definitions Archives

Recap of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

November 15, 2010 By Rachel Happe

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.”

eModeration Whitepaper: Communities of Purpose

June 23, 2010 By Rachel Happe

The team at eModeration – a community moderation and management services company in the UK – released a whitepaper this week discussing ‘communities of purpose’. They distinguish these communities of purpose from communities of interest in the following way:

Communities of purpose: An online community of people with a common, clear, defined goal.
Communities of interest: Communities built around a shared interest, but with no single defined goal (like Mumsnet or iVillage – although of course, there may be purpose elements within these sites, such as a pregnancy section within iVillage).

It goes on to say that communities of purpose can take two forms, those that have an explicit goal (to provide support to customers or to quit smoking) or those that support a defined event (to raise money for Movember, to crowdsource new product requirements). The paper also defines the various characteristics needed by a community of purpose:

Burning imperative
Value
Relevant to the brand/organizational mission
A clear timeframe
Goalposts that enable quick, regular ‘wins’
Clear guidelines

Overall a good description of the high level characteristics of online communities and if you are just thinking about how to structure a community, a great place to start. One concept that was not touched on that I feel is important is to understand out the outset of building a community is that the lifecycle of a community changes over time. So to does the management of a community change over time – in terms of programming, concentration of community managers’ time, and in what can be expected of the community. As communities mature and become more complex they still have all of the primary characteristics outlined in the whitepaper but are subject to many operational changes which is also something to expect, if not plan for explicitly at the outset.

You can download a copy of the whitepaper here.

A Community? A Network? An Audience?

September 9, 2009 By Rachel Happe

We have a lot of semantic issues in the social media/online space. The term community is particularly problematic because people tend to throw it around for any online group that interacts with content. The problem for me is that communities are not about content, they are about relationships. Relationships do need content/programs/conversations in order to develop – just like they do in the real world – but just because a large group of people come by regularly and comment on online content doesn’t mean there is a true community.

Now I know, a lot of people are not going to agree with me on this but here is how I roughly define some terms for collections of people:

Group: A relatively small collection of people, most of whom know each other. I would say 80%+ of group members have interacted and formed a relationship with one another.

Community: A moderate size collection of people, a large percentage (somewhere between 30 – 70%) of which know and have interacted with each other.

Network: A large collection of people who are accessible to each other in a particular location but only a small percentage of whom know each other personally – perhaps 30% or less. Networks typically contain groups or communities.

Ecosystem: Intersecting networks, communities, groups, companies, individuals, and other organizations within an environment.

Audience: A large collection of people who experience the same content and may react to it but who don’t have relationships with each other (except for those people they bring with them).

None of these collections of people are good or bad, but they each are effective for different outcomes and trying to get an audience to collaborate with each other will be challenging (not impossible, but challenging). Getting a community to drive traffic is not the most efficient mechanism. For organizations, this means understanding what outcomes are needed and what activities the target population is likely to participate in is absolutely critical. And like the image suggests, you can have groups within audiences or communities within networks – architecting your management solution (which includes tools, processes, guidelines, metrics, people, etc.) to fit your strategy is key – as well as understanding the cycle time and investment that will be required to build out that management architecture.

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What Defines a Community Manager?

June 9, 2009 By Rachel Happe

By Rachel Happe, Principal and Co-Founder of TheCR

Flat Hillary What is a community manager?

We all know that the community manager role comes in a wide variety of flavors with different expectations and different levels of responsibilities and often the person in the role isn’t called a community manager – they may be a VP of Marketing, a director of customer support, a business analyst. For us at The Community Roundtable this is a complex issue because it gets at the heart of who we target and invite in to our community. So what makes one VP of support a community manger and another just a VP of support? What does the person who manages a smaller B2B community have in common with the major brand manager who is managing tens of thousands of people?

Tough questions for us but critical to define. If The Community Roundtable can tackle that one issue with some success, I will feel like we have helped move the conversation forward for the whole market. Today I opened up the conversation to my Twitter crowd and got a flurry of activity. Below are some of the definitions and replies:

@Aronado – @rhappe who reps the Co. and has the most consistent & deep relationships with the customers

@megfowler – @rhappe I think you define it according to volume, tone, results, and uptake in terms of community response (also volume + tone)

@AuctionDirect @rhappe – Engagement levels, type of content, metric objectives (ie: proven traffic, conversions, leads, revenue, etc) Stuff like that?

@4byoung – @rhappe Tough call. No consensus in biz as to what a comm manager is / should be. Ability to organize & manage groups is key.

All good suggestions. One issue I raised is that some of the best community managers I know are like the silent hand of God – they don’t necessarily post and get huge reactions… they get others who get huge reactions to post. So direct measurement of short term responsiveness is dicey. A couple of people had really good analogies that I thought were useful to think about:

@gyehuda – @rhappe the analogy I use is Minister of Culture – not the artist, not the mayor, not the police, but still has budget and responsibility

@ayeletb – @rhappe That’s the same issue as communicators – everybody’s job is communication esp leaders so there is a need to isolate com mgr role too

I liked Gil’s the best – in that it is the job of the community manager to create the environment, set the stage, and make sure participants are encouraged and rewarded but not to be the primary actor. That means the measure of the community managers success is the activities of the community members. But what is the timeframe to measure? I would bet that the timeframe is different for different types of communities.

There were some other insights that I thought worth pulling out. 1 – Community managers job is to interface between one group or community and another. @AmberCadabra @DavidAlston and I were just discussing this today – that community managers spend just as much time converting internal advocates as they do with the community they were hired to manage. So the interface or foil role is important to the job description.

@Aronado – @rhappe haha! well, to me it means allowing a situation where two or more communities begin to communicate effectively with one another

There were also some things that people felt a community manager must do:

@DavidWLocke – @rhappe Someone who never posts can’t be the CM. No credibility. Ah, a metric.

So there are patterns we can identify – if not always explicit metrics.

A community manager:

The Community Skills Framework help community managers identify their strengths and find areas to improve their skills.

– Manages the interface between two communities/groups/networks (in effect be a translator)
– Participates in the conversation personally
– Creates the environment the encourages the intended outcome
– Influences activity of the participants

My question is not completely answered – still working out in my mind how I might identify the customer support manager who is a community manager vs. one who is not. Like many things in life, I know it when I see it but I can’t quite put words to everything. Characteristics I would add but have a hard time finding fact-based items to use as identifiers are:

– Must be a connector – (which is different than a hub)
– Have a desire to attract people vs. hunt people down
– Have no need to be right but also have an assertive perspective

Ultimately, you can have an isolated, discrete community manager or you can have a person in a functional role, performing that role in a community or social fashion. Is one a community manager but the other not? How would you decide?

I welcome your thoughts on this. As the community manager role evolves – and gets more strategic – it is will change. Who *should* we at The Community Roundtable consider a community manager?

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