network Archives

CMSS Stats You Can Use: What’s the Best Way to Network?

March 4, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Community professionals have no shortage of resources to help them grow in their careers.

It’s an exciting time to work in the community management world. Given the rise in community management, blogs, books and other publications are in abundance for those looking to read up on good practices and trends in the field. (You can check out our recommended reading list here.)

Conferences and other networking opportunities that connect community professionals with their industry peers help them stay current with trends in a field that is growing as technology advances. We’ve found that vendor conferences can be particularly helpful when connecting you with people that are struggling with the same challenges that you face – and provide a great way to expand your understanding of the platform you use.

Through our Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 research we found that 51% of survey participants belong to a professional development group – these groups (like TheCR Network) provide an instant network of like-minded community practitioners and a 24/7 support system for often-siloed community professionals. Many cities also host community-focused meet-ups (like OcTribe in San Francisco and the Community Manager Breakfast series in Austin)- check out what is available near you or start your own group!

Community managers may want to take a look at our newest eBook, as well. Defining Community Management Roles provides you with information on salaries, experience, skills and responsibilities for three key community management roles – community manager, community strategist and director of community. Check it out now!

Introducing TheCR Champion Program

October 9, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager The Community Roundtable.

Turns out Fall 2014 is a pretty big season here at TheCR. (In case you missed it we announced a new service last week and announced our new partnership with #ESNchat the week before!) Today, I’m excited to share some news from inside TheCR Network.

After months of work, we are launching a leadership program for TheCR Network called TheCR Champions. This program serves to:

Deepen conversations among special interest groups who share a common use case or characteristic
Enhance our content and programming by having community leaders, who have deep expertise in their domain, lead conversations
Connect you more closely with similar peers and industry experts

We’ve sought out Champions who are experts in the space and who can add depth to the conversation in their respective domains, introduce members to the others within their personal networks, and facilitate a special interest group within TheCR Network.

We have launched three special interest groups to start:

Associations & NFP/Non-Profits: exploring issues related to associations and non-profit organizations in the social and community space
The Social Executive: to explore and curate best practices for gaining executive support and coaching executives to get started and succeed in their communities
Business Model Innovation: to explore the critical role of community elements in the development of new business models at enterprises large and small

We have groups on social support and governance launching soon, with groups on ESN/collaboration and social media in the works.

What does this mean for our members? They’ve seen (and will continue to see) more content and programming (available to the entire network but tailored to specific groups) with a variety of quality facilitators and guest experts that address special interests.

For me, it’s the culmination of months of work below the visible surface of the community – the iceberg effect of community management – and over the next few weeks, I’ll be introducing our first TheCR Champions on the blog. We are honored to work with them and excited to have them invest their time and expertise inside the network, and we want to give you an idea of the special work they are doing.

Thanks for reading along. I love sharing the cool stuff that happens inside the Network, and I’d love to chat with you if you think membership might be a good fit for you and your community journey. Drop me a line!
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Want to take advantage of programs like TheCR Champions? Join the Network today!

Sneak Peek Inside TheCR Network: February 2014 Wrap-Up

February 26, 2014 By Hillary Boucher

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

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.

A Community? A Network? An Audience?

September 9, 2009 By Rachel Happe

We have a lot of semantic issues in the social media/online space. The term community is particularly problematic because people tend to throw it around for any online group that interacts with content. The problem for me is that communities are not about content, they are about relationships. Relationships do need content/programs/conversations in order to develop – just like they do in the real world – but just because a large group of people come by regularly and comment on online content doesn’t mean there is a true community.

Now I know, a lot of people are not going to agree with me on this but here is how I roughly define some terms for collections of people:

Group: A relatively small collection of people, most of whom know each other. I would say 80%+ of group members have interacted and formed a relationship with one another.

Community: A moderate size collection of people, a large percentage (somewhere between 30 – 70%) of which know and have interacted with each other.

Network: A large collection of people who are accessible to each other in a particular location but only a small percentage of whom know each other personally – perhaps 30% or less. Networks typically contain groups or communities.

Ecosystem: Intersecting networks, communities, groups, companies, individuals, and other organizations within an environment.

Audience: A large collection of people who experience the same content and may react to it but who don’t have relationships with each other (except for those people they bring with them).

None of these collections of people are good or bad, but they each are effective for different outcomes and trying to get an audience to collaborate with each other will be challenging (not impossible, but challenging). Getting a community to drive traffic is not the most efficient mechanism. For organizations, this means understanding what outcomes are needed and what activities the target population is likely to participate in is absolutely critical. And like the image suggests, you can have groups within audiences or communities within networks – architecting your management solution (which includes tools, processes, guidelines, metrics, people, etc.) to fit your strategy is key – as well as understanding the cycle time and investment that will be required to build out that management architecture.

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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 industry leaders. Join today