role Archives

Community Management Skills That Matter: Strategy

March 28, 2018 By Jim Storer

Strategy: Proving the value of community

Strategic skills are the most valued skillset across all community roles, and community strategy development is the most valued of the 50 skills in the Community Skills Framework. For community professionals, this demonstrates the constant need to assess input and activity through a strategic lens — without doing so, community professionals can quickly get consumed by reacting to tactical issues that keep them making significant progress.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY

Across all roles, improving how communities measure, benchmark and report their success on key goals is seen as a number one training need. That’s more than just mechanics — a key piece of training must address identifying the right metrics to really get at behavior changes.

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Not surprisingly, community strategists place a high priority on strategy. If you want to head in that direction, an understanding of strategy, roadmap development and consulting approaches are required. Want to make your mark as a Director of Community? Learning how to effectively coach executives will not just improve your job success — it correlates highly with community engagement.

Want to learn more about critical skills for community managers?

Check out our Community Skills Framework and download our Community Careers and Compensation report.

Introducing the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 Infographic

October 23, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

If you’ve been reading our blog for the last year you know we love a good infographic, which makestoday’s post extra exciting. We are thrilled to share the first data from our newest research platform, the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014, via this new CMSS 2014 infographic: Careers in Community Management.

We surveyed more than 350 internal and external community managers, strategists and directors for this first-ever survey, asking them to share information including their salary, their expertise and responsibilities, their experience, and their career path. The infographic was released Wednesday night during JiveWorld14. (Jive Software is sponsoring the infographic and upcoming publication of the survey data.)

The infographic represents the first research results from the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014. It highlights the salary range for internal and external community professionals, and illustrates the demonstrable career path for those who want to use their skills and experience in more strategic roles. Rachel shared her perspective earlier today:

“The new research highlights a number of what were unproven truths in the community space and adds new insights. It makes clear that community management as a discipline has matured to the point where not only are there great, well-paying jobs to be had, but there is also a clear career path for career professionals.”

You can head over to the official CMSS 2014 Infographic page to download the entire high-res infographic and sign up to be notified when the full Community Manager Salary Survey is released later this year.

Careers in Community Management

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Free Jive Webinar

Join The Community Roundtable and Jive as we dig into the community manager role.

Deep Dive into the Community Manager RoleEvent Date: Tuesday, November 18thEvent Time: 10am PT/1pm ET

The Community Manager Salary Salary research aims to bring more awareness to what community managers can expect in their career and what hiring managers should know to grow effective community programs. This new research from The Community Roundtable takes a comprehensive look at community manager roles.

Learn more >>

The Iceberg Effect of Community Management

August 6, 2009 By Rachel Happe

Starting The Community Roundtable has been a great way to understand better the day to day issues of community managers in a wide array of
organizations. There are a few things that come up somewhat regularly:

Community managers are under pressure to justify what they do to peers and bosses that don’t really see or understand what tasks make up their day.
Some community managers are dealing with the challenge of inspiring participants to author only to see them become unmotivated when they don’t receive any comments or activity on their content.
Almost all the community managers we talk to struggle with ways to maintain or increase engagement.

One thing that more experienced community managers know – and will typically be learned over time by anyone in the role – is that the visible activity of a community is only a very small part of the overall activity of a community. There are a huge number of things that happen in the background, between two individuals, or behind a wall. While over time, this background activity is done by many in the community it typically falls heavily on the community manager during the development and growth phases and include all of the following tasks:

Back-channeling: Encouraging participants privately to post, comment, and participate.
Event planning and orchestration: Ensuring that events are successful by getting commitment from the influencers within the community that will bring along everyone else and make for a successful event.
Posting event documentation and recaps to extend the value of the event and include more members.
Sending community activity and content to members that have a specific interest in the topic to ensure the members with something of value to add see it.
Drafting content, discussions, and ideas so that it is easy for members to contribute or share.
Creating or re-publishing content into different modalities – text, pictures, audio, & video.
Building relationships with key members of the community to maintain an ‘ear to the ground’ of what is really going on.
Intercepting or interceding with members who are acting inappropriately.
Evangelizing within the sponsoring organization to generate more involvement and/or gain support.
Gathering and reporting on activity and results.
Helping to translate and negotiate between organizational and community needs.
Monitoring discussions and content.
Brainstorming on activity, content, and ideas that keep community members interested.
Working with colleagues to build programming that is valuable to them and the community members.

