The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

Faces of Community Management: Jamileh Delcambre

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By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable. The last monday of the month always means a new Faces of Community Management profile – you can check out previous ones here and here. This month we’re excited to introduce you to Jamileh Delcambre. Jam is a community manger at  Thomson Reuters and has been an active member of TheCR Network since 2011. 

“Jam is one of those community members that makes TheCR Network so valuable. She inherently understands community and she’s generous with her (great) ideas and expertise. One of my favorite things about Jam is that she exudes authenticity. I’ve read some of her communications with her community members and she does an amazing job of balancing the professional tone of her company with her authentic and very real voice. I count myself lucky to work with her!” -Hillary, Community Manager at TheCR Network

FacesCM_Jam

Download Jam’s profile here: Faces of Community Management – Jam

—– Did you know that TheCR Network members work with all kinds of communities? In fact, about 25% work in either internal or external communities and 50% work with both! No matter what kind of community you work with membership in TheCR Network will save you time and improve the quality of your work by connecting you with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

Interview with a Community Veteran – Heather Strout

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By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Heather Strout

To celebrate our 5th anniversary this month I sat down with a few of our long-time members to chat about their community experience over the last five years. Today I’m happy to share my conversation with Heather Strout, Director of Product Marketing at Lithium. I’m actually lucky enough to know Heather in real life – we worked together many moons ago, and can personally vouch for her awesomeness.

In addition to her day job at Lithium, Heather is part of the team that hosts a monthly community manager breakfast in Austin, TX. If you’re in the Austin area tomorrow (4/3/14) you should join them!

1. How have you seen the community management space evolve over the past five years?

Community Management for business is no longer uncharted territory. We can rely on the documented experiences of others to shape a successful community today. Five years ago, we were still relying on other industries and precursors to community to chart community strategy.

Organizations like The Community Roundtable have allowed Community Managers to evolve their community, and thus the industry as a whole, so quickly. It’s still a nascent business strategy but is considered a core strategy to so many companies now. Five years ago, it still seemed as if many companies were in the experimental stage.

2. What are some of the biggest differences from when you first started out in community management?

Now, businesses take the role of community manager, and the value of community, seriously. It’s no longer a secret weapon for those who have figured out the value. In some industries, having a customer community is not an option; it’s a necessity to stay competitive.

3. What would you do differently in your first community management role knowing what you know now?

I would have been more insistent on making sure the business knew how to make a successful community and what it took to get there. Specifically, getting senior management buy-in to not just why a community can be valuable but the effort needed to make it a success.

Thanks, Heather! We are so lucky to have long-time members like you advocating for community management! If you want to connect with Heather you can find her on twitter.

 

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Did you know that 95% of TheCR Network members agree that the content and peer input improves the quality of their work? It’s true! Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: March 2014 Wrap-Up

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager of TheCR Network

March = SXSW

And lest we forget SXSW! Many of our members rendezvoused in Austin earlier this month. That’s our fearless co-founder, Jim Storer, on the left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As promised, I am back to share a snapshot of what went on inside TheCR Network this month. In February, I gave a pretty extensive overview of our regular programming, content offerings, and range of conversations that take place over the course of one month. Today, I picked out highlights from March:

  • Community Manager Exit Strategy (Discussion). A good community manager builds real and solid relationships with their community members. But what happens when you change roles or companies? Members are discussing the proper etiquette of saying good-bye to your community and the best practices to ensure clear communication and a clean hand off to the new community manager. It was particularly helpful (and touching) to have a member share the private message she posted to her super-user program members and the the public announcement she made when she left her community of two years to start a new role.
  • How to Build a Mentor Program (Case Study). Earlier this month we had a TheCR Network member share an excellent case study on a live, virtual Roundtable call. We got an extensive overview of this member’s adventures in building a traditional mentoring program within her community. In the past we have discussed the merits of reverse mentoring program, but this dive into a traditional mentor program was a popular and well-received case study.
  • Best Practices for B2B Customer Engagement (Live Virtual Roundtable Session). We find that our members who manage B2B customer and partner communities come up against some specific engagement challenges that are different than their consumer facing counterparts. Tomorrow we have an experienced member sharing his more successful engagement strategies for B2B communities and facilitating a discussion amongst our practitioner participants to gather the group’s collective wisdom on the subject. A true meeting of the minds!

