programming Archives

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: November 2015

November 25, 2015 By Hillary Boucher

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable

Are you feeling grateful? I am feeling immensely grateful for the community superstars I get to work with every day inside TheCR Network.

Here’s a sneak peek into what’s been going on inside TheCR Network this past month:

NEW NETWORK LAUNCH! (Milestone) What did we do in November? We invited our members into our brand new, shiny platform with all the bells and whistles. We’ve been working on this for the better part of 2015 and it was so exciting to finally bring in our members. We’re very happy with how smooth the launch went and it’s fun to see our members take advantage of the new platform capabilities.
Letting Go of the Reins: Bringing a New Community Manager into Your Community (Member Call): You are a solo practitioner who has built your community with tears, sweat and blood. You’ve done such a great job that you have secured the the resources to hire a new community manager so you can work more strategically. That was the scenario for this member call and we had three teams on a panel to discuss best practices from the perspective of both the hiring manager and the new community manager. It was a stellar conversation and I look forward to archiving the reports in the member library.
Gamification Study Group (Concentrated learning experience): After working with Jeff Merrell from Northwestern’s Masters in Learning & Organizational Change Program we have been thinking about designing a learning experience for members to encourage an optimal learning experience on a specific topic. We know that gamification is a hot topic for practitioners and we knew folks were signing up for the Coursera course with Kevin Werbach so we designed a study group encouraging interested members to take the course with the support of TheCR study group. We have active discussions around lessons and homework in the forums and an open office hours session in Slack every Friday afternoon. It’s been great and we’re just a few week’s in.

Those are my big highlights for the month, but there’s not enough room to tell you about our active work out loud threads, discussions and other programs. If you are interested I hope you’ll join us!

Want to access our programming for the benefit of your community work? Reach out and ask us about membership.

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Learn more about TheCR Network at our monthly webinar. In December Hillary will highlight new member welcome programs. Join us!

Introducing TheCR Champions: Jennifer Honig

December 22, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager The Community Roundtable.

Earlier this summer I told you about the Champion Program we’ve been working on and I introduced you to our first Champion, Maddie Grant, who has done an awesome job of adding programming to the network with an association/non-profit lens. I’d now like to introduce you to another Champion. Meet Jennifer Honig, executive director at Techstra Solutions.

Jennifer, tell us a little bit about your background.

I began my post-MBA career as a management consultant focused on reengineering/change management. This led me to Young & Rubicam where I ran the Key Corporate Account Group (multiple lines of business/geographies). At Y&R, we faced the challenge of connecting our global network to service clients. We leveraged technology to create a global intranet; one of the first in the industry. We were excited to share best practices especially around creative work. I was captivated by what was happening in technology and went to work for several tech start-ups. I led Marketing and Public Relations, building global brands and positioning executives as industry leaders.

Fast forward to the advent of social communities and internal/external social media. “Social” brings engagement to an entirely new level – it builds brands (corporate and personal), communities, and networks that disrupt the status quo and change the game. Technology is the tool and I am the conduit, enabling companies to harness its power.

Tell us about your current work.

I started Techstra Solutions to help companies address the opportunities that social collaboration brings to their organizations. Our offerings continue to expand as social networks and communities add business value to drive innovation, improve productivity, and company transformation.

Many executives feel challenged by how to utilize social networks(internal/external) in a leadership capacity. However, they acknowledge the need to do so. In my discussions with community managers and corporate leaders, I realized that executive engagement is a challenge for many and an essential element that must be addressed for initiatives to thrive. This is why I was excited to become a Champion in TheCR Network on the topic of executive leadership.

What working group you will be facilitating here at TheCR?

The Social Executive

What are your goals or what is your vision for the group?

Executive engagement is the “Holy Grail” of community initiatives; highly sought and rarely achieved. If achieved, it is with just a few executives, not en masse.

Coaching an executive is challenging and time consuming, taxing limited resources. My goal is to bring together this group to help “Crack the Code” of executive engagement. Together we can create best practices and a knowledge base that will pave the way for others.

What is your proudest moment as a community builder?

An executive that I work with 1:1 moved beyond posting/engaging with the national team that he leads and started to engage globally. Creating a personal communication strategy for executives works! When you help someone realize the benefits of utilizing these systems to accomplish their business goals, they get it. It just takes time, continuous reinforcement, and for some, a leap of faith.

