The Community Roundtable

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

3 Quick Community Wins for February

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Check these three easy community management to-dos off your list and set yourself up for community success.

We are delighted that in recent years February has become a time to practice love in all its forms. If you’re into all that Cupid stuff? Awesome! But the rise of Galentine’s Day, along with increased calls for self-care is what really warms our hearts. Our quick wins for February focus on online community love.

1- Put your oxygen mask on first.

If you aren’t taking care of yourself, can you really do your best job taking care of other people in your online community? No. So, February is a great time to reflect on the parts of your online community management role that help you thrive. Thinking about your role and your future isn’t selfish; knowing yourself and where you excel and where you want to grow is only good for your community.

If you aren’t familiar with our Community Skills Framework, it’s a great way to assess your strengths and identify areas for growth and areas for outsourcing. You aren’t going to be great at every single community thing and that’s ok (more than okay – normal!) Identifying the places you should ask for help, hone your skills, and better use resources will make you happier at work and more productive. This short video walks you through all 50 skills in community management and helps you prioritize your time.

2- Show Your Superusers Some Love

Every online community – internal (employee community) and external (custom community) – has a handful of dedicated members who contribute more than the rest. Whether you have a formal superuser, advocacy, or membership leadership program, or informally track and interact with these members, now is a great time to show them some love.

5 Ways to Show Super Users Love in Your Online Community:

1- Swag. Everyone loves free stuff, and it doesn’t have to be an expensive investment. A hand-written note and some stickers go a long way with your superusers.

2- Shout-Outs. Highlight these members in the online community with a quick mention. Feeling seen and appreciated by online community managers makes super users feel valued.

3- Online Badges. If your online community uses badges, create a special badge to identify your superusers. This will also highlight your superusers as a resource to new members who may not understand how to engage when they join your online community.

4- Personally thank active contributors. It seems simple, but it helps increase member satisfaction.

5- Give them a sneak peek at an upcoming program, feature, or initiative. You’ll get valuable feedback and your superusers will love feeling like they got a behind-the-scenes look at something before everyone else does.

How to Start a Super User Program

If you don’t already have a superuser program in place you might consider putting that on your 2022 to-do list. Our State of Community Management research shows that when a member of an Average External Community shifts from a passive recipient of information to an active participant, their activity increases by more than 10x. Their ROI – the return they get for the time they invest – increases by over 200%. This makes investing in advocacy and member leadership programs a no-brainer.

This case study from Mimecast highlights how their community team nurtures their superusers, resulting in the growth of customer participation over 3x in two years.

3- Encourage Your Community to Say Thanks

Everyone is tired. Everyone is burnt out. Everyone is over being on Zoom. Ok, maybe not everyone, but definitely a lot of people. This last quick win is as much for your sanity as for the good of your community. Find a way this month to bring out the good people are feeling.

Maybe it’s a shout-out thread where members can recognize people or ideas that have inspired them recently. Maybe you start a gif-off channel in slack where people can share thank yous accompanied by delightful memes. Maybe you start an appreciation discussion where you tag three people who have made your work life easier/better/more fun/less crazy and ask them to tag three people, and so on.

A wise man (ok, it was Ferris Bueller) once said “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Use February as an excuse to slow down and show some love.

If you have other ways you like to show appreciation in your community we would LOVE to hear them! Please share in the comments below, in our free Facebook Group with over 1500 members, or tag us on twitter @thecr.

PS – We love you. After 14+ years in the community business, we know that we are only as successful as our community. You’re killing it out there, and we’re proud of you. Stay strong!

Community Management Skills That Matter: Business

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Community Management Business Skills: Integrating community into the organization

Not surprisingly, the value of community management business skills grows as community managers more effectively integrate their communities with their overall organization. Directors of Community are typically tasked with leading such efforts, and typically work with more mature or strategic communities — and that is reflected in their business skill value rankings.

