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The Community Roundtable

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

(Roundtable) When Growing Your Career Means Leaving Your Community

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In light of recent layoffs in our industry, it’s hard to ignore how it impacts our communities and business outcomes.  How do you say goodbye to the community you’re leaving behind? How do you advance in your career? How do you navigate the job market? These are some questions we’d like to have a meaningful conversation about and learn from each other because they affect our meaningful work.

So come join us in a discussion panel-style roundtable call with Amanda Petersen, Shannon Emery, and Meghan Bates.

5 Tips for Launching an Online Community

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The idea of not planning for a grand launch day for your online community is hard to consider. You’ve spent months project managing and planning for the launch, so of course, you want to celebrate!

But, having a huge to-do to launch a new community can set up unrealistic expectations that tend to follow the hype of a grand online community launch. The hype and tunnel vision surrounding a grand launch can skew your metrics for a long time. This can cause the community’s maturity model to be locked in too early as it has not had the opportunity to evolve to see what kind of online community maturity model truly fits).

You don’t want to encourage short-term, campaign-style thinking vs. a long-term community engagement outlook.

You want to start as you plan to continue. And we recommend starting small, leaving room for incremental and sustainable gains.

1 – Know your timeline Despite the advice above to NOT have an online community launch day, you should…consider a launch day (if you need help, we have an entire resource bundle on how to launch an online community). Not a real “grand launch day”, but a launch process that has a concrete end date. Spend time defining a pre-launch checklist then you can focus energy on determining what tasks you need to get done and by when. Make sure you prioritize tasks and save enough time for each plus wiggle room. Surprises will come up!

Beta programs are your friend. You can roll out membership to a small group of members to seed the community with content and engaged comments. You can use your beta users to test the community, then invite the rest of the group for a more formal launch.

2 – Don’t be afraid to pre-seed content One path to easy pre-seeded content is to curate content from other areas of your business. This might include library documents/entries, resource threads, thought leadership questions, and existing user programs. Consider populating your community with “low hanging fruit” questions – this allows members to participate in a low-risk way and will help them become comfortable engaging with more dense conversations.

Mobilize your super users and key stakeholders to be the “life of your party”. Find the people who will get others excited about the space and support them in their participation. Offer them opportunities to collaborate with you and take a larger role in the community if they want it. This is a great way to lay the groundwork for an advocacy program down the line.

Whenever you are talking about your community or thinking about how to make your community critical to your organization, ask yourself, “How can I offer something here, that cannot be found elsewhere?” This is the motivation that drives people inside the community and keeps them coming back. Instead of sending an email or searching on for information, you want your members to come to the community first. Add content and create programs that give them a reason to do that.

3 – Create new member welcome programs Our research has shown that robust new online community member welcome programs have an outsized impact on long-term engagement. It makes sense – having someone welcome you, give you some ground rules on behaviors, give you a tour of the community, etc., makes new members more comfortable, and you’re more likely to dip a toe in a new community if you have ideas for how to do it.

One of the hardest things to remember is that while the new member process can seem boring and rote to the person conducting it, to the new member it’s all brand new. Luckily, automation has come a long way in the last few years, allowing even the smallest community team (we see you, lone wolves) to have a big impact on the way new members start their community journey with you. You can review five best practices for new member onboarding programs here.

4 – Designated a launch team – Make sure you know who will be helping you launch the community and make sure that team has the necessary skills. Do you need IT involved? What about customer success? At this point you’ve pre-seeded your community with a group of super users, so you’ll also want to include these advocates as a part of your launch team. Get their thoughts and feedback on how the community functions and engage them as things roll out. Make sure everyone involved is clear on timelines, their responsibilities, and what is expected of them.

5 – Communicate, Communicate, Communicate You cannot over-communicate your community launch. Create a communications plan so that you’re sure to spread out the activity over time. You’ll want to vary the mediums and tactics you use to reach your entire audience. It’s important to ensure you’re reaching all users consistently.

You can’t do this all yourself, so use your team, advocates, and stakeholders to help spread the word. Be flexible and open to the fact that this might take time. Everyone’s membership base is different and some things will work, others won’t. Remember that things won’t always work right away.

