socm2016 Archives

Best-in-class communities measure behavior over activity – SOCM Fact #12

September 23, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

What is the best way to capture the value of your community?

Communities serve a number of strategic uses, so it can be hard to come up with the metrics that best demonstrate how the community delivers on that strategy. But one thing is certain – the basic activity metrics – logins, visits, and such – won’t capture that value. While almost every community tracks basic activity, best-in-class communities are far more likely to measure behaviors and outcomes than the average community.

Why? It’s no accident. People, groups and organizations typically focus on things that they know are being measured, from the kid who asks, “Will this be on the test?” to the executive who pays closest attention to the numbers that go in the report to his CEO. When you select metrics that get at the behaviors you want in the community, you focus on those behaviors. It’s human nature.

So what should you do? Here are 5 tips.

1. Start with what you want to see, not with what you have.

One bit of bad news if you hoped this was easy. The easy stuff that your community platform delivers you in pretty charts probably doesn’t get it done. Visits, posts and logins make for easy graphics, but they don’t necessarily tell you if people are getting value.

Behavioral metrics also take longer to move. Activity can ramp up quickly – and there is nothing wrong with looking at activity metrics to make sure people are coming to the community and doing things, especially when you are just getting started. But as your community matures, it’s less about them showing up and more about the ways they are giving and getting value.

“Visits, posts and logins make for easy graphics, but they don’t necessarily tell you if people are getting value.”

2. Push the value conversation.

It’s really hard to measure fog. If you can’t express the value of the community to the organization and its members in a clear, concise way, you’ll have a hard time getting members to engage (because they don’t know why they should). But equally important, you won’t know when you are truly delivering value. Stories and anecdotes get you there for a while, especially at the start. But at some point, you’ll need hard numbers – so nail the value piece down.

3. Make metrics a part of the strategic conversation from day one.

Once you have your value defined, identify and begin tracking the metrics. It’s OK if your numbers aren’t huge right off the bat. Your metrics are the way you will be able to track your progress, and will help you troubleshoot, generate new ideas and recognize gaps.

Plus, you don’t want to be caught flatfooted when someone above wants to know whether this community investment is paying off.

SOCM2016_Fact_#12_Reporting

4. Share your data with an eye toward your audience.

When preparing your data – remember who it’s going to. Your immediate boss may want the intimate details of which customer forums are generating the fastest community response times to support questions. Your CEO probably doesn’t.

5. Storytelling still matters.

While getting the right metrics is critically important, qualitative data, case studies and clear examples bring a human face to the numbers on a page. Don’t get so caught up in the numbers that you stop gathering the pieces that you can attach to show the human business impact of a 58% increase in number of questions answered in your platform.

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Do community manager roles change as communities mature?

July 18, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

Explaining what you do as a Community Manager is never easy – and it turns out, it’s likely to change as your community matures. That’s right – not every community manager does the same thing, and all community manager roles evolve as their community does. (We can see you nodding along at your desk – this is one of those “I knew it!” type facts that confirms a long held belief in the community community.

In the State of Community Management 2016 survey, we asked respondents how they spent their time among the five skill sets of our Community Skills Framework – Engagement, Content, Strategic, Technical and Business.

Learn more about the Community Skills Framework and the 50 skills of community by downloading our Community Careers and Compensation 2015 report.

We found subtle but noteworthy changes when we compared the skills of Stage 1, relatively immature communities, with those that scored in Stage 3 or 4 on our Community Maturity Model. Early-stage community managers spent the majority of their time on engagement and content skills – 57%. The same held true for more mature communities, but the balance shifted. Whereas early-stage community managers spent the greatest percentage of their time developing content – 31%, Stage 2 and 3 communities spent their time on engagement – 35% and 34%, respectively.

SOCM2016_Fact_#7_EvolvingRoles

The data show a second shift that happens as a community matures. Stage 1 managers spent almost as much time on technical issues in their community – 19%, as they did on strategic and business elements combined – 24%. By Stage 2, that begins to shift, and in Stage 3 and 4, community managers are spending 32% of their time on strategy and business, and 14% on technical skills.