I’m sure there are quite a few more activities that I’m forgetting (please feel free to add any I missed) but the point is this: If you are just looking at public community activity, you are likely seeing a very small percentage of what is actually going on.

This dynamic is critical to keep in mind when thinking about resources and investment needed to manage a community. What may look like a ‘part-time’ responsibility likely requires much more than that if you want to successfully drive member engagement and growth. Once a community is more mature and community leaders emerge and take over some of these tasks, the percentage of a community manager’s job likely shifts to less back-channeling and evangelism to more time spent working with community leaders and programming. What you see in a successful online community is really only the tip of the iceberg.

How do you think about, prioritize, and articulate your ‘hidden’ work?

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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

What Defines a Community Manager?

June 9, 2009 By Rachel Happe

By Rachel Happe, Principal and Co-Founder of TheCR

Flat Hillary What is a community manager?

We all know that the community manager role comes in a wide variety of flavors with different expectations and different levels of responsibilities and often the person in the role isn’t called a community manager – they may be a VP of Marketing, a director of customer support, a business analyst. For us at The Community Roundtable this is a complex issue because it gets at the heart of who we target and invite in to our community. So what makes one VP of support a community manger and another just a VP of support? What does the person who manages a smaller B2B community have in common with the major brand manager who is managing tens of thousands of people?

Tough questions for us but critical to define. If The Community Roundtable can tackle that one issue with some success, I will feel like we have helped move the conversation forward for the whole market. Today I opened up the conversation to my Twitter crowd and got a flurry of activity. Below are some of the definitions and replies:

@Aronado – @rhappe who reps the Co. and has the most consistent & deep relationships with the customers

@megfowler – @rhappe I think you define it according to volume, tone, results, and uptake in terms of community response (also volume + tone)

@AuctionDirect @rhappe – Engagement levels, type of content, metric objectives (ie: proven traffic, conversions, leads, revenue, etc) Stuff like that?

@4byoung – @rhappe Tough call. No consensus in biz as to what a comm manager is / should be. Ability to organize & manage groups is key.

All good suggestions. One issue I raised is that some of the best community managers I know are like the silent hand of God – they don’t necessarily post and get huge reactions… they get others who get huge reactions to post. So direct measurement of short term responsiveness is dicey. A couple of people had really good analogies that I thought were useful to think about:

@gyehuda – @rhappe the analogy I use is Minister of Culture – not the artist, not the mayor, not the police, but still has budget and responsibility

@ayeletb – @rhappe That’s the same issue as communicators – everybody’s job is communication esp leaders so there is a need to isolate com mgr role too

I liked Gil’s the best – in that it is the job of the community manager to create the environment, set the stage, and make sure participants are encouraged and rewarded but not to be the primary actor. That means the measure of the community managers success is the activities of the community members. But what is the timeframe to measure? I would bet that the timeframe is different for different types of communities.

There were some other insights that I thought worth pulling out. 1 – Community managers job is to interface between one group or community and another. @AmberCadabra @DavidAlston and I were just discussing this today – that community managers spend just as much time converting internal advocates as they do with the community they were hired to manage. So the interface or foil role is important to the job description.

@Aronado – @rhappe haha! well, to me it means allowing a situation where two or more communities begin to communicate effectively with one another

There were also some things that people felt a community manager must do:

@DavidWLocke – @rhappe Someone who never posts can’t be the CM. No credibility. Ah, a metric.

So there are patterns we can identify – if not always explicit metrics.

A community manager:

The Community Skills Framework help community managers identify their strengths and find areas to improve their skills.

– Manages the interface between two communities/groups/networks (in effect be a translator)
– Participates in the conversation personally
– Creates the environment the encourages the intended outcome
– Influences activity of the participants

My question is not completely answered – still working out in my mind how I might identify the customer support manager who is a community manager vs. one who is not. Like many things in life, I know it when I see it but I can’t quite put words to everything. Characteristics I would add but have a hard time finding fact-based items to use as identifiers are:

– Must be a connector – (which is different than a hub)
– Have a desire to attract people vs. hunt people down
– Have no need to be right but also have an assertive perspective

Ultimately, you can have an isolated, discrete community manager or you can have a person in a functional role, performing that role in a community or social fashion. Is one a community manager but the other not? How would you decide?

I welcome your thoughts on this. As the community manager role evolves – and gets more strategic – it is will change. Who *should* we at The Community Roundtable consider a community manager?

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Need community management resources? Check out our online training courses, our community benchmarks and TheCR Network – a private community for community pros.