Microsoft Archives

Alex Blanton on Supporting Technical Audiences and Identifying SMEs

March 20, 2020 By Jim Storer

Conversations with Community Managers - Alex Blanton — Conversations with Community Managers – Alex Blanton

Join the community experts at The Community Roundtable as they chat about online community management best practices with a wide range of global community professionals. Topics include increasing online audience engagement, finding and leveraging executive stakeholders, defining and calculating online community ROI and more.

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Episode #66 features Alex Blanton, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft.

In this episode of the podcast, Alex shares best practices for creating synergy between online and offline events, how community managers can support technical audiences if they aren’t technical experts, identifying SMEs in your audience, and how to support other community programs in tandem with your own.

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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.

What I Learned about Community Management from Organizing a 1,700-Person Conference

August 5, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Alex Blanton, Senior Program Manager, Community and Outreach – Information Management & Machine Learning at Microsoft, and member of TheCR Network.

On May 28-29, we held our third Machine Learning & Data Science Conference here on the Microsoft campus. This is an internal-only event that brings together our data scientists and engineers interested in advanced analytics, including machine learning and the end-to-end data science process and real-world applications that are leading to intelligent new apps and new insights from our ever-expanding universe of digital data. (If you don’t understand that description, that’s okay–it’s enough to know that machine learning and data science are very hot areas for Microsoft and other technology companies right now.)

This event has grown in popularity each time we’ve held it, and this May our attendance number of 1,706 was double the number of people who attended the event last October. We had more than 80 different talks and tutorials, as well as two executive keynotes, a tradeshow-like reception where more than 60 projects presented their work, and an onsite data science consulting service. As the community manager for our internal machine learning community, I look at this conference as an “anchor” event for the community, and the best opportunity for our members to get together face to face with so many of the people they work with virtually throughout the rest of the year.

Planning, organizing, and delivering the conference would have been impossible to stage without the active participation of many members of the vibrant machine learning and data science communities that we have here at Microsoft. This was my first time leading a conference effort this large, and I learned 5 big things about community management as it relates to putting on an event of this size.

1. Inclusion works.

From a budgetary standpoint, this event was primarily sponsored by my business group. But while we had the money to stage the event, we didn’t have enough people to make the event happen. Also, there are other groups and communities at Microsoft whose audiences and memberships overlap with ours, and who had their own plans for events in this timeframe. Instead of “competing” with those other groups, I reached out to them, explained what we were trying to accomplish, listened to what they were trying to accomplish, and ended up working with most of them to create a combined event that concentrated all our efforts on one big goal.

In the end, seven other groups and communities of varying sizes co-sponsored the event and helped make it a success, with more than 50 people giving their time, expertise, and enthusiasm over the past few months. This mindset of inclusion and cooperation did make some aspects of the event more complicated to manage and track, but the return on investment–in the form of the talents of those 50-plus people–more than made it worth it.

2. Sometimes, you just have to ask.

One of the teams that helped out with the conference was a data science team that works with engineering teams around the company. When the time came for me to find qualified reviewers of proposals and experienced people to give feedback in speaker rehearsals, I didn’t have enough people lined up to do so, because the data scientists on my own team had commitments to Microsoft customers they were busy fulfilling.

So I reached out to Juan’s team and just asked, “Is there any way your team could help out since you have experience?” I got an immediate “Yes,” both because they wanted the event to be a success, and because they publish a journal of applied research, and saw the opportunity in taking part with reviews and rehearsals to discover great work to feature in the journal. This was a classic win-win situation, but we never would have discovered it if I hadn’t made the request.

3. It pays to know your superusers personally.

On the morning of the 2nd day of the conference, I got an urgent email from the videographer who was making a short “sizzle reel” video of the event. He needed someone to interview to give some context and voiceover to the video, and he wanted me to do it. I knew I was the wrong person, since (1) I organized the event, and (2) I am not a data scientist. I immediately I started thinking through who would be right for him to interview. It had to be:

Someone who is a data scientist
Someone who understands the event and why we run it (ideally someone who has presented at the conference)
Someone who is articulate
Someone who is passionate about learning and learning from others
Someone who was actually there at the event that day

It’s hard to describe what happened in my mind over the next 10-15 seconds; it was as if I took our 2500-person community and applied all these criteria, rapidly filtering down to two names out of the dozens or perhaps hundreds of possibilities: Ram and Esin. Ram is a security expert, and he runs a special-interest community focused specifically on machine learning and security. Esin works in our Bing Ads business, and she teaches a regular introductory ML class as part of our community. I looked at the event schedule, guessed which room each was likely to be in at that time, and went to track them down. I found them where I expected them each to be, they both agreed, and less than 90 minutes later the interviews were both done.

The time I had invested over the past couple of years getting to know Ram and Esin personally paid big dividends in this unexpected moment, and I have no doubt that the time spent getting to know other superusers will similarly pay off in the future.

4. Content can be your best community recruiter.

Every time we published content out to the people who registered for the conference–whether it was a draft agenda, an online beginner’s tutorial before the conference itself, a Conference Preview webinar, or something else–we included a call to join the machine learning community at Microsoft. And sure enough, during the weeks before the event, we welcomed hundreds of people to the machine learning community.