Age ain’t nothing but a number

What about age? It would make sense that someone in a new community would need to spend more time on content as they ramped it up, so you might think that we’d see the same kinds of shifts with age. Turns out, though, just as with people, maturity and age don’t necessarily go together. Splitting the sample by community age showed absolutely no correlation between community age and how community managers spent their time. Stage 1 communities that were more than 10 years old looked just the same as those started in 2013-2015.

As with so many things in community, the evolution of community manager roles is non-linear. It will happen as your community grows and develops – it’s just not a matter of time.

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Give real responsibilities, and real rewards, to your community advocates – SOCM2016 Fact #6

July 7, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

They like you. They really really like you. Your community advocates. They are the ones you love to see – they answer questions and cheer you on and by being engaged they give you a sense that your time and efforts aren’t going unnoticed.

But are you giving them what they want – or getting enough in return?

Our research suggests the answer is “probably not,” in both cases.

In the State of Community Management 2015, we found that while most communities recognized key contributors in some way – with badges and swag most often – they often failed to provide real, business-driven rewards for community advocates, such as opportunities to test products, feedback opportunities and access to executives.

In 2o16, that still holds true – but we built upon the question by asking what communities are asking their advocates to do, as well. While a large majority of communities said their advocates answered questions, half or fewer said they took part in product testing or feedback, moderation, programming or member recruitment.

There are many understandable reasons for this. Many community managers don’t want to overburden their most active members with extra duties that could make them feel used or make them less active in the community. They don’t have the budget or authorization to provide needed training and resources for advocates to be effective in leadership roles. Or they feel like they don’t have the bandwidth themselves to give structure to an advocacy program on top of the rest of their own duties.

But here’s why you should engage your advocates to take on more leadership responsibilities.

Advocates help you scale yourself as a manager.Getting advocates to take on a greater leadership burden frees you up to focus on more strategic opportunities, which will in turn enhance their own experience as community members. If you can moderate fewer threads and instead develop more robust programming – it’s a win-win.
Today’s advocates are tomorrow’s community leadersThis may not be true in every use case, but in many communities, the next generation of community managers can be found in the ranks of the current members. Dedicated advocates can provide future leadership – and giving them responsibilities now prepares them for it.
Expanding roles can strengthen advocates’ dedicationYou know the many versions of the quote, “If you want to understand someone, walk a mile in her shoes.” That’s the premise here. Giving advocates a greater first-hand understanding of the operations and duties of community management gives them insight into how decisions get made – and in difficult times, those allies are critical to have.
It helps justify (and can expand) investment in advocacy, too.We’ve highlighted the need to improve rewards for advocates already. Giving your advocates rewards they deserve is a balance. Making the case for greater rewards for advocates is easier when they have legitimate responsibilities as well. But when asking for investment from the organization, you need to demonstrate the value of the program to the organization.

The bottom line is this: Empowering your advocates by giving them real opportunities not only helps you, it helps them grow and ultimately provides greater benefits to your organization. It’s an untapped investment that can reap real rewards for both your organization and your key members.

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Who’s the most valuable group for your community engagement? (It’s not your CEO.)

July 6, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

Who is the person you most need involved to create a successful online community (other than a full-time community manager)?

It’s not your CEO. Or anyone else in the C-suite.

Our State of Community Management research finds that while getting C-level leaders involved is a worthy goal, the biggest difference between best-in-class communities and the average is in their ability to get those a little farther down the org chart engaged – functional leaders and subject matter experts.

In other words, it’s the not the people who call the shots who help make the community hum. It’s the people who know the answers.

So, are we saying CEO involvement doesn’t matter? Definitely not. Getting your C-suite engaged in community efforts helps you get budget, sell the community to the organization, and drives investment. C-level executives need to understand community growth and ROI patterns to understand present conditions and the future potential and scale of a community approach. Oh, and communities can give executives unparalleled value and insight into and organization and its members and customers.