While every role places value on community advocacy and promotion, Directors of Community value those skills in conjunction with hiring, program management, and budget management. As a result, Directors of Community placed the highest value scores on 9 of 10 skills in this skill family. The tenth: training development and delivery, makes perfect sense for a strategist who works across a number of communities.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY

Training needs change as community professionals move up the ladder. While managers placed a high priority on community advocacy and promotion, strategists and directors were far more interested in training on developing effective business models. Managers also wanted more training on budget management, while strategists and directors expressed interest in training on selling and evangelizing for their community programs.

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Community management business skills had the largest variance between what managers and directors valued. Thinking about a strategist role? Learning how to develop and implement training is valuable for rolling out consistent strategy, operations, and tactics across multiple communities. If becoming a Director of Community is your goal, understanding budgets, and building business models are vital. And Directors of Community can’t do it alone — so being skilled at finding and managing the right talent is critical.

Want to level up more of your community management skills? Click a skill set to learn more:

community manager skills

Community Skills Engagement

Community Management Skills That Matter: Content

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Content: Ensuring the community is generating value

Community Managers place the highest relative value on content skills, although all three key roles give writing and communication high marks. Community managers’ content skills are focused on the development and production of community content and programs. At higher levels, those skills are less utilized, while being able to develop narratives and take a higher-level approach to how content fits
the overall story of the community becomes more relevant.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY

Top training needs underscore the subtle but important difference between how managers, strategists, and directors of community view their work through the lens of content. Managers find communication planning, such as the management of content calendars, their most critical skill set for development. Strategists and directors say they most need training in developing the community narrative, which gives members and those in the organization an understanding of the community’s role and value through data and storytelling. More tactical skills like multimedia storytelling, graphic design, and SEO optimization had appeal across roles. They may be incredibly valuable for some team members but are not needed by everyone in a community team.

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Our research shows that if you can’t communicate, your future in community (and your present) is in serious jeopardy. But moving up from a manager role can take one of two routes. Developing a specialty in a specific skill, such as multimedia or SEO can make you a valuable (and hard to replace) team member and can be a selling point for someone seeking or moving into a strategist or community content expert role. Growing into a director role can mean not just understanding how to tell stories, but how to weave those stories together into a compelling narrative that demonstrates the value of and need to invest in a community program.

Want to learn more about critical skills for community managers?

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

Community Management Skills That Matter: Engagement

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Engagement: The day-to-day lifeblood of communitiesCommunity Skills Engagement

Engagement skills are likely what comes to mind when one pictures the life of “typical” community manager, and these daily skills are indeed what helps communities form and grow. Engagement skills are a core community management skills family for all community roles — without engagement fundamentals, it is impossible to understand or influence communities.

TRAINING OPPORTUNITY

Behavior change and gamification are buzzwords in community, and they resonate as the top training need across all community roles. Boiled down, these skills allow community professionals to leverage key motivators to engage, influence and change behavior in their community. A related topic — promoting productive behaviors — was second choice.

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Want to become a community strategist or a Director of Community? Your skills managing the day-to-day moderation, content, programming, and connections that create engaged communities won’t go to waste. As you move up, though, you may spend less time inside the community, and more time building relationships between the community and the organization as a whole — engaging stakeholders who can ensure the community succeeds along with community members.

Want to level up more of your community management skills? Click a skill set to learn more:

community manager skills community manager skills

Community Management Skills That Matter: Strategy

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Strategy: Proving the value of communitycommunity skills strategy

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.

Building A Skill-Based Community Manager Job Ad

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Community Manager Job Ad

A quick search on LinkedIn finds more than 1,000 jobs with “Community Manager” in the title at any given moment. Subtract the ones about property management, and add in “Online Community”, “Community Specialist” and a dozen other terms and you are left with several hundred job descriptions — not two of which have the exact same requirements or expectations. As we have noted on many occasions, many current community management job descriptions are not well balanced and tend to be misaligned in one or more of the following ways:

  • Hiring organizations want more experience than they can get for the compensation they are offering.
  • They expect more specific expertise than is reasonable for the general years of experience required.
  • They ask for more advanced skills than are required for the role’s responsibilities.
  • They have too many responsibilities listed for one individual to reasonably be able to handle.
  • The traits they are seeking are misaligned with the work environment (i.e. agile in a big bureaucracy).Community Manager Job Ad

Enter The Community Skills Framework

Using the Community Skills Framework to craft job descriptions based on the skills you value, and aligning those skills with the appropriate roles and compensation can do a great deal for talent acquisitionand retention. A simple exercise can help. On the Framework, check off the skills you value and need for your team. Those skills can form the basis of a job ad.

