marketing Archives

Looking for a Few Great Community Fellows

December 17, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

help wanted I’ve already mentioned that we’re excited for all the new content, programming and research that 2015 will bring. Now, I’m extra excited to announce that to support all the new community initiatives we are undertaking we are also expanding TheCR team.

In the past we’ve hired Community Fellows specifically for our research and community management teams, and this time we’re expanding both the scope and size of our search – we are currently seeking community fellows for our Research, Community Management and Sales/Marketing teams.

TheCR Fellowship program is designed to help the right candidate immerse themselves in the community management discipline and accumulate the expertise to qualify for community management roles after their time with us.

At a high level, each Fellowship will provide:

•   Formal community management training
•   Hands-on experience in community management, with a lens toward research, engagement or sales/marketing.
•   Access to leading community management practitioners
•   Direct access to potential employers
•   The opportunity to work with a variety of organizations and brands
•   Community management and business mentorship from TheCR team.
•   A monthly stipend

While you can visit each job description above for more details for each position, the Fellow’s roles would generally include:

•   Commitment of 35+ hours a week for at least 6 months and no more than 12 months
•   Day-to-day tasks related to their role
•   Special projects which, depending on the person’s skill set and interests, could be research, content, business development, marketing, or events projects

Why a fellowship and not a permanent hire?

As a small organization there are large risks for someone in deciding to work with us and there are risks for us in making a permanent hire. By providing training, access to market leaders, and a stipend to a fellow, we can ensure that she or he is very well positioned to find a great position with a larger organization at the end of the fellowship. To us, this creates a win-win-win for potential candidates, employers, and for us. It also serves our mission by enabling us to develop trained, experienced professionals for the market. We liked our last two fellows so much we hired them both into permanent roles, which is also a potential outcome of the fellowship.

Why a Fellowship at TheCR?

The Community Roundtable has been championing the discipline of community management for over five years. In that time we have built up frameworks, training and research that demonstrates the value of community and community management. We work with over 100+ leading brands and organizations and understand more about how communities are used and managed in business environments than any other organization. Because of our network and relationships, this is a great opportunity for the right person to meet and collaborate with our clients and members.

Learn More About Each Role

Do you have what it takes? Check out the open positions now:

While not a requirement for the right candidate, preference will be given to people within commuting distance from Boston.

Join TheCR Team: Seeking a Sales/Marketing Fellow

December 17, 2014 By Jim Storer

Are you interested in learning a community-oriented approach to marketing and understanding social selling? TheCR is thrilled to announce an opening for a Sales/Marketing Fellow in 2015.

What’s a Fellow?

The Community Roundtable has hired a number of fellows over the years because it is a unique opportunity for both an individual, TheCR and TheCR’s ecosystem to benefit. Our fellowships are intended to last 6-12 months and give individuals a strong background and network with which to find a permanent research or analyst position – you can read more about this program here.

What you will learn:

How to creating pull marketing and sales programming – collaborating with prospects and clients to create something together
What it means to be a generative business (one that generates more value for every segment of a company’s ecosystem than it takes out)
How to work with a fast-paced, transparent and collaborative team that has a bias for action and as little overhead as possible
How a community management approach to business transforms work into a series of fluid, meaningful collaborations with a network of individuals that build value

You might be our next sales/marketing fellow if you:

Love people and have experience with social technologies and online communities
Care about your work and the people with whom you work
Bring your best effort to every project but can leave your ego at the door
Get excited about content creation – in lots of different formats
Love communicating with people through writing and social media
Are organized, self-driven and have strong project management skills
Enjoy the flexibility – and responsibility – of working from home
Have a great sense of humor and want to work as part of a small, driven team
Are a good copy-editor and like to ensure communications are professional

Responsibilities:

Help TheCR team and our ecosystem to demonstrate the value of community and community management
Building content that effectively triggers learning or action – must be comfortable with WordPress and PowerPoint, graphic and video skills are a bonus, as is light website coding.
CRM maintenance and analysis – experience with Salesforce is a plus, but not a must
Relationship development and sales outreach – you’ll be in the trenches with our sales team generating, managing and nurturing conversations
Special projects which, depending on your skill set and interests, could be related to research, content, business development, marketing, or events

You might be the ideal candidate if:

You are detail-oriented, recognize the value of community management, and want to help us shout it from the rooftops.

Why a fellowship and not a permanent hire?

As a small organization there are large risks for someone in deciding to work with us and there are risks for us in making a permanent hire. By providing training, access to market leaders, and a stipend to a fellow, we can ensure that she or he is very well positioned to find a great gig with a larger organization at the end of the fellowship. To us, this creates a win-win-win for potential candidates, employers, and for us. It also serves our mission by enabling us to develop trained, experienced professionals for the market. But we liked our last two fellows so much we hired them both into permanent roles, which is also a potential outcome of the fellowship.

Apply Now

Do you have what it takes? Are you excited by what we could do together? Please tell us more about you! While not a requirement for the right candidate, preference will be given to people within commuting distance from Boston.

Content Marketing is Required but not Sufficient

August 27, 2013 By Rachel Happe

by Rachel Happe, Co-founder of The Community Roundtable

I hear the phrase ‘content is king’ thrown around a LOT. Great content is certainly a critical component of any digital strategy – it’s a keystone of what we do at TheCR – but on its own it is insufficient.

I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop when it comes to great content.