This is only a small sampling of the events and discussions that took place this past month. I’d love to hear your top priorities and topics of interest from this past month in the comments. If you are anything like our members, I bet you were juggling a full plate. Tell us about it!

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Did you know that 95% of TheCR Network members agree that the content and peer input improves the quality of their work? It’s true! Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

Friday Roundup – Will Winter Ever End? Edition

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By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

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(Illustration by Sarah Lazarovic)

Despite it being not quite halfway through March we are very ready for winter to be over. After an unseasonably warm weekend it snowed twice in Boston this week. Enough!

We are already looking forward to April – and not just for the (hopefully) nicer weather. April marks our five year anniversary and we are ready to celebrate. This week we announced our 5th anniversary celebration – a Happy Hour in Cambridge, MA. If you’re in the Greater Boston area we’d love to see you!

That’s all for this week, friends. Have a great weekend, beware the ides of March and we’ll see you back here on Monday!

 

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Did you know that 95% of TheCR Network members agree that the content and peer input available inside the Network improves the quality of their work? It’s true!

Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

Celebrating Community Success – Ian White (Rackspace)

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at TheCR Network.

Screen Shot 2014-03-04 at 3.59.49 PMAs community manager of TheCR Network – our peer network of social business and community leaders – one of the things I love is celebrating our members’ successes with them. We know the many challenges our members face as they work to implement community models into their organizations’ infrastructure and it’s great when there is validation for all of their hard work. In this case, we were thrilled to hear that one of our members, Ian White of Rackspace, and his community team was awarded a silver award for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service at the eighth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. I caught up with Ian to get more details.

Hillary: Congrats on your big award! Tell us more about the award and why you and your team was chosen to receive it.

Ian:  The Stevie Awards are considered the Oscars of the business world, and the Sales & Customer Service awards honor companies across sales, contact centers and customer service. More than 400 nominated customer service and sales executives from the US and several other countries attended.

My team, the Rackspace Community Team was honored for its contribution towards providing Fanatical Support®. One of the tenants of Fanatical Support is proactively serving our customers – providing solutions to problems before customers know they have them and before they even have to ask. The team took home a silver award for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service – Computer Services at the eighth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Hillary: Sounds like your customers enjoy this more modern form of support – can you share some feedback you’ve received from users on the community support model?”

Ian: Our customers are primarily business owners, and they’ve told us that they appreciate the ability to have a library of solutions at their fingertips that is accessible when they want it. They are delighted at the speed and quality of our specialists’ responses in the Community. Additionally, our customers enjoy the access that the Community gives them to have transparent communication with Rackspace leadership about big issues such as security in the cloud.

Hillary: We know it’s a pretty big deal for a community team to win this over traditional support teams. Can you share a little background about your community and how you ended up at this point of achievement?

Ian: We started the Community on February 4th, 2013 with the goal of expanding our Fanatical Support to a digital audience that prefers self-service. In the current market, many people prefer to google an answer to a question rather than speak to a human, so expanding that concept to include support for Rackspace customers was a key objective. It was also important that our Community provide access to specialists in a wide variety of technologies that can address specific concerns. After one question has been answered, it can be viewed and provide insight to other customers who are experiencing similar problems. This allows us to create a comprehensive support experience for our customers with information that is constantly evolving and growing.

Hillary: Thinking back at the process of standing this community up, what was a major obstacle and how did you overcome it?

Ian: The biggest challenge out of the gate was trying to find content that would be valuable to our audience. It’s something we continually debate as a team, and we challenge each other to find the best content, through the right channel, for the right member. Fortunately our customers are very open about what they want, so we have the advantage of learning from them and adapting our processes along the way.

Hillary: What’s next for your community?

