executive engagement Archives

Executive Engagement

July 6, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Getting executives engaged in community has been a challenge for community managers since the beginning of community management. For every social CEO out there, there are dozens of C-suite members who “don’t have time,” “don’t feel the need” or “don’t see the point.”

The point is pretty simple – the conversation is happening. Among your customers. In your organization. And it’s happening with or without you. If you don’t know about it – and don’t use the opportunity to connect with stakeholders – then someone else will. And if, as an organizational leader you want your investment in communities to pay dividends, one of the best ways to strengthen your community as an executive is by taking part in it.

That’s lesson #4 in our State of Community Management Monday Facts series. Our best-in-class communities were substantially more likely to have engaged executives than the average in our 2015 survey.

Executive engagement doesn’t just add another voice to the stream. It sets a tone. It says to an organization that community is something that matters to the overall strategy and operations of the organization. And it’s not just something for the CEO to consider. In fact, the data show that while just 1-in-3 CEOs take part in their organization’s communities, that the highest percentage of any C-suite executive. CFOs, COOs, even CMOs take part at a lower rate.

But there are signs of opportunity. More and more training is being created to help executives understand the role that they can play in community, and the personal and organizational benefits that accrue from it. Our The Social Executive framework is now being supplemented by a series of Social Executive Shorts that will soon be available. (Stay tuned!)

Also, the percentage of community budget being approved at the C-level or VP level is growing. Nearly 70% of communities with separate budgets have them approved at the VP level or higher, and that rises to over 80% of best-in-class communities. If an executive has to sign off on your budget, there’s a good bet you can get them paying greater attention to your community, creating another entry point for you to talk with them about the benefits of the community approach.

Want to tap into more great ideas for connecting your executives with community? Join TheCR Network!

Other posts in the #SOCM2015 Monday Facts Series:

#1: Community Teams Build Success
#2: Empowering Your Members
#3: Strategic Investment

Friday roundup: Connecting with executives

March 13, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Executive engagement is always a popular topic in community – and sometimes divisive. “You must get the CEO involved,” says one camp. “Don’t waste your time with hesitant executives,” suggests another. Of course, the research demonstrates it’s not as simple as that – but there is no doubt that a socially-engaged C-suite is helpful for growing your community effort.

We took a look at one strategy for increasing stakeholder support in your community efforts in the Community Manager Handbook. What we found was that the best strategy for getting executives on board doesn’t just include the executives, but also includes others throughout the organization. The Handbook is a great resource – and expect to hear more about executive engagement in our State of Community Management research and some other products we are working on that we will get to tell you about later.

We also threw the topic doors open for #ESNChat, the weekly Twitter chat we host on Tuesdays at 2pm. If you have been a past visitor to #ESNChat, or haven’t but work on internal community, we’d love to hear from you about the topics you’d like to cover in the coming weeks. We have Storified a number of recent chats, too, providing resources and insights for internal community professionals.

Now on to other items from the week.

What we are reading this week

Solving the Inception Paradox – Communities are made of passion, energy, relationships and knowledge. Human beings are the main ingredient. Their inner dynamics are not deterministic, nonlinear and very hard to predict. They are often invisible to organizations as they don’t fit into the neat, hierarchical and transactional mechanisms that have been designed to get work done. Even worse, crucial cultivation, engagement, measurement and change management skills are clearly missing in most large corporations today on the market. Without such competencies and sensitivity, organizations are simply not equipped to recognize communities, to understand them or to see their amazing role in business outcomes.

How the Millennial Workforce is Changing Business – Millennials are entering young adulthood at a unique point in our history, where society is poised for a tectonic shift, particularly around business, leadership, and management. There is a “perfect storm” of trends converging in a way that will generate an actual revolution in business, affecting organizations of all shapes and sizes. Yes, a revolution.

How Smart CEOs Use Social Tools to Their Advantage – Empowerment—in whatever form—requires alignment around purpose, strategic intent and the boundaries within which decisions can be made. Otherwise, it could result in confusion, contradictory behaviors and chaos. Savvy CEOs use fire to fight fire, effectively employing digital media inside their organizations to create the kind of alignment and shared purpose they need.

