outcomes
Membership growth

Are you a Director of Community at your organization? We’d love to hear how your responsibilities and priorities stack up against our survey participants. What is your top community focus for 2015?

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Directors of Community may find a lot of great ideas for their team in the new Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes, available starting February 4. Learn more at https://www.communityroundtable.com/CMHandbook.

Friday Roundup: Community Manager Appreciation, Respect, and Job Searching

January 23, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

In case you haven’t heard – Monday, January 26 is Community Manager Appreciation Day. We’ve talked a lot about our CMAD events in Boston, New York, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Washington, DC, and if you still want to get in before the tickets are all gone, you should probably click on this link to claim one. (It will open in a new window. We’ll wait.)

Having done that, you should know that there is a lot more to CMAD than just T-shirts, balloons, stickers and food and drink. There is the annual 24-hour Hangout, which includes an hour hosted by our own Hillary Boucher, who will be joined by TheCR Network members Patrick Hellen, Kirsten Laaspere and Melissa Potvin, as well as yours truly, to discuss The Power of Programs to Drive Engagement in Your Community. It’s a topic Hillary and I have discussed with each other on a number of occasions, and it is the focus of her section of The Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes, which comes out in another week (although we will have excerpts at our CMAD events.) Content and programs are like the fuel and air mixture in a car engine – without the right mix, you just won’t get going.

We have a lot of other CMAD elements to mention – the launch of this year’s State of Community Management research, the release of the Handbook – but we’ll get to those Monday.

Our other major element of the week was a bit of a headache – we had some major website issues that basically drove us to a new host by Wednesday night – so you may have missed a couple of other posts. I followed up on Rachel’s CMSWire article, Customer Communities: Strategy or Tactic, with a more personal account one here about one industry that seems not fully ready to understand in this day and age that the relationship now comes before the transaction – and how that affects how you treat customers.

And Shannon provided another piece of research from the Community Manager Salary Survey, which reminds us that another important set of relationships – your professional ones – are far more valuable than your ability to find and respond to ads if you’re seeking that next Community Manager job.

Now on to some other great reading.

Some Other Interesting Readings This Week

Why Online Community Managers Don’t Get the Respect They Deserve (And What You Can Do About It) – It is important to point out that no one is denying the enormous impact having a community manager in place has on creating healthy and growing online communities. In their annual report on, “The State of Community Management,” The Community Roundtable found that having a dedicated community manager clearly led to higher community maturity. So, in an age when community managers are growing in demand, how can you prove your value? The answer is rooted in understanding that online communities must serve a bigger purpose for a company than simply bringing people together.

Can Forum Communities Compete with Facebook and Twitter? – In the heyday of ‘online discussion boards’ – when you really could just build it and they would come – the humble forum stood unchallenged when it came to social networking. Then suddenly, along came a whole new concept in online networking led by Facebook, the new kid on the block that everyone wanted to be friends with.

The Never Ending Quest to Dethrone Email – Build a better mousetrap, as the cliché has it, and the world will beat a path to your door. That line of thinking has even been applied to the most rudimentary corners of the technology world: standards and protocols that have stuck around for decades, yet viewed as creaky and badly in need of replacement. But few old-guard standards have seen as many pretenders to the throne as the SMTP/POP3/IMAP email triumvirate has. If only someone could come up with an alternative that did everything email did but better, more securely, and with less hassle, wouldn’t it be worth it?

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

Director of Content Strategy – Electronic Arts, Redwood City, CA

Digital Community Manager – Collabera, New York, NY

Community Manager – Sysomos, San Jose, CA

Communications Officer, Community Management – Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA

Community Manager – Kabbage, Atlanta, GA

Startup Community Manager – MassChallenge, Boston, MA

Community Manager – BSC Solutions, Neenah, WI

Community Manager – BMW Impact Ventures, Woodcliff Lake, NJ

B2C Social Media Content Manager – Move, Inc., San Jose, CA

Community Manager and Marketing – SeeClickFix, New Haven, CT

Communications and Community Manager – Children of Domestic Violence, New York, NY

CMSS Stats You Can Use: How Do I Find a Community Manager Job?

January 22, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

As we close in on CMAD this Monday, we hope there will be a lot of focus on community managers and their careers. Our Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 found signs of an emerging career path for community professionals – but it’s not a path driven by the help wanted ads.

Community management is a profession of relationships – use your network to discover your next role. Most community jobs are not currently found through traditional job listings.

