state of community management 2015 Archives

Community Teams Build Success

June 15, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

The State of Community Management 2015 is out in the wild. Odds are that you are aware of that, if you are a regular reader of this blog and a friend of The Community Roundtable. But if not, or if you haven’t had a chance to pull up a chair, kick back and dive into research and analysis in this year’s report, today is your lucky day.

Today, we begin a regular SOCM Monday Facts series – giving you a glimpse inside the report and directions for ways to dig into some of the important findings of this year’s survey. This week, we take a look at community teams. It might not surprise you to know the largest communities (1,000,000+ members) are more likely than others to have community teams. After all, you figure, with that many members, you need all the help you can get to moderate and manage the community.

That’s true, but as it turned out, having a team didn’t necessarily improve response times and other tactical elements of their communities. Instead, the power of community teams was more evident for strategic reasons.

Fact #1:

Community teams correlated strongly with the likelihood a community had a roadmap and/or a playbook, had invested in a strong advocacy program and had done a better job integrating the community and business strategies. That’s because a community team not only provides more resources for moderation and day-to-day operations of the community, it also allows for community professionals to step back and look strategically at the community, rather than focusing solely on tactics.

Here’s an example – communities with a single community manager were just as likely as those with teams to be able to express the value of community to the organization and to the members. But the team-led communities were more likely to have a measurable strategy and resourced roadmap to deliver that value to the organization and members.

Where else did team-led communities shine? Download the report – and turn to page 29. Investing in a community team might make your moderators more nimble – but its real power is far more strategic.

Want to learn more? Download the State of Community Management 2015 here and check back here each Monday this summer for more Monday Facts from The State of Community Management.

It’s here! The State of Community Management 2015 Report

June 4, 2015 By Rachel Happe

By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder and Principal, The Community Roundtable

Today is a big day for The Community Roundtable – it’s the day we publish our annual research, The State of Community Management. Each year, we look forward to providing more data to support the work of online community professionals – those that enable, facilitate and inspire network of people to contribute in ways that generate more value than the sum of each individual contribution.

When we started The Community Roundtable we felt that research into the practices and resulting impacts of community was a core missing piece that could help demonstrate the value of community management. The research we do at TheCR is a collaboration between members of TheCR Network and TheCR research team. We work together with our members to ensure that we focus on and exploring the areas of biggest need to practitioners, so that the research is immediately practical and valuable – and evolves as quickly as the discipline does.

At the leading edges, the discipline of community management has moved beyond the idea that engagement is purely a matter of tactical execution and our members are working to build the operational structures and processes that reinforce a culture of engagement. We are also seeing organizations start to contemplate how business models and organizational strategies will need to change as a result of engagement with their ecosystems. For this reason, we broke up this year’s key findings into three critical categories for those working to make a community approach successful within larger organizations: strategy, operations and tactics. This year’s key findings are:

Strategy: Invest in people and systems, not just platforms
Operations: Advocacy Programs are More Than a Checkbox
Tactics: Quick Wins Exist to Improve Engagement

In each of these areas, TheCR Network members told us that there was not enough data to help them educate their stakeholders, or an understanding of what it meant to do these things well. We took that input to heart, and asked for more detail in our research. As an example, advocacy and advocacy programs are a much-discussed topic but there is a wide variation what people think advocacy programs look like and it is often seen as an easy thing when, in fact, it requires a lot of planning, thought and investment to do well. This year’s research bears that out, showing that basic advocacy programs have minimal impact on engagement but multi-faceted programs, whcih address multiple roles and have significant benefits for advocates do have an impact on engagement and value.

We are particularly pleased this year to be able to break down the markers of community management maturity into maturity stages, which allows you to see more detail about what initiatives are most prevalent in each stage of a community’s lifecycle. This data helps considerably in building community roadmaps and providing stakeholders with data that supports it. Other new analysis features this year include:

Reporting on ‘inactive’ populations in our engagement profile – critical for putting the other engagement categories into context.
Discussion of some of our ‘data dilemmas’ as we analyzed the data, which will give you some insight into areas of the research that are still immature or non-standard.

Ultimately our goal with this research is to provide data that helps you:

Plan and develop a roadmap
Prioritize resources effectively
Educate stakeholders
Increase your credibility
Demonstrating your value as a community professional

We hope this research supports your work and contributes to your success. If it does, we hope you will consider joining TheCR Network, contributing to the development of the discipline by sharing what you know, asking questions about what you don’t and participating in the evolution of our research in the future. The results will provide fuel for discussions and programming throughout the coming year, and we’d love to expand the conversation – and the number of people getting the benefits of TheCR Network.