And for good measure, tell us about a ‘community on the side’ that you are passionate about. Something you are passionate about outside of work.

I am excited that winter is coming! I am an avid skier and my daughters (Samantha and Grayson) are racers on the ski team at 7 Springs. I am taking an active role in building a community around the ski team and its member families. It is great to be able to apply what I know to an organization that is so important to our family.

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Want to collaborate with community champions like Jennifer Honig? Join TheCR Network!

2014: A Year of Community Advancement

December 16, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

It’s hard to believe we’re coming up on 2015 – the past year flew by, and we wanted to take a minute to pause and reflect on the past 12 months before we dive into planning the next 12! We kicked 2014 off by launching several new initiatives aimed at connecting community managers with each other, and showcasing just how different the average profile of community practitioners can be. Our Faces of Community Management profile series shared a glimpse into the background of a wide array of community managers, and our monthly Community Manager Spotlight webinar series provided an in-depth look at what leading community professional are working on and best practices for furthering your career in community.

We shared our annual State of Community Management 2014 research in April and released an accompanying infographic”Drive Success with Basic Executive Coaching” and eBook “Building a Community Roadmap” later in the year. You can check out all the related report materials including exclusive insights, expert advice and informative blog posts here.

In October we released a brand new research platform – The Community Manager Salary Survey which aims to bring more awareness to the emerging career path in community management; detailing what community professionals can expect from different roles and what hiring managers should know to grow effective community programs. In addition to the full report, which you can download here, we also released an informative infographic “Careers in Community Management” that profiled three main community roles and provided exclusive job role, responsibility and salary information for each.

The Fall also saw us assume the stewardship of Jeff Ross’s extremely popular “#ESNchat” a weekly twitter chat where enterprise social network focused community professionals gather weekly to discuss hot ESN topics and share advice and best practices for creating thriving ESNs. The upcoming topic schedule, as well as archives of past chat can be found here.

Finally, we shared some news from inside the TheCR Network – the introduction of our first formal Champion program.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 and connect our members more closely with similar peers and industry experts.

We are proud to have shared so much new research and content with you over the past twelve months. 2014 was a year of growth and expansion at TheCR – both in terms of new programming and research initiatives, but also in terms of our team, TheCR Network, and our connections with community professionals around the world. We hope you also enjoyed a fruitful and fulfilling 2014, we can’t wait to connect with you in 2015 and help advance the community work you do.

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Looking to take your career in community management to the next level in 2015? 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 in the new year and beyond.

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: April 2014 Wrap-Up

April 30, 2014 By Hillary Boucher

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.

I’m really not ready for April to be over. Can I get an extension on this month? Ha! I guess I better just keep moving forward. Part of the reason that April flew by was because we launched State of Community Management 2014 this month and celebrated our fifth anniversary. And somewhere in between we facilitated five Roundtable sessions, added four reports to our directory and supported dozens of discussions and introductions within the network. Phew!

I wanted to catch my breath for a moment and share a few highlights from inside the TheCR Network this past month:

State of Community Management 2014 Supplement (Resource Bundle). You may have noticed the “Lessons from TheCR” section for each competency within the State of Community Management 2014 report. Those were excerpts from full reports that live inside the ever growing TheCR Library within the network. We bundled all the reports mentioned in SOCM this year so members could have easy access to continue their research.

How to Scale Community Management Efforts (Roundtable Sessions). We had two calls that approached how to scale your community management efforts from different angles. One was facilitated by the very insightful Richard Binhammer who taught members how to use a talent assessment model to identify skill gaps and find community and social talent to supplement and support their strategy. The other call was a member-led discussion on how to hire for your community team. Experienced members swapped hiring approaches, favorite interview questions, and identifiers to help you spot a natural community manager.

Design Thinking for Complex Community Program Challenges (Roundtable). Complex challenges are those that don’t have a black and white answer. Sound familiar? TheCR member Erin Liman generously shared her expertise on using design thinking to approach the complex issues that many community managers face. Challenges like: “Our executives say they support our community initiative, but their actions tell a different story,” or “We bring our advocates to the table, involve them in decision-making, but they never seem to happy.”

I shared a more extensive overview of what goes on every month if you are curious and you can also check out last month’s sneak peek. Would love to hear what was going on in your world this past month in the comments, too.

Until next month!

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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.

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.