I think that putting effort into creating valuable content, and then pairing that content with a call to action to join the community, is so much more effective than a simple request to people to join your community. The fact that you create original content shows your own commitment as community sponsors, and it also gives potential members a sense for the value they will get if they join the community.

5. The metaphor of the conductor and the orchestra really does make sense. We started work on the conference in January, and it was daunting. There was so much I didn’t know, and I had no idea how we would get it done! Now it’s six months later, and I still don’t know how to do so much of what it takes to put on an event of this size. But I’ve come to peace with the fact that I may never be able evaluate a strongly technical machine learning proposal, I can’t find a math error in a data science presentation, and I have no idea how to estimate how much food to order for 1,700 people.

What I can do is conduct the overall experience–that is, make sure that I know people who can do those things well, that I have recruited them to take part, and that they are motivated to do so, understand what’s expected of them, have the information they need to do the work, and feel like they’re getting recognized and rewarded in the ways that they want. Being able to orchestrate all of their individual talents so that they work together seamlessly to make this big event a great experience for our attendees is classic community manager work, and it’s something that I’m going to strive to do even better at our next conference–which is only six months away!

Using the Community Maturity Model for Internal Consulting at Microsoft

June 26, 2014 By Jim Storer

One of the perks of TheCR Network membership is the opportunity for community managers to collaborate and solve challenges in working groups. Last fall, TheCR Network members formed a Community Maturity Assessment Working Group, with the goal of building a tool to measure the maturity of communities. Members of the group worked on persona exercises to understand member behaviors in different types and maturity stages of communities, and then used this information to outline maturity markers based on the competencies in the Community Maturity Model.

This work helped extend the Community Maturity Model in new ways — both for TheCR and other members. We’ve already shared a couple examples on the blog here:

The maturity artifacts helped develop the survey for the State of Community Management 2014 research
On March’s Community Manager Spotlight webinar, working group member Heather Ausmus shared how she uses the Community Maturity Model to build a community roadmap

Most recently, another working group leader, Alex Blanton of Microsoft, shared how he’s using the Community Maturity Model for internal community consulting as part of TheCR Network’s weekly programming. Internal community consulting has been a trending topic in the network – we’ve hosted two other Roundtable calls on the topic – because our members are being asked to extend their skill sets to the rest of their organizations, through training and advisory services. We were excited to have Alex share how he has used the Community Maturity Model as a framework for the advisory work he does with internal engineering communities at Microsoft.

Alex adapted the working group’s assessment tool to align with the needs of the teams with which he consults. One of the services Alex offers is a 90-minute consultation including a maturity self-assessment based on the Community Maturity Model. Alex follows this session with a comparison to industry norms, recommendations and additional resources.

Alex demoed his maturity assessment tool on a Roundtable call for TheCR Network.

Some lessons from Alex for starting internal maturity assessment consultations:

–Do consultations on paper. Don’t focus on a “score.” Alex starts his consultations on paper by printing out the Excel-based assessment tool (that automatically generates maturity values), so that clients focus on discussing where they are instead of on trying to achieve a number.

–Use the Community Maturity Model to start a conversation. Alex observes that as clients review the model, they sometimes disagree with colleagues about where their community belongs in certain competencies. Coming to alignment on the maturity level sparks conversation about community activities and progress in a way that helps identify gaps or opportunities.

–Offer a variety of service offerings. Recognizing that not all communities need the same level of support, Alex offers a tiered service model for consulting. For example, he developed an “8-Step Community Jumpstart” for new communities that aren’t yet ready for a full assessment and instead need to prioritize getting started.

If you use the Community Maturity Model in your work, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn more about the Community Maturity Model and how other organizations are using it here.

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Looking to take your career in community management to the next level? 92% of members agree that TheCR Network supports and advances their personal and professional goals. Learn how our research, access to peers and experts, targeted content and exclusive concierge service can help you achieve your goals.

SXSW Panel – Building Social Strategies at Fortune 100 Companies

August 17, 2009 By Rachel Happe

The SXSW panel picker is up with more goods stuff than ever – 2,219 panels proposed for the interactive portion alone. Oy. Not many people will have the patience to actually sift through all of those panels but we would appreciate your vote for the panel we proposed:

Building Social Strategies at Fortune 100 Companies

Questions:
1.   What has the path to becoming a social organization looked like for your company?
2.   What is the end game for social media and community strategy at the Fortune 100?
3.   What are the biggest challenges in getting started?
4.   What are some of the legal issues that arise with transparency and how do you navigate those risks?
5.   How to define metrics that support both your community and give the c-suite what they want?
6.   What tools should I use to build an online community?
7.   What is the C-Suite listening to?
8.   How is the CMOs role evolving as a result of social media/community?
9.   Who should own community/social media within your organization?
10.   When is the right time to engage your customers in community?
Description:
Companies of all sizes are adopting social media and community, but large organizations have some unique challenges and opportunities. This panel will uncover best practices through stories told by social media leaders from Ford, Nationwide, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Dell.

We’ve recruited a few superstars to join the panel including Scott Monty, Shawn Morton, Rawn Shaw, & Mark Yolton. We think they will be worth a listen – and hope you do too.

Vote Here and thank you.