Happy reading and please let us know if you have questions, suggestions or comments!

Friday Roundup: Fundamental Questions about Community Value

January 16, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Another week in the books at The Community Roundtable – and it seems like the second week of the New Year had people thinking more about some of the fundamental questions about community value. Rachel sparked one of the bigger reactions of the week with a post in CMSWire, Customer Communities: Strategy or Tactic, which looked at the fundamental shift from building relationships with customers to building your customer base with relationships – a fundamental change in the social media era. The critical importance of shared value is not new to fans of TheCR – we have talked about it for years – but it’s great to see the theme reach new audiences, along with its companion, shared purpose.

If you’re struggling with the shared value discussion, you may want to connect your audience with our Community Fundamentals deck. We gave it a little polishing up in 2014.

Within TheCR Network, a couple of blog posts elsewhere have sparked thoughtful discussions on some of the basics of community, and a number of members had their minds opened (or blown) by Peter Gloor of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Any one sentence summary I tried to give of the presentation wouldn’t do it justice – so I’ll just recommend you look at his books, or better yet, sign up for TheCR Network and read the Roundtable summary notes when they become available. (Did you know that one of the valuable assets of the Network is that all our programming is summarized for you to digest at your convenience or when you need it most?)

Looking ahead – we are just a little over a week from CMAD on Monday, January 26, and we have our locations set for all six of our CMAD events with Higher Logic. There’s still time to sign up to join us for food, drinks and discussion in Boston, New York, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Washington, DC on the 26th. However, there’s apparently no such thing as a free lunch in San Francisco, where tickets for our free lunch were snapped up in record time.

CMAD will also be the day we kick off our survey for our most established research, the 6th annual State of Community Management. SOCM 2015 is only as good as the data you provide, so we hope you’ll take the time to fill out the SOCM survey, and spread the word with your fellow community professionals when the survey link goes live.

Lastly, we shared a couple of other pieces on the blog this week. Shannon noted that there is one way for you to stand out from the crowd when applying for community manager positions, and I suggested a practical strategy for taking those big ideas for your community in 2015 to fruition.

Now on to some other good reads!

Some Other Interesting Readings This Week

It’s Time to Flip the Social Media & Community ROI Equation on its Head: It’s no secret that many Brands realize tremendous value from their social media and online community efforts. Value in the form of cost-reduction for support and service, ideas for and feedback on products, product and brand advocacy… the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, there is also a problem with the current approach Brands take: it’s unsustainable – unsustainable because it is predicated on Customers doing valuable work for free.

Facebook Where? The Enterprise Reacts To Facebook At Work: Enterprise Social as a category has been with us for almost a decade, with companies like Jive, Yammer (now part of Microsoft) and Socialcast (now part of VMware) trying hard to get organizations to embrace social tools — often being sold ironically as “Facebook for the enterprise.” Facebook is jumping feet-first into this existing market with all of its baggage and trying to show it can make the transition to a business product and all that entails. While the Facebook enterprise product has many advantages, there are also many unanswered questions.

Internal communications predictions for 2015: For its part, 2014 was a growth year for internal collaboration, as the platforms matured and companies continued to deploy new and updated tools, usually with a special emphasis on social and mobile collaboration. The good news: Overall, growth in newer forms of internal collaboration tools continued on a double digit year-over-year pace according to market research firms. This growth trend will actually ramp up into 2015 as organizations get more proactive about getting ahead of digital workplace change.

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

Community Manager — i2Coalition, Washington, DC

Zoe Community Manager — HTC, Seattle, WA

US Digital Social Engagement Lead – McDonalds, Oak Brook, IL

North American Gaming Community Manager – Nvidia, Santa Clara, CA

Online Community Coordinator – Melanoma Research Foundation, Washington, DC

Manager, Community Management – Ignite Social Media, Birmingham, MI or Cary, NC

Content and Online Community Manager – ANZ, Melbourne, Australia

Community Manger (bilingual) – Wanderu, Boston, MA

Digital Client Engagement Strategist – Fleishman Hillard, Dallas, TX

—

Looking to break new ground in your community in 2015. Maybe one of our community toolkits could help! They provide information and strategic guidance for starting, building and improving your community.