community manager Archives

Faces of Community Management: Rebecca Braglio, Pet360

June 23, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

This month’s Face of Community Management is TheCR Network member Rebecca Braglio. Rebecca is the Community Engagement Manager at Pet360 and has one of the most interesting paths to community management that I’ve ever heard. Check out her story and learn how her (very cute) dog helped her find a new career as a community manager.

Note from Hillary: Rebecca is one of our super users inside TheCR Network and I’m always so grateful to catch up with her. You might find us chatting in virtual Happy Hours, connecting on a Roundtable call, or hanging off a trolley in San Francisco in between conference sessions. 🙂 I appreciate her warm and compassionate demeanor and how she helps make the network a welcoming place for new members. We’re lucky to call her a member!

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95% of TheCR Network members (including community mangers like Rebecca) agree that the content and peer input available inside the Network improves the quality of their work. Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

The End of DIY Community Management and the Rise of the Community Executive

June 16, 2014 By Rachel Happe

By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.

The discipline of community management is growing up. For us at The Community Roundtable it’s easy to see as the conversations have shifted from how we best execute on day-to-day community challenges to how do we transfer that knowledge and how do we integrate community processes into core business processes. But it’s also changing the role of the community manager – we see responsibilities of members of TheCR Network shifting to include more:

Internal consulting
Training/coaching
Building governance for other community managers
Program management

From my perspective this is a great thing – it means community management is extending to everyone in an organization and becoming they new approach to management. But it is also disruptive, because not all community managers understand this shift and many don’t (yet) have the skills to execute effectively on these new responsibilities. Add to this, for community managers who have been in the role for a while, they likely got started in a context where there were no formal resources or services available to them and they had to figure everything out on their own. They experience a tension between wanting to grow in the field and get more authority within their organization and still preferring to do everything themselves.

This struggle between wanting to do everything yourself and needing to scale is not uncommon – most people experience this in some form or another as they gain responsibility within their field. In order to become a director or VP, it is an absolute necessity to stop doing everything and start assembling a team of resources, both internal and external, to which you can delegate the doing. Once you do that, your responsibility is to help create a shared sense of purpose, the operations to support your point of view consistently and to mentor those who are on the front lines. Practically, that means you need:

Documented standards and playbooks
Training/Onboarding solutions that frame the challenge
A common way to assess and track performance, at various levels
Common tools and resources available to your whole team
External resources that have more cost-effective expertise or scale, to complement internal resources

In many ways, these new responsibilities fundamentally shift the day-to-day work of community management as it becomes more about assembling the right resources, managing budgets and hiring than planning community programs or moderating discussions. Not everyone wants to or needs to make the leap but it is helpful to understand the trade-off; if you want strategic authority and responsibility, you need to learn executive skills.

The other challenge for community managers who do make the transition to senior roles have is a hesitation to ask for and spend money – they are so used to operating in a context of scarcity that they assume they have to do everything themselves. We see this all the time with TheCR Network membership fees – when we talk to executives, membership for their community team is an easy and obvious yes but community managers themselves often assume they don’t have budget before they even ask.

Times have changed – community programs are now much more strategic, we have data and case studies that demonstrate community effectiveness and the role of community management is much more well understood. However, community managers still often fail to recognize that:

If you have built a reasonable and itemized roadmap that is tied to business outcomes, you are likely get at least some of what you ask for but do not limit your asking to your direct supervisor – you may need to go up a couple of levels.
You cannot scale without spending money and it’s not about the money per se, it’s about scaling your impact. If you do not build a roadmap, ask for budget and bring on resources that help you extend your reach, you will hamper your ability to grow your community program and its impact. If the community is effective, that harms the organization as a whole.

Growing up is a bumpy process and different people like different stages of maturity better than others. It’s worth really thinking about which part of the process and work you love – and seeking out opportunities that are weighted toward those responsibilities. The tide of community management is rising and bringing all of us along with it – enjoy the ride!

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Looking to take your career in community management to the next level? 92% of members agree that TheCR Network supports and advances their personal and professional goals. Learn how our research, access to peers and experts, targeted content and exclusive concierge service can help you achieve your goals.

Friday Roundup: Saying Thank You, 30,000 Times

June 6, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

UPDATE: The State of Community Management has now been viewed more than 75,000 times! Learn more about The Community Roundtable and what we do for hundreds of organizations and community managers by clicking here.

