The Community Roundtable

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

How Do You Move a Conference Online?

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Canceling events is the theme of 2020 so far – and it’s made many of us realize just how dependent our businesses are on them. Whether your organization produces workshops and training events, thought leadership and advocacy symposiums, or a huge annual customer event, it’s likely that a lot of revenue is tied up in them. How do you move an entire conference online?

The shut down of events is likely to cause a huge restructuring of the transportation and hospitality industries as planes sit idle and hotels stand empty. Some people have decided to cancel events. Many are considering how to adapt or restructure them. Others are quickly pivoting and moving events to an online-only format, like the Atlassian Summit.

The History of Online Conferences is Awkward

Remember the awkward Second Life Conferences? Yeh, they never resonated for me either, although maybe I’m showing my age… because I am sitting here, watching my daughter enjoy running around in Minecraft and Star Stable, both virtual games that she loves.

The Challenges of Online Conferences

The basic issue is one that Liz Miller of Constellation Research insightfully points out; just trying to replicate an offline conference in an online channel is the wrong way to think about this – it is a completely different medium. Yes, video conferencing and meeting software has gotten much better but no one wants to sit in front of a computer listening to people speak for hours on end.

Online Conferences as an Opportunity

One of the biggest challenges – and a huge opportunity – in bringing things online is it forces things to be explicit and transparent. That can be quite uncomfortable for those charged with producing events because they are paid to ensure smooth operations and predictability. Event producers do an amazing job with that – making sure food is there when needed, sessions start on time and with the right equipment, and everything from lighting to temperature to MC scripts are considered. It is a lot of work with high stakes because events are so expensive.

The reality for conference attendees, however, is that at least half of the value comes from ad hoc, emergent, and secondary events that happen around the edges of the main event. Event staff control and see very little of this explicitly and it is almost impossible to plan for… but it’s critical to the attendee experience.

Digital is no Longer an Afterthought

For too long, digital has been a secondary channel; it complements rather than hosts the main events. Because of that, it is used primarily to extend or replicate the offline conference experience. Streaming sessions, posting recordings, using apps to provide agenda and attendee information, and using webinars to run an ‘online’ event are common. But none of the digital supplements feels the same or offers the best part of a conference experience to attendees because they don’t provide the spaces and structures for building connections and relationships. The part of conferences that happens in between the formal structure at coffee breaks, restaurants, bars, and lounges are the experiences that drive business. People come for the content but at great conferences, they come back for the relationships.

What About Engagement?

Engagement, connection, and relationships are the precursor to transactions, not the outcome – and events are so valuable because they enable this. Many event producers take for granted that this will happen at conferences without overt planning. The best event planners know that designing prompts for attendee collisions ensures that outcome. They think about space design, room size, activities, type of food, and the attendee list based on the type of event.

How Do You Bring the Best Conference Experiences Online?

Digital channels are challenging not for their limitations but for the level of comfort and familiarity many people have in using them for building relationships. People tend to default to using digital properties for content consumption and sharing – even on social media. The best conferences include learning new things, sharing experiences and knowledge, and connecting with peers.

The challenge as event planners is to create ways for people to learn, share, and connect in a new medium. It’s creating programs and events that prompt members to engage and get to know each other. It’s mixing types of interaction because different people enjoy different ways to connect.

It sounds a heck of a lot like…. an online community.

It looks pretty different than a conference though. That is, however, the point – it uses the digital channel to its maximum advantage – extending sessions, programs, and discussions across the entire year rather than consolidating them in an exhausting two-day sprint. This not only allows members to learn more effectively but gives them the space and time to cultivate relationships in a way that builds strong bonds.

TheCR Network, for example, offers a variety of programs all designed to prompt different behaviors and different outcomes for different members. We combine all of those programs into monthly topic cycles, which we use to explore topics in a variety of different ways, with different audiences.

Some of TheCR Network programs include:

  • Roundtable calls with guests who offer a perspective, technique or case study. Many of those calls are a mix of discussion and presented expertise. They are recorded and turned into recordings and reports for the library, available for years to come.
  • User Groups for people who use the same platforms, work in the same industry or oversee similar use cases.
  • Learning Cohorts that go through our training courses together with a facilitator, sharing their work, reflecting and discussing how they plan to apply the lessons.
  • New Member Calls to help people navigate what is available, who is in the community, and how to get the most value out of their experience.
  • Office Hours to discuss a specific topic with and get advice from an expert
  • Partner Demos & Webinars so our members can explore the relevant technology and services they need to be successful.
  • Working Groups that tackle a project together, whether helping TheCR team to define research or put together resources they all need to develop Centers of Excellence or other initiatives.
  • Working Out Loud on a weekly basis to share their work and collectively understand what expertise is available.
  • Skill Building Workshops that help members develop a specific skill like public speaking, measuring ROI or creating a roadmap.
  • Happy Hour/Tea Time where members can join a group chat and blow off steam, discuss movies, or ask questions about work.
  • Monday and Thursday Emails that summarize what’s going on, highlight new members, point to active discussions, and identify unanswered questions.
  • Resource Bundles of curated content that include links to reports, discussions, and external expertise.
  • Podcasts and Webinar recordings that give people access to interviews and other materials.