Be prepared to evangelize! You’ll be selling your community and the value of your community. Perfect your elevator pitch and what your community brings to the table and know how to present it to different kinds of people. Not everyone will “get” it right away and that’s okay, keep trying and sharing the message.

The Role of Communities in Innovation

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Communities play a critical role in innovation. Whether in the middle ages or now cities, in particular, are critical to innovation. Cities are a type of community that produces a high cadence of collisions between a diverse set of individuals. This collision of people and ideas allows people to converge on what is meaningful and interesting and then to find ways to scalably address the opportunities that arise from that meaning. The obvious current example is the innovation generated in Silicon Valley.

However, in the conversation around online communities and innovation, the connection to innovation is not as clearly understood. A lot of the discussion is focused on ideation and input. As someone with a background in innovation and product management, this represents only a tiny portion of innovation – and a tiny portion of the opportunity.

Emergence in the White Space

To better understand the connection, let’s consider how innovation happens. The front end of innovation starts with a feeling; a frustration about what is or excitement about what could be. It’s vague and unformed. These feelings are best expressed through art because they are still unarticulated. To me, this provocation to develop new sensibilities or understanding is the crucial difference between art and graphics or crafts. It’s the emergence of something new in the white space around what currently exists.

An example of this that I love, is how Billy Porter uses clothing to make an artistic statement. To me, this is an expression of frustration at current gender norms and expectations. It challenges us to think more broadly about what it means to be a man, a woman, or neither. It opens up space for something different.

Developing Shared Meaning

Once we have something expressed through art we can show it to others, discuss it, and together find the words to express its meaning. We can translate it into something more defined. We find words. We argue about them. We refine them.

I use art in workshops to help develop a shared perspective on things like culture and leadership, which many people find hard to articulate. Selecting images that represent those things and then having a conversation about if, how and why those images resonate helps people put more specific language to what feels vague and squishy. It also helps uncover divergent perspectives, which can reveal underlying issues or mindsets that are making progress hard.

As more and more people engage in developing shared meaning, it is absorbed into the culture and people’s mental models. It becomes normalized. This process requires dialog, trust, and relationships. The more frequent and deeper the discussions, the faster art transforms into meaning and then into concrete opportunities.

Norming and Optimizing

Addressing concrete opportunities allows something to become normalized, predictable and even routine. People have a shared understanding and expectations about how we interact with the new concept and the value it has. It becomes a pattern that can be applied again and again – a template.

Once a pattern is established, you can apply technology to the pattern so it can be optimized and repeated with a lot less effort. Critically, this also allows innovation to be measured, further optimizing it.

This is how innovation has always worked but it has been hard to see because translating something from emotion to language to patterns to metrics has often taken decades – especially if the innovation was complex and expensive and the value hard to understand.

As communications, collisions, and engagement have increased in speed thanks to the Internet and the global online community it created, the speed of innovation and adoption has fundamentally changed. Innovation gets initiated, understood, and translated into concrete and meaningful products and services within months.

This increase in adoption has largely been the unintentional benefit of people clustering naturally in online spaces to engage. However, in the past few years organizations are finally starting to see and optimize these networks – these communities – to explicitly pursue learning, change, and innovation. One great example of that is the community ecosystem at ESRI, a geographic data company that works with a huge range of industries and applications, all of whom are developing unique ways to realize value from its data. By intentionally structuring and managing the community, its partners can access, learn, and develop solutions more quickly, accelerating shared value for the entire ecosystem.

Capturing the Value of Innovation

Communities are, at their core, the way people have always come together to learn. They provide the space, relationships, collisions, and trust necessary to create shared meaning, to iterate on emergent ideas, and to norm new patterns and behaviors. Offline that complex system is hard to understand but now that many communities are online, we can see, measure, and optimize them.

We can also measure and project the value and speed of innovation, through engagement in communities. In the 2019 State of Community Management research, we found that the growth in engagement and value of communities closely matches the innovation S curve. The implication is that the better an organization can foster, develop and sustain communities, the better they will be at rapidly turning market frustrations and insights into opportunities and then into solutions.

Friday Community Jobs Round-Up – 03/03/17

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job boardEach Friday we compile a comprehensive list of the latest jobs across community management. Be sure to check back in each week to see the latest listings.

Know of a great community opening that we’ve missed? Let us know and we’ll add it to the list!

