community management Archives

Ryan Paugh on Tone and Passion in Community

April 15, 2010 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.

Our third episode features an interview with Ryan Paugh, co-founder (with Ryan Healy and Penelo pe Trunk) and Director of Community for Brazen Careerist.com. From their web site:

Brazen Careerist is a career management tool for next-generation professionals. It exists to give everyone an opportunity to build and nurture a network of trusted peers. Think of it as a 24-7 virtual networking event, filled with people who can help you get ahead in your career.

Conversation highlights include:

The challenge of managing a community where the community is the product
How much attention to pay to “tone” when your community caters to a specific demographic (in this case, “Generation Y”)
The role of passion for your topic/category when managing a community
The freedom to mix in new tools and technology with a community of early adopters

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

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Cindy Melzer on Starting Community Management

April 9, 2010 By Rachel Happe

I had a serendipitous intro recently with a couple of different people from Isis Maternity – a local childcare retail and services company – and we got to chatting about online communities. They have operated in a community-centric way in the offline world for quite some time – bringing parents together for maternity and childcare classes and enabling relationships between parents and children. They have just started to explore extending the relationships they build with and among their customers to the online world. It clearly makes a lot of sense.

Cindy Meltzer who is now their community manager, recognized the opportunity to engage more effectively with their existing Facebook Page toward the end of last year. Like many social initiatives, she started small with some basics and found that Isis’ latent online community was more than ready to engage. She was willing to share with me how she started out and their early results which shows a dramatic increase in members and engagement on their Facebook page as soon as she reached out in a human voice. Community management can start by simply asking questions:

Between October of 2009 and January of 2010, fans of their Facebook Page grew from 699 to 1043 – impressive but not nearly as impressive as the growth in interactions which grew from 7 to 463 per month over that short time. Cindy and Isis graciously shared these stats to show others who are just starting out what a dramatic difference community management can have and Cindy recently sat down with me to talk a little more about her experiences as a new community manager:

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This post is a follow-up and was inspired by our post The Value of Community Management.

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Tim Walker on Community Manager Vs. Social Media Manager

April 8, 2010 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.

Our second episode features an interview with Tim Walker, Social Media Manager at Hoovers. From their web site:

We deliver comprehensive insight and analysis about the companies, industries and people that drive the economy, along with the powerful tools to find and connect to the right people to get business done.

Conversation highlights include:

Knowing when to use what tools… Twitter, Facebook, email, phone or a walk down the hall.
A discussion of the difference between being community manager and a social media manager.
Understanding the balance between “on-domain” and “off-domain” engagement.
What community management and The Dating Game have in common. (!!)

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

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Avoiding the Community Clique

April 6, 2010 By Rachel Happe

Finding people who share the same interests, perspectives, and passions that we do is part of the visceral power of communities. It is inherently human that we love to engage and form tight relationships with people to whom we can relate. We can congratulate ourselves if we’ve built a community where those tight relationships have formed and has created a network of like-minded individuals who promote each other and the community.

And yet, this may be precisely a point of great risk for communities. If the community knows each other well and speaks to each other using short-hand and references to shared experiences, new members can feel horribly out of place and awkward even if the existing members are not trying to be overtly exclusive. This may be OK if it doesn’t matter whether the community grows but for most organizationally-sponsored communities, growth is necessary and evolution is critical as the business needs change.

It’s a difficult conundrum for community owners – we drive toward creating shared experiences and tight relationships between members but it can cause other huge issues to arise. So what to do? Some suggestions:

Create mentoring or explicit links between new members and established members.
Create new member programming and groups so new members feel like they are on equal footing with a set of other members.
Continually encourage established members to make a point of reaching out to new members or lurkers.
Encourage new members to participate and acknowledge them when they do (and encourage others to as well).
Break up public displays of affection – i.e. if a group of members is creating public cliquey behavior ask them to take it private and or use a different channel. This can be a tough judgment call and take some nuance to facilitate but it is worth making sure core members are aware of behavior that is socially exclusionary. You want members to build those relationships too but be aware of when, where, and how they interact – and how it might affect a group of other members.

