leadership Archives

Lisa Beatty on Brand-Focused Communities

June 3, 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.

Episode #10 features Lisa Beatty, “Chief Jane Advocate” for Jane Nation, one of the first online communities for women to share their opinions and ideas about brands, and information among themselves and with brands about the uniqueness of their community.

Podcast highlights include:

Running a community that is a hybrid of centrally-produced and controlled content, and more self-moderated forums
The relationship between a community about brands and the brands themselves, including the need to comply with disclosure guidelines, and how to include the brands as part of the community (with examples from the Mayo Clinic and General Motors)
Approaching community monetization without ads, with approaches such as sponsored content and access to community members for private conversations
The challenges of managing a community including people at different stages of their lives (age, careers, parenthood, etc)
Reconciling running a brand-focused community with a career as an advertising executive, as Beatty does

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Brian Simpson on Combining Online and Offline Relations in Hospitality

May 13, 2010 By Jim Storer

Our sixth episode features Brian Simpson, Director of Social Hospitality at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City.

Highlights include:

How online extends and combines with the vital offline relations and events in the hospitality industry
A discussion of whether or not being a nimble small business is an advantage over being a big chain when it comes to using social media
How hard metrics and the more “touchy-feely” side of social media mesh
A critique of Roger Smith Life and the value of showing an off-product side of your business; “It’s got to be interesting.”

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Shwen Gwee on using Social Media Tools to Grow Community

April 29, 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 fifth episode is an interview Shwen Gwee, who works in the health care and pharma industries, and heads up a network called SocialPharmer* and the blog Med 2.0.

Highlights of the conversation include:

Taking a community cultivated at a conference and continuing to grow it online with social media tools
Conversely, how online groups (like Twitter chats) can be used to lead to more substantial offline events
The reluctance in highly-regulated industries like pharmaceuticals to using social media, and how to counter those
How growth in industry participation has actually taken off in some areas, particularly Twitter, and Facebook, which has seen many popular Fan Pages grow up around support for people with certain diseases
Lessons learned from live events, including: the ability for people to talk across different verticals, the opportunity to speak with patients in an informal setting, and in-depth discussions of the mutual trust needed to keep social media use growing in pharma

Download this episode.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

* Note: SocialPharmer is currently a Ning group, but with the announcement that Ning will stop support for free groups, Shwen has told us that he is working on moving the network to a new platform, to be determined soon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Rachel Happe on Social Media Vs Community

April 22, 2010 By Jim Storer

Our third episode features an interview with Rachel Happe, co-founder of The Community Roundtable.

Conversation highlights include:

Introduction of the topic: the difference between the roles of social media manager and community manager. Rachel has been thinking on this topic, with posts such as “Social Media is Not Community“
Rachel discusses social media as content-based, while community is more specifically relationship-based
How should a CMO hire a social media manager? What should they look for?
How the type of company effects the need for deeper relationships or less deep connections (is it a scaling problem?)

Download this episode.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Tim Walker on Community Manager Vs. Social Media Manager

April 8, 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 second episode features an interview with Tim Walker, Social Media Manager at Hoovers. From their web site:

We deliver comprehensive insight and analysis about the companies, industries and people that drive the economy, along with the powerful tools to find and connect to the right people to get business done.

Conversation highlights include:

Knowing when to use what tools… Twitter, Facebook, email, phone or a walk down the hall.
A discussion of the difference between being community manager and a social media manager.
Understanding the balance between “on-domain” and “off-domain” engagement.
What community management and The Dating Game have in common. (!!)

Download this episode.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Wait for It… Emergence Happens

February 19, 2010 By Rachel Happe

One of the most enjoyable and gratifying moments of being a community manager is when members of the community start to step up, create content, proactively initiate something, build relationships with people they’ve discovered, and feel comfortable enough to show more of their personalities. This is all emergent behavior that as a community manager you want desperately to encourage but which is almost impossible to directly induce. In new communities it is wonderful to watch the new shoots of activity happen. But… it goes in fits and starts. Some days it feels like everyone chimes in and some days, it feels like no one is paying attention. One of the hardest things do to – especially if you are getting pressure from other stakeholders – is to wait for it.

Waiting is not a business activity that is recognized as having any value but it’s kind of like lurking – it has a lot more value than it appears to have on the surface. Amber Naslund wrote a recent post about the spaces in between and it gets to something that has been foundational in my thinking for a long time – contrast enables clarity. What I mean by that is that you can’t have success without failure leading up to it. You can’t have light without dark. You can’t have activity without quiet. You would not be able to recognize the good things if you the bad things didn’t exist. But waiting in a business context can kind of feel like goofing off. It is the perfect time to go for a walk/clean out your inbox/etc. Knowing and having the confidence to hold back and not overwhelm the community with your own content and activity is so, so critical. Because if you do it all, your members will see no need or benefit to participating themselves. You can over-water a plant. That doesn’t mean you build it and wait for them to come either but knowing how to seed a little, nudge a little… and then wait…. is the trick.

