management Archives

Jeff Esposito on Shaping Social Media Efforts with Community

January 20, 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 #20, featuring Jeff Esposito, PR Manager with Vistaprint. Highlights include:

Birth of a program– getting hit (literally) with a magazine and being asked to “figure this Twitter thing out”
Getting the community to help shape social media efforts rather than dictating the strategy to the audience
Backing up the “No Customer Left Behind” philosophy through personal interaction over mass messaging
Weighing short term fixes (marketing gimmicks) vs a long-term strategy
Creating customer service expectations; when you are online, from posting duty hours to managing the lack of presence around a weather emergency

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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.

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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Kathy O’Reilly on Managing Niche Communities

November 18, 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 #14, featuring Kathy O’Reilly, Director of Social Media Relations for Monster.com (a Voce client). Highlights include:

Handling disparate – but related – audiences via community; in this case, job seekers and employers
The challenges of managing many separate niche communities without splintering the corporate mission
Using a healthy content library to support community and spark discussion, including use of external contributors
Making sure you have the resources (people, content and time) to nurture a community properly
Goals: create brand awareness, product awareness and driving traffic

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

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Assessing Social Business Maturity – Getting to Stage 2/Emergent Community

July 14, 2010 By Rachel Happe

When we originally developed the Community Maturity Model, we thought of it as a tool that organizations of all sizes could use in creating a baseline understanding of where they were on the path to becoming a ‘social’ organization. Additionally, it was designed to provide organizations with a general roadmap of the competencies and milestones needed to operationalize a social layer within their organization.

Recently we had a large corporate client take the Community Maturity Model and build out an organizational gap analysis using both the model and the best practice research that was published in The State of Community Management report. We’ve taken that work and created a template for our other members – giving them a huge jump start in creating a document that is easy to understand and communicate to other organizational stakeholders. In addition, we have created baseline assessment criteria to help organizations better understand where they fit on the model and identify the milestones and deliverables that are typically associated with the next stage of maturity. These criteria were developed based on our work with many companies and our understanding of the typical pathways to becoming a social organization.

In Stage 1/Hierarchy, where there is no organized initiative around social business, community management, or social media use it is easy to assess – there are no identifiable artifacts of an emergent community management discipline – no policies, no people responsible for it, no planning – although there may be a lot of ad hoc or informal use of social tools by employees.

Stage 2/Emergent Community defines an organization that is actively pursuing a social business strategy and has begun to lay the operational groundwork to support that, but has not yet realized full deployment and scale. Moving in to Stage 2/Emergent Community, there are standard indicators of organizational evolution, including:

A documented active listening strategy
One or more people explicitly responsible for social listening
One or more social business leads have been identified
There are some places where constituents (customers/partners/employees) can comment and/or contribute to a company sponsored conversations. (this might be a Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn account, a blog, or a support forum)
A centralized ‘social’ team has a documented roadmap and identified gaps
Corporate accounts are established on the major social networking sites – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
A basic listening toolset has been identified and is actively used
Basic metrics – number of participants (members/fans/followers), pageviews, and number of comments – are tracked and reported to functional managers

The above indicators are those we feel are required elements to be in the Emergent Community stage, but there are additional elements that very likely exist in this stage as well, including a documented social media policy, and active social media presence, an executive sponsor, a dedicated social media or community manager, and an internal social software pilot – among many other possible initiatives that may exist in this early stage of maturity.

Are there early milestones that we missed that you feel are required elements for companies that are seriously pursuing a social business approach? We’d love to hear from you.

Find this interesting? We use the Community Maturity Model to organize content and programming in TheCR Network and to advise clients. Consider joining TheCR Network as a member to discuss this an many other topics with peers and industry experts.

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.

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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.

Sonny Gill on Social Media Participation in Education

May 6, 2010 By Jim Storer

Our sixth episode features Sonny Gill, Community Manager for DeVry University.

Highlights include:

Regulatory hurdles for social media participation in the education sector
The importance of integrating and harnessing the disparate internal communities at educational institutions
The importance of students as an, ever-changing and tech-savvy resource to help drive community-building
Extending connections beyond the current faculty and students to incoming freshmen and alumni- is that happening enough?
A discussion of “Community Chat,” which Sonny ran with Bryan Person on Twitter andFriendFeed (and how to keep momentum going in community- bring the chat back, guys!)

Download this episode.

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

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The Secret Sauce of Communities

February 25, 2010 By Rachel Happe

A lot of people might say that the secret sauce of communities is conversion, lower cost of advocacy, lowered support costs, faster information discovery, etc and they would not be wrong. Communities – done well – can drive a lot of specific business outcomes in a sustainable way while reducing the long-term costs. And for the most part, that is how they are currently being planned and deployed but there is a much bigger, larger value communities can provide to enterprises. Real-time data. And I’m not just talking about traditional market research which also can benefit from a community approach – see Forrester’s take or this overveiw.

What I’m talking about is using communities to make the interface between the discussions going on within the organization much more permeable to the conversations going on outside of the organization. One of the biggest risks to medium and large organizations is they become relatively self-absorbed – there are so many people with functional roles that never even speak to external audiences and are so focused on the internal processes and politics that it is quite easy to miss the forest for the trees.