We found in our Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 research that only 27% of community managers found their current role through a job listing. Instead, build your professional community and network to identify new opportunities. Have a brand you are passionate about? Join their community as a member – showing interest and commitment to something you love is a great way to get noticed by a potential employer.

And get yourself more noticed in the places you want to succeed. In a digital industry, reputation matters. Share what you know and seek to connect with others in the industry. Whether you’re active on Twitter or LinkedIn, contribute to a professional development network or association, serve as a mentor, or speak at events, taking the time to help others learn what you know will demonstrate your expertise and commitment. Having a strong professional network increases your likelihood of having the inside scoop on new community manager jobs.

Propose your own promotion

And sometimes, the best next step on your career path is as close as your current desk. If you’ve been in your role for a few years, evaluate your current responsibilities and goals for your community and seek out an opportunity to promote yourself. Think about what you do and need to keep up with the day-to-day tasks in the community AND stay on top of strategic planning – and write a new job description detailing how a new higher level role would better capture the work you do, benefit the community and make the case for hiring someone to help out with your previous responsibilities. Smart employers know the critical importance of retaining top talent, and your approach can help you articulate both your value and the value of your community in important ways.

CMSS Stats You Can Use: How To Win That Community Manager Job

January 14, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

As organizations begin to increasingly recognize and reward the value of good community management the market for jobs has begun to heat up. While at any given moment there are literally dozens of interesting community jobs open around the country (and truly, the world) the competition for these roles is getting stiffer. How can you set yourself apart?

Working with communities requires a diverse skill set and is more complex than many assume.

Through our Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 research we identified community management skills in four skill families:

Engagement and people skills: These skills enable relationship development, understanding motivations and the design of social environments that reward individuals.
Content development skills: These skills enable the creation of multi-modal content and programming designed to build engagement and drive value from multiple segments.
Strategic and business skills: These skills include the program management, governance, advocacy and training required for organizations to understand this new approach.
Technical skills: These skills include an understanding of the need for and implications of platform architecture, integration and analytics.

The best way to differentiate yourself from the competition for community roles is to strength your skillset in the above families – especially in areas that other candidates might be weak. One example? We found only 51% of community managers have graphic-based content skills. Use your downtime to brush up on traditional graphics tools like the Adobe Creative Suite and new tools like Canva and Pitkochart. Not only will you be able to add valuable skills to your resume, you’ll set yourself apart from 49% of the competition!

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TheCR Network offers dozens of skill-building professional development opportunities and a network of hundreds of top community leaders to help you build and grow your skills and expertise. Make an investment in your community – join us!

CMSS Stats You Can Use: The Role and Compensation of Directors of Community

January 7, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

It’s the time of year when many community professionals are making career resolutions – whether to strengthen their current role in their organization or take that next step on the career ladder. With that in mind, it seems like a good time to surface more of the great and useful data from the Community Manager Salary Survey that illustrate the career path of community professionals. So in the coming weeks, we are going to use Wednesday as our day for sharing statistics from our research.

Director of Community Profile from the CMSS 2014

Today, we begin with some information on Directors of Community – once a rare unicorn indeed, but a role now popping up more and more in our community travels. Directors of Community typically own community programs at their organizations, and are responsible for community strategy, governance, team management and budgets. Not every community has a director – instead, a functional executive often takes on these responsibilities. But the Director of Community role is becoming common (as well as some VP of Community roles) in mature communities, in large organizations and in organizations where the community program is central to the business model.

Through our research in the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 we found that true to the title Directors of Community have more community and more general work experience than the average Community Manager or Community Strategist. And there are signs that they are being treated (as they should be) as members of management – with higher salaries and bonuses as part of their compensation – in fact, 65% of Directors of Community receive a bonus.

That high percentage is good news for the Directors, and it also sends a signal that organizations are developing an appreciation for the demonstrable value that community can provide.

Does your organization have a Director of Community as part of your community team? Are you a Director of Community yourself? We’d love to hear your perspective on the challenges you face in your role, the way you demonstrate value – and the information and research that would be most helpful to support you in demonstrating and getting compensated for your value.

Click the link to explore the full Community Manager Salary Survey 2014, now available from The Community Roundtable.

Are you a Director of Community? Build the connections and skills that can move you forward in your own career. TheCR Network provides dozens of professional development opportunities and opens doors to connect you with one of the largest networks of experienced community managers and directors in the world. Join us!