The Community Roundtable

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

TheCR Network 2016 Year in Review

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As we close in on the end of 2016 we are always excited to take a minute and look back at the year. It’s easy to forget about all the things you’ve accomplished when your days fly by (anyone who works in community can probably commiserate!)

In 2016 we saw membership in TheCR Network grow, we expanded our live events series and we got to work with new community professionals all over the world. We are incredibly lucky to collaborate with and learn from some of the brightest minds in the community space. Here’s a quick look back at our 2016 – we’d love to hear what made your top ten list for the year?

thecrnetwork_infographic_2016_final

 

TheCR Network August Highlights: Navigating Social Crises

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable

TheCR Network logoAugust, I don’t want to say good-bye! The summer months are so good, but fall is rapidly approaching. I spent most of the month preparing for a busy September and it’s helpful to look back and reflect on highlights from inside TheCR Network:

  • Navigating Current Events & Social Crises in Your Community (Roundtable Call): We pause Roundtable programming for summer, but sometimes an emergent topic is important and relevant enough for us to schedule one. In this case, members gathered to discuss the common challenges they face while navigating current events & social crises in their internal employee communities. The group had an insightful and meaningful conversation and we shared best practices on how to proactively approach governance for our communities.

  • Screen Shot 2016-08-22 at 5.03.53 PMShow & Tell (Discussion Threads): We notice it’s super helpful to peek at others’ community architecture, design, campaigns, and programs. This summer we set up a number of show & tell threads to help curate helpful community examples. Members shared screenshots of their home pages, new member pages, dashboards, and ideation programs. I’m very happy to continue to grow them and have as resources in the network.

  • Gamification (Resource Bundle): One thing is for sure — a network of community practitioners creates a lot of content! We like to curate and organize information topically to make it easier for members to find helpful resources. This month we released a new resource bundle filled with reports, discussions and case studies on how to encourage engagement and reach business and community goals using gamification tactics.

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Want to access our exclusive community programming for the benefit of your community work? Looking for community peers to share with and learn form? Click here to learn more about membership in TheCR Network or feel free to reach out to ask us any questions.

TheCR Network

What does a community for community pros look like?

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By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable

This week Rachel shared a fantastic look inside the programming inside TheCR Network. You can check out her whole post here.  My favorite part is this great “A Month Inside TheCR Network” calendar she put together:

TheCRNetwork_April2016_ProgrammingCalendarThings We Are Reading This Week 

A Community for Community Managers

Championing Community Management at SXSW 2017

Streamlining the burgeoning cloud of online communities

4 keys to build an employee community: The State of Community Management 2016

How online communities are faring in 2016

I also wanted to share this fun infographic. If you need help convincing your boss that you should join TheCR Network and attend TheCR Connect this might help!

thecr-connect-flow-chart-_FINAL

CMGR Swag – Week Three of The SOCM

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By Shannon Abram, Director of Marketing at The Community Roundtable.
SOCM2016_GetStarted_Badge

The 7th annual State of Community Management research survey and contributions is rolling along – do I sound like a broken record yet? If so, at least I have a good reason. The SOCM is the community industry’s most comprehensive research platform and the data collection period is one of the most important times of the year for us!

I cannot stress enough how important this research is – and how valuable your contributions are to us, and to the community industry as a whole. The larger sample size we collect the deeper the insights we can provide – free – to you, and community manager around the world!

Have 20 minutes? START THE SURVEY HERE

As a thank you for every participants time their next coffee is on us or you can donate $5 to No Kid Hungry/Share Our Strength.

As a surprise to all participants we are giving away a weekly community prizeCMGR Essentialspack every Friday for the duration of the survey period (eight weeks!) This week’s prize is a goodie bag of community swag – directly from TheCR Vault! Including:

  • Two exclusive community t-shirts
  • A TheCR Moleskine
  • Hard Copies of our most recent research
  • Extra TheCR Surprises!

 

This week’s winner has chosen to remain mysterious – but next week it could be you!