Ian: In 2014, our focus is targeted at expanding the self-service options for our customers through a redesigned Community and a unified customer experience for all of our digital portals. The concept of proactive Fanatical Support will continue to inspire any and all projects moving forward. I’m really excited to see how customers react to the updates we are planning, and I hope that they love it. If they don’t, I hope they will tell us so that we can improve it!

Hillary: Great job, Ian! We’re all really proud of the work you are doing and we look forward to keeping up with your efforts inside TheCR Network!

IanWhite

Ian White is the manager of support at Rackspace and has 19 years of experience leading large scale cloud hosting programs and teams. He identifies strategic opportunities and grows them into sustainable business models. He specializes in creating digital self-service channels to connect people with online solutions, knowledge bases, communities, and social learning environments. His passion is creating customer delight.

Sneak Peek Inside TheCR Network: February 2014 Wrap-Up

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Hello. My name is Hillary Boucher and I am the community manager of TheCR Network – our private peer network of the smartest social business and community professionals. And I kid you not — every day I am honored to work with the intelligent, savvy and experienced community professionals in our network.

I know there are many people who want to know what membership is like, and so every month I’m going to be giving a sneak peek into what we’ve been up to inside the network. Ready? Here we go!

Nerdy Valentine's Day card by Stephanie Evergreen

Nerdy Valentine’s Day card by Stephanie Evergreen

 

Last month in TheCR Network…

February is for lovers. Community lovers that is.

It might have been a cold and snowy month for most of our team, but with 95+ companies represented and globally located we were able to live vicariously through our members located in warmer climates.

Member Questions & Discussions

Inside TheCR Network members have access to groups and forums based on their work and priorities. Here, they can ask questions for other members to answer or report on their own insights and experiences. Some of the hot topics this month were:

  • How do you get members over the “it’s a stupid question so I won’t ask” hump?
  • What are some best practices around community approvals?
  • Do you have different tiers for your MVP/super user program?

New Resources

TheCR Network members have access to TheCR Library, which includes an archive of Roundtable Reports, TheCR Research, Resource Bundles organized by use case, member case studies and more.

  • Community Maturity Model Resource Bundle. This month we revamped and re-released our Community Maturity Model Resource Bundle to include new resources our members co-created with our team.
  • New crowdsourced conference guide. It’s a common challenge to keep track of industry appropriate events so we decided to take the challenge on as a network. The collaborative document is filling up fast with helpful info and insights about various conferences and events that might be helpful to members.
  • Advocacy Program Quick Case. Every week we host two virtual Happy Hour chats for our team to connect with other members around work and personal interests. It was one of those beautiful community moments. Two members bumped into each other in Happy Hour chat. After some casual introductions, one member mentioned she was researching how to launch an advocacy program and another member replied that she had just been there and launched a program last year. A case study was shared right there in Happy Hour and with their permission we grabbed the most helpful parts of their conversation, reformatted it and released it as a quick case so other members could benefit from the information exchange.
  • Four new Roundtable reports. We create reports from every single Roundtable call. In February we released four new reports filled with best practices and lessons learned on a variety of topics including: 2014 trends for social business, State of Community Management research overview, how to manage up in a networked world, and how gamification can drive business objectives in your community.

Roundtable Calls and Member Events

Roundtable calls are the heartbeat of our programming. Every week we host a live, interactive call with expert facilitators covering various topics and case studies that are important and supportive to our members’ work. Here are the discussions we hosted this month:

Social Business and Transparency
This was a well attended Roundtable call hosted by one of our members from a large, financial institution. She shared an inspiring case study and best practices on transparency and engagement in enterprise social networks.

Community Maturity Workshop
As you know we’ve been collecting survey data for our 2014 State of Community Management Research both inside the network and with our extended network of friends. (Have you taken the survey yet? It closes Friday and we would love to have you included!) What you might not know is that inside the network we have an active Community Maturity Assessment Working Group who has been collaborating with our team and building maturity assessment tools. Their work informed our survey creation and this month we gathered for a workshop, facilitated by Maggie Tunning, to take a peek at the early results and discuss insights.