Members engage in different ways, constantly mixing and meeting each other, while learning, discussing, and sharing. Our goal for members is that they become better leaders of their own communities and by doing so get rewarded with more support, more staff, and more opportunities.

Upcoming Virtual Event

Join Liz Miller and me for a conversation about this and other topics on my weekly conversation series, Engagement That Scales next Friday, April 10th at 1pm ET.

Engagement That Scales - Liz Miller
Engagement That Scales – Liz Miller

Just like events, successful communities don’t just happen. They are lead and managed by professional community staff, which is why the best hire you can make during this crisis is a community manager.

Want to explore more resources about how effective communities are? Find podcasts, webinars, case studies, and more here.

Using a Community Strategy to Transition to the Future of Work

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Digital Transformation is a Given

All executives know that the world of business and work is changing rapidly as digital channels and technologies become more integrated into everything we do. From the small bakery that posts evocative pictures on Instagram to the multi-national organization that needs to align more employees than exist in small countries. We are all facing a world that is more interconnected than ever – but with the skills, perspectives, beliefs, and social norms that we developed in an educational and work environment built for the last century.

We feel the stress of that dichotomy, whether we have accepted that we are unprepared for the world we now live in or not. There is also a raft of analysts, experts, and self-proclaimed thought leaders that have a vision for what the Future of Work looks like and collectively, we are getting a better picture of what that looks like as more case studies emerge at the edges.

Where Do We Start?

While we need to change ourselves and our organizations, I see a lot of avoidance in making any decisions at all – or stalling by having one more expert come in share their perspective, hoping it might be the magic bullet. From my perspecrtive, this is due to people wanting more certainty before making the huge investments we know are needed to do this. Part of the challenge is that there is no ONE right answer to this and that causes executive teams and boards to seize up – debating options endlessly while the world around them continues to change.

Which thread do we pull first? Do we implement the technology first and hope for the best? Do we try and shift the culture? Do we change leadership?

These ALL need to be addressed and my take is that there is no sequential process that will work. The technology, the culture, the governance structure, our measurement models, and the leadership approach are all inter-dependent, making digital transformation a giant hairball.

Communities Can Co-Create the Future, Incrementally

Using communities as a strategic approach is one of the best ways to lead in a complex environment, where there are no right answers only a series of options. In effect, it takes the risk out of making the wrong decision off the table and allow the future to emerge in an efficient and addressable way.

A community approach works because:

  • You don’t need to have an answer. The problems and opportunities are what bring people together, energize, and engage them.
  • Participation in the solutions drives commitment and buy-in.
  • Communities naturally bring people along and compel them to change as different solutions emerge – reducing resistance and rejection to change.
  • You can say yes to everyone – anyone interested in the problem or opportunity can contribute, without it taxing the system.
  • You discover the risks and opportunities that you could never have seen – all the things you didn’t know you didn’t know.

Structuring an Ecosystem for Today – and Tomorrow

The way our clients are doing this is to architect ecosystems that accommodate both the culture and structure of their current organization while also encouraging and enabling emergent structures. These ecosystem strategies typically include multiple types of communities:

  • Organizationally sponsored and managed communities that address the current organizational priorities and structures. These communities include those focused on a current strategic priority (AI, for example) or aligned with current operational structure (a customer support community).
  • Organizationally supported communities, managed by those who have taken on the initiative to manage them. These communities are typically formed around innovation – tackling new problems and opportunities that someone sees at the edge and wants to pursue. The organization provides support in the form of tools/infrastructure, training, measurement, and advise but does not formally assign staff to them.
  • Emergent communities started by individuals who want to experiment. These communities have access to infrastructure but need to ‘prove’ themselves before more resources or support will be provided.

This model provides avenues for current organizational priorities to dominate in the near-term, which helps everyone understand the purpose and direction of the communities while getting comfortable with the new engagement dynamic. Critically, however, it also allows for a more emergent approach to grow in influence over time, shifting the balance of power as people become comfortable with the new model. This allows organizations to explore who wants to take leadership initiative and what topics, problems, or challenges gain traction with their stakeholders. As those communities grow in influence, they will get wrapped up into core organizational priorities.