If you didn’t win, don’t worry – take the survey you’ll be entered to win every Frida until the survey closes! Next week we’ll be giving away a “TheCR Goes to the Movies” including a copy of our favorite movie, tasty movie watching treats and more!

Don’t forget to share the survey with community friends and colleagues – the grand prize is $1 for every survey participant – help us give you the best prize possible and collect the most comprehensive community data in the world! Share the survey: https://the.cr/socm2016survey

Things We are Reading This Week

CMGRs are Entry-Level? Not Anymore.

Dear IT Department, Why Community Management Matters

Best Practices for Community Platform Migration

Lightning in a Bottle: How to Build a Successful Community in Days

Milestones of community maturity: Getting there from here

Six Obstacles To Building Communities In Organizations

Why Community User Feedback Matters

New Community and Social Media Jobs

Friday Roundup – Resources for Community Managers

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Hard to believe that we’ve already reached the end of the first full week in August. Here in the Northeast we are still a few weeks away from back-to-school, but I’ve heard from folks in other parts of the country that their kids are gearing up to return next week! Whether you’re knee-deep in newly sharpened pencils and notebooks, or in a lake have a great weekend and enjoy the links below!

Things We Are Reading This Week

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

Is Gamification the Fast Food of Community Engagement? – In a tweet last week, my old boss at SAP, Mark Yolton, who is now leading Digital at Cisco, challenged the SAP Mentors and me to analyze Cisco’s gamification efforts. What they have done looks very…


State of Community Management 2015 Monday Fact #7: Real rewards for community advocates –  Where’s your college diploma? If you’re like most people, it’s hanging on an office wall, sitting in a drawer, or stuck in the back of a closet. It’s nice to have, but the recognition that you graduated…

Get Executive Buy-In and Participation – Tip #3 for a Successful ESN – In this third post in my series of advice on how to build a successful enterprise social network (ESN), I discuss the following important tip: Get executive buy-in and participation.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Online Community Management – Think about why people engage in communities – they’re looking for context, a sense of belonging. Newbies need time to get acclimated. If you launch your brand new community with an immediate focus on “acquiring” new members, that will put these newbies off, especially if there’s no value or content for them when they first arrive…

 

New Community and Social Media Jobs
  1. Community Manager – Loot Crate – Los Angeles, CA
  2. Social Media Specialist/Community Manager – Beneva Solutions – Sarasota, FL
  3. Community Manager – WeWork – New York, NY
  4. Jive Community Manager – Callminer – Waltham, MA
  5. Community Manager – RecargaPay – Arkansas
  6. Community Manager – Laundry Service – Los Angeles, CA
  7. Community Manager-Ovirt – Red Hat, Inc.  – Westford, MA
  8. Platform Growth Community Manager – Twitter  – San Francisco, CA
  9. Community Manager – Daily Secret Inc. – New York, NY
  10. Community Manager  – Superpedestrian – Boston, MA
  11. Marketing Community Manager  – Cultura Technologies Inc – Minneapolis, MN
  12. Community Manager – Daily Secret Inc. – New York, NY
  13. Press & Community Manager – Fundrise – Washington, DC
  14. Community Manager – SkySlope – Sacramento, CA
  15. Content and Community Manager  – PI Worldwide – Wellesley, MA
  16. Community Manager  – Tendr – Brooklyn, NY
  17. Community Manager – Bully Dog Technologies – American Falls, ID
  18. Social Media & Community Manager – SteelSeries – Chicago, IL
  19. TED Fellows Community Manager – TED  – New York, NY
  20. Associate Community Manager – Nexon America – El Segundo, CA

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Want to advance your career in community management? The resources in TheCR Network help community professional excel at their jobs, and get the training and development they need to level up!

Friday Roundup: The Early Bird Gets the Discount

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Today is the Early Bird discount deadline for TheCR Connect! Register today and save $50 off the cost of the event this October – and trust me, if you work in community you don’t want to miss it! (And you can trust me – I’m organizing the event, and we’ve got some really awesome stuff planned and some fun surprises!)