How Do you Measure the Success of Community Managers?
This is a hot topic for members and the second time in six months we’ve gathered to discuss. We heard from experienced team leaders on how they assess the success of the community managers on their teams, and we also heard from individual community professionals on how they measure their own success.

Crowdsourcing and Collaborating with Consumers: Understanding the Difference
For this discussion we brought in an external expert, Julie Wittes Schlack who is the VP of Innovation at Communispace, to take a detailed look at best practices for collaborating and crowdsourcing with consumers.

Book Club: The Circle by Dave Eggers
Is sharing really caring? Are you spooked by the public’s disregard for privacy? No? Then you haven’t read The Circle by Dave Eggers yet. It’s a novel that takes a very interesting look at where society could be heading with its technology and the slippery slope of privacy and transparency. It’s not as far fetched as you might think and it’s particularly interesting to discuss with others who work is the social and community space. Our team gathered with members for a book club chat and decided that the book affirms that the conversation at hand is not just about technology — but the intent of the people who yield it.

Alumni Series: 20 Questions w/ Claire Flanagan
We gathered for a small and intimate discussion with longtime TheCR member, Claire Flanagan to discuss her career journey in the community space. Along with Claire’s perspectives, members weighed in with their own thoughts on what they’ve learned over the past five years, where the career path of a community manager can lead, and the current trends that are affecting and shaping the way they approach their community work.

Want to join the conversation?

What do you think? Enough for one month? I’ve only just highlighted some of our more prevalent discussions. There have been many more questions and discussions, high quality content curated and archived for future research needs, and many peer-to-peer introductions made by our team as part of our concierge service we provide members. If you are interested in being a part of TheCR Network you can learn more about membership here. I’d love to help you get started!

See you next month!

 

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Do you manage a community? Take the 15 minute State of Community Management survey and save $500 on individual membership through Friday, February 28th.

What Can The SOCM Research Do for You?

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By Maggie Tunning, Learning and Culture Manager at The Community Roundtable.red old style alarm clock isolated on white

Time’s running out – the last day to take the 2014 State of Community Management survey is next Friday, February 28.

The Community Roundtable publishes The State of Community Management research each year to highlight advances and trends in the business of community management. This research is for – and prepared in collaboration with – community managers. Mike Pace sums up the reason to participate – Community Manager: Help Yourself (note: that post links to the 2013 survey – you can take the 2014 survey here).

We want the State of Community Management research to be a useful resource for community managers. How can it help you? Members of TheCR Network use it to:

1. Educate. As community managers, we are on average poorly resourced and largely haven’t yet broken through to having a seat at the executive table. While on one side there’s massive interest in using social to provide better experiences for the ecosystem, on the other side there’s still a broad lack of understanding of what that actually takes. Maria Ogneva

2. Benchmark. The past reports have been a great asset to community and social media managers as they offer insight into how other companies are doing community. It also allows individuals at these companies to take an honest look at their programs. Jeff Esposito

3.  Resource. Community Managers will continue to struggle for capacity, budgets, and recognition. But, this can change if we as Community Managers become comfortable challenging our leaders, consistently sharing results, and educating business areas on how to use the tools and successes. James LaCorte

Your participation is important to us and your community management peers, and we’re interested in responses from all types of communities at all stages of maturity. Take the survey here today or help spread the word to others you know. As a thank you for participating, you’ll receive a discount on new individual membership in TheCR Network ($500 off!)

 

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The Community Roundtable  is committed to advancing the business of community. We offer a membership based peer network, community management training programs and advisory services for corporations and individuals.

 

 

Introducing: Faces of Community Management

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By Shannon DiGregorio, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day! We’re excitedly following along with all the #CMAD activities today.

In TheCR Network we’re always surprised with how different our members are – in wonderful ways. It seems like no two community managers have taken the same path on their journey and their varied backgrounds make for a fascinating set of members. The greatest benefit of such a diverse group is how broad and deep their knowledge bases are. We have ex-lawyers, former journalists and even an librarian! We’ve decided to honor our members through a new 2014 initiative called The Faces of Community Management and we thought unveiling the project on #CMAD was a perfect opportunity to share our love and appreciation.

