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The Community Roundtable

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

Community Best Practices: Architecting the Community that Meets Your Needs

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By now, countless organizations have learned the painful lesson: “If you build it, they will come,” only

Architecting Your Community Needsworks in the movies. But there’s a related lesson that is a core tenet of community management. How you build it—the shape of the community you create—drives whether the community meets your goals.

The shape of your community will depend entirely on what success looks like for the goals you have, the complexity of those goals and where potential members are comfortable engaging. Generally speaking, the less complex the outcome (information sharing, discovery, awareness) the larger and more diverse your community can and should be— suggesting that the shape of the network is loose, only lightly connected and may cross channels and platforms.

If on the other hand, you are solving complex technical issues or negotiating business terms you will need a much smaller community that is highly interconnected and includes a high level of trust and confidence, which means it is very likely private and exclusive with no explicit links connecting it to a wider network.

Understanding what kind of community and ecosystem structure best fits your needs will help you superheroesdefine an effective community management approach. The more trust you need to execute on your goals, the better the relationship between participants will need to be.

Are you charged with starting an online community? Check out the Community Manager Handbook for more community best practices, strategy ideas and case studies.

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Want the chance to contribute to research like the Community Manager Handbook? Members of TheCR Network get exclusive professional development opportunities like this and more! Join us and let us help you grow your career as a community manager.

Throwback Thursday – Building Your Community

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By Amy Turner, The Community Roundtable

A community is only as successful and effective as the people who are part of it. When first starting out, or perhaps re-energizing and re-building a stale community, how do you build a strategy and lay the foundation for a successful one?

Architects team discussion on blueprints in office

We’ve compiled some of our best resources for starting and building a community, including a detailed toolkit for starting on your journey, tips for building a thriving community, as well as a unique perspective about how on-boarding a new community member is similar to welcoming a new baby into the world.

This week’s #throwback thursday post focuses on starting and building community.

Want even more #throwbackthursday action? Check out all our throwback posts!

Throwback Thursday – Community Management 101

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By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable

community management 101Looking to get started in community management, or just need a refresher on the basics? Check out these community management 101 resources! We’re highlighting the fundamentals of community management in this week’s #throwbackthursday post – including an exclusive glossary of community management terms for members of TheCR Network!

This week’s #throwbackthursday focuses on Community Management 101 – getting back to basics with some fundamental community definitions.

  • Defining Community – The challenge with the word “community” is people mean a lot of different things when they say it, but there are few definitions. Joshua Paul at Socious took a crack at this issue and provided some great suggestions on how to differentiate between several meanings of the word, highlighting the preposition that comes before it. Is it ‘The community’, ‘our community’ or ‘a community’?

  •  Differentiating Between Social Media and Community Management – As someone who works with social media managers and community managers, it seems the line between the two types of positions is not terribly clear – and maybe doesn’t need to be – but I think it would be helpful to distinguish between the two.  Why?

  • Community Types and Terms Defined – There still seems to be a lot of confusion and disconnects when people are talking about their community or talking with The Community Roundtable about how being a member of TheCR Network can help them.  And it’s not surprising.  Much of the lingo and concepts are still very new in organizations and understanding what lens you view community practices through is important.

  • Connection, Friend, Member – Who’s In Your Company’s Online Ecosystem? – We came across this article last week about defining your online community to higher ups, and it resonated because people mean a lot of different things when they use the word community. As the article so aptly states, it is hard sometimes to understand if you are “referring to the online community at large, the community of people that your organization interacts with online, or an online community where your customers, employees, or partners can engage one another and support your customers or members.”

  • For TheCR Network Eyes Only: Community Management Glossary – Are you a member of TheCR Network? Check out this exclusive glossary of dozens of community management terms – and add the ones you think need to be there!

Want even more #throwbackthursday action? Check out all our throwback posts!

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Throwback Thursday – Community Strategy 101

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community strategy 101By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable

Too often new community managers (or veteran community managers faced with a brand new community) will dive right in – because from day one, the to-do list can be daunting. We can’t urge you strongly enough: STOP! DROP! STRATEGIZE!!

To liberally paraphrase the great Ben Franklin – an ounce of stratigization is worth a pound of community success. (Our apologies to Mr. Franklin…) But seriously – time and time again our research has shown that communities that spend time thinking about their long term strategy are simply more successful. Join us for this week’s trip in the way-back machine as we explore community strategy 101.

This week’s #throwbackthursday focuses on Community Strategy 101 – getting back to basics with the fundamentals of building a community strategy.

  • The Basics of Community Strategy – Are you just getting started and looking to build your community strategy? We recommend using the Community Maturity Model to help in building a community strategy.
  • Why is a Community Roadmap Important? – A roadmap highlights your community’s objectives and how you will community strategy 101achieve them. When you have a roadmap, your conversations with stakeholders become more productive. Instead of talking about “why we should invest in community,” you can discuss where to target your investments.
  • I need to build a community strategy. Where do I start? – Whether you are starting from scratch with a new community, or taking over an existing community that could use some love there is a good chance you’ll be tasked with building a community strategy.

  • For TheCR Network Eyes Only: Community Pitch Deck – Are you a member of TheCR Network? Check out this community strategy pitch deck that a fellow member put together to make the case for their community strategy!

Want even more #throwbackthursday action? Check out all our throwback posts!

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The Community Maturity Model

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Community management is becoming a lot more common at all sorts of organizations – driven by adoption of people doing more and more online and the social media tools that allow for easy conversation and collaboration. As that happens, however, there is a lot of friction due to lack of standards – not just technical standards but also standard expectations and understanding of what community management is and what should be expected of it.

This lack of standards is causing a lot of friction and frustration – particularly for community managers themselves. Companies have bought intosocial media and online community to the extent that they think it’s important and have put some resources into funding community management positions and tools to enable community but there is still a lot of uncertainty about what to expect of both the roles and the tools. That lack of clear articulation can create a lot of pressure and/or missed expectations for community managers.

One of our missions at The Community Roundtable is to further the discipline of community management – not just in our own community but more broadly in the marketplace. Our first effort to define the discipline is our Community Maturity Model:

The Community Roundtable's Community Maturity Model 2019

This model does two things. First, it defines the eight competencies we think are required for successful community management. Second, it attempts – at a high level – to articulate how these competencies progress from organizations without community management that are still highly hierarchical to those that have embraced a networked business ecosystem approach to their entire organization. We use this model in a number of ways:

  • As a mental model for understanding all the areas and skill sets required for community management and hopefully, to remind community managers that it is about assembling a internal team to gather all the required skills – not to try and be the expert in all of them individually
  • As a tool for community managers to educate and set the expectations of colleagues and advocates within the organization
  • As a roadmap for community managers looking to understand what is important to do given their current state of evolution, and in what order
  • To organize content, programing, and conversations within The Community Roundtable
  • As a way to categorize and find best practices and case studies – we will be working with our members on both Quick Cases (techniques and methodologies) as well as full case studies and be matching those with the appropriate box on the matrix
  • As a good model over the long term to develop training

While the Community Maturity Model is something that is core to our services, we also want to ‘open source’ it for those that find it useful.  Feel free to use it either for internal or external presentations – we just ask that you attribute it back to The Community Roundtable.