We all fall in to the trap of getting comfortable in established relationships. As professional community managers, it is our job to constantly be aware of those dynamics and counteract them for the long term success of the community. Breaking up cliquishness is also what often separates organized communities from organic ones without explicit leaders that force the behavior modifications that allow the community to grow, evolve and change.

DJ Waldow on Scale Issues and a Day in His Life

April 1, 2010 By Jim Storer

Our first episode features an interview with DJ Waldow, Director of Community at Blue Sky Factory. From their web site:

Blue Sky Factory is all about your success (Blue Sky), and the idea that success isn’t luck or an accident, but something you make (Factory). Our chosen vehicle for helping you achieve success is email marketing.

Highlights include:
– DJ answers the “isn’t email dead?” question.
– We discuss the difference between social media and community management, and how DJ juggles the two roles.
– DJ describes a day in his life, from monitoring to outreach and response and even prospecting
– We discuss scale issues for smaller companies, larger companies, and franchises

*Special Bonus: DJ mentioned being an expectant father during this recording. Eva Claire Waldow was born Tuesday, March 23, 2010. Congratulations!

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

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Differentiating Between Social Media and Community Management

March 17, 2010 By Rachel Happe

By Rachel Happe, Principal and Co-Founder of TheCR

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? Jim will often say that everyone is a community manager and he is right – everyone has a group of constituents which could be cultivated to drive better performance. However, not all companies want, need to, or can cultivate a community. I may see this differently than many and here is my take:

Community infers the following:

Tight interlinking relationships between a significant percentage of members
An acknowledgment of shared fate or purpose
A potentially wide range of topics/conversations within that shared purpose
A distributed leadership network – sometimes with a single leader, sometimes not
A core membership that is relatively stable and active

Social media on the other hand infers the following:

Socially- or conversationally- enabled content
A loose network with the predominant structure being a hub and spoke model of interaction between an audience and the content creator
Comment/response transactions

To me this means that communities and social media are good for different types of business outcomes.

In low complexity markets and use cases (think Sharpie pens) the focus is on social media because the relationships desired between Newell Rubbermaid and Sharpie customers does not need to be that deep – and the business model cannot support deep relationship development (i.e. spending hundreds on developing a relationship with a customer who buys $25 worth of products doesn’t make much sense). The goal is providing infrastructure and management that drives awareness and a sense of connection to the brand with tens of thousands or millions of customers. Furthermore, proactively connecting customers with other customers doesn’t do much for Newell Rubbermaid because customers don’t need deep references from other customers to make the decision to purchase or to use the product itself. This example is managed by someone who aggregates UGC, publishes content, and responds to people talking about Sharpie – either on the site itself or on a public social network.

Some common social media tools.

In high complexity markets or use cases, communities make more sense. If the decision-making process is
complex and long to reach a conversion, customers benefit greatly by interacting and building relationships with other customers – as well as getting introduced to affiliated product and service providers who can help them maximize their value. Adobe’s design tool communities are a good example of this – customers help each other maximize the use of the tool, creating better adoption and affiliation. Because the price point of the product is higher, the business model can support richer relationship development. These communities are managed by people who are connecting members to each other and to relevant content but may be doing very little content creation themselves.

The confusion comes because in both cases, the person managing the initiative is responsible for being responsive and conversational, for tracking the success of the interactions in driving desired outcomes, and sometimes they use similar tools.

I took a stab at articulating the primary responsibilities of social media managers and community managers.

Social Media Manager:

Content Creation (Blogging/vlogging/podcasting) designed to spur conversation/viral sharing
Responding to conversations about the brand and the content
Ensuring input/feedback gets channeled to the appropriate internal functional group
Curating and promoting UGC
Managing tools – mostly social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) and blogs
Reporting/measurement
Not every community manager looks like this, but some do!
Planning and developing strategies for increasing engagement and conversion

Community Manager:

Welcoming members to the community & acclimating them
Building relationships with key members of the community and influencers
Moderating conversation and encouraging specific topics
Promoting members, making introductions to other members, and encouraging relationship formation
Running regular programming/content/events
Finding internal resources to respond to specific community discussions and coordinating cross-functional needs
Enforcing guidelines/boundaries
Managing tools – might be a combination of enterprise & social networks (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc)
Reporting/measurement
Channeling input and response from community into other organizational processes
Planning and developing strategies for increasing engagement and conversion

Do you agree that there is a difference in these two roles and if so, do you agree with how I have differentiated them? Admittedly, there is a lot of overlap but I believe the intent and focus of each role is fairly unique. For companies looking to make a hire in this space, it is useful to understand whether they need primarily a content-oriented person or a relationship-oriented person.

