leadership Archives

Honoring Our Retiring Member Advisory Board Members

January 21, 2019 By Jim Storer

Image from Charrow

At The Community Roundtable, we are fortunate to work with amazing people and companies, helping them make strategic assets out of their community programs. We have always relied on our customer-members to help us prioritize and develop our research, services, and training.

In 2017, we launched our member advisory board composed of clients and partners who are changing the world of work – both internally and in how organizations build relationships with customers. We couldn’t be prouder of the company we keep.

Member advisory board members serve one year at a time, and no more than two years in a row. We partner with our advisory board members to receive feedback and direction on:

Opportunities in the market
New product offerings
Research roadmaps

We want to acknowledge and thank our retiring board members who have served us so well.


Chris Catania, Customer Community Program Manager, Strategist at ESRI Served 2017-2018	Amy Dolzine, Manager, Modern Workplace, Enterprise Technologies at EY Served 2017-2018	Lori Harrison-Smith, Enterprise Community Manager at Steelcase Served 2017-2018	Monique ven den Berg, Senior Manager, Community Engagement at Atlassian Served 2017-2018

These community leaders are doing phenomenal work at their organizations and contributing to the advancement of the community management industry. These are community leaders to watch, follow and learn from – and we encourage you to connect with them!

We’ll be announcing our 2019 member advisory board in the coming weeks and look forward to introducing our returning and new members for the new year.

Real rewards for community advocates

August 3, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Where’s your college diploma?

If you’re like most people, it’s hanging on an office wall, sitting in a drawer, or stuck in the back of a closet. It’s nice to have, but the recognition that you graduated from the University of Western Maine or Generic Ivy U. in itself doesn’t do that much for you.

What works for you are the things you learned, the connections you made, the way it taught you to think – the things with real value. It’s great to be recognized as a graduate, but it’s your college experience, not your diploma, that you remember – and that makes you more likely to give back to your alma mater.

The same is true in your community.

Your top community advocates and contributors might welcome recognition and rewards, but the State of Community Management 2015 research finds that best-in-class communities do a better job of giving their advocates rewards with real business value – such as early access to products and access to the community team or executives.

That’s not to say recognition and badges don’t matter – they are a valuable way to say thank you, and let others in the community see the people you count on to contribute, giving others someone to emulate and see as the leaders you want them to be. Being an advocate takes time and effort, however, and to make advocates a valued part of the community, make sure you are giving them real value in return.

Community advocacy programs are a major focus of the State of Community Management 2015, and a regular topic in TheCR Network. Thought about joining? Learn more at communityroundtable.com/TheCRNetwork.

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Want to contribute to our next round of research? Get involved!

5 reasons to recognize the superheroes in your online community

May 5, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

This month, our new and brilliant Community Management Fellow, Georgina Cannie, kicked off a wonderful and equally new feature of TheCR Network. Starting this month, we are recognizing members of the network as TheCR Network Superheroes, complete with badges on their network profiles. As you may have noticed, the superhero theme appears to the be the theme of 2015 for us here – we highlighted 2o Community Manager Superheroes in the recently-published Community Manager Handbook – but whatever you call the best members of your online community, recognizing their work should be a critical piece of your community management efforts.

Here are five reasons why.

Your superheroes model the best behaviors.

In communities as elsewhere, the old saying “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” often rings too true. You’re putting out fires, settling disputes, moderating touchy situations and fighting tooth and nail for resources – and your superheroes are providing value with their actions and words. Your superheroes help you tackle the headaches you have to deal with at the very least by not adding to them, and they are doing what you wish everyone would do. One of our May superheroes, Jerry Canaday of MasterCard, is a frequent answerer of questions and a provider of resources, and has led member workshops and a recent #ESNChat on ‘The Future of the Intranet.’ Who doesn’t want a member like that?

Your superheroes aren’t just your most experienced members – and that’s awesome.

Another superhero from this month, Ivonne Grantham Smith of Skillsoft, is a super example of how newer members of the community provide value. As a new community manager when she joined, Ivonne was well-suited to take advantage of the roundtables, calls and resources TheCR Network provides. She jumped in with both feet, working out loud, asking questions and providing the interaction that is the lifeblood of any community. Now, she’s giving back, sharing the resources she is developing for her own community. The student becomes the master – in a friendly, community sort of way.

Recognition highlights unseen actions.

Just as we talk about the iceberg effect of community management – where 90 percent of the real work of running a community goes unseen beneath the surface – there are members who play critical roles behind the scenes who deserve recognition for their work. Emily Wade of Market Street Solutions has been an active member and has helped organized member Roundtable calls – just the kind of work that no one would notice normally, even though they should.

Your superheroes are worthy of public praise.

We’re fortunate to have a community with a lot of Jerrys, Ivonnes and Emilys, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take every chance we can to recognize them. The public praise isn’t just a stroke of the ego – it’s an important element of raising up the expertise of the members, to get them using each other as resources and to have the opportunity to matter. That scales the community, it scales you as a community manager, and, no the good feeling it gives those who get recognized doesn’t hurt.

Recognition builds advocates.