  1. Community Manager – Blackbaud – Charleston, SC/Austin, TX
  2. Social Media Community Manager – Julep – Seattle, WA
  3. Social Media and Digital Marketing Manager – Coaching Psychology, Ltd. – Boston, MA
  4. Social Media Manager – Cannaverse Solutions – Oakland, CA
  5. Social Media Manager – Carbonated.tv – San Ramon, CA
  6. Customer Success Online Community Manager – SnapLogic – San Mateo, CA
  7. Manager of Partnerships, Community Advocacy and Engagement Services – Kansas City School District – Kansas City, MO
  8. Social Community Manager – Clarins – New York, NY
  9. Content Marketer/Community Manager – Superior Fireworks – Orange Park, FL
  10. Community Manager – AlphaProTemps, Inc. – Neenah, WI
  11. Social Media Strategist – 24 Seven – San Francisco, CA
  12. Senior Content Strategist, North America Marketing – Oracle – Redwood Shores, CA/San Diego, CA/New York, NY or Reston, VA
  13. Vice President, Employee Communications – Nuveen  – New York, NY
  14. Internal Communications Specialist – WellCare – Tampa, FL
  15. Internal Communications Advisor – Hanger, Inc. – Austin, TX
  16. Senior Manager, Medical Communications – Genzyme – Cambridge, MA
  17. Mgr Internal Communications – Novant Health – Charlotte, NC
  18. Internal Communications Manager – Leidos – McLean, VA
  19. Communications Manager – The TJX Companies, Inc. – Marlborough, MA
  20. Director, Global Communications – 505 Games – Calabasas, CA
  21. Internal Communications Leader – Hearth & Home Technologies – Lakeville, MN
  22. Internal Communications Specialist – O’Reilly Auto Parts – Springfield, MO
  23. Internal Communications Manager for Americas Markets – EY – United States
  24. Internal Communications Director, Global Supply Chain – Schneider Electric – Nashville, TN
  25. Senior Communications Partner – USAA – San Antonio, TX
  26. Knowledge Management Officer – The World Bank – Washington, DC
  27. Knowledge Management Consultant – Farmers Insurance Group – Phoenix, AZ
  28. Knowledge Management Content Manager/Trainer – Booz Allen Hamilton – Fort Belvoir, VA
  29. Wellness Program Administrator – Akamai – Cambridge, MA
  30. Community Consultant, Salesforce Success Community – Salesforce – San Francisco, CA
  31. Functional Coordinator, Document Management System – University of Maryland University College – Largo, MD
  32. Portal Manager (Jive) – MobileIron – Mountain View, CA
  33. Communications Manager, IC – Intuit – Mountain View, CA
  34. Jira Business Analyst – Marketo – San Mateo, CA
  35. Community Consultant, Salesforce Success Community – Salesforce – San Francisco, CA

Best practices for getting a community management job

  • How Do I Find a Community Manager Job? – 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.
  • 50 Skills of Community Management – The Community Skills Framework represents the five skill families and top 50 skills that are required to build a successful community program.
  • How To Win That Community Manager Job – 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?

TheCR Connect 2016 – By The Numbers Recap

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It’s no secret we’re sort of data nerds over here – I mean have you seen the SOCM lately? Here’s something you might not know though – numbers aren’t my favorite thing – but I’ve never met an infographic I didn’t like. (Longtime readers might remember our brief infatuation with #infographicthursday!). That’s why recapping our latest community manager event – TheCR Connect – through the lens of an infographic seemed perfect to me.

Here’s a little peek into our two day community workshop last month. If you were there I’d love to hear your favorite stat – maybe we’ll even update the infographic with the best ones!

Social Media is Broken…Communities Can Help

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Social media is broken – you need only look at political discussions on Twitter, gamer gate, or online bullying.

In 2015, organic reach on Facebook page posts was 2.6%. Social media is, at its heart, a media model that thrives off of more; more content, more clicks, more attention. Because of that, social media sites wants more content and more engagement – not necessarily better content or better engagement.

This media frenzy, designed to trigger our emotions, assaults and overwhelms our fight or flight response system – increasing our anxiety, depression and anger. “Individuals with higher levels of emotional reactivity may be prone to anxiety and aggression, which illustrates the implications of appropriate emotional reaction in the fight or flight response.” It also fractures our society into splinters – making us retreat to our corners to feel safe.

