The Community Roundtable

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

Janet Aronica on Twitter and the Evolution of a Startup

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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 podcast series, Conversations with Community Managers continues with episode #18, featuring Janet Aronica, Community Manager for oneforty.
Highlights include:
  • Letting community members create and use “toolkits” as a way to encourage interaction
  • Managing community identity when its image is attached naturally to a larger existing community (in this case, Twitter)
  • How to encourage members to complete profiles
  • Bridging the divide between two distinct communities within the larger community to mutual benefit (social media users and developers)
  • The evolution of a startup; where the intital focus is on the consumer (free apps), getting the business-oriented (enterprise applications) members integrated into the community
  • Three Twitter tools Janet can’t live without

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

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.

Jeff Rubenstein on Working with Product-Knowledgable Communities

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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 podcast series, Conversations with Community Managers (a co-production with The Community Roundtable), continues with episode #17, featuring Jeff Rubenstein, Social Media Manager for Sony Playstation. Highlights include:
  • Working with a community that is not only passionate, but extremely knowledgeable about the company, its products and its industry
  • Idea generation from the community– how PlayStation Share works
  • The seasonality (or lack of it) for communities based on retail products
  • The merging of personal and professional personae online, and the challenges that presents to the Sony PlayStation team

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

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.

Christopher Barger on the “Immerse and Disperse” Method

By

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 podcast series, Conversations with Community Managers (a co-production with The Community Roundtable), continues with episode #16, featuring Christopher Barger, Global Director of Social Media at General Motors. Highlights include:
  • The “immerse and disperse” method of cross-training social media staff; immersing them via a consistent training program, then dispersing them to represent different divisions of the company
  • Using internal communities to identify creative thinkers who might not otherwise surface
  • Why a Fortune 500 company would bother sponsoring small events
  • Measuring results, both long- and short-term, using GM’s participation in SXSW as an example

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

PHOTO CREDIT: Becky Johns

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Megan Murray on Managing Multiple Internal Communities

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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 podcast series, Conversations with Community Managers (a co-production with The Community Roundtable), continues with episode #15, featuring Megan Murray, community Manager and Project Coordinator for Booz Allen Hamilton. Highlights include:
  • Managing internal communities within a large company, and managing to culture towards adoption
  • The challenge of overseeing a total of 535 communities
  • Integrating community participation into employee workflows
  • Privacy, confidentiality, and other HR issues as they apply to community
  • Build vs. buy, in terms of tools

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Kathy O’Reilly on Managing Niche Communities

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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 podcast series, Conversations with Community Managers (a co-production with The Community Roundtable), continues with episode #14, featuring Kathy O’Reilly, Director of Social Media Relations for Monster.com (a Voce client). Highlights include:
  • Handling disparate – but related – audiences via community; in this case, job seekers and employers
  • The challenges of managing many separate niche communities without splintering the corporate mission
  • Using a healthy content library to support community and spark discussion, including use of external contributors
  • Making sure you have the resources (people, content and time) to nurture a community properly
  • Goals: create brand awareness, product awareness and driving traffic

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Michael Pace on the Roles of Email and Social Media

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The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this podcast 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 podcast series continues with episode #13, featuring Michael Pace, Director of Customer Support at Constant Contact. Highlights include:
  • Moving an email-oriented company into social media and community by internalizing the information about social media into the corporate psyche and processes
  • The changing, yet continuing place of email in our communications hierarchy
  • Creating “virtuous cycles” by providing recognition and sharing it with the larger community
  • How social media and community are creating new job roles
  • The “Social Media Council” model of bringing the social media from different departments together- is it necessary to have such a council based on a set of tools?
  • The “a-ha” moment of adopting social media: getting beyond the books and blogs and meeting people to gain knowledge first-hand

 

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Ray Gans on Defining an “Active Community Member”

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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. After an extended vacation, we’re back! Episode #12 features Ray Gans, Community Manager at Actuate (a Voce client). Highlights include:
  • A description and history of the BIRT  Exchange, a business intelligence community run by Actuate
  • Building an effective community with a passionate group of developers
  • Measurement- what to measure, why and how
  • What defines an “active community member?”
  • The importance of (international) face-to-face user groups in augmenting community

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Recap of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

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Last week, I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference and, with Ted Hopton, chaired the Community Development and Management track. There were a several notable changes to this event – the first was that the conference was broken up into disciplines and business processes which helped bring more business owners to the conference. The second was that the newer west coast version of this conference is approaching the size of its east coast counterpart, held in June every year in Boston. In my mind, both of these signal an evolution in the market from experimental to operational and it’s a good sign. There were still a lot of new faces and balancing the needs of those attendees with the needs of E2.0 “regulars” is something that needs to be done going forward.

The community development and management track received very positive remarks (although we’ll have to wait a bit to see the tabulated feedback – please fill in an evaluation if you were at the conference). I was happy to be able to introduce Mark Yolton of SAP (slides here) and Bill Johnston of Dell to the E2.0 conference crowd and both spoke to a packed room. Bill Johnston and a panel moderated by Claire Flanagan with Erica Kuhl of Salesforce.com and Megan Murray from Booz Allen Hamilton gave the audience the fundamentals of community and community management while weaving in their own case studies.