Every few weeks we’ll profile one of our members and really shine the spotlight on their place in the community world. We can’t wait to share some of our amazing members with you! Without further ado, the very first Face of Community Management is James LaCourte, Online Strategist and Community Manager at Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina. He blogs at The Gaspar and you can find him on LinkedIn.

FacesCM_JamesDownload James’ profile here: FacesCM_James.

We are also delighted to share a guest blog post from James today! You can read it below or check it out here.

5 ways your community can be more engaging and still keep your sanity!

Community Manager Appreciation Day is here again but I don’t think most people outside the social media realm even know about it. Community Managers are the unsung heroes working behind the scenes to nurture and grow the community. It’s a tough job that many underestimate the skills and time required.  In a single day you can go from feeling energized to worn down and lonely. But it’s worth it. That’s why whenever two Community Managers get together there’s an instant connection. They know what it takes and the rewards to be gained from such a role.

Here’s 5 ways you can help your community be more engaging and still keep your sanity!

1. Set the tone Define the purpose and set the stage by planting the seeds of discussion.

2. Make visitors feel at home Recruit and welcome new members. Give them a tour or better yet have another member mentor them.

3. Connect people and ideas

The key to any community is in the relationships among participants. Building relationships online takes time. A successful Community Manager can foster relationships by connecting ideas and members to each other.

4. Steering conversation

Sometimes conversations need a little help getting started. Other times conversations need to be steered in another direction or cooled down. Do it with confidence and creativity.

5. Shining the light on others

I think one of the most powerful tactics a Community Manager can remember is to find ways to empower and praise community members. Let them shine in the light, allow them to become advocates for the community and in the end the more advocates a community has the easier your job will be.

So from one Community Manager to another I wish you a wonderful day and know that what you do may not be understood by many, but you have a small group of peers who understand and are here to help. That’s the great thing about the Community Roundtable, it’s a support group for all of us crazy people who took on this role, many of us not knowing what we were getting into!

Enjoy your day!

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TheCR Network is a membership network that provides strategic, tactical and professional development programming for community and social business leaders. The network enables members to connect and form lasting relationships with experts and peers as well as get access to vetted content. TheCR Network is the place to learn from social business practitioners.  Join today

Become a Part of the Network You Need… Before You Need It

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By Jim Storer, Co-Founder and Principal at The Community Roundtable

2013 has been an amazing, busy and productive year here at The Community Roundtable. Membership grew by 34% and we now reach members in thirty-one US states and seven countries around the world. I am personally thrilled with the collaboration and camaraderie that the Network fosters – watching members help each other with real issues and solve problems together is gratifying and brings us one step closer to realizing our vision for a truly interactive hub for advancing community strategy and management. The best reward for us is that our progress also makes our members proud.

To support this growth we’ve made significant changes this past year, including doubling the size of our team. 2014 will also bring changes to what membership in TheCR Network looks like. First, we’ll begin bundling our Toolkits with membership starting in 2014 and our research library will continue to grow to support our additional members. After a lot of discussion Rachel and I have decided to increase the fee for TheCR Network membership. In order to provide quality content and programs, access to industry-leading research and our signature professional concierge service, we feel this is essential. As of January 1, 2014, TheCR Network membership fee will increase from $995 to $1,499/person/year and will include your choice of one toolkit along with your membership seat. Contact us for special team pricing for three or more people.

Current members will be grandfathered at the current membership rate, meaning if you join by December 31st you can lock in the $995 price. In other words, if you have been thinking of joining, now is a great time to do so!

Members of TheCR Network enjoy:

  • Weekly member-only roundtable calls with industry leaders like Jeremiah Owyang, Richard Millington, Maria Ogneva, Bill Johnston and more
  • Access to over 200 case studies and reports in our research library highlighting best practices from Fortune 500 companies
  • Our professional concierge service, matching you with a member or expert that has experience with your specific issue
  • Downloads of all TheCR Research in pdf format
  • Exclusive discounts on training, events, research and Toolkits
  • The opportunity to define TheCR roadmap and research priorities

We know it’s not always easy to convince your boss to allocate budget for your professional development. We are happy to help you with cost justification and referrals. We’ve drafted a justification letter for you to use and we are also happy to speak directly with you and your team. Contact us to learn more.