The tail is wagging the dog.

What went wrong?

Remember a decade ago and the promise of social media? It was going to connect the world and offer boundless opportunity. That’s nothing close to what you are likely seeing on your Facebook wall in relation to the election. That’s not bringing us closer together…

We mistook what was easy for what was meaningful – either to our organizations or to individuals. We reduced ‘engagement’ to a switch – either people are engaged, or they are not.

In reality, engagement is a huge spectrum of behaviors – some more valuable and meaningful than others. But there are few standards or definitions around what engagement is.

Community managers have been unpacking engagement for decades and unlocking its secrets. We’ve turned what community professionals know about engagement into TheCR’s Work Out Loud model, which categorizes different types of engagement based on their core value – validate to increase comfort, share to increase connection, ask & answer to increase trust and explore to increase partnership.

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This more sophisticated understanding of engagement allows community managers to measure the culture of a community and, more critically, to orchestrate higher levels of higher value engagement. It also helps stakeholders understand the value of different types of engagement and, with it, the value of strategic community management.

Communities can do that because they create contextualized, trusted dialog that brings people together – reducing segmentation and extremism, as shown in this Harvard Business School case study of the Wikipedia community.

We’ve been working on a community ROI model at The Community Roundtable that is focused on the value of answers and the networked value of answers – because answers form the core of any relationship and all knowledge workflows.

Communities – by providing a trusted peer environment – create a business model that scales the most expensive workflows in organizations; sales, product development and innovation, team collaboration and learning and development.

In this simplified example below, you can see how a community approach can reduce the cycle time and increase the profitability of your marketing and sales process.

screen-shot-2016-11-15-at-9-46-19-amSocial media has proven superficial – and because of that weak. Communities generate more tangible value without as many risks.

If you are interested in more, here are my slides from a presentation I delivered at Inbound 2016

Want even more? Follow Rachel and The Community Roundtable on Twitter and join our Facebook group.

Throwback Thursday: All About Us

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By Amy Turner, The Community Roundtable

As I quickly approach my one year mark at The Community Roundtable (crazy how fast time flies!), I thought it would be fun to feature a few oldie but goodie posts about our team. It’s been an incredible year for me as I learn how to embrace a work-out-loud, collaborative and social business environment – a huge departure from my traditional marketing agency background. With that said, there still are countless posts, articles and research our team has published over the past eight years that I’ve yet to uncover, and I continue to get blown away by all the amazing content this small (but powerful) team has produced.

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This week’s #throwback thursday post is all about us – The Community Roundtable team.

  • Infographic: The Community Roundtable’s 5th Anniversary When we started thinking about how to celebrate our five year anniversary we found a way to share our excitement and highlight some of the coolest moments in our first five years. Please enjoy our retrospective infographic – celebrating our most memorable milestones from 2008 until now.
  • Meet TheCR Team: Rachel Happe If you had asked me a decade ago whether I wanted to start a company, the answer would have been a resounding no. But a funny thing happened on the way to the circus – technology, communications and organizational development collided in a way where my experiences gave me unique insight – some of which is personal and some of it through my previous work.
  • For TheCR Network Eyes Only – TheCR Network Resource Bundle. Are you a member of TheCR Network? Have you checked out this amazing resource bundle of research, reports, and strategic exercises compiled from years of member-driven conversations, work and calls?

Want even more #throwbackthursday action? Check out all our throwback posts!

Throwback Thursday – Building Your Community

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By Amy Turner, The Community Roundtable

A community is only as successful and effective as the people who are part of it. When first starting out, or perhaps re-energizing and re-building a stale community, how do you build a strategy and lay the foundation for a successful one?

Architects team discussion on blueprints in office

We’ve compiled some of our best resources for starting and building a community, including a detailed toolkit for starting on your journey, tips for building a thriving community, as well as a unique perspective about how on-boarding a new community member is similar to welcoming a new baby into the world.

This week’s #throwback thursday post focuses on starting and building community.

Want even more #throwbackthursday action? Check out all our throwback posts!

Throwback Thursday – Community Management 101

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By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable

community management 101Looking to get started in community management, or just need a refresher on the basics? Check out these community management 101 resources! We’re highlighting the fundamentals of community management in this week’s #throwbackthursday post – including an exclusive glossary of community management terms for members of TheCR Network!