But when you think about it, the value of subject-matter experts relative to C-suite makes a lot of sense in a number of contexts. Words from top executives define an organization’s culture, highlight beliefs and goals, and provide a guiding vision. Those are perfect to be shared in a community context. But subject matter experts and VPs are relevant to the daily work of the organization. In the 2016 SOCM we talk about how answered questions are at the core of community ROI for an organization – and we’ll talk more about that in other posts. In most organizations, the answers to the daily questions at the heart of the organization’s operations are far more likely to be generated by subject matter experts than C-level executives.

Communities with subject-matter expert involvement may not be more engaged from a volume standpoint (at least the 2016 data didn’t find that), but there’s value generated in their interactions, and it’s that value that helps communities move forward.

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Communities have big goals, but too few have a roadmap to get there

June 28, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

community roadmap satnav failure

If you’re planning a vacation this summer, you have a plan. You have a vehicle. You have destinations in mind. And I bet you know how to get there, or have a map to get you there.

Can you say the same for your community? In most cases, the answer is actually no.

For the second year in a row, we asked community managers from hundreds of communities if they had an approved community strategy and a resourced community roadmap to implement it. And for the second straight year, most community managers said they had the strategy, but not the roadmap. That’s like having a destination and a car, but no planned route – or way to get refueled on the way.

The best communities couple a strategic plan for the community with the resourced plans needed to get there. But while an approved strategy is almost universal among our best-in-class communities, a third of them don’t have a resourced roadmap of goals, waypoints and elements that can turn their strategy into reality. Overall, more than two-thirds of communities that have approved strategies lack the resourced community roadmap for implementation.

SOCM2016_Fact_#4

Let’s be clear – you need a strategy to get you started. But while investing in a strategy is critical, your roadmap enables your community to thrive, and helps you secure the resources to succeed. The roadmap conversation and resource discussion, while never easy, can also serve as a valuable opportunity to get stakeholders to understand community as more than just words on a page, and see how community can develop in or around your organization. And as we know from elsewhere in the research, getting the organization behind community plays a powerful role in strengthening engagement.

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Best-in-class communities know their value

June 14, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

“Is it worth it?”

It’s a common question when making any investment – time, money, energy or brain power – in anything, whether it’s a movie, a meal at a new restaurant, a new exercise program, or anything else. We like to know whether what we are doing has value.

Often in communities, though, we shy away from defining the value of a community. This can be for a number of reasons. We can feel that defining value is too difficult, too hard to measure, or too limiting. That’s understandable – because the value of community can be multifaceted, and we don’t want to create a value definition that leaves out any valuable elements.

But deferring that process can slow the development of your community. In the State of Community Management 2016 survey we asked whether communities could define the value of community for members and for the organization, and whether they could define the shared value for members and the organization together. Then we asked whether the community could measure its value.

Three things emerged:

About 40 percent of communities could not define the value of the community for members or for the organization, and 60 percent couldn’t define the shared value of the community.
Communities that could define shared value scored more highly overall than their peers.
And Best-in-Class communities, our Top 20% overall scorers, were more than twice as likely as their peers not only to be able to define value, but to measure it as well.

Being able to measure value is more than just a marketing need. It’s part of the strategic feedback loop that can improve communities. Defining value shouldn’t be seen as a box. It’s a tool that lets you target your resources for greatest benefit. Being able to measure that value – even imprecisely – gives you information you need to make changes and demonstrate progress.

As a community manager, you’re a driver of the community. Measuring the value of your community not only helps you make sure you’re headed in the right direction, it helps ensure your community members and your organization are on board for the ride.

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Want community engagement? Make your organization care about it.

June 13, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training, The Community Roundtable

Convincing skeptics about the value of community is a part of the job for all too many community managers. When faced with adversity, there’s almost a “fight or flight” choice. The “fight” choice in this case is to strive to win converts and create a better vibe for the community. The “flight” response is to turn inward, recognize the difficulty of engaging the larger organization and focus on creating the best possible community.

