The Community Roundtable

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

Michael Pace on the Roles of Email and Social Media

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The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this podcast 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 podcast series continues with episode #13, featuring Michael Pace, Director of Customer Support at Constant Contact. Highlights include:
  • Moving an email-oriented company into social media and community by internalizing the information about social media into the corporate psyche and processes
  • The changing, yet continuing place of email in our communications hierarchy
  • Creating “virtuous cycles” by providing recognition and sharing it with the larger community
  • How social media and community are creating new job roles
  • The “Social Media Council” model of bringing the social media from different departments together- is it necessary to have such a council based on a set of tools?
  • The “a-ha” moment of adopting social media: getting beyond the books and blogs and meeting people to gain knowledge first-hand

 

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Recap of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

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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.”

Assessing Social Business Maturity – Getting to Stage 2/Emergent Community

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When we originally developed the Community Maturity Model, we thought of it as a tool that organizations of all sizes could use in creating a baseline understanding of where they were on the path to becoming a ‘social’ organization.  Additionally, it was designed to provide organizations with a general roadmap of the competencies and milestones needed to operationalize a social layer within their organization.

Recently we had a large corporate client take the Community Maturity Model and build out an organizational gap analysis using both the model and the best practice research that was published in The State of Community Management report. We’ve taken that work and created a template for our other members – giving them a huge jump start in creating a document that is easy to understand and communicate to other organizational stakeholders. In addition, we have created baseline assessment criteria to help organizations better understand where they fit on the model and identify the milestones and deliverables that are typically associated with the next stage of maturity. These criteria were developed based on our work with many companies and our understanding of the typical pathways to becoming a social organization.

In Stage 1/Hierarchy, where there is no organized initiative around social business, community management, or social media use it is easy to assess – there are no identifiable artifacts of an emergent community management discipline – no policies, no people responsible for it, no planning – although there may be a lot of ad hoc or informal use of social tools by employees.

Stage 2/Emergent Community defines an organization that is actively pursuing a social business strategy and has begun to lay the operational groundwork to support that, but has not yet realized full deployment and scale. Moving in to Stage 2/Emergent Community, there are standard indicators of organizational evolution, including:

  • A documented active listening strategy
  • One or more people explicitly responsible for social listening
  • One or more social business leads have been identified
  • There are some places where constituents (customers/partners/employees) can comment and/or contribute to a company sponsored conversations. (this might be a Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn account, a blog, or a support forum)
  • A centralized ‘social’ team has a documented roadmap and identified gaps
  • Corporate accounts are established on the major social networking sites – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
  • A basic listening toolset has been identified and is actively used
  • Basic metrics – number of participants (members/fans/followers), pageviews, and number of comments – are tracked and reported to functional managers

The above indicators are those we feel are required elements to be  in the Emergent Community stage, but there are additional elements that very likely exist in this stage as well, including a documented social media policy, and active social media presence, an executive sponsor, a dedicated social media or community manager, and an internal social software pilot – among many other possible initiatives that may exist in this early stage of maturity.

Are there early milestones that we missed that you feel are required elements for companies that are seriously pursuing a social business approach? We’d love to hear from you.

Find this interesting? We use the Community Maturity Model to organize content and programming in TheCR Network and to advise clients. Consider joining TheCR Network as a member to discuss this an many other topics with peers and industry experts.

Jodi Gersh on “Old School” Journalism and New Media Channels

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The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new 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.
 
Episode #8 features Jodi Gersh, Social Media Content Manager at the Gannett Company, where she helps Gannett’s 80+ newspapers and 20+ TV stations with their social media needs and strategies.
 

Highlights include:

  • Meshing “old school” journalism with new media channels
  • How Gannett coordinates social media learnings and tactics among more than 100 separate entities.
  • The importance of internal communications in keeping employees at all levels- and in all markets- engaged in using social media, including the use of “old school” methods like email
  • Upcoming trends: you guessed it, location and mobile
  • Melding “citizen journalism” with professional investigative journalism

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

What Online Communities Will Expose in 2010

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There is a lot of chatter in social media and online community circles about how social initiatives lead to increased transparency – and some of that is definitely true.  Customers and the public can find out a lot more about what others think about a company’s products and service than ever before. However, I don’t think it will miraculously make companies share their planing and decision-making processes with the world because those processes are quite messy and not always fair or well-articulated. In fact, it’s not ideal to share much of that information out of context because it only serves to confuse so it’s entirely appropriate that not everything is shared in real-time.

