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Energize your community: the generative power of co-creation

May 21, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Ever have a conversation with someone who was focused solely on their needs and wants? Of course you have. It doesn’t make for great engagement.

So why do we expect to engage members when we focus solely on our organizational needs?

ChildrenWiPadIn a nutshell, that’s the message of a new whitepaper from Anna Caraveli of The Demand Networks and Elizabeth Engel of Spark Consulting that features TheCR Network’s Community Manager (and force of nature) Hillary Boucher. The target audience of “Leading Engagement from the Outside In: Become an Indispensible Partner in Your Members’ Success” is associations, but there are plenty of good points for anyone running a membership network that is striving for engagement.

TheCR Network case study highlights the co-creation of content and programming that Hillary champions with members of TheCR Network on a daily basis in the network. Virtually every project The Community Roundtable has developed in our history has been built in collaboration with our Network members. Indeed, we say the shared purpose of our network is to demonstrate the value of community management, through the co-creation of research that demonstrates its impact.

But true collaboration means much more than expecting free feedback from members. It’s an authentic investment by the organization in supporting the needs, desires, and values of the community members. Our State of Community Management research, for example, is a “Community Roundtable” publication, but the research focus each year is shaped in collaboration with members, and informed by the dozens of Roundtable events planned, created and archived by and/or for the membership.

This approach recognizes that the value of a community is not the network, it’s the relationship between and among the organization and community members. Improving engagement is often less about the mechanics of connecting and more about the value of the relationships to members and the organization.

It’s also great to see the work of one of our community superheroes from the Community Manager Handbook highlighted as well. TheCR Network member Christian Rubio is the Community Director at SERMO, a for-profit, private social network of more than 300,000 doctors, which represents approximately 40 percent of MDs and doctors of osteopathy in the United States. SERMO strengthens the community by building trust among members, creating a network where member contributions serve as a powerful value generator and focusing on ensuring that the valuable data the organization gets from the community is also shared within the community – a generative business model that enhances the value for both SERMO and its members.

Creating valuable engagement, rather than simply generating responses, is at the heart of the work the best communities do each day. It serves us well to follow the lead of organizations that have tapped into the shared value promise of community approaches.

Friday Roundup: Community Manager Appreciation, Respect, and Job Searching

January 23, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

In case you haven’t heard – Monday, January 26 is Community Manager Appreciation Day. We’ve talked a lot about our CMAD events in Boston, New York, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Washington, DC, and if you still want to get in before the tickets are all gone, you should probably click on this link to claim one. (It will open in a new window. We’ll wait.)

Having done that, you should know that there is a lot more to CMAD than just T-shirts, balloons, stickers and food and drink. There is the annual 24-hour Hangout, which includes an hour hosted by our own Hillary Boucher, who will be joined by TheCR Network members Patrick Hellen, Kirsten Laaspere and Melissa Potvin, as well as yours truly, to discuss The Power of Programs to Drive Engagement in Your Community. It’s a topic Hillary and I have discussed with each other on a number of occasions, and it is the focus of her section of The Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes, which comes out in another week (although we will have excerpts at our CMAD events.) Content and programs are like the fuel and air mixture in a car engine – without the right mix, you just won’t get going.

We have a lot of other CMAD elements to mention – the launch of this year’s State of Community Management research, the release of the Handbook – but we’ll get to those Monday.

Our other major element of the week was a bit of a headache – we had some major website issues that basically drove us to a new host by Wednesday night – so you may have missed a couple of other posts. I followed up on Rachel’s CMSWire article, Customer Communities: Strategy or Tactic, with a more personal account one here about one industry that seems not fully ready to understand in this day and age that the relationship now comes before the transaction – and how that affects how you treat customers.

And Shannon provided another piece of research from the Community Manager Salary Survey, which reminds us that another important set of relationships – your professional ones – are far more valuable than your ability to find and respond to ads if you’re seeking that next Community Manager job.

Now on to some other great reading.