The first week of June has been an exciting one here at TheCR. The State of Community Management 2014 had it’s 30,000th view yesterday! We are thrilled that the research is connecting with and engaging community managers around the world – and we can’t thank you enough for reading along. We’ve also spent a good chuck of this week brainstorming upcoming projects, new research initiatives and more content to help members, and non-members alike advance the business of community at their organizations.

Also related to the SOCM 2014 we released our 4th poster in a 10-part series of fun facts from the report. You can check out the latest here. Do you have a favorite fact or stat from the report? Send it our way and it just might be selected as a future poster!

The Email Embargo Policy: Turn Smartphone Off and Chill!: Be honest. How often do you check your email? Do you scroll though messages before work? In bed? On vacation?

Let Your Employees Mix Business and Personal Time at Work: While taking time out of the workday to run personal errands has previously been frowned upon in the corporate world, a recent infographic by Captivate Network on “homing from work” – doing personal activities during the workday – shows mixing work and personal time may be the best way to rectify work/life conflict.

Spark Creativity with These Tips from Pixar’s President: Growing up, Ed Catmull was transfixed by two things: Disney films and computer science. He went on to earn his PhD in the latter, but he never forgot the magic he discovered in animation.

LiNC 14 social media conference: five key takeaways: Marketers and business leaders from global brands BuzzFeed, Sony and Telstra debated the future of social marketing and the value of online communities at the LiNC ‘14 conference in San Francisco.

Why You Hate Work: The way we’re working isn’t working. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re probably not very excited to get to the office in the morning, you don’t feel much appreciated while you’re there, you find it difficult to get your most important work accomplished, amid all the distractions, and you don’t believe that what you’re doing makes much of a difference anyway.

3 Tricks to Make It Easy for Busy Executives to Participate in Your Online Community: As easy as it would be to show your executives this data and have them immediately begin actively engaging your online customer or member community, we all know that isn’t likely to happen. Executives are busy.

New social media and community jobs:

Senior Community Manager – Social Listening Expert at iCrossing- New York, NY
Senior Manager, Online Community Management Consulting – at Socious – Mesa, AZ
Social Media Strategist at Analytic Recruiting, Inc.- Baltimore, MD
Social Media/Community Manager at Extreme Networks- Salem, NH
Social Media Community Manager at AAA Auto Club Enterprises- Costa Mesa, CA
Social Media Manager at Villa- Philadelphia, PA
Community Manager at Meredith Corporation- Los Angeles, CA
Community Idea Exchange Manager at AT&T- Atlanta, GA
Community and Contents Manager at OneTraction- San Francisco, CA
Social Media Community Manager at A.T. Kearney, Inc.- Chicago, IL
Stylist Community Manager at Stella & Dot- San Bruno, CA
Social Media Community Manager at Cardtronics- Houston, TX
Community Manager at Electronic Arts- Los Angeles, CA
Community Manager at Cie Games- Long Beach, CA
Content/Community Manager at Lawley Insurance- Buffalo, NY
Community Manager at Blizzard Entertainment – Irvine, CA

It’s so exciting to see so many new community manager jobs cropping up every week all around the country! We’ll see you back here next week. We’ll share the recap from this week’s awesome Community Manager Spotlight webinar with Ian White and more!

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Are you a Community Manager looking to take your career to the next level? 92% of members agree that TheCR Network supports and advances their personal and professional goals. Learn how our research, access to peers and experts, targeted content and exclusive concierge service can help you achieve your goals.

Faces of Community Management: Luke Sinclair, Sitrion

May 27, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Another month in the books and another chance to share with you a new Faces of Community Management profile. This month we’re highlighting Luke Sinclair, Director of Community Management at Sitrion and member of TheCR Network. I was lucky enough to meet Luke this month at Sitrion’s annual conference – Collective 2014. In addition to being the emcee of the event, Luke delighted in emulating Oprah and giving away free books at every turn. Collective was easily the most engaging event I’ve been to personally and a large part of that was Luke’s infectious personality (the Australian accent doesn’t hurt either). Luke even managed to get a room full of pretty serious looking people snapping selfies left and right. He is a true delight to work with and best of all he really, really loves his job in community management.

Without further ado: Luke Sinclair!