The track then focused on specific areas of community management – engagement, collaboration & project management, governance, analytics & measurement, and building support.  One of my favorite moments from the conference was when Joe Crumpler, an IS Manager at Alcoa Aerospace, mentioned that he finally realized at the conference that there was a name for what he did – community management – and that it really represented for him a new way of managing teams. I couldn’t agree more as I think community management is both a role and a discipline or methodology of general management.

Other interesting comments/themes that I heard over the course of the event:

  • Alcoa has reduced the need for status meetings almost entirely by using social environments, which has direct cost and productivity implications. They’ve seen a 30% increase in work time for their team members. Mark Yolton from SAP chimed in and said they had reduced their status meetings to one time per month/5 minutes per project.
  • There is a big cultural change getting people comfortable with sharing ‘in process’ work vs. finalized documents. Individuals often want to perfect something before it is seen and reviewed.
  • There was a lot of discussion around finding the individuals in a network that are most capable of spreading information or spurring action and a growing realization that networks and communities must be looked at as collections of different segments/behaviors to effectively manage them. Erica Kuhl of Salesforce talked about their efforts to create the various personas that make up their community and how they think of creating effective experiences for each of those personas.
  • Many people are mis-using the ‘community’ term and often confusing it with a target audience.  The two are not the same thing.
  • Week ties are often misunderstood because they quickly can become very strong, relevant ties when the context changes.
  • Orchestrating ‘A Ha’ moments for others is less about evangelism and more about persistence and getting people to see value vs. getting excited by a shiny object

Two of the track panel moderators, Claire Flanagan and Robin Harper, created interesting and very effective panel formats, interestingly both used slides to help structure the conversation just a bit.  Claire moderated a track on community managers and their role and did a compare/contract between the different perspectives on the panel.  Robin Harper used very simple slides, some with definitions, to help guide the panel and audience through the conversation. I felt like both formats allowed room for the discussions that make panels interesting, while giving the audience a framework for putting that conversation into context so they had clear take-aways.

Finally, the best part of a conference like this is the people. Gil Yehuda wrote a nice post about the E2.0 crowd that resonated with me and the highlights of my week included dinner with Community Roundtable members, catching up with friends and colleagues, and conversations with a variety of people that are working on different challenges in this space.  If you are working on community management or social collaboration it is worth putting this conference on your radar and I’m looking forward to the next event in June in Boston.

If you are interested in sharing and collaborating with other professionals in charge of enterprise social initiatives, come explore what membership in The Community Roundtable has to offer.

Photo credit: This photo is from Alex Dunne’s excellent Flickr set “Enterprise 2.0 Conference Santa Clara 2010.”

Drupal Commons – Open Source Social Business?

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Late last week we heard about a new offering from Acquia, an open source software company focused on the Drupal social publishing system and a partner of The Community Roundtable.

The product is called Drupal Commons and it’s focused on expanding the use of Drupal in business. This is an interesting development because it may force proprietary community platforms to re-think their pricing models. Drupal Commons is free. Yes, Acquia will offer a host of value-added services, but the total cost of ownership should be dramatically lower than with proprietary solutions.

Drupal already powers robust communities like Intel’s Atom Developer Program, Novell’s Solution Provider Community and Intuit’s Quickbase Community, so it’s not like Drupal Commons is starting from scratch.

We spoke with the folks over at Acquia and what impressed us the most is that they understand that technology is just a piece of equation in building a vibrant, successful community. Our Community Maturity Model makes sense to them. Keeping your eye on all eight competencies (of which one is technology) is essential if you want to be be successful.

So if you’re trying to do more with less and want a proven community platform, you might want to check out Drupal Commons. You can try out an instance on the Acquia site or sign up for a webcast happening later this week to learn more.

Once you’ve had a chance to kick the tires, we’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

A Community Vacation

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This morning when I peeked in at my Facebook stream, I saw this:

[It’s a grainy screen shot but reads: Dear Fan, it’s summer time and also Nutella® fan page will be on vacation for the next weeks. Our wall will be closed until September 1st. You might want to come back in September to find out our new activities and all surprises we are preparing for you! Enjoy your summer with Nutella®…]

It struck me as bold for a brand to just take a vacation but thinking about it more, why not? After all brands – and their Facebook pages – are run by people like you and I… who like our vacations.  It helps that Nutella’s primary market is Europe and culturally most people take the entire month off so a brand doing so is likely to be more acceptable but vacations are a reality of most people’s work lives. I then got to thinking about communities and some recent calls we’ve done with community managers of periodic communities – FAWM and Movember – and thought about how energized both of those communities were.  Vacations, breaks, and sabbaticals are not just wasted time to be begrudgingly given to people as a benefit to them. Especially in creative disciplines (and by that I mean any information/content/management discipline), people need time to reflect, pause, and consolidate their thinking in order to be energized and engaged in the next task or challenge.

Communities, like individuals, can’t keep up a frenetic pace week in and week out – no matter how interesting the content, the monotony of the activity can cause people to glaze over and tune out.  At The Community Roundtable we’ve addressed that by switching our regular programming during the summer to book discussions and TheCR Summer Camp – essentially different types of activities that mix in a bit of off-topic fun.  We hope that helps focus members when they re-engage in the fall.  The Nutella post got me thinking though… maybe we need to plan a vacation too.

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