Lastly on this list – recognition programs set the stage for building even bigger and better advocacy programs. As we have already hinted at in past posts about the State of Community Management 2015 report, strong multi-tiered advocacy programs have a remarkable effect on the vibrancy and effectiveness of communities to achieve business outcomes. Recognition is a great reward, but even more powerful when it is one level of an advocacy program that gives members a chance to generate more value from the community than they put in. This generative model is the base on which the most remarkable communities build their advocacy programs – and it is the model on which they can build their organizations.

So what are you waiting for? There are heroes out there…

Community Management Case Study: The Evolution of a Community Advocacy Program

February 3, 2015 By Jim Storer

One of the perks of being a member of TheCR Network is access to fresh community management programming every week. Our community manager, Hillary Boucher, does an amazing job of tracking down interesting and engaging case studies from every stage of the community journey.

This past year Hillary and members of TheCR Network sat down with Erica Kuhl and Matt Brown from Salesforce to discuss a case study of Salesforce’s MVP program. While I can’t share the whole Roundtable call with you here, there are three key best practices I wanted to share for building out a community advocacy or leadership program.

Note: Matt is also one of the case study participants in the Community Manager Handbook, which was released February 4.

If you don’t current have any formal community advocacy or leadership programs, they are something to consider for your to-do list: community advocacy and leadership programs correlate to overall community maturity, the number of full-time community managers, the ability to measure value, higher levels of executive participation, higher levels of product team and subject matter participation, more user-generated content, higher levels of conversation vs. content sharing and more robust community tools

1. When building a community advocacy or leadership program, avoid over-governing the program with too many policies at the beginning. In this case, Salesforce wanted to grow the program with their MVPs. As they started to grow and enlist new MVPs, they added policies, guidelines and expectations in tandem with the growth.

2. Understand from the onset of the program the plan to leverage your advocates. This is critical in order to guard against the advocates feeling used or abused. It also contributes to a successful transition from an informal to a formalized program.

3. Ensure the organization elicits the feedback of the top advocates in the creation of the program. If this group likes the program and has an opportunity to refine it, it will be accepted by the greater population of advocates.

Do you have a formal community advocacy or leadership program in your community? What tips would you add for someone starting on the ground floor with a new program?

We recently had a great discussion over at #ESNchat about how to make the most of community champion programs. You can check out the Storify from the chat here, or review the mini-deck for highlights from the five questions we discussed, which included:

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Looking for more case studies like this? Members of TheCR Network have access to weekly community management programming and our complete archive of over 200 expert-led sessions. Learn more about being a member in TheCR Network.

Friday Roundup: Almost Fall Edition

September 19, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable. Inbound-Simon Sinek

With Fall just around the corner things are back in full swing here at TheCR. This week I was lucky enough to attend a great marketing event, Inbound2014, held by Hubspot here in Boston. So many of the sessions I attended were great, but the keynotes in particular were fantastic – and really appealed not just to the marketer me, but also the community manager. One session, led by author Simon Sinek, focused on leadership – and specifically how great leaders create environments where employees can work together to thrive. The folks over at The Draw Shop put together the great graphic on the right which really captures the essence of his talk.

I hope you’ve been enjoying our month of strategy-focused posts and content. We have some exciting things planned for next week including sharing a brand-new SOCM 2014 infographic and more fun stuff!

Enjoy this week’s links from around the web, and of course more new community manager and social business jobs, and we’ll see you back here on Monday!

Meet TheCR Team: Jillian Bejtlich, Community Strategist – Like many community managers out there, I never actually set out to work in this field. By education and the first few rungs of my career ladder, I’m an engineer with a focus on architectural and civil technology. I lived and breathed physics. But after a variety of welcome twists and turns, I ended up in community.

How Do I Convince our Executives to Invest in Community? – Through the State of Community Management 2014 we identified three best practices for getting executives on-board with your community initiatives.

Lessons From the Classroom for Community Managers – At my daughter’s “back to school night,” I had the opportunity to follow her exact sequence of classes, from first period homeroom, through seventh period. A slogan on the board of her homeroom class read, “Our classroom is a community.” Mr. Braxton, her homeroom teacher, introduced himself to the assembled parents and started to speak about community.

The New Habit Challenge: Create a Better To-Do List – Tons of successful leaders laud the to-do list as the key to more organized, productive, and focused days, but is there a right way and a wrong way to do your to-do? The short answer: Yes.

Workplace Redesign: Turning your Environment into a Productivity Machine – Corporate real estate is undergoing a revolution. Companies are tearing down their walls, and the result is that shared spaces like “huddle zones” are crowding out individual workspace – including the corner office, in some cases. Such overhauls tend to yield big cost savings in the form of rent and construction costs. What many companies fail to take into account, however, is that physical space is just one component of today’s workplace. Two other components, namely virtual interactions and management practices, also play critical roles in shaping how people work and how productive they can be.