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Did you know that TheCR Network members work with all kinds of communities? In fact, about 25% work in either internal or external communities and 50% work with both! No matter what kind of community you work with membership in TheCR Network will save you time and improve the quality of your work by connecting you with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

Friday Roundup: J.Boye Recap Edition

May 9, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Photo Credit: @jedpc

We kicked off an exciting May of travel by tagging along with Rachel as she attended the J.Boye Web & Intranet Conference in Philadelphia. Rachel, along with three TheCR Network members, presented at the conference, and if our twitter stream is any indication, a great time was had by all.

Next week Rachel and Shannon will visit Orlando for Collective 2014, and the week after Jim, Hillary and Jillian will trek to the West Coast and visit San Francisco for Lithium’s LiNC. Will you be attending any of these events? Let us know – we’d love to catch up in person!

Didn’t get to attend J.Boye? We’ve pulled together all our favorite moments from the three day event in our very first Storify and included it at the end of this post.

Don’t worry – we didn’t forget the links (or the jobs!) this week:

Framework: Collaborative Economy Honeycomb – “The Collaborative Economy enables people to efficiently get what they need from each other. They use powerful technologies that enable Crowdfunding, Peer-to-Peer lending, the Maker Movement, and the Sharing Economy. If you look closely, the crowd is becoming like a company: self funding, designing, producing, and sharing what they already have.”

To Be Heard, Turn Down The Volume – “What is it about the Internet that has made everybody so sure of themselves? You’d think the level of disruption during the past 20 years would have had the opposite effect. Instead, the number of people stepping onto their virtual soapboxes and telling the rest of us what to do and think has exploded. They opine with such surety, such clarity, such force.”

New Webinar: Community Manager Spotlight with Ian White – This 30 minute live webinar on June 3rd at 2pm ET will focus on Ian’s community journey and his team’s innovative use of a community customer support model. His team recently won a silver award for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service at the eighth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. This webinar will include a Q&A – have your questions ready.

Want to Succeed in Social Business? Invest in It .- “The good news is that 76 percent of communities have approved strategies. This is a great indication that organizations and executives can now envision the value communities will contribute to their business and suggests a maturing market. The bad news? Only 35 percent communities have approved and resourced roadmaps.”

Community and Social Media Jobs:

Community Executive at 1000heads – Greater New York City Area
Senior Community Manager at Reputation.com – Redwood City, CA
Global Director of Social Media BlackRock USA – NY
Social Media Copywriter at Thrillist Media Group – NY
Director Social Media Marketing at Capital One – Mclean,VA
Associate Director, Social Media at Fuel Freedom Foundation – Irvine, CA
Pro Sports – Social Media Associate at Workinsports – Minneapolis, MN
Online Community Manager at TechSoup Global – San Francisco, Remote Work Possible
Community Manager at HERE, a Nokia business – Boston, MA
Social Media Community Manager at MDG Advertising – West Palm Beach, FL
Community Manager at Carolina Herrera – New York, NY
Social Media Strategist at Mason Zimbler – Austin, TX
Community Manager at CyberCoders, Newton, MA
Community Manager – Unreal Engine at Epic Games – Cary, NC
Director of Social Media at Bentley Channel Group – Washington, DC
Social Media & Community Manager at Zoosk – San Francisco, CA
Content & Community Manager at The News Hub – London, England
Community Manager at NPR – Washington, DC

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Culture and Community

May 5, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Great look at culture from Smart Talent

After a month-long love fest highlighting our 5th anniversary and the release of the State of Community Management 2014 we are back to business as usual here on TheCR Blog. This month we’re going to take on the idea of culture and community – specifically how community management can impact a company’s culture with a special deep dive on culture findings from the State of Community Management 2014.

Before we jump in, I wanted to share some of my favorite posts about community and culture from around the web. Over at The Community Manager, Emily Castor, Director of Community Relations for Lyft, talks about how incorporating rituals into 1:1 interactions can foster deliberate culture:

“For Lyft this includes the pink mustaches, riders sitting in the front seat, fist bumping and rewarding drivers with shout-outs and recognition within their newsletters, events and online communities. Your community members want to feel like they belong, and rituals give them an identity.”

I love the idea of defining rituals and letting your community run with them. Having the equivalent of a secret handshake or the “Jeep wave” for your members can build both good feelings, loyalty, and brand awareness. Over at GovDelivery, Joseph Porcelli takes this idea and steps back, defining community culture as,

“… the shared set of beliefs, expectations, values, desires and rituals that influence the ways in which individuals, groups and teams will interact with one another and collaborate to achieve common objectives.”