As 2013 draws to a close I want to thank you for being a loyal friend of The Community Roundtable. TheCR Network members are a vibrant part of our world, but we also appreciate your continued support. We will continue to invest in curated content and research for our wider community of friends and followers (including our curated Twitter stream, Pinterest boards, Slideshare presentations, favorites and blog). Over the last two years we’ve added services and content for those of you just starting out – including training and toolkits that can be purchased a la carte.

Join TheCR Network now!

Here’s to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2014. We can’t wait to see what the new year brings!

Thanking it Forward – Fostering an Attitude of Gratitude

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By Rachel Happe, Co-founder of The Community Roundtable

At The Community Roundtable we like to celebrate Thanksgiving instead of other end of the year celebrations. It both fits our ethos of articulating our thanks and it better fosters a sense of community than any gift ever could. We’ve been using the #ThankItForward tag to encourage our community to thank those that have made a positive impact on their lives this year. For TheCR team everyone on the team has the name of one other team member and a check to spend on thanking that person in whatever way they choose.

Personally, the #ThankItForward challenge is daunting to me – to pick just three individuals is nearly impossible. I feel literally overwhelmed with support, inspiration and friendship from so many people. It is an embarrassment of riches that is both amazingly gratifying and sometimes a bit confounding – at least to me. There are some people and things that stood out this year, however, in no particular order:

  • J.J. Lovett who asked me to edit his book with Margaret Brooks and Sam Creek, Developing B2B Social Communities.
  • Claire Flanagan who has continually advocated on behalf of The Community Roundtable and encouraged me personally, culminating in a partnership with Jive this year.
  • CheeChin Liew and Marlene Wolf who saw potential to extend the work that we do and supported that effort.
  • Sandy Carter for her support and advocacy of my work.
  • David Carr who included our research and work in Social Collaboration for Dummies.
  • Maria Ogneva who has so willingly and openly shared and collaborated to move the community management discipline forward.
  • Ted Hopton who supported and enabled us to write the UBM Case study.
  • TheCR Team – Jim, Hillary, Maggie, Jillian, Shannon and Leanne all make the work we do amazing. They surprise and delight me often and I couldn’t ask for a better team with whom to work.
  • Sue Feldman who has supported me since I worked for her at IDC and continues to mentor me. I learned from her that it is initially more important to focus on having interesting conversations than what I’m trying to get out of an interaction. If you do that, business will follow. She was right.
  • Bill Synder – someone I hardly know and yet, through one conversation, let me see my work in an entirely new way with an implicit assumption of its potential value in a whole new area and for Mark Bonchek who made that conversation possible.
  • CV Harquail who is generous with her expertise and continues to prod in ways that make me re-think our potential and what we do.
  • TheCR Network members, who collaborate with each other, rally around each other and are committed to making the work that we all do more meaningful.
  • TheCR clients who collaborate with us to deliver results for their organizations. We are very fortunate to have client relationships that have never felt like transactions.
  • My husband, Ted McEnroe, who I like to think of as both my personal partner but also as an investor in The Community Roundtable who has exhibited unwavering support of the work I do, despite its small and large impacts on his life.

Not included in this list are the hundreds of people who have made introductions, riffed off and added to our work, advocated for what we are doing, contributed to events and discussions, become clients or members, invited me to events and generally helped nudge my success along.

As TheCR has grown, I’ve realized that while it’s taken a lot of work for a few people, it has also taken a little work from a great many people. One of the things that I am most proud of is that we’ve collaborated with our community to advance the discipline of community management and while The Community Roundtable is doing well, our ultimate goal is to enable the success of those in our community and that is and will be the true measure of our success.

Thanks to all of you for interesting conversations – here’s to more of them!