Members Archives

Shannon Paul on Protected Health Information and Privacy in Communities

April 15, 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 #23, featuring Shannon Paul, Social Media Manager at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.

Podcast highlights include:

Dealing with “Protected Health information” (PHI) due to regulations such as HIPAA, including the names of members, and how to balance the need for community and the privacy of members.
Creating resources such as www.ahealthiermichigan.org to present wellness resources.
Coordination and sharing among associated but separated organizations, as with the Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans in different states.
When “I can’t answer you” is an answer.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

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.

Recap of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

November 15, 2010 By Rachel Happe

Last week, I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference and, with Ted Hopton, chaired the Community Development and Management track. There were a several notable changes to this event – the first was that the conference was broken up into disciplines and business processes which helped bring more business owners to the conference. The second was that the newer west coast version of this conference is approaching the size of its east coast counterpart, held in June every year in Boston. In my mind, both of these signal an evolution in the market from experimental to operational and it’s a good sign. There were still a lot of new faces and balancing the needs of those attendees with the needs of E2.0 “regulars” is something that needs to be done going forward.

The community development and management track received very positive remarks (although we’ll have to wait a bit to see the tabulated feedback – please fill in an evaluation if you were at the conference). I was happy to be able to introduce Mark Yolton of SAP (slides here) and Bill Johnston of Dell to the E2.0 conference crowd and both spoke to a packed room. Bill Johnston and a panel moderated by Claire Flanagan with Erica Kuhl of Salesforce.com and Megan Murray from Booz Allen Hamilton gave the audience the fundamentals of community and community management while weaving in their own case studies.

The track then focused on specific areas of community management – engagement, collaboration & project management, governance, analytics & measurement, and building support. One of my favorite moments from the conference was when Joe Crumpler, an IS Manager at Alcoa Aerospace, mentioned that he finally realized at the conference that there was a name for what he did – community management – and that it really represented for him a new way of managing teams. I couldn’t agree more as I think community management is both a role and a discipline or methodology of general management.

Other interesting comments/themes that I heard over the course of the event:

Alcoa has reduced the need for status meetings almost entirely by using social environments, which has direct cost and productivity implications. They’ve seen a 30% increase in work time for their team members. Mark Yolton from SAP chimed in and said they had reduced their status meetings to one time per month/5 minutes per project.
There is a big cultural change getting people comfortable with sharing ‘in process’ work vs. finalized documents. Individuals often want to perfect something before it is seen and reviewed.
There was a lot of discussion around finding the individuals in a network that are most capable of spreading information or spurring action and a growing realization that networks and communities must be looked at as collections of different segments/behaviors to effectively manage them. Erica Kuhl of Salesforce talked about their efforts to create the various personas that make up their community and how they think of creating effective experiences for each of those personas.
Many people are mis-using the ‘community’ term and often confusing it with a target audience. The two are not the same thing.
Week ties are often misunderstood because they quickly can become very strong, relevant ties when the context changes.
Orchestrating ‘A Ha’ moments for others is less about evangelism and more about persistence and getting people to see value vs. getting excited by a shiny object

Two of the track panel moderators, Claire Flanagan and Robin Harper, created interesting and very effective panel formats, interestingly both used slides to help structure the conversation just a bit. Claire moderated a track on community managers and their role and did a compare/contract between the different perspectives on the panel. Robin Harper used very simple slides, some with definitions, to help guide the panel and audience through the conversation. I felt like both formats allowed room for the discussions that make panels interesting, while giving the audience a framework for putting that conversation into context so they had clear take-aways.

Finally, the best part of a conference like this is the people. Gil Yehuda wrote a nice post about the E2.0 crowd that resonated with me and the highlights of my week included dinner with Community Roundtable members, catching up with friends and colleagues, and conversations with a variety of people that are working on different challenges in this space. If you are working on community management or social collaboration it is worth putting this conference on your radar and I’m looking forward to the next event in June in Boston.

If you are interested in sharing and collaborating with other professionals in charge of enterprise social initiatives, come explore what membership in The Community Roundtable has to offer.

Photo credit: This photo is from Alex Dunne’s excellent Flickr set “Enterprise 2.0 Conference Santa Clara 2010.”

Avoiding the Community Clique

April 6, 2010 By Rachel Happe

Finding people who share the same interests, perspectives, and passions that we do is part of the visceral power of communities. It is inherently human that we love to engage and form tight relationships with people to whom we can relate. We can congratulate ourselves if we’ve built a community where those tight relationships have formed and has created a network of like-minded individuals who promote each other and the community.

And yet, this may be precisely a point of great risk for communities. If the community knows each other well and speaks to each other using short-hand and references to shared experiences, new members can feel horribly out of place and awkward even if the existing members are not trying to be overtly exclusive. This may be OK if it doesn’t matter whether the community grows but for most organizationally-sponsored communities, growth is necessary and evolution is critical as the business needs change.