Why? Watch this:

Crap. The Content Marketing Deluge. from Velocity Partners

What do we do once everyone is creating content? Imagine if the dynamic we see on Twitter happened in real life. Hundreds of people and companies stopping by your desktop to dump reams of paper, while you try to catch the things that are actually useful.

The answer in the above presentation? You need to build a great content brand.

But that answer seems insufficient. There are several issues that I see:

First, there are a lot of sources of amazing information that I routinely miss because of the sheer volume that goes by on my desktop. Will people pay attention to your content just because they trust your brand? I don’t think so.
Second, content is not the ultimate goal. It’s a tactic to achieve the goal of getting people’s attention and hopefully, building trust so that they DO something. So by definition, content cannot be the entire solution, but that discussion seems to often get lost in the frenzy to build content engines.

The Goal

In my mind, the end goal of marketing is to get someone to change behavior – to select your product instead of another, to solve a problem with the solution you are offering or to advocate on your behalf.

Behavior change requires three things, according to The Power of Habit:

The mechanics of the the change, which content often provides
Faith that change/a solution is possible and desirable
A community that reinforces the change

Behavior change is unlikely to be inspired by content alone. Relationships are what inspire, reinforce and extend behavior change.

So my question is this…

Are you thinking about how your content feeds into a community where people can build relationships that inspire and reinforce changes in behavior?

If you are not, are you wasting money creating great content, but not supporting the behavior change with a community to reinforce it?

It’s worthwhile spending some time thinking about the UX (user experience) and the HX (human experience) that comes before and after your content because if you can deliver your content at the point of need and then follow-it up with reinforcing relationships you will dramatically effect the impact of your content.

Differentiating Between Social Media and Community Management

March 17, 2010 By Rachel Happe

By Rachel Happe, Principal and Co-Founder of TheCR

As someone who works with social media managers and community managers, it seems the line between the two types of positions is not terribly clear – and maybe doesn’t need to be – but I think it would be helpful to distinguish between the two. Why? Jim will often say that everyone is a community manager and he is right – everyone has a group of constituents which could be cultivated to drive better performance. However, not all companies want, need to, or can cultivate a community. I may see this differently than many and here is my take:

Community infers the following:

Tight interlinking relationships between a significant percentage of members
An acknowledgment of shared fate or purpose
A potentially wide range of topics/conversations within that shared purpose
A distributed leadership network – sometimes with a single leader, sometimes not
A core membership that is relatively stable and active

Social media on the other hand infers the following:

Socially- or conversationally- enabled content
A loose network with the predominant structure being a hub and spoke model of interaction between an audience and the content creator
Comment/response transactions

To me this means that communities and social media are good for different types of business outcomes.

In low complexity markets and use cases (think Sharpie pens) the focus is on social media because the relationships desired between Newell Rubbermaid and Sharpie customers does not need to be that deep – and the business model cannot support deep relationship development (i.e. spending hundreds on developing a relationship with a customer who buys $25 worth of products doesn’t make much sense). The goal is providing infrastructure and management that drives awareness and a sense of connection to the brand with tens of thousands or millions of customers. Furthermore, proactively connecting customers with other customers doesn’t do much for Newell Rubbermaid because customers don’t need deep references from other customers to make the decision to purchase or to use the product itself. This example is managed by someone who aggregates UGC, publishes content, and responds to people talking about Sharpie – either on the site itself or on a public social network.

Some common social media tools.

In high complexity markets or use cases, communities make more sense. If the decision-making process is
complex and long to reach a conversion, customers benefit greatly by interacting and building relationships with other customers – as well as getting introduced to affiliated product and service providers who can help them maximize their value. Adobe’s design tool communities are a good example of this – customers help each other maximize the use of the tool, creating better adoption and affiliation. Because the price point of the product is higher, the business model can support richer relationship development. These communities are managed by people who are connecting members to each other and to relevant content but may be doing very little content creation themselves.

The confusion comes because in both cases, the person managing the initiative is responsible for being responsive and conversational, for tracking the success of the interactions in driving desired outcomes, and sometimes they use similar tools.

I took a stab at articulating the primary responsibilities of social media managers and community managers.

Social Media Manager:

Content Creation (Blogging/vlogging/podcasting) designed to spur conversation/viral sharing
Responding to conversations about the brand and the content
Ensuring input/feedback gets channeled to the appropriate internal functional group
Curating and promoting UGC
Managing tools – mostly social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) and blogs
Reporting/measurement
Not every community manager looks like this, but some do!
Planning and developing strategies for increasing engagement and conversion

Community Manager:

Welcoming members to the community & acclimating them
Building relationships with key members of the community and influencers
Moderating conversation and encouraging specific topics
Promoting members, making introductions to other members, and encouraging relationship formation
Running regular programming/content/events
Finding internal resources to respond to specific community discussions and coordinating cross-functional needs
Enforcing guidelines/boundaries
Managing tools – might be a combination of enterprise & social networks (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc)
Reporting/measurement
Channeling input and response from community into other organizational processes
Planning and developing strategies for increasing engagement and conversion

Do you agree that there is a difference in these two roles and if so, do you agree with how I have differentiated them? Admittedly, there is a lot of overlap but I believe the intent and focus of each role is fairly unique. For companies looking to make a hire in this space, it is useful to understand whether they need primarily a content-oriented person or a relationship-oriented person.

If you’re looking for way to hone your community management skills check out the Community Careers and

Compensation research, our Community Skills Frameworks and more free community manager resources!

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Need community management resources? Check out our online training courses, our community benchmarks and TheCR Network – a private community for community pros.