By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Quick show of hands: do you consider email to be your friend, or a foe to be vanquished? We’ve been thinking a lot about the ways we communicate with our communities this week. Yesterday’s #ESNchat focused on the very email question above and unearthed some strong opinions and great advice about communication methods and how they relate to a community’s success.

After a great call with collaboration strategist Michael Sampson in early March we brought back to continue the discussion on facilitating successful collaboration efforts within an organization, including how communication can effect collaboration. The first call discussed a roadmap to success with collaboration tools and approaches and and this week he continued the conversation by exploring how to cultivate collaborative behavior at your organization.

We’d love to hear your answer to the email question posed above – tweet us your feelings and tag it #emailfriendorfoe and we’ll share a roundup of responses next week!

Things We Are Reading This Week

Why Strong Customer Relationships Trump Powerful Brands – Since the birth of e-commerce, marketing experts have disagreed about the future role of brands. Some have predicted that digital technologies will hasten the demise of brands because customers will have ready access to information they need to make purchase decisions, and “brand” will therefore become less relevant. Others have prophesied an increasing importance of brand as a simple way to evaluate choices in an era of information overkill.

Influence is a Side Effect of Interestingness –  We listen to people who say and do interesting things. This still leaves the big question of what interesting means. Take for example John Oliver, a comedian who first came to prominence as a cutting-edge political stand up in the UK, with a string of television appearances and sold-out solo shows at the Edinburgh Festival. His HBO show Last Week Tonight has become for many a go to source of amusement — and a way to get up to speed on what is going on in terms they can understand.

I need to build a community strategy. Where do I start? – Whether you are starting from scratch with a new community, or taking over an existing community that could use some love there is a good chance you’ll be tasked with building a community strategy. This can be both daunting and exciting. In our State of Community Management 2014 research we found that the foundation of a successful community really is the presence of a well-defined strategy- one that integrates social tools and methods with business goals and processes. A good community strategy also aligns an organization’s goals with member needs setting you up to succeed in both keep engagement high and provide ROI.

The parable of Ray’s Helicopter Company – Once there was a man named Ray who was the CEO of a company that made helicopters. In his youth he had been an avid pilot. Soon after, he started the company with a few friends. Over time, Ray’s Helicopter, as the company was known, grew rapidly to command an impressive share of the world market. Every day he was happy to go to work, and most days his job energized him even more. His workers respected his passion for quality and by and large were quite happy to work for his company.

Should You Enable ‘Big’ Social Business or Team Collaboration? – There are few business decisions more critical than determining how to provide an enabling environment for a workforce to operate efficiently and effectively. Yet the key levers of the modern digital workplace are still relatively unfamiliar to most executives.

New Social Media and Community Jobs