This structure allows the current, top-down structure to blend over time with an emergent bottom-up structure – while avoiding a hard flip to a ‘change’ switch that would be very expensive and is more likely to fail. It also allows the organization to address incremental issues as they arise instead of planning for every plausible scenario centrally before initiating any change.

How to Start

The first step to implementing this approach is to develop an ecosystem strategy – understanding the participants, their motivations, and imaging what each type of community will look like in terms of resources required and outputs expected.

The second step is to build a community team prepared to both manage some communities and support many more as a center of excellence – developing a services model that differentiates between each type of community and defining what resources and requirements are available to each.

The third step is to resource this team appropriately. Currently, the majority of community teams are acting like centers of excellence but only 8% are officially tasked and resourced to perform this role.

Interested in learning more? Please reach out – this is the majority of the advisory work we have been doing with clients over the last 18-24 months.

Orchestrating Compelling Engagement: TheCR’s Engagement Strategy Canvas

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Engagement behaviors are a leading indicator of value

Engagement is a key measure of attention, alignment, learning, and leadership. Sustained and deepening engagement is critical for organizations in a digital world where prospects, customers, and employees have endless options and distractions. Organizations that engage well reap huge rewards in attention, conversion, productivity, innovation, and advocacy.

How does an organization inspire, encourage and cultivate engagement?

At The Community Roundtable, we’ve spent almost a decade working with global community leaders to understand engagement and how to successfully increase its breadth and depth.

It starts with a strategy that speaks to the needs of both the organization and its community members. If the strategy is good for the organization but does nothing for the individual, there will be no engagement. If the strategy serves individuals but doesn’t benefit the organization, the efforts to cultivate that engagement will ultimately fail and be disbanded.

TheCR’s Engagement Strategy Canvas

We’ve taken the lessons we have learned about great engagement strategies and distilled them into four important elements:

  • Shared Purpose
  • Shared Value
  • Key Behaviors
  • Value Add Inputs and Value Gained Outputs

 

Great engagement starts with a well-crafted Shared Purpose

Shared Purpose is the compelling vision for what the organization and the community both have a vested interest in addressing. It communicates the mission and overall goals of the community. A well-crafted shared purpose is inspiring and exciting. It communicates the motivation for coming together and acts a community mission statement.

Shared Purpose is not enough

If there is a compelling and exciting shared purpose, people will come but they are unlikely to stay unless there is a way to constructively address it. This is why Shared Value is critical. It provides specifics about what the organization/sponsor and the community do together to address the shared purpose that they could not do on their own. Shared Value is the tangible output of engagement that provides the motivation to stay engaged.

Together, Shared Value and Shared Purpose create a new behavior paradigm that benefits both the organization and the individual. Each contributes and gains value from the engagement. Cumulatively, the power of communities ensures that each participant receives more value than they contribute, creating a virtuous feedback loop that strengthens the community and enhances its value.

Key Behaviors translate strategy into tactics

Key Behaviors are member inputs. They are discreet, strategically aligned actions the organization asks members to contribute. They help keep community leaders focused on the actions that are most likely to create a Shared Value. They are an essential part of your community strategy because they help create the value pathways for your members to travel along.

Key Behaviors enable members to be successful in the community and invite them to participate in moving towards a collective goal. Because Key Behaviors are distinct actions, they are easy to encourage, support, and reward. By identifying, measuring, monitoring, and prompting these behaviors through community management initiatives, community leaders ensure that Shared Value is being created.

Member engagement needs structure to thrive

Community management initiatives are organizational inputs. They are the lattice up which member engagement grows and matures. By hosting the community gathering space, the organization agrees to provide the structure, governance, activities, resources, and facilitation members need to be successful in moving towards the Shared Value. These initiatives enable a targeted and streamlined experience so that members can direct their full energy towards the Key Behaviors that drive success.

Co-create the future through engagement

The future is full of unknowns and rapidly changing technology. There is no longer a single successful way for analysts and consultants, sitting in back rooms, to plan effectively. Information must be rapidly digested, processed, distributed, and incorporated – by everyone. Engaging the organizational ecosystem in communities and creating an effective system of engagement is the only way to maintain alignment with a market. Cocreation with stakeholders ensures their attention, commitment, and loyalty. Engagement determines how likely individuals are to understand, learn, align, and apply new information. It’s something no organization can afford to ignore.

Interested in exploring more about how to build an effective engagement and community program? Check out TheCR’s Community 101 resources.