While focusing inward may have short-term advantages, the research suggests that in the long run, working to improve the perception and understanding of community in the organization pays off.

There are two elements of this graphic I want to highlight. The first is that organizations whose culture encourages or enhances community approaches get significantly higher engagement in the community itself. It’s not a surprise. If the organization values community, then the people in the organization can more readily see evidence of that value even before they get involved. It effectively pre-qualifies members for the community, and then once they are in, the community culture itself takes over.

But the second piece to me is just as interesting – maybe more interesting. It’s that there’s basically no difference between organizations that are neutral to communities and those whose cultures are perceived as constraining community. The enemy of community approaches, it seems, is not opposition to community, it’s not caring about community.

“If we build it, they will come around,” may not be the best approach, after all.

What does this mean for community managers? It may mean that connecting community to the organization needs to happen early on, even though that external effort may take up time that you’d rather use making the community stronger. Setting up the community, establishing your core group of advocates and setting behavioral norms don’t necessarily need buy-in from the larger organization, but once your community efforts are ready for prime time, having the organization on board becomes critical for the long-term success of the community program.

Bottom line: Healthy communities thrive in supportive environments.

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Member feedback creates engagement opportunity

June 3, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

June is wedding season, but engagement happens year-round. At least that’s what community managers hope.

For The State of Community Management 2016, we wanted to get a better sense of some of the cultural elements that drive higher engagement in communities – and it turns out one of the best ways to get members involved in your community is to ask them for their opinions of it.

Communities that had formal systems to get member feedback about the community had on average 43% higher active engagement than communities without those systems. (We define active engagement as contributing to, creating or collaborating on content in the community.) More than a third of members in communities with formal feedback systems were actively engaged, versus a quarter of those in “feedback free” communities.

Not every community has the available resources for formal surveys and systems – but even informal systems to encourage feedback correlated with higher engagement. If you think about it, it’s not that surprising. Feedback systems effectively encourage engagement by making the community operations a two-way street and giving members a shared interest in the community’s success.

Of course, collecting feedback is only part of the process. Soliciting input and then ignoring it can undermine your efforts by telling potential advocates – those with the interest level to provide feedback – that their thoughts are not valued. Make sure you combine your efforts to create a feedback system with the follow-up to act upon that feedback. That means thinking about the process you might undertake, and getting the stakeholder support to respond to member needs.

Ask for feedback. Act on it. A commonsense approach to building connections with your members. We’d love your feedback on the post, and the report – leave us a comment!

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Scale yourself as a community manager to take community to new heights

May 31, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training, The Community Roundtable

Have you ever met a successful community manager who says they wish they had more to do?

Me neither. Community managers wear multiple hats, work with myriad stakeholders and are expected to understand everything from business models to technical support – often working alone or (maybe) with part-time or volunteer help. 95 percent of communities in The State of Community Management 2016 had some sort of dedicated community management staff, and 75 percent had a full-time staff member. But only 31 percent of communities say they had a team of community managers, and even in communities with tens of thousands of members, community teams are the exception, not the rule.

How do you survive? Our research highlights some real opportunities to scale yourself, ease your workload and empower your members.

Start a Champions Program

Every community manager knows how important key members are to keep the community vibrant and engaging. But not everyone is giving your advocates the training and responsibility to tackle real tasks in the community. TheCR Network has a champions program that taps into the interests and expertise of members and gives them real opportunities to develop their skills and share knowledge. Their skills expand the knowledge base in the community, and help take the content burden off the community manager.

Give Your Advocates Real Responsibilities, and Real Rewards

Advocacy programs are usually good about recognizing community stalwarts, but sometimes fall short of giving them other benefits and responsibilities. Nearly 90% give their advocates visual recognition in the community and 74% give them access to the community team – but many stop there. Best-in-class communities build beyond mere recognition with special opportunities to give feedback and gain access to executives, and they are also more likely to expect advocates to answer questions, test new products and organize programs.