If you’re looking for way to hone your community management skills check out the Community Careers and

Compensation research, our Community Skills Frameworks and more free community manager resources!

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Need community management resources? Check out our online training courses, our community benchmarks and TheCR Network – a private community for community pros.

The State of Community Management 2010

March 1, 2010 By Rachel Happe

Community management is emerging as a critical discipline for managing social initiatives. From those focused on marketing, to those focused on support, collaboration, knowledge management, human resource development and innovation, community managers are the glue that hold it all together. Yet, most organizations are just beginning to understand how to incorporate community management into their processes and organizational structures.

The Community Roundtable was created to help companies understand and integrate the role of community management into their day-to-day processes. The State of Community Management is our groundbreaking work in aggregating the best practices and lessons learned from our members who have been leading the practice of community management in a variety of contexts – B2B, B2C, marketing, support, and employee oriented.

Our members work in over 35 companies ranging in size from SAP, PerkinElmer, Ernst & Young, Allstate, & EMC to smaller ones like TripAdvisor, SolarWinds, Immaculate Baking, and GHY – provide a rich range of experience and perspectives to share and we are grateful to them for their participation, questions, suggestions, and experience. You’ll hear their collective voice in The State of Community Management and it represents over 180+ years of community management experience.

The State of Community Management is structured around the competencies in the Community Maturity Model – a management framework that articulates the competencies required to effectively manage communities – and links high level analysis to very specific tactical lessons learned about how to execute social programs. It provides guidance that can be used to:

Improve your community management practices
Educate peers, colleagues, and stakeholders
Create a baseline for your community strategy or plans
Identify topics for further research and investigation
Find additional resources

We would like to thank our sponsors – Fuze Box, Powered and Rosetta – who have made it possible to widely distribute The State of Community Management 2010 which was written as a summary of what we learned from members of The Community Roundtable over the course of 2009.

To download the 60+ page report, please tell us a little bit about yourself:

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Wait for It… Emergence Happens

February 19, 2010 By Rachel Happe

One of the most enjoyable and gratifying moments of being a community manager is when members of the community start to step up, create content, proactively initiate something, build relationships with people they’ve discovered, and feel comfortable enough to show more of their personalities. This is all emergent behavior that as a community manager you want desperately to encourage but which is almost impossible to directly induce. In new communities it is wonderful to watch the new shoots of activity happen. But… it goes in fits and starts. Some days it feels like everyone chimes in and some days, it feels like no one is paying attention. One of the hardest things do to – especially if you are getting pressure from other stakeholders – is to wait for it.

Waiting is not a business activity that is recognized as having any value but it’s kind of like lurking – it has a lot more value than it appears to have on the surface. Amber Naslund wrote a recent post about the spaces in between and it gets to something that has been foundational in my thinking for a long time – contrast enables clarity. What I mean by that is that you can’t have success without failure leading up to it. You can’t have light without dark. You can’t have activity without quiet. You would not be able to recognize the good things if you the bad things didn’t exist. But waiting in a business context can kind of feel like goofing off. It is the perfect time to go for a walk/clean out your inbox/etc. Knowing and having the confidence to hold back and not overwhelm the community with your own content and activity is so, so critical. Because if you do it all, your members will see no need or benefit to participating themselves. You can over-water a plant. That doesn’t mean you build it and wait for them to come either but knowing how to seed a little, nudge a little… and then wait…. is the trick.

How do you spend your time while you wait? How do you explain that dynamic to people around you?

Raising Good Communities

February 15, 2010 By Rachel Happe

I am not the first, nor will I be the last to equate community management to parenting. Connie Bensen made the analogy and recently Simon Phillips wrote a post You Teach What You Accept that got at a similar behavior modeling aspect of community management. It’s a very apt analogy and it is a good way to think about community management – knowing what kind of community you want to raise is the first step.