It’s a difficult conundrum for community owners – we drive toward creating shared experiences and tight relationships between members but it can cause other huge issues to arise. So what to do? Some suggestions:

Create mentoring or explicit links between new members and established members.
Create new member programming and groups so new members feel like they are on equal footing with a set of other members.
Continually encourage established members to make a point of reaching out to new members or lurkers.
Encourage new members to participate and acknowledge them when they do (and encourage others to as well).
Break up public displays of affection – i.e. if a group of members is creating public cliquey behavior ask them to take it private and or use a different channel. This can be a tough judgment call and take some nuance to facilitate but it is worth making sure core members are aware of behavior that is socially exclusionary. You want members to build those relationships too but be aware of when, where, and how they interact – and how it might affect a group of other members.

We all fall in to the trap of getting comfortable in established relationships. As professional community managers, it is our job to constantly be aware of those dynamics and counteract them for the long term success of the community. Breaking up cliquishness is also what often separates organized communities from organic ones without explicit leaders that force the behavior modifications that allow the community to grow, evolve and change.

Roundtable Call: Tribalization of Business Study

July 7, 2009 By Jim Storer

A big part of what we’re trying to build with The Community Roundtable is a peer network that shares what we learn with our broader community. To that end, we made the Community Maturity Model open source and shared our construct for TheCR Quick Case and continue to figure out new ways to give what we’re doing back to the community at large (we’re currently in the process of launching a public podcast series specifically for community managers… more in another post).

The cornerstone of what we do as a member-based organization are Roundtable Calls. They typically start with a brief introduction by a recognized “expert” and then become a facilitated discussion between members, us and the expert. The best practices and stories that are shared during the discussion often result in “aha” moments for members and lead to deeper bonds between the members. We record the calls and write reports summarizing the best practices that we uncover as a group, never attributing insights to individuals (to maintain their privacy).

We hosted a Roundtable Call last month with Francois Gossieaux from Beeline Labs. He gave an excellent overview of the latest installment of the Tribalization of Business study he’s working on with Ed Moran from Deloitte. Following the call we talked with Francois about “open-sourcing” his intro and in typical Francois fashion he said “go for it!”

In the audio below, Francois compares/contrasts quantitative information from the 2008 and 2009 studies, highlighting where he sees big changes. He also shares several qualitative stories that help illustrate how companies are evolving their business practices to better embrace community. Enjoy!

Interested in learning more about becoming a member of The Community Roundtable? Send us a note or ping us on Twitter.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

A Few of Our Members

June 15, 2009 By Rachel Happe

We are fortunate at The Community Roundtable to have started off with a number of amazing members – individuals experienced in online communications, support, and marketing who are pushing the boundaries of both the profession of community management and what it means for organizations to engage their communities. One of the most engaging pieces of content in the community is the podcasts that Jim does with new members – where we get to know them a little better than we could just with text. So far, a common theme of all of our members has been a thoughtfulness in how they approach their job and a bent towards collecting. Every time I listen to one, I am reminded about what Jim and I are hoping to build – a community of rich interaction where we learn from each other but also connect at a deeper level… and smile.

I wanted to share a few of our particularly compelling new members. I urge you to follow them on Twitter if you are interested in the community management space. They are worth watching – each bringing a particular skill set and perspective to the space that is immensely valuable:

Dawn Lacallade has been involved in enterprise social media and community initiatives since the days when Dell was struggling to figure out how to respond to the PR issues surrounding its batteries. Dawn is now at SolarWinds after a very successful run managing Dell’s IdeaStorm initiative. Dawn brings an almost unmatched passion to the community space because of a belief in its ability to improve customer experience with brands. She is also well known for sharing her time, experiences, and expertise with others and is an advocate for a more articulated description of the community manager role and discipline.

Tom Humbarger is currently consulting, helping companies develop community strategies and writing on community topics. He was the community manager for Catalyze Community (a B2B community sponsored by iRise) from its initial spark of an idea in August 2006 through the public launch in June 2007 until it hit the 4,000 member mark in July 2008. Tom brings with him a background in product management and marketing and has been a leader is mining and using metrics to understand community performance. He blogs at: https://tomhumbarger.wordpress.com/

Rachel Makool spent a number of years at the helm of eBay‘s community management group and has unmatched corporate experience in understanding large consumer communities, how to manage them, and how to integrate community management into a larger enterprise. Rachel feels passionately about how communities and transparency is improves business performance, both financially and in terms of the customer experience. Rachel is particularly committed to raising awareness of how the community management role contributes to corporate performance and how strategic it is.

Ryan Eades is the Online Community Manager for Special Olympics and acts as their brand manager for the online space. Ryan deals with the challenges many distributed organizations have – particularly in the non-profit and government space in that Special Olympics is a group of independently run organizations under one banner. This creates unique challenges for marketing and customer support, particularly as more activities go virtual. Ryan blogs at: https://ryaneades.blogspot.com/

We are really pleased to have their perspectives as part of our group… and looking for a few more good members. Interested? Feel free to email – rachel@community-roundtable.com or jim@community-roundtable.com.