New Community Manager and Social Media Jobs:

Community Manager, JewishBoston.com – Combined Jewish Philanthropies – Boston, MA
Community Manager, Audiophile – Massdrop – San Francisco, CA
Online Community Manager – Headspring – Austin, TX
Community Manager Lead – Pace Communications – Greensboro, NC
Community Manager (Intern) – Loverly – New York, NY
Community Manager – The Climate Corporation – San Francisco, CA
Community Manager – Freelance – GolinHarris – Chicago, IL
Open Source Technical Community Manager – edX – Boston, MA
Community Manager – Orlando Sentinel Media Group – Orlando, FL
International Social Media Community Manager – Integr8staff – Culver City, CA
Social Customer Care & Community Manager – Intuit – Mississauga, ON
Community Manager (Co-op) – RBC – Toronto, ON
Creative Marketing Manager – Seedbox Technologies – Montréal, QC
Marketing and Communications Manager – LUSH Cosmetics – Vancouver, BC
Community and Content Manager – Etobicoke, ON – Yellow Pages Group – Etobicoke, ON
Social Media Marketing Lead – Tangerine – Canada

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Want access to the complete library archives inside TheCR Network – including resource bundles, case studies and roundtable reports from over 200 events? Join TheCR Network now!

Executive is Just Another Word for Community Manager

September 13, 2011 By Rachel Happe

Executives are charged with executing on a set of goals. They all want to accomplish those goals in a way that maximizes their investments. Executives need to marshal a range of constituencies (their team, peers across the organization, customers, partners, experts, consultants) to make things happen. Most executives do this by creating a plan and then packing their calendars with meetings, webinars, conferences – all of which they use to negotiate their position and drive progress. Their email inboxes are also overflowing with similar interactions. Those executives that best maximize their time are the most effective and as a result, executives are always looking to understand with whom their time is best spent.

One-to-one communications – or even small group communications – is limiting when your most precious resource is time. Regardless of the tools and methods of interaction, executives all have communities they want to influence but until recently they haven’t been able to see the community as a whole and they have dealt with constituencies individually or in small groups. Social software has made communities and ecosystems visible.

By taking a community approach to an operational goal, executives can do the following:

Maximize their communications investment by making their positions visible to a community, enabling the community to build momentum around their ideas
Quickly understand community influencers, regardless of explicit roles
More quickly understand objections to and interest in their approach or project so they can adjust their strategy if needed
Reduce the time their teams spend sharing information one by one and eliminating misunderstandings that happen as a result
Allow individuals closest to the problem to speak directly to everyone else
Discuss opinions, positions, and goals with many more people synchronously than they can using any other approach

At The Community Roundtable, our goal is to help business leaders understand the dynamics of communities, how to communicate in networked environments most effectively, and how to use that knowledge to maximize investments. To us, community management is not just the day to day tasks of interacting with people online but a strategic perspective on efficient operations. Done well, it reduces the cost of sales, increases employee and customer loyalty, reduces internal duplication and waste, and helps to empower employees.

We will be discussing the Future of Communities today at FutureM in Boston and from our perspective, communities are the future of business. I’m betting most executives do not yet see themselves as community managers – do you think a community approach is prudent for your senior executive team or is that extending the concept of community management too far in your mind?

Photo by Nestlé

Becky Carroll on Using Educational Content and Idea Exchanges

May 5, 2011 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management. Our series continues with episode #26, featuring Becky Carroll, Community Program Manager at Verizon. Podcast highlights include:

Using educational content rather than product-focused content, to cater to customer lifestyle rather than a hard sell in the “Room to Learn” community.
Using an idea exchange; workflows, processes and partnership with product team
Advice for getting started in community management

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Jay Batson on Open-Source Communities

April 28, 2011 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management. Our series continues with episode #24, featuring Jay Batson, VP and Founder at Acquia, a provider of commercial services around the Drupal open-source web platform.

Podcast highlights include:

Considering long-term health of an open-source community hen launching a commercial enterprise from within it
The kinds of companies adopting open-source community platforms
Can developer communities provide examples for other types of communities

Download this episode

Subscribe to this podcast series

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove

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Christopher Barger on the “Immerse and Disperse” Method

December 9, 2010 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management. Our podcast series, Conversations with Community Managers (a co-production with The Community Roundtable), continues with episode #16, featuring Christopher Barger, Global Director of Social Media at General Motors. Highlights include:

The “immerse and disperse” method of cross-training social media staff; immersing them via a consistent training program, then dispersing them to represent different divisions of the company
Using internal communities to identify creative thinkers who might not otherwise surface
Why a Fortune 500 company would bother sponsoring small events
Measuring results, both long- and short-term, using GM’s participation in SXSW as an example

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

PHOTO CREDIT: Becky Johns

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Megan Murray on Managing Multiple Internal Communities

December 2, 2010 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management. Our podcast series, Conversations with Community Managers (a co-production with The Community Roundtable), continues with episode #15, featuring Megan Murray, community Manager and Project Coordinator for Booz Allen Hamilton. Highlights include:

Managing internal communities within a large company, and managing to culture towards adoption
The challenge of overseeing a total of 535 communities
Integrating community participation into employee workflows
Privacy, confidentiality, and other HR issues as they apply to community
Build vs. buy, in terms of tools

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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