Some Other Interesting Readings This Week

Why Online Community Managers Don’t Get the Respect They Deserve (And What You Can Do About It) – It is important to point out that no one is denying the enormous impact having a community manager in place has on creating healthy and growing online communities. In their annual report on, “The State of Community Management,” The Community Roundtable found that having a dedicated community manager clearly led to higher community maturity. So, in an age when community managers are growing in demand, how can you prove your value? The answer is rooted in understanding that online communities must serve a bigger purpose for a company than simply bringing people together.

Can Forum Communities Compete with Facebook and Twitter? – In the heyday of ‘online discussion boards’ – when you really could just build it and they would come – the humble forum stood unchallenged when it came to social networking. Then suddenly, along came a whole new concept in online networking led by Facebook, the new kid on the block that everyone wanted to be friends with.

The Never Ending Quest to Dethrone Email – Build a better mousetrap, as the cliché has it, and the world will beat a path to your door. That line of thinking has even been applied to the most rudimentary corners of the technology world: standards and protocols that have stuck around for decades, yet viewed as creaky and badly in need of replacement. But few old-guard standards have seen as many pretenders to the throne as the SMTP/POP3/IMAP email triumvirate has. If only someone could come up with an alternative that did everything email did but better, more securely, and with less hassle, wouldn’t it be worth it?

 

New Community and Social Media Jobs

Community Management Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Research Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Sales/Marketing Fellow (Paid) – The Community Roundtable, remote

Director of Content Strategy – Electronic Arts, Redwood City, CA

Digital Community Manager – Collabera, New York, NY

Community Manager – Sysomos, San Jose, CA

Communications Officer, Community Management – Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA

Community Manager – Kabbage, Atlanta, GA

Startup Community Manager – MassChallenge, Boston, MA

Community Manager – BSC Solutions, Neenah, WI

Community Manager – BMW Impact Ventures, Woodcliff Lake, NJ

B2C Social Media Content Manager – Move, Inc., San Jose, CA

Community Manager and Marketing – SeeClickFix, New Haven, CT

Communications and Community Manager – Children of Domestic Violence, New York, NY

 

Focus on the relationship, not the transaction

January 20, 2015 By Rachel Happe

I wrote a post for CMSWire last week that has resonated with a surprising number of readers. In it, I noted that social media has reversed the traditional sales and marketing paradigm. Once upon a time, a transaction was the trigger for building relationships – and the repeat customer was the holy grail.

Today, of course the repeat customer still matters, but the relationship between a business and its customer now begins well before the initial transaction.

This has powerful implications for communities, which are often the place where potential customers are first connecting with organizations, in both a positive and negative way. A positive community/social media experience can drive a customer to transact business, but a positive initial experience coupled with a poor experience during the transaction can actually be a net negative for a brand.

Steve Garfield has recently written a series of posts about his experience with Mercedes, where a quick social media reaction to a frustration he was feeling about a test drive not only led to him being more enthusiastic about the car and the brand, it actually inspired him to invest in a dealership.

Flickr/Mark Fowler - Creative Commons

Flickr/Mark Fowler – Creative Commons

But it can work the other way as well. In the market for a new car, I had my mind pretty well made up on what I wanted. It was fairly expensive, but I had done my research, had developed a strong track record with the brand, and went into the dealership ready to buy – title in one pocket, checkbook in another.

One hour later, the transaction was so painful, I left with my title and checkbook intact and wavering on my decision. A day later, I had more or less decided not just to walk away from the dealer, but from the brand as well.

Think about that. I walked in ready to buy – and to spend tens of thousands of dollars. I left rethinking whether I would ever buy from the brand again. Why? Because those conducting the transaction ignored the relationship completely. They were so anxious to get the transaction that they did irrevocable damage to the relationship. What should have been a sure thing turned into to a complete failure.