There is, however, one thing that online initiatives expose reliably once they gain momentum: business and operational inconsistencies. I’ve spoken with a number of companies who have a hard time identifying where they should start with social media or what their goals should be. To me, this is often an indication that corporate or departmental strategies and goals are not well clarified and articulated because they should be the drivers of any social media or community initiative. Unclear strategies and goals are not social media problems. But business issues will be exacerbated by and exposed using social media.  That can be a good thing – it can force the organization to grapple with the bigger strategic or operational issues – but if it’s not recognized for what it is, social media initiatives can give businesses some surprises they were not expecting in the form of confusion over who ‘owns’ the relationships, who has the ‘right’ to say certain things, and internal rivalries between functional groups – not to mention confused customers or employees.

Social media execution is often in a bit of a bubble – either handled by a small number of individuals internally or outsourced to a marketing agency. The market is starting to see how this is an insufficient model because of the business and operational issues it brings up but far too often, social initiatives are not given allocated senior business oversight.  Without a senior champion – who has the time and resources to actually solve strategic and operational issues – social media will increasingly become a venue for frustration for many people within the organization and burn-out on the part of social media practitioners who spend their time seeing issues but who have no avenue to solve the underlying business problems they expose.

My bet is that 2010 will bring a lot more executive attention to social media and online community. The companies that will excel at social initiatives will be those that recognize how linked it is to their core strategies – and be willing to spend the time, money, and resources to ensure ‘social’ is not an isolated activity but a core strategic competency.  It’s not an easy or cheap task and because of that, it will start to separate the market between those who see social as a driver for differentiation and competitiveness and those that dabble because they think they ‘should’.  A side effect of this will be that those practitioners who now have some experience will change organizations and roles as demand for their experience increases and they better understand which companies are serious and which are dabbling. If you are a practitioner, it’s a good time to assess how realistic and serious your organization is, whether there is progress to be made or whether you are being asked to be a band-aid for business ills that are far beyond the scope of ‘social’ without the means to address them.   It’s also a good time to read some basic business strategy books by Michael Porter or  Clayton Christensen or newer additions like Linked and Information Rules.  As with most operational disciplines, success is much more predicated on a realistic assessment of your organization, its limitations and its opportunities than on idealistic plans.  January is a good time to ask:

  • What do you want to get out of this year?
  • What does your organization want you do to this year?
  • What is realistic to expect for this year?
  • If the above answers don’t line up, what’s possible and acceptable to change so that they do?

A Peek Inside

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We’ve been working hard to get the technology, content, and business operations in place over the past few weeks and we are making a lot of progress. We have the community up, we are categorizing and combining content sources, and we are reaching out to a number of potential members to review our plans and gather feedback.

Thank you to those of you who have been generous with your time and thoughts – we definitely appreciate it and some areas that we think are good synergies for our original concept have been identified. One of which is to work on standards for things like metrics, processes, and policies. There are potential members who are working on tools and standards already and having access to a bigger group of qualified peers to help is a win-win for them as well as The Community Roundtable.

We’ve also talked to a number of potential partners who see The Community Roundtable as a nice complimentary service to what they already offer and because we are committed to protecting the identity of members, see us a trusted partner which they feel comfortable recommending to their customers. We endeavor to be fair and balanced with sponsors while also being mindful of offering members a safe place to discuss a wide variety of issues and that trust is critical to us – and we are honored that we have it – both from potential members and sponsors.

As we build out our infrastructure we are also mindful of not spending too much on capital ahead of potential success. We are therefore using Ning as our initial community platform. This allows us to maintain some degree of vendor neutrality while offering us a low cost test bed that is stable, reliable, and easy to use. It will have limitations as our community and content grows but it allows us to get up quickly and adapt as customers show us what is most interesting to them.

Take a look at our content models and some screen shots:

The Community Roundtable

View more presentations from rhappe.

We are excited to see things take shape and are interested in your feedback, questions, and suggestions. If you are interested in chatting, please get in touch with us – rachel@community-roundtable.com/@rhappe or jim@community-roundtable.com/@jimstorer

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