We also released a sneak peek at the agenda this week:

TheCRConnect_Promo

 

We hope we’ll see you there!

Things We Are Reading This Week

Conversations with Community Managers – Patrick Hellen, Part Two – Welcome to the latest episode in our community podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” Join TheCR’s Jim Storer and Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about their community…

The Web We Have to Save – The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it?

Sneak Peek: TheCR Connect Agenda – I’m excited to share the first look at the agenda for TheCR Connect – our first live workshop happening this October in our hometown. Without further ado…TheCR Network Sneak Peek: July 2015 – Working out Loud, Compensation Research, & AMAs – I’m not going to lie; I spent a part of July with my toes in the sand, but alas vacation is over and instead of digging for treasure with the kids, I’m digging out of my…

A Guide to Social Collaboration and Learning with James Tyer of Kellogg’s #SMKnowHow – What is social collaboration and learning? How can organisations benefit from using these? How do you calculate ROI? We get the answers from James Tyer.

Is Gamification the Fast Food of Community Engagement? – In a tweet last week, my old boss at SAP, Mark Yolton, who is now leading Digital at Cisco, challenged the SAP Mentors and me to analyze Cisco’s gamification efforts. What they have done looks very…


New Social Media and Community Jobs

  1. Community Manager – SkySlope – Sacramento, CA
  2. Community Manager – Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. – Cambridge, MA
  3. Community Manager – Havas Worldwide Puerto Rico
  4. Community Manager-Ovirt – Red Hat, Inc.  – Westford, MA
  5. Community Manager – Scopely – Los Angeles, CA
  6. Senior Community Manager – WeddingWire – Chevy Chase, MD
  7. Community Manager – Bully Dog Technologies – American Falls, ID
  8. Community Manager – NBC Universal – Los Angeles, CA
  9. Community Manager, Relay For Life – Youth – Milwaukee – American Cancer Society – Milwaukee, WI
  10. Community Manager – SheKnows – New York, NY
  11. Social Media Community Manager – GlobeOne – Santa Monica, CA 

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Want to advance your career in community management? The resources in TheCR Network help community professional excel at their jobs, and get the training and development they need to level up!

Friday Roundup: Calling All Early Birds

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.TheCR Connect Boston

Hey East Coast early birds, don’t forget: early bird registration for TheCR Connect ends next Friday – and half your registration fee can be applied to a membership in TheCR Network!

If you’ve been thinking about joining now is the time the see how we can help you advance your community and your career! And, stay tuned for the first look at the agenda on Monday!

Things We Are Reading This Week

State of Community Management 2015 Monday Fact #6: Community Strategy Needs Resources – We’ve said many times in this space that having a community strategy is a critical part of getting your community to succeed. Strategy is critical, but it’s just the first step in the process of building a successful community. It needs to be coupled with a roadmap and the resources to execute on that roadmap for your community to succeed.

Activating Knowledge Sharing at DLR Group –  Video about creating engagement from Christopher Parsons from KA Connect

Best Practices for Selecting a Community Platform – Q: What’s the difference between buying a new home and selecting a community platform? A: One is a major expense, fills you with angst and forces you to move all your stuff. The other changes your address.

Why won’t people ask questions in the open?  – When someone needs to find the answer to a question, what do they tend to do?

  1. Try searching their hard drive, an FAQ database, or the Internet
  2. Turn to the person sitting next to them
  3. Call or instant message a trusted colleague
  4. Send an email to a few people or a distribution list
  5. If the first four options don’t work, give up

A Guide to Social Collaboration and Learning – What is social collaboration and learning? How can organizations benefit from using these? How do you calculate ROI? We get the answers from James Tyer.

The Web We Have to Save – The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it?