Are We Asking the Right Questions of the Digital Workplace? – Questions like “where do intranets fit with ESN platforms” serve as yet one more reminder of how deeply stuck we are in technology-centric thinking. The conversation needs to turn to what digital services do people need to get their work done, and how do we design these tools to fit people’s work styles and working conditions. If we start with the employee in mind, we get a clearer view of how the capabilities both intranets and ESN platforms bring can help people work smarter together. People usually need a mix of both.

When Your Intranet and Enterprise Social Network Get Married – Pop the champagne and get ready to celebrate: your Intranet and Enterprise Social Network are getting married! As we prepare to toast this joyous integration, remember that the Intranet and the ESN are strong, independent entities with many individual merits. As in any marriage, each partner must remain unique with its own purpose. By tying the knot, however, the Intranet and the ESN will complement each other’s strengths (and minimize their weaknesses), improving the overall employee communication experience.

Jobs in community and social media this week:

Community and Growth Manager, Project Ignite – Autodesk, San Francisco, CA

Community Associate – Sidecar, San Francisco, CA

Senior Producer, Social Publishing – CNN, Atlanta, GA or New York, NY

Social Media Specialist – Mariano’s, Chicago, IL

Social Media Community Manager – ITR, Knoxville, TN

Community Manager – Shapeways, New York, NY

Community Manager – Amazon Game Studios, Seattle, WA

Senior Manager, Real-Time Content and Community Management – Capital One, McLean, VA

Community Manager – ChAIR/Epic Games, Salt Lake City, UT

Community Manager – Toca Boca, San Francisco, CA

Getting executives engaged in community? Do it, but don’t forget everyone else!

March 9, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

We talk a lot about executive engagement and sponsorship throughout The Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes – and with good reason. Our research shows that Best-in-Class communities have sharply higher rates of executive engagement than average. We also have seen the power of engaged leadership in driving adoption of community initiatives across organizations.

Because of those statistics, it’s not surprising that a lot of community professionals put executive engagement high on their priority lists for their communities. Getting executives excited about and engaged in the community will trickle down.

How do you start?

Keep it simple – recognize the time and focus limitations of busy executives
Keep it personal – one-to-one has impact and is worth the investment
Make it easy – give executives tools that make engagement simple
Make it relevant – help executives understand both the power of their participation to the organization and its positive impact on their specific responsibilities

But that doesn’t mean you can ignore the rest of the organization in your efforts to build stakeholder support.

At Fidelity Investments, Kirsten Laaspere and her team spent hours engaging executives about the launch and importance of their internal community. But, she advises, spending time with all levels of the company was critical to the initiative’s success.

Using webinars, established communication tools and Q and A sessions, they made sure word about the community, named Ribbit (after Fidelity’s unofficial frog mascot), got out to the entire organization. “We knew we needed to get executives on board, but we needed to get the associates excited too, so that when executives said, ‘Hey, we should try this Ribbit thing,’ they could jump right in.”

For organizations with skeptical leadership, having partners who can add strength to the community case and have the ears of management can nudge hesitant executives to dip that first toe in the community water.

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Want more strategies to overcome common challenges facing community professionals as they start, build and grow their communities? Download the Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes.

Executive Engagement Matters

May 22, 2014 By Jim Storer

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

We’ve heard a lot of talk in the last few weeks about the link between executive support and community success It seems like executive adoption is on the mind of many community practitioners, and with good reason. In our State of Community Management 2014 research we saw that communities with CXO participation are more likely to have a fully-funded community roadmap. We also found (and were a little surprised) by how much executive participation increased general engagement, particularly when the CIO participated.

In best-in-class communities, 58% include CEO participation vs. average CEO participation rates of 36% – those are the same communities that are most likely to be able to measure value, have a fully-funded roadmap and have advanced community leadership programs. This brings us to Community Fact #03 – executive engagement matters.

You can review more findings related to community maturity in the State of Community Management 2014. This post is the third in a 10-part series highlighting some of the most thought-provoking data from the SOCM 2014 – brought to you via a fun poster – perfect for sharing on Twitter, hanging at your desk, or printing out and waving around your next community strategy meeting.

You can view Fact #01 and Fact #02 or download the whole report today.

The State of Community Management 2014 from The Community Roundtable

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