He then shares a fantastic template that his team uses to facilitate this type of thinking. I’ve included a screenshot here, but it’s definitely worth checking out in entirety.

Finally, in an “oldie but goodie” post Sandra Ordonez shares “5 Guidelines for Community Managers to Have Cross-Cultural Fluency” over on pbs.org. These are basic, but important, fundamentals when thinking about defining culture through community:

1. Watch Your Language
Language is understood in conjunction with context and body language — two things that are hard to infer online.

2. The Golden Rule: Tolerance
Any successful diverse community usually ensures that all members feel comfortable to be themselves.

3. Be a Good Mediator
Your community looks to community managers for cues on how to behave.

4. Educate Yourself on Different Views
As someone who is native in two languages, I sometimes have what I call “spanlexia” moments. I’ll say something in English that is grammatically correct, but only makes sense in Spanish.

5. Admit Weakness
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Honesty and respect are really the only two cornerstones that 99 percent of all communities demand.

There is so much more over on the original post that provides a really nice framework for setting expectations in your community. How do you think about defining and supporting culture in your community and through your community efforts? Do you have a favorite article or blog post you’d like to share? We’d love to hear how you tackle these topics and are excited so share some of our findings over the next month!

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Did you know that 95% of TheCR Network members agree that the content and peer input improves the quality of their work? It’s true! Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

Faces of Community Management: Jamileh Delcambre

April 28, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable. The last monday of the month always means a new Faces of Community Management profile – you can check out previous ones here and here. This month we’re excited to introduce you to Jamileh Delcambre. Jam is a community manger at Thomson Reuters and has been an active member of TheCR Network since 2011.

“Jam is one of those community members that makes TheCR Network so valuable. She inherently understands community and she’s generous with her (great) ideas and expertise. One of my favorite things about Jam is that she exudes authenticity. I’ve read some of her communications with her community members and she does an amazing job of balancing the professional tone of her company with her authentic and very real voice. I count myself lucky to work with her!” -Hillary, Community Manager at TheCR Network

Download Jam’s profile here: Faces of Community Management – Jam

—– Did you know that TheCR Network members work with all kinds of communities? In fact, about 25% work in either internal or external communities and 50% work with both! No matter what kind of community you work with membership in TheCR Network will save you time and improve the quality of your work by connecting you with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

Announcing The State of Community Management 2014

April 22, 2014 By Rachel Happe

By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.

The fifth annual State of Community Management report is here!

A lot has changed in the five years we have been publishing this research and the State of Community Management 2014 continues to push the boundary of what we collectively know about community management. As the discipline has matured we have been able to translate much more of it into quantitative data. This year’s report is chock full of data, segmented and delivered in ways that will help you plan and act.

The report includes:

Key Findings
Findings by Community Maturity Model competency
Guidance on using the research, by competency
Best practices from TheCR Network, by competency
Additional resources

What you’ll see in the data is that community management is standardizing – but still not mature or completely integrated into core business processes. Most community initiatives now have approved community strategies, which is fantastic – and quite a change from the early days of shiny object syndrome. However, all to often those strategies are not mirrored by approved and resourced roadmaps, pointing to one of the biggest challenges in the space today – funding the resources and programs that will translate aspirations to reality.

Also encouraging is that the vast majority of best-in-class (most mature) communities can measure value, indicating an important shift in the market from something that was considered innovative and unproven to something that is understood and measurable.

This research was the result of a community effort that included TheCR Network members who guided our exploration, experts who helped tease out best practices, TheCR team who all contributed in ways large and small and finally our sponsors – DNN, Enterprise Hive, Jive, Lithium, and Sitrion – who made it all possible.

The collaboration across our community allowed us to bring this rich data to you. We hope you find it interesting but more importantly, we hope this data helps you succeed. If it does, we would love to hear about how you used it to plan your roadmap, educate stakeholders or justify your budget.

Happy reading!

The State of Community Management 2014 from The Community Roundtable

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Interview with a Community Veteran – Michael Pace

April 15, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Our last interview with a community veteran is with one of our earliest members and most vocal supporters – Michael Pace. Michael has worked tirelessly to advance the ideas and practice of community customer support and has been a great leader in and out of TheCR Network.