How do you spend your time while you wait? How do you explain that dynamic to people around you?

Orchestrating Emergent Control

December 28, 2009 By Rachel Happe

I ran across this quote today and it reflects something that I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past few years, namely how to encourage specific activities within communities without explicitly telling people what to do.

Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our future.

This approach is something that separates good managers, parents, and leaders from those that use more direct means of control that, interestingly, are often less effective. Giving individuals choice while making an overall desired structure more desirable than other options is one of the best skills a manager can develop – regardless of how hierarchical the overall organizational structure is. It’s similar to what I’ve often heard advised for parents – don’t ask you children open-ended questions like ‘What would you like to wear today?” because you will end up with a long debate about needing to wear long pants in the middle of winter (as an example); instead give your child the option of two or three different appropriate outfits. They get to choose, you make sure they are dressed appropriately – everyone wins with little debate.

Finding outcomes where everyone wins is the essence of community leadership and involves thinking about what makes the outcome good for everyone involved. At its core, it is simply good negotiating skills – not easy and it often takes considerable time to think through and orchestrate – but highly effective in ensuring sustainable outcomes with a lot of buy-in.

Community Is A Management Approach, Not Just a Role

December 17, 2009 By Rachel Happe

The way we currently think about community management – for the most part – is a role played by someone managing a set of relationships often mediated by an online destination. One of the reasons Jim and I started The Community Roundtable is that we saw it emerging as a career path for many and that some of the most interesting work in community management was being done by mid-level executives who were thinking about how to restructure business operations to become more community-driven.

Over the last nine months working with and speaking with a wide array of individuals who are practicing community management it has become apparent that community management is not only an explicit role or career but also a general approach to management. This came up in an early discussion with David Alston which resulted in a bit of exploration about what defines a community manager. Jim has taken the stance that ‘everyone is a community manager’ which has led to some spirited conversations and personal explorations at #TheCRLive lunches. Ultimately what we’ve found is that community management can be a discrete role and that role is an important one if an organization has a defined community approach. Someone has to ensure that the needs of each constituent group is balanced, engagement is encouraged, community members know the scope and guidelines of the community, a programming plan is in place, and community information gets addressed by the right people.

However, for functional managers and leaders who want to use social tools and processes to accomplish their goals, community management is more than the tactical details of community management – it is a management approach and discipline that weaves an interactive element into everything they do because that allows them to execute better, faster, or more cheaply. This is ultimately the purpose of our Community Maturity Model – to guide the management practices of organizations to adapt to this new real-time interactive approach to business processes. The discipline of community management at the tactical level is just one element of becoming a community-oriented organization.

Are you an executive looking for what a ‘social’ approach means in terms of a leadership, cultural, strategic, measurement, programming, or tools perspective? You are likely looking to build your community management skills – even if that is not exactly how you think about it. What are you likely to gain?

A better understanding of how to incorporate real-time conversation into traditional workflows in order to improve communications, expectation-setting, quality, and adoption of a business process.
An ability to see the systemic effects of your position in a network and knowledge about how to strategically improve that position and with it outcomes.
A persuasive approach to business outcomes such as inbound marketing that lowers costs, reduces cycle time, and increases satisfaction.
A better understanding and sensitivity to the needs of your constituents – whether they are employees, customers, peers, vendors, or partners.
A more social approach to management and negotiation that allows everyone to win and thus become advocates for your position.
Better understanding of your risks and opportunities because of better intelligence – created from an open and discursive culture across employee and customer groups.
Methods of looking at and tracking not just the last touch point before a business outcome but the behavior paths that drive business outcomes.
Familiarity with the different tools that can be used to manage communities and how/why different tools optimize for different business outcomes.
Understanding of the role of the community manager – what they do and the value they bring.
The role of information/content development and distribution in a network and ultimately how to reduce the cost of content development and management.

Community approaches can be used effectively for many business processes, particularly those that rely heavily on information, content, and relationships. However, community dynamics are fairly different than traditional operational dynamics so planning, investment, and organizational structures needed to adapt to really take advantage of its benefits. While we typically recommend that the metrics used to measure business outcomes today be the same as the ones used to measure performance in a community-oriented approach, the cycle time and investment/return profile look different. That dynamic is critical to understand as business processes become more social. A better understanding of community dynamics is a great place to start.