Then ask yourself some questions:

  • What level of individual (i.e. — a moderator, manager, strategist, etc.) are these skills most applicable for? Set the right title.
  • Is there a reasonable expectation that I can attract the skills I want, with the experience I need, at the compensation I can offer?
  • Am I seeking a unicorn? (A person with such unique qualifications — such as a business model expert who can code APIs — that I’ll never find them, and would be better served with a narrower focus or two hires.)

The best job ads take into account not only the skills you value, but the experience you need and the traits you desire in your next hire. By making sure your expectations are realistic and your compensation competitive, you can find talented community professionals — and keep them.

CMAD 2016 – Unleash Your Inner Community Management Superhero

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By Shannon Abram, Director of Marketing at The Community Roundtable

It’s no secret that we love community managers. We’ve sort of built our entire business around it! The truth is we not-so-secretly believe that every community professional has the ability to be a community management superhero. From defeating evil trolls to proving the strategic ROI of your community program you might as well be wearing a cape to work.

In honor of all the community professionals we love we put together a little look at some of the top skills that make a community pro, well – a pro. Happy CMAD (Community Manager Appreciation Day!) to all the community superheroes out there!

community management superhero

Looking for ways to boost your skill set? TheCR Network is an amazing training and education resource for community management professionals at every level.

50 Essential Skills in Community Management

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community manager skillsWe’re going to take a break from our weekly series of facts from the Community Careers and Compensation report to review the 50 essential community manager skills from the Community Skills Framework™.

We updated the Community Skills Framework™ as a means to explore the value of 50 essential skills of community management. This is the second iteration of the framework, which was launched in 2014 as a set of 37 skills in 4 skill families. Reviewing the data from 2014 with members of TheCR Network, we recognized that we hadn’t tapped into the full family of business and strategic skills — which we separated into two families, and added a number of other skills that we noted were absent from the first edition of the framework.

In the Community Careers and Compensation Survey — we asked community management professionals to rank the skills that are most valuable to their role and surface those skills which carry the greatest value across all community roles, as well as those that are most critical within individual community roles and use cases.

We also see an opportunity to use the framework as:

• A structure for strategic planning

• A tool for online community manager training and professional development

The Community Skills Framework™ gives community leaders a way to better identify and understand skill gaps and opportunities for creating stronger teams

The 50 Essential Community Manager Skills

—ENGAGEMENT COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SKILLS—

  • Listening & Analyzing
  • Response & Escalation
  • Moderation & Conflict Facilitation
  • Promoting Productive Behaviors
  • Empathy & Member Support
  • Facilitating Connections
  • New Member Recruitment
  • New Member Welcoming
  • Member Advocacy
  • Behavior Change & Gamification

—STRATEGIC COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SKILLS—

  • Community Strategy Development
  • Roadmap Development
  • Policy & Guideline Development
  • Needs & Competitive Analysis
  • Measurement, Benchmarking & Reporting
  • Trendspotting & Synthesizing
  • Consulting
  • Executive Coaching
  • Content Strategy Development
  • Evaluating Engagement Techniques

—BUSINESS COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SKILLS—

  • Program Management
  • Business Model Development
  • Budget & Financial Management
  • Team Hiring & Management
  • Contractor Hiring & Management
  • Selling, Influencing & Evangelizing
  • Community Advocacy & Promotion
  • Training Development & Delivery
  • Vendor Management
  • Governance Management

