By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.
This week the themes of engagement and community success kept popping up – both
inside and outside the Network. Rachel posted an insightful look at the The Business Model of Engagement, this week’s ESNChat focused on tips for measuring community success, and a private working group call lead by Jennifer Honig highlighted mapping organizational values to community success.
In this call, members added their perspectives to further develop the framework outlined earlier. This framework is in the process of being applied by a small subset of members, after which the framework will be further refined. Exciting work! Are you thinking about how to measure the value and success of your community initiatives? We’d love to hear how you define and track your community successes.
Things We Are Reading This Week
The Business Model of Engagement – Engagement is a hot topic. For those of you who have heard me speak, you know I don’t think all engagement is created equally and I think there is far too little focus put on the purpose behind the engagement. You can have high engagement and very little value – look no further than the comments on a general news site. The other common problem is you have no engagement at all, which happens far too frequently inside organizations where people feel like the only outcome of sticking their head up is becoming a good target.
Tools, Schmools: It’s Really About Community Management – “What we really need is our own private company Instagram, or maybe a chat-app just for employees” said no reasonable manager ever. So why is it that we’re seeing those very tools pop up in the enterprise market?
Is Your Community Approach a Hollow Bunny? – We have learned a lot about communities recently, thanks to a new service we launched last year – the Community Performance Benchmark. We use the research and knowledge we’ve developed with the annual State of Community Management survey to analyze a community program’s maturity on the eight competencies of the Community Maturity Model.
A 3 Point Plan to Preserve Institutional Expertise – Social learning ranks high today among the priorities of learning and development professionals in businesses large and small. It’s easy to see why — studies have found that informal knowledge sharing among colleagues is responsible for 70 to 80 percent of the information employees learn on the job.
Our Community Superheroes Share Their Superheroes, Part 3 – Our first two installments (#1 and #2) included thoughts from 12 of our superheroes – Alex Blanton, Matt Brown, Charissa (Carnall) Cowart, Eileen Foran, Jerry Green, Patrick Hellen, Ted Hopton, Bill Johnston, Kirsten Laaspere,James LaCorte, J.J. Lovett and Lesley Lykins. Today we finish up, with the people our superheroes highlighted and the reasons why. If you go back through the three posts, you’ll have a great list of about 40 thoughtful leaders in the community space to follow as you wrestle with your own community challenges.
Can’t Kick a Bad Habit? You’re Probably Doing It Wrong – I had just finished giving a speech on building habits when a woman in the audience exclaimed, “You teach how to create habits, but that’s not my problem. I’m fat!” The frustration in her voice echoed throughout the room. “My problem is stopping bad habits. That’s why I’m fat. Where does that leave me?”
Building Journalism With Community, Not For It – At the end of last year Kristin Hare of the Poynter Institute was collecting tech resolutions for 2015 and asked for mine. Here is what I wrote: “In 2015 I want to help more journalists build with their communities, not just for their communities.”
How to measure the success of your internal social network – This is something we have been asking ourselves from when we started to use social media internally. At Philips, it has been evolved from very basic to more advance data. We demonstrate the power of internal social networking through data supported by infographic illustrations so it is easy for stakeholders to understand how our internal social network is being used.
New Social Media and Community Jobs
- Social Media Manager – Brook Street Inc. – Chicago, IL
- Operation & Community Manager – F14 – Oklahoma City, OK
- Teanaway Community Forest Manager-WMS Band 1 – Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs – Cle Elum, WA
- Community Association Manager – The Management Trust – San Luis Obispo, CA
- Community Manager – Bitly – New York, NY 10003
- Community Development Manager – Habitat for Humanity – Appleton, WI
- Associate Community Manager – WeWork – Washington, DC
- Platform Evangelist / Community Manager – NoshList – San Francisco, CA
- Alumni Community Manager – Global Women’s Leadership Network – San Jose, CA
- Customer and Community Marketing Manager/Specialist – SmartBear Software, Inc. – Somerville, MA
- Community Manager – Eaze – San Francisco, CA
- Senior Community Manager – Wargaming America – Emeryville, CA
- Manager, Editorial and Community Engagement – PillPack – Somerville, MA
- Chief Blog Editor – Rackspace – San Antonio, TX
- Marketing Internship – Chicago Pneumatic – Rock Hill, SC
- Web/Social Media Communications Assistant – Susquehanna University – Selinsgrove, PA
- Social Media Editor – NBC Universal – Miramar, FL
- Social Media Specialist – Wayfair – Boston, MA
- Social Media Coordinator – Hendrick Motorsports – Charlotte, NC
- Digital Marketing Strategist – GREENLEAF CREATIVE LLC – Centerville, OH
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The Community Performance Benchmark uses our extensive research database to provide organizations with a comparative community maturity analysis and recommendations to enhance community performance. Learn more about the CPB and other services from The Community Roundtable on the Services page of communityroundtable.com.
In case you missed it (and therefore the title of this post makes no sense to you- yet!) we 