This week’s #throwbackthursday focuses on Community Management 101 – getting back to basics with some fundamental community definitions.

  • Defining Community – The challenge with the word “community” is people mean a lot of different things when they say it, but there are few definitions. Joshua Paul at Socious took a crack at this issue and provided some great suggestions on how to differentiate between several meanings of the word, highlighting the preposition that comes before it. Is it ‘The community’, ‘our community’ or ‘a community’?

  •  Differentiating Between Social Media and Community Management – As someone who works with social media managers and community managers, it seems the line between the two types of positions is not terribly clear – and maybe doesn’t need to be – but I think it would be helpful to distinguish between the two.  Why?

  • Community Types and Terms Defined – There still seems to be a lot of confusion and disconnects when people are talking about their community or talking with The Community Roundtable about how being a member of TheCR Network can help them.  And it’s not surprising.  Much of the lingo and concepts are still very new in organizations and understanding what lens you view community practices through is important.

  • Connection, Friend, Member – Who’s In Your Company’s Online Ecosystem? – We came across this article last week about defining your online community to higher ups, and it resonated because people mean a lot of different things when they use the word community. As the article so aptly states, it is hard sometimes to understand if you are “referring to the online community at large, the community of people that your organization interacts with online, or an online community where your customers, employees, or partners can engage one another and support your customers or members.”

  • For TheCR Network Eyes Only: Community Management Glossary – Are you a member of TheCR Network? Check out this exclusive glossary of dozens of community management terms – and add the ones you think need to be there!

Want even more #throwbackthursday action? Check out all our throwback posts!

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Six Tips for Selling Social Media and Community to the C-Suite

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By Amy Turner, The Community Roundtable

Jaime PunishillNeed some help convincing executives why your organization needs to be more active in social media and community? TheCR Network spoke with Jaime Punishill and discussed practical strategies for selling these important social functions to the C-Suite.

Set the Control Function Areas of the Organization Up for “Wins” 

The control function areas refer to legal, compliance, fraud, risk, information security, IT, etc. These folks see everything that you are presenting to them in terms of risk and thus have trouble absorbing the opportunity sets. Therefore, Jaime’s strategy is to deal with these groups first, realizing they are perceived to be the blockage to all business so you can move forward versus continually jumping hurdles. 


Ask for Probability and Worst Case Magnitude

When dealing with these control functions, be aware that for every objection they give you, it will be framed up as a 100% probability and the worst case magnitude. A best practice in this instance is to always lead with the question: “Give me probability of magnitude.” When you actually press them on it and get to real probability and magnitude, now you have the ability to frame a business case around opportunity vs. cost vs. risk.

Translate Social Media to the Organization’s Business Objectives

Always present your case in relation to your business objectives. It is the only language that the C-Suite understands. Furthermore, when faced with presenting a crash course in social media and community to help get executives or the control functions on board, do not overwhelm them with too much information. The critical thing is to convince them that you know how to translate social media and community into business objectives.

Frame up the Riskchess pieces

Sometimes, legal will ask you to put disclosures and disclaimers on everything that is the printed word. That just is not going to work, but they will push for it without even a valid argument. If this happens, tell them to frame up the size and the risk of doing it or not doing it. Then, armed with that information, you can present your case to a business head and see if they are willing to accept the risk.

Show the C-Suite What your Competitors are Doing with Social Media

Show all the things that competitors are doing wrong and that you would never do. This gives legal and the executives a sense of the broad sets of activities, and that you are responsible, careful, cautious and understanding the legal concerns. It also simultaneously shows how you are trailing behind the competition.


Skinny Down the Ask

How do you handle the second stage of social media, i.e. to garner the funds to help the community grow? Jaime explained that the best way to do this is to get creative and “skinny down the ask” to make it small enough to do the initial experiment that proves the business case. Also, gain an understanding of how your organization manages the P&L and find a business case that people can rally around.

Remember, it takes a risk-taker to sell social media and community to the C-Suite. If that is not you, find a risk-taker in your organization who can support you. Are you that risk-taker, or do you take a team approach to selling to the C-Suite? Share your tips and insights with us!

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