You can connect with Michael on twitter, or follow him on his blog: thepaceofservice.com.

1. How have you seen the community management space evolve over the past five years?

Interesting question. Oddly, I feel I have seen two separate paths for community management over the last five years. Path #1: I call this the status quo path. People who still preach and practice exactly the same way they did 3,4,5 years ago. They seem to be adding very little to the conversation, and continually regurgitate the same old same old spiel. Many of them do not believe you should or could quantify the value of your community, and believe in many of the original “isms” of yesteryear. Path #2: I call this the edge of the box path. This is the true evolution of community management. They look at how to leverage the skills, competencies, and tools to push our thought on what can be done. Folks interested in social business have moved down this path, because it is bigger and immensely more valuable than just social media networks. They have operationalized social, their communities, and tools to distill the insights necessary to move forward.

2. What are some of the biggest differences from when you first started out in community management?

The biggest difference (for me) from when I first started is the incorporation of customer service into the social space. In ’09 it was still all Marketing and PR, except for Frank Eliason at Comcast. Finding others interested in social/community management for customer service was very scarce. In a lot ways I appreciate that open range today, because I may have fallen lock step with the crowd if it wasn’t so scarce. It pushed me to find ways to make social work for customer service.

3. What would you do differently in your first community management role knowing what you know now?

Executive champions, executive champions, executive champions! Did I mention executive champions? Without executive championship, you are going to be Sisyphus pushing your rock up the hill each day. I had relatively strong executive championship, but if I was to do it again, I would have made it bigger and more pronounced.

4. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Five years from now, I see myself with my own customer service shop/contact center. But it wouldn’t be your father’s contact center. It was be rich with efficient communication and collaboration.

5. Did you have any community management mentors along the way? Any specific advice they gave you that stood out to you?

Not just saying this for the purposes of this questionnaire, but Rachel and Jim were my primary local mentors. I had a Facebook page to keep track of idiots I didn’t like in high school, and a LinkedIn page to source job opportunities. Beyond that no social training what so ever. They helped me ramp up so quickly that I was speaking about social customer service in front of audiences within a few months. Best advice came from Rachel. She told me my Twitter stream was boring. “Who wants to only hear about email marketing all day. Show your personality. If I am interested in you, I’ll be interested in what you share.” Three months later, I was making Movember shower videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glPko3I-EHc&list=UUZLGMCmn9LcpxOaRwm8vIow

6. What would you tell someone who has made the career leap and is in the early stages of their career in community or social business?

If someone was making the career leap over to social and community management, I would tell them regardless of what you believe this role will entail, you should continue to focus on core business competencies, as well as social networking skills. Core business competencies should include (but might not be limited to) communication, influencing others, analyzing data, teamwork, customer focus, results focus (getting things done efficiently), and people development and management. Odds are is your community management role will be cross functional, and you will need to (continue to) learn how to develop these competencies in order to effectively advocate for funding/people, deliver on cross functional goals, communication activity and vision, and gain insight.

7. If you could go back and give yourself advice five years ago what would you say?

“Hey this Facebook and Twitter thing may actually take off, go get yourself involved.”

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Recap: Community Manager Spotlight Webinar with Heather Ausmus

April 3, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

In March, Jim chatted with Heather Ausmus as part of our ongoing Community Manager Spotlight webinar series. Heather has used the Community Maturity Model in her community work and shared how she has developed a plan through FY18 using the model as a framework.

Heather Ausmus is the Online Community Manager at Johnson Controls Building Efficiency where she manages the Connected Community, an external community for customers, partners and prospective customers. She recently also started managing Johnson Controls Building Efficiency social media programs. Prior to Johnson Controls Building Efficiency, she helped consumer brands develop and implement social media programs and was the Marketing Manager for a global consumer brand.

Watch the video below to learn more about Heather and her team’s use of the Community Maturity Model in their work, and hear her answers to great questions, including:

How she has proven the worth of the community internally
How she was able to scale her effort with such a small team
What tools she uses to run reports, capture the data and methods of distribution
How her community team engages with product management teams

Have a question for Heather? You can connect with her on Twitter or leave them in the comments below.

This content has moved inside The Network.

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Did you know that 95% of The Network members agree that the content and peer input improves the quality of their work? It’s true! Membership in The Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining The Network can improve the work you do.

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