New Social Media and Community Jobs

  1. Technical Marketer – Godaddy – Sunnyvale, CA
  2. Senior Social Business Strategy Consultant – East Region – Jive Software – Boston, MA
  3. Social Media Director – iTalent – Miami, FL
  4. Social Media Manager, Glamour – Condé Nast – Entertainment and Media Industry – New York City, NY
  5. L’Oréal Paris – Director, Social Media – – New York City, NY 
  6. Director, Social Media – Celebrity Cruises – Royal Caribbean International – Miami, FL
  7. Sr. Social Media Manager, Traffic Strategy – Birchbox – New York City, NY
  8. Social Media Manager – Full Time Exempt – Herschend Family Entertainment – Pigeon Forge, TN
  9.  Director of Network Relations – Scion Staffing – Stanford, CA
  10. Director of Digital Content – Sinclair Broadcast Group – Las Vegas, NV
  11. Director of Digital Marketing – Mondo –  Los Angeles, CA
  12.  Community Manager  – YEC – Boston, MA
  13. Community Manager  – Lifesize – Austin, TX
  14. Community Manager – WeWork – Portland, OR
  15. Community Manager – R/GA – Austin, TX
  16. Community Manager, Making Strides Against Breast Cancer – American Cancer Society – Fresno, CA
  17. Content and Community Manager – PI Worldwide – Wellesley, MA
  18. Community Manager – Cimpress – Lexington, MA
  19. Online Community Specialist – Sony Computer Entertainment of America Inc. – San Diego, CA
  20. Marketing Community Manager – Cultura Technologies Inc – Minneapolis, MN

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Want the chance to contribute to our research and content? Members of TheCR Network get exclusive professional development opportunities like this and more! Join us and let us help you grow your career as a community manager.

Friday Roundup: Conversations with Community Managers

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Have you checked out our podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers?” Recently we’ve podcastchatted with community practitioners from Mastercard, Aetna and Deep Information Services. And you can check out our archives for episodes featuring community managers from Verizon, Sonos, H&R Block, Sony, GM and more!

Things We Are Reading This Week

All Things in Moderation – Best Practices for Successful Community Moderation – Direct moderation is the day-to-day interaction and management that signals to members what gets attention—both good and bad—from the organization. Successful community management requires not just a day-to-day awareness of the activity in your community but also the seamless application of tools and strategies to maximize engagement and minimize disruption.

Spreading Slow Ideas – We yearn for frictionless technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way that norms and standards change.


State of Community Management Monday Fact #5: Investing in new community members pays off – You walk into a restaurant. There are people dining, chatting, having a good time – and there’s an empty table, but there’s no one there to greet you, seat you or give you a menu. Do you stay? You might, or you might leave. Either way, it’s not a comfortable first impression.Conversations with Community Managers – Patrick Hellen – Episode #29 features Patrick Hellen, Director of Community and Engagement at Deep Information Services. You’ll find part one (of two) below, where we chat about getting unlikely folks active in your community and how humor can be a community superpower.

 

New Social Media and Community Jobs

  1. Community Manager – Superpedestrian – Boston, MA
  2. Community Manager – Lifesize – Austin, TX
  3. Community Manager – Amazon – Seattle, WA
  4. Marketing Community Manager– Cultura Technologies Inc – Minneapolis, MN
  5. Community Manager – HourlyNerd – Boston, MA
  6. Community Manager – Foxtail Marketing – American Fork, UT
  7. Community Manager – Cimpress – Lexington, MA
  8. Community Manager – Rare – Cox Media Group – Atlanta, GA
  9. Community Manager– Vistaprint – Lexington, MA
  10. Community Manager – Phoenix – Yelp – Phoenix, AZ
  11. Senior Community Manager – Blade & Soul – NCSOFT – Aliso Viejo, CA
  12. Community Manager – Adobe – San Francisco, CA
  13. Community Manager – IPG Mediabrands – New York, NY
  14. Community Manager – Ragu & Bertolli – Havas Worldwide Chicago 2 reviews – Chicago, IL 
  15. YouTube Creator Community Manager – Google – San Bruno, CA

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Looking for a new community event to connect with peers, get hands on community training and workshop your biggest challenges? Join us for TheCR Connect – a workshop for community professionals.