—CONTENT COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SKILLS—

  • Communication Planning
  • Writing
  • Graphics & Design
  • Multimedia Production
  • Narrative Development
  • Editing
  • Curation
  • Program & Event Planning
  • Taxonomy & Tagging Management
  • SEO &/or Internal Search Optimization

—TECHNICAL COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SKILLS—

  • Systems Administration & Configuration
  • Data Collection & Analysis
  • Tool Evaluation & Recommendation
  • Technical Support
  • Member Database Management
  • Platform Architecture & Integration
  • Technology Issue Resolution
  • Software & Application Programming
  • UX & Design
  • Algorithm Design & Data Manipulation

How do your community skills stack up against the list of essential community manager skills? Any areas you’d like to focus on for your personal growth as a community manager? What is your list of essential community manager skills?

Want to dig deeper into the essential community manager skills?

Check out our free Community 101: Models and Frameworks course to walk through the Community Skills Framework™. Use the worksheet included with the free course to document where you are and how you can level up your essential community manager skills.

Community Management Models and Frameworks Free Online Course

How can I be a more productive community manager?

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By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.
Being productive image via Forbes.com

This month we’ve been discussing community management hiring topics, including what traits a hiring manager might look for in a potential community manager and things an aspiring community manager can do before they are hired to be the best possible fit for a community role. Today I’d like to change gears and talk about a challenge that everyone – not just community managers – face: how to be more productive.

Being more productive isn’t a task you can add to your list – it requires a change in your work habits. We spend a lot of time at TheCR talking about the power of forming habits – and how hard that can be for even the most disciplined person. You’ve probably heard the old adage that it takes three weeks of consistent behavior change to form a habit. Or is 27 days? Or 66 days? Turns out I couldn’t find any conclusive evidence on the magic timeframe that turns a chore into a time-saving, productive habit. I did however find a lot of really helpful advice on ways to encourage behavior change and productive habit forming.

The Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin has an upcoming book focused on habit formation – Better Than Before, and she sums up the entire book in just 21 sentences. The whole post is worth reading, but this list showcasing the four pillars of habits really jumped out at me:

Pillars of Habits

Monitoring: You manage what you monitor, so find a way to monitor whatever matters.
Foundation: First things first, so begin by making sure to get enough sleep, eat and drink right, move, and un-clutter.
Scheduling: If it’s on the calendar, it happens.
Accountability: You do better when you know someone’s watching–even if you’re the one doing the watching.

If you are looking to affect behavior change (namely, being more productive at work or at home) this list is a great place to start. The concept of monitoring habit change strikes me as especially valuable since through the act of deciding what to monitor you are defining and documenting the change you’re looking to see.

Another great resource for anyone looking to form better habits and change their behavior is John Stepper. John blogs about the power of working out loud – a concept that goes hand-in-hand with the accountability pillar above. Inside TheCR Network our community manager Hillary has started a weekly working out loud thread based on the concepts that John advocates. Each Monday, Hillary and our members share their top priorities for the week. This speaks directly to the monitoring and accountability pillars of habit forming, but it has an added benefits for our members as well. Since Hillary can now see what each member is focused on she can better provide resources, research and connections to help each person tackle their week. Working out loud doesn’t just help make sure you are more productive by helping you focus on forming better habits, but also connects you to the community you’re working in.

Finally, I wanted to share this great post from Forbes on productivity hacks. Being conscious of intended behavior change is important, but having the resources and tools to help you be more productive is an important piece of overall success as well. Forbes outlines seven strategies to help you maximize your productivity, and they apply especially well to the role of a community manager where you are not only wearing many hats, but possibly expected to be in multiple places at one time. Their list includes “let your phone go to voicemail” and “set specific times to check your email.” Obviously, each of these tips had to be applied to your specific role – you might have the type of job where not answering the phone when it rings is unacceptable, but the list does provide a starting point for time-saving habits that might boost your productivity.