They failed to recognize a number of things. Among them:

  • In the social media era, your customer often doesn’t need you to sell them something, they need you to help them buy what they want.
  • The best customers come in very well prepared and well informed – don’t give them a salesperson who knows less than they do.
  • If your employees cannot match the enthusiasm the customer has for your product, you have ignored the most powerful asset you have available to you – shared value.
  • Increasingly, the only reason the customer goes to a physical store is to confirm that their research matches the physical experience of the product and service and to sort out the details of the transaction.
  • If the customer’s needs cannot be met, helping them understand their alternatives is good. Trying to corner them into a transaction is not. By doing the former, you might generate an even larger transaction. By doing the later, you lose what was close to a sure thing.
  • Respect – which practically means not making assumptions, asking a lot of questions and understanding the customers constraints – was always a good idea in sales, and now is more important than ever.

And there’s one more thing:

  • The higher your customers’ expectations of you, the more damaging it is when you fail to meet them.

That’s not to say you have to bend over backwards for customers with unrealistic expectations. But you need to recognize that failing to meet expectations can be devastating. In the case of my car buying experience, it has been very tempting to rip the brand I once loved on social media and in review sites. I haven’t – but if I see someone mentioning they are considering a purchase, I will tell them my story.

That hidden cost then is that they haven’t just lost one buyer. They’ve also failed to acquire another. That five-figure loss? Now it approaches six figures.

If that customer has become a part of your community, he or she has access to your fans and followers in a way that you have never experienced before. He or she may have already been talking about their excitement entering the transaction. If that excitement turns to disenchantment, they have an audience that will want to know why. The good news is that by having a community, your brand advocates have an avenue to rush to your defense and you have the opportunity to fix the situation. The bad news? Your advocates have allegiance to your brand, but also to the community and if they think the community member is right, you best be prepared to deal with it.

Social media and community allow you to build relationships with your brand and create lifelong advocates before they ever transact business with you. But if you fail them during the transaction, you create a customer who is empowered and dissatisfied – and that’s a dangerous combination.

You might be a community manager if…

October 13, 2009 By Rachel Happe

…communications is an integral part of your job

…you work with a dispersed group of constituents

…you are responsible for building & growing relationships

That covers a lot of ground – PR/communications, marketing, sales, any management position, HR, product management, knowledge management, research… many organizational roles fit this description.  The difference is that the social media revolution has made us realize that it is no longer as powerful to develop content as it is encourage and promote the content of others.  Why? Well, it’s only natural in an ego-crazed world that people have started to trust more in what other people have to say about a person/brand/company than what they say about themselves.  In some ways, we’ve broken the social contract by over promoting ourselves and our companies to such an extent that no one really trusts what we have to say about ourselves anymore. So they look to who we are friends with, who we promote, and what we say and do toward others as a way of gauging how much they can trust us. Only then will they start to really hear what we have to say about ourselves.

This is a tough shift. For those of us, myself included, who are so geared toward producing a lot of content to demonstrate our own value it’s risky to stop talking and start referring people to others on a more regular basis. For those that aren’t really paying attention (maybe our bosses) it’s much harder to ‘see’ our value – see my earlier post on the Iceberg Effect.  That shift however, is at the core of a community management-based approach to communications and relationships, and vitally important to getting your point across – whether it is to internal teams, customers, prospects, or partners. So… want to think differently about how to communicate? You may want to learn more about community management…. whatever your job title.

Don’t trust us? Here are some people we think you should listen to:

  • Aaron Strout
  • Adam Cohen
  • Alex Howard
  • Amber Naslund
  • Andrew McAfee
  • Angela Connor
  • Beth Kanter
  • Bill Johnston
  • Chris Brogan
  • Connie Bensen
  • Colin Browning
  • Dawn Foster
  • Francois Gossieaux
  • Greg Verdino
  • Heather Strout
  • Jake McKee
  • Jeremiah Owyang
  • KD Paine
  • Leslie Poston
  • Luis Suarez
  • Nancy White
  • Peter Kim
  • Pistachio Consulting
  • Richard Millington
  • Scalable Intimacy
  • Scott Monty
  • Shel Israel
  • Shiv Singh
  • Steve Garfield
  • Stewart Mader
  • Todd Defren

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The Community Roundtable is committed to advancing the business of community and being a valued resource to community management and social media professionals through our  monthly subscription report,  membership based peer network,  community management training program and customizable advisory services for corporations and individuals.

 


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