I would extend the point beyond just parenting to all relationships. We get the relationships we are prepared to have at any given point. If we ourselves seek out constant reassurances because we need to feed our own egos, we will attract sycophants and the relationship will necessarily be un-equal. If we have an extreme need to control, we will have relationships with people looking for others to take responsibility. If we are insecure about our own self-worth, we will hang on to abusive relationships for far too long. If we do not know what we want, we will allow others to railroad us. This 1-to-1 relationship dynamic has been well trodden by others – just search for any book on confidence, anxiety, or relationships and you can find a lot written on the topic. All these things that hold true for relationships with each other, however, also hold true for communities and their leaders. The ability of the leader to be confident but not controlling, clear but not dictatorial, tolerant yet firm – in essence their ability to maintain a healthy balance between the needs of themselves and their organization and the needs of the community members – will have a huge impact on the health of the community overall.

While this is not at all new territory on the self-help bookshelf, it is a new and uncomfortable area for businesses. Businesses like to think of themselves as logical, efficient, and non-emotive operating entities. Most people understand at some level that they are anything but that. However, there is a collective denial that organizations have emotional personalities that often come with many of the same positive and negative personality quirks that individuals do. The real problem in denying this is that customers, employees, and partners often get it and react accordingly in order for them to maintain their own health. So if you have others entities creating strategies to mitigate their exposure to the negative aspects of your own business that are not being acknowledged internally, that relationship will be limited – and is unlikely to change or improve until the issues are acknowledged, discussed, and addressed in some way. In economic terms it is an opportunity cost and without acknowledging the issues, it isn’t even clear what the opportunity costs are.

Community managers are often the people who see this relationship most holistically – across business functions – from a customer’s or employee’s perspective. In that way, if the community manager has high emotional intelligence, they can help their companies ‘see’ – often for the first time – how they are perceived by the constituent group that they serve. That, of course, is worth little if the organization is unwilling and unmotivated to hear the input and respond to it. That in turn gets to budgets and resources for community initiatives – both for the community management staff but also for functional and line staff that will need resources to investigate, acknowledge, and address the issues being raised. Without the functional and operational resources to respond, community management teams will find themselves as frustrated receptors of understanding – with no real ability to solve the recurring issues brought to them by the community.

Organizations will fall into two primary categories in this area – much like individuals – those who care to do something about it and those who don’t. Companies who don’t have any interest in improving themselves to better their relationships and grow their business are probably better off stepping down from the social express right rnow.

Building and Sustaining Brand Communities

February 3, 2010 By Rachel Happe

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, having a few wicked smart people take what we’ve done and elaborate on it is… amazing. We are always very impressed with the quality of thinking and communication done by the community management team at Radian6 – led by David Alston & Amber Naslund – now with additional strength from Lauren Vargas, Teresa Basich, and Katie Morse. They have done a tremendous job of advocating on behalf of community management and share our passion for its growth as a discipline.

A lot of people are just exploring what community management means and Radian6 has put together a fantastic eBook on the topic – Building and Sustaining Brand Communities. It covers a lot of ground, including:

Understanding what communities are
Making a business case for community initiatives
How to think about resource needs and what kind of people to hire
Best practices of community management
Measuring communities
The future of community management

In an easy to read and absorb format, they’ve combined the principals of community with the fundamental tenants of good business to create a playbook for companies who want to start engaging more proactively with their communities. I particularly appreciate their emphasis on the resources required to implement a community initiative – it’s not free, even if using public social networks. Developing a realistic strategy and budget that accommodates one’s goals is a really important initial step. I also appreciate the importance they place throughout their book on cross-functional collaboration, whether it is with IT to ensure the systems are in place and effective or it is around early discussions with legal teams regarding the risks and boundaries that might exist. Lastly, predictably, I love how they have interpreted and extended the definition of the Community Maturity Model that we developed.

This is a great eBook to share with colleagues, executives, and customers who may not be very familiar with what community or community management means.

An additional resource that we put together for people to share “Getting your Feet Wet in Social Media & Communities” is geared to be a bit more basic than Building and Sustaining Brand Communities if you want to provide an overview to people just starting to wonder about all the hype around social media.

If you are a community manager or a functional leader working on socializing your processes and looking for more in-depth discussions and best practices, The Community Roundtable is a peer network for that purpose. More about membership can be found here. We’d love to speak with you if you are interested!