Have you undertaken any habit changes this Summer? We’d love to hear any tips you have for affecting positive behavior change and being more productive as a community manager.
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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.

Hiring for Social Media: Part 1

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Dawn Headshot[This post is the first in an on-going series of posts by a members of The Community Roundtable,  highlighting the voices of experienced community managers. It is cross-posted at Dawn’s blog, Under The Hood]

This is part one in a series on hiring a social media person or company.

One of the most challenging parts of this field I love is finding experts.  I have seen people that look great on paper, but when you talk with them, their knowledge is only paper deep.  I am going to tell you a story about John.  John was absolutely fascinated with social media and worked at a company that did some in the space.  He managed to get to work on a project!  He listened and absorbed.  In his next career move, he elaborated on his resume.  Perhaps he was not just a participant on that single project.  Perhaps he was the mastermind.  Sure he knows all he needs to, he lands a position as a strategist for a medium sized company.  Now that he is in the position, he is struggling because he is not the social media professional the claimed to be.  There are plenty of “Johns” out there.  Beware.

Ok, so at this point, you are like, ok Dawn. So how the heck do I know?  Well let’s start with what kind of social media professional you are looking to hire.

Part 1:  Strategist

Part 2:  Faceman

Part 3:  Moderator

Part 4:  Technologist

Part 5:  Vendor/Company

Community Strategist

This is a professional position that will manage the strategies, implementation and projects for your community.  This person needs to be a seasoned professional with demonstrable successful projects to share with their resume.  Ask for examples.  When I say samples of their work, I am not meaning a personal blog where they explore their expertise area, but actual projects on behalf of a company.  While a personal blog in the area of expertise might be a way to demonstrate their knowledge, it doesn’t show success.  I could do enough research to have a medical advice blog, but that doesn’t mean I am capable of actually practicing medicine.  Some of the people in this industry that I admire most are almost completely behind the scenes.  The high participation members of their communities will know them, but from a passing glance, you would not necessarily.  This person does not need to, necessarily, be an expert in your business area.  You will have experts within the business.  This person needs to be an expert in communities.

You should research this person.  Look carefully at their implemented sites and see if they are actually successful.  Are people participating?  Is the site itself nicely done?  Is the company participating?  Use this research to drive questions for the interview.  Ask to see the scorecard from there existing community. (there will be a future post on scorecards and metrics)

Other skills attributes and abilities: (in addition to the Social Media/Communiy skills above)

  1. Organized with Project Management skills
  2. Passion for Social Media/Community
  3. Process oriented
  4. Manages up well- comfort talking with, selling concepts to, etc.
  5. Can lead a team from various departments that may or may not actually report to you.
  6. Diplomatic
  7. Creative thinker.

Interviewing questions:

Use the interview to do a deep dive into the sites they have done before.  Ask the hard questions.  If no one is participating… ask why,.  Ask why they chose the tool that they did.  Ask about corporate support for the effort.  Ask what the budget was.  Ask about the technology vendor.  If you ask specific enough questions, even “John” should stumble and show his true colors.

Give a real life scenario that is currently happening at your company.  Like say you are trying to engage a new audience and are not sure where to start.  Ask how they would begin and the first several actions.  It will give you a window into their skills.

Ask a scenario question (you make up) about an exec that doesn’t buy into the social media effort and the candidate has to convince them to join the movement.  See if their ideas are close to your corporate culture and if the candidate has the right thought processes to sell and idea.

If there is no current social media program, ask them where they would start to create one.  If they answer with a tool (before they even found out the corporate goals) this should be a big red flag.

Ask how they keep up with social media.  If they don’t list several of the industry blogs and books, be concerned.

Finally and critically important… check the references carefully.  I have found that while many companies don’t want their managers to recommend people, they will still verify the role and scope.  I had a conversation recently about a candidate with a manager that readily told me he couldn’t talk about performance of the person.  I asked if he would just verify the magnitude of the role.  It turned out that when I read the role description from the resume, it was grossly over stated.  The manager was HAPPY to tell me that.