Friday Roundup: TheCR Connect

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

TheCR Connect

Have you ever wanted to crawl inside your computer and meet up with all the amazing community folks you know to chat about your challenges, vent your community frustrations and walk away energized and inspired by their stories?

Well now you can – sort of.

This week we announced our new workshop series – TheCR Connect, coming soon to a city near you. We’re kicking things off in Boston this Fall. To learn more visit TheCR Connect and join us this October!

Things We Are Reading This Week

The Parable of Reddit or How Traditional Business Models Fail Communities – If you work in the community or digital space, it’s been impossible not to follow the turmoil at Reddit during the last week. It is cause for a lot of anxiety in the community space because until this turmoil hit, Reddit was viewed as community success story – growing geometrically over the years. If Reddit can’t make community work, than who can?

SOCM2015_FunFact4_EngagedExecutives

State of Community Management Monday Fact #4: Executive Engagement – Getting executives engaged in community has been a challenge for community managers since the beginning of community management. For every social CEO out there, there are dozens of C-suite members who “don’t have time,” “don’t feel the need” or “don’t see the point.”

Engagement and Community Architecture – Most of us who drive cars stick to driving on roads. Why? They helps us get where we are going faster – even though the route is rarely a straight line between where we start and our destination. We could try and take a more direct route but at a minimum it would involve driving over uneven ground – at worst we would have to remove barriers like trees, houses, rocks, animals, etc. That would be slightly, um, crazy – even if there were someone that was encouraging us to do so and helping.

Announcing TheCR Connect – A Workshop for Community Managers – TheCR Connect is technically a workshop for community professionals, but our goal is to have it be much more that that. By bringing together an intimate group of community practitioners we want to facilitate conversations, share knowledge, solve problems, inspire action and provide the tools participants need to go back into their communities and create real, meaningful change.

New Social Media and Community Jobs

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Looking for a new community event to connect with peers, get hands on community training and workshop your biggest challenges? Join us for TheCR Connect – a workshop for community professionals.

Friday Roundup – Strategic Investment in Community

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

Hello and happy Friday everyone! I’m posting just a quick recap this week for anyone who wants to catch up on the community news from the week. Most of our team is out celebrating (early) Independence day; we hope you have a wonderful Holiday weekend if you’re in the States, and a fantastic regular weekend if you are  elsewhere!

Things We Are Reading This Week

State of Community Management 2015 Monday Fact #3: Strategic Investment – As more and more organizations join the community bandwagon, what separates the best from the rest? In part, it’s that the best communities are integrated into their organization’s overall strategy. The State of Community Management 2015 report finds that best-in-class communities demonstrate a commitment to making community more than just a tool in the toolbox – they make strategic investments in community that align with broader business goals.

Spreading Slow Ideas – We yearn for frictionless technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way that norms and standards change.

Conversations with Community Managers: Erin Winker, Aetna – Episode #28, features Erin Winker, a community manager at Aetna. Podcast highlights include:

  • The differences between traditional communications and community management
  • An overview of the power of plain language in community management
  • Advice for transitioning into community management from a more traditional marketing or communications role

The Sounds of Silence – Are we confusing silence with disinterest? As marketers, ‘paying attention’ equates and audience’s level of ‘engagement’.  Jakob Nielson’s rule for participation inequality has been the standard for how we think about an audience’s engagement.

Regain Freedom at Work – Corporate Rebels United, Rebels At Work and Change Agents Worldwide recently organized an amazing 24-hour Rebel Jam where corporate change makers from around the world shared ideas and advice. My contribution to the Jam consisted in supporting people who suffer from a controlling work culture and want to do something about it.

“Social” Business: What do I do? Where do I go next? – There’s an emerging role in organizations and I’m lucky enough to have one of them. However, it’s hard to pin down a definite description, despite the enormous value such roles bring. Many people ask what I and others like me do. Here I’ll try to explain, based on my experiences and conversations with others.

New Social Media and Community Jobs

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