My background is in product management and I’ve done it for both enterprise and consumer oriented technologies and both have large cost barriers to customer input. With enterprise customers, customer input often involved visits with our largest customers where I spoke with the business owners and a few of end users. In terms of time and cost I couldn’t visit all my customers or speak to even a good fraction of the end users of the product. That meant my job involved a lot of inferencing to define priorities based on a small sample size. Once the research/input phase was over we typically didn’t go back to customers until we had a working beta product. At that point we could adjust functionality but unless the product was a complete disaster (luckily that never happened), major features were not changed. On the consumer end of things, there were so many customers that we got our input in two ways – testing mocked-up product designs with a random sampling of end users and aggregating issues that came through our customer support and online forums. That too required a lot of infrencing to fill in the gaps and to notice issues that were not even being brought up. In my own way, I tried to ask customers as often as possible when I had a decision to make but I did not have a standing group that I could reliably go to on a daily basis. The result is that there were often long-winded internal debates between marketing, product management, and engineering about what was the best solution and none of us were using anything more than our experience and opinion to argue our position. Some of that will never change – one thing you learn in product management is that people have a difficult time self-reporting and imaging solutions that don’t exist so that will always be part of the role of product management. However, the transactional mode of input is expensive and not just for organizations. Once we identified a customer willing to talk to us, they were often barraged by questions marketing, support, product management and executives. The process was costly on both ends. And this is just an example of how product management suffers because of the high cost of customer input.

Robust customer/prospect/partner communities which are available and can be accessed by all functional areas of a company can bring huge benefits:

Employees who may not otherwise talk to customers directly or are restricted in which customers they speak with and when, can lurk and in so doing get a much better sense of the customers’ perspectives and context which ultimately allows each employee to make better informed decisions.
Employees that need customer input for a decision can ask the community in a way that allows customers to opt-in rather than be asked directly again and again. While this dynamic has some risks to be aware of it does broaden out access to more customers and respects customers’ time and interests.
An organization’s content creators – in marketing, support, engineering – can get almost immediate feedback as to whether their approach resonates. This can reduce an incalculable amount of wasted effort and expense.
If a good percentage of customers and prospects are in the community, behavioral and conversational data will enable early warning of market changes whether that is change in demand or change in need. This benefit will go primarily to the first mover in every market if they are able to aggregate the market conversation.
Inviting in partners and giving them tools to market and transact business within the community will provide organizations a much better understanding of affiliated demand in their ecosystem which is often another way to get early information about market direction.

We are hearing from companies that have dramatically improved their products, reduced excess inventories, and reduced waste at the end of the supply chain simply by using relatively small customer communities to provide real-time insights at every step in the process – it’s as simple and as complex as integrating customers into the process.

It will require a number of things:

Broad employee training on listening, empathizing, how to ask questions, and on corporate policies and boundaries.
The trust of executives in their employees judgment in speaking with prospects and customers (this in turn, over time, will shape hiring priorities and practices significantly).
A rethinking of major operational processes. Really listening to customer feedback requires making changes that disrupt predictability which is the primary tenant of many corporate processes. How can you incorporate some flexibility while still managing complex and expensive corporate processes?
A change to corporate incentive structures to something more collaborative is needed. All functional areas should primarily be oriented toward customer success and renewals vs. more myopic functional-specific targets.

The first step, however, is aggregating and reporting on the current information coming out of communities in a way that is useful to a variety of employees. We’ve got a long way to go but strategically, if you are not considering real-time data integration from the external market into your organization’s daily decisions as your ultimate goal, you will be limiting your vision of value communities can generate.

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The Community Roundtable is committed to advancing the business of community and being a valued resource to community management and social media professionals through our monthly subscription report, membership based peer network, community management training program and customizable advisory services for corporations and individuals.

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.

Eight Competencies to Socializing Your Organization

May 27, 2009 By Rachel Happe

The social media and community space is transitioning from a nice thing to do to an operational discipline across teams/groups/the organization. That transition is actually pretty difficult and disruptive because it requires cultural, leadership, strategy, workflow, and operational changes. However, it is critical if organizations don’t want to have their social efforts isolated from everything else, which doesn’t work very well anyway. The other thing that this transition requires is a common framework for the different competencies involved to give everyone has a common taxonomy and visual for thinking about all the issues included in being ‘social’.

I developed the Community Maturity Model to help people and organizations make sense of the complexity of what socializing their organization means. This model is the basis for how Jim Storer and I are categorizing content and conversations at The Community Roundtable. It’s a good tool to discuss the issues related to community management, a good structure for benchmarking and tracking operational improvements, and a great framework for training or certification.The competencies laid out in the model are:

Strategy
Leadership
Culture
Community Management
Content & Programming
Policy & Governance
Tools
Measurement

Michael Chin (who, as an aside, really gets the culture of the social media world) from KickApps invited me to share my thinking today in a webinar – I’m grateful for his support but also for getting me to put my thinking together in a cogent slide deck. You can find the recording at the KickApps blog but the slides are below.

Eight Competencies to Socializing Your Organization

View more OpenOffice presentations from Rachel Happe.

Cross-posted from The Social Organization