Empower Your Members

Your advocates are key, but they’re by definition just a subset of your members. Don’t forget about “the 99%” in your community, either!

Ask their opinions: The research demonstrates that communities with formal processes for member feedback have substantially higher engagement – and finding out what’s not working for members can help you focus on the things that members really value.

Put them in charge: Best-in-class communities excel at getting members and internal experts to lead programming, not just community managers. And communities with member-led programming get higher engagement, too.

The bottom line is this: Good community managers manage their communities. Great community managers enable their communities. It’s an investment in the short-term, but worthwhile for your long-term community – and personal – health.

And we’ve got the research to prove it.

Check out the stats and gain valuable insights in The State of Community Management 2016 – available for free download now! And be sure to see how our other research can help!

2016 SOCM Report: Quantifying the Value of Community

May 18, 2016 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training, The Community Roundtable

It’s here! Months of data gathering and analysis. Hundreds of thousands of data points. More than 100 charts. Today, we release the most comprehensive State of Community Management report in our history.

The State of Community Management 2016

This year’s report is a collaborative effort, involving not just the members of TheCR team, but members of TheCR Network who gave their time to the State of Community Management Working Group, and hundreds of community professionals – 339 in all – who invested the time to take the SOCM survey.

Now in its 7th year, this research has turned the tacit art of community management into the explicit discipline of community management. We now know how to build successful communities. That is enormous progress and it has been rewarded with the strategic spotlight. Communities are now seen as the most effective way to deliver on a range of complex goals from delivering digital transformation to enabling integrated customer experiences to creating a culture of innovation.

That strategic spotlight is burning brightly, putting pressure on community professionals to demonstrate value and community ROI. It’s a tall order and it’s time for community professionals to prove themselves.

Key Findings

Our 2016 key findings are broken down by strategy, operations and tactics:

Strategy: Defining shared value drives success.

Communities that define the value of community for their members that overlaps with the value for the organization outperform those that don’t explicitly do so. And communities where the shared value is defined and can be measured handily outperform all others in the survey.

Operations: Empowering members accelerates engagement.

In last year’s The State of Community Management 2015, we highlighted the importance of strong advocacy programs. This year, we take a broader view. Communities that give their members real opportunities in the community – to lead programs and give actionable feedback – also achieve higher levels of engagement.

Tactics: Measure what you want to see, not what you have.

Our third finding suggests that communities need to be aspirational in their metrics instead of settling for what is easily available. Measuring behaviors and outcomes rather than just activity correlates with overall community maturity. That’s a challenge for a couple of reasons – those metrics can be harder to define and they can be harder to track in many platforms.

However, tracking behaviors gets at the heart of how the community generates value. It also taps into an important part of human nature. If you measure something, and you hold yourself accountable for it, you are more likely to do things to improve yourself in that area. Measure “members online” and you’ll try to improve members online. Measure “questions answered” and you’ll try to improve the number of questions answered. Which one has more value to a community and to the organization?

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

There is a lot more in the report – including an expanded section on measuring ROI using a straightforward metric – answers. It’s a topic for another post – but the bottom line is clear. Communities are now seen as strategic enablers. Executives are watching and listening. But if we can’t or don’t show how communities drive business value over the next 18 to 24 months – that attention will go away, potentially to the latest shiny object like the idea of using chatbots instead of community managers to generate engagement.

But the thing is – communities do work and they work because of excellent community management. For the third straight year our data disproves the “90–9–1 rule” of engagement and our ROI findings show that those who can measure their ROI can post remarkable numbers.

We hope this report is the next step forward in helping you quantify the value of community. There will be a lot more to come and we have many other resources and services to help you deliver on the promise of community.

Learn more about The State of Community Management and ask your own questions. Higher Logic and The Community Roundtable present the State of Community Management 2016 Release Webinar: Wednesday, May 25 at 2pm ET. Register now on higherlogic.com.