 

Engagement Strategy Canvas

Nurturing Super Users to Cultivate Success

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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 (or superusers, power users, top contributors, champions, etc.) 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 engaging your advocates to take on more leadership responsibilities can be a mutually beneficial relationship for you and your community members.

Community Management Case Study- Nurturing Super Users

Empowering your advocates by giving them real opportunities not only helps you, but it also 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 Mimecaster Central “Legends” Program rewards the most active community champions who continue to offer Legendary assistance to their peers in their support community.

Learn how the Mimecast community team nurtures these super users to cultivate customer success and increase member satisfaction in this case study. Download the Mimecast case study.

Gaps in Strategy Contribute to Community Professionals’ Burnout

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If you work in community management, chances are that you’ve felt burnt out recently – according to the State of Community Management 2018 Report, 45% of community professionals have felt that way in the past year alone. Do you ever think about why that is?burnout

To put that 45% in perspective, almost 60% of emergency medicine physicians experience burnout, according to the Medscape Lifestyle Report 2017 by the American Medical Association. That means that the most stressful physician position is feeling only slightly more burnout than community professionals; that’s astounding.

While community professionals aren’t working in emergency rooms and dealing with critical patients, they are similarly being overworked.

Strategy is at the Root of the Problem

Community professionals face internal struggles like unrealistic expectations, a lack of executive understanding, and not enough resources, but a large reason why community professionals are overwhelmingly feeling burnt out is more focused: a lack of a clear strategy. 

If you’ve worked in community management (or have read past State of Community Management reports), you know that strategy is important, so why is having a clear strategy still a problem for community teams?

  • Why do only 17% of community programs have an approved and resourced community roadmap?
  • Why do 70% of community programs lack operational and measurable strategies?
  • Why do less than half of the existing strategies include a business problem statement?

We can cite the aforementioned frustrations as causes for the above strategic problems – a lack of resources is definitely a problem when looking to fund a roadmap – but where should we focus if we’re looking to improve these numbers?

 

 burnout

What’s Causing the Burnout?

If we’re looking at funding, then we should look to executives; that’s a logical step.

But what about focusing on community professionals? It’s on them to give executives a reason to better fund their programs and, if these frustrations ultimately stem from a lack of strategy, then it is also the responsibility of community professionals to improve their strategies. That, in turn, will allow them to better prove the value of their community programs so that they can receive the funding they need. 

A Complete Community Strategy Can Address Burnout

There are many layers to the cause of this burnout and there are at least two actors involved. So how do we remedy this?

There is no easy answer, but one place to start is to make sure that your community strategy has all of the elements that you need to be able to communicate resource need to executives.

You should make sure that your community strategy includes important pieces:

  • Communicating key business needs through a problem statement
  • Identifying key behaviors and use cases
  • Recognize and measure key metrics

To find out more about what your community strategy should include, download the State of Community Management 2018 here: https://the.cr/socm2018.

So Much Community Data, So Little Insight

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Everyone wants engagement, but few know how to measure it.

Organizations are realizing that in the age of options, engagement is a key indicator of attention, commitment, and ultimately, success.

Executives see the level of engagement on platforms like Facebook, SnapChat, and Twitter and they want that for themselves, both with customers and employees. Most organizations, however, don’t really understand the dynamics of engagement, how to deconstruct and measure it, and how to tie online engagement to business outcomes. This disconnect results in both poor applications of technology and uneven results.

Not surprisingly, the result is a mess.

Social technology vendors that support complex, high-value engagement environments are being sold for their parts because their complexity and value are not well-understood by the mainstream market. Vendors that support simple engagement objectives are getting more and more attention because they are easy-to-understand and straightforward. Organizations struggle to see how different engagement approaches impact their business objectives AND that not having access to engagement data will severely limit their ability to succeed. In short, most organizations don’t understand the range of engagement behaviors, how they connect to value, what behaviors they need to support their business objectives, and what technology best supports the range of behaviors they need to be successful.

This inability to show self-evident value has caused the social software market to rapidly commoditize. For most vendors, their front-end engagement functionally, back-end analytics, back-end governance and management, and business models are poorly aligned. This creates confusion and churn in the community platform space and hurts the market, making it slow to mature and hard to understand for stakeholders.

We created the Community Engagement Framework to categorize engagement behaviors and help organizations understand how to differentiate and measure various engagement behaviors. Many of these behaviors cannot be measured easily in existing community platforms and as a result, manual work is required to map existing data to these behaviors.

Engagement analytics are terrible.

There are two big issues with community platform analytics.

  1. Not all engagement behavior is supported, so measuring it is impossible and even when certain behaviors are supported, the data is not readily available.
  2. Most engagement analytics are architected around content or transactions, not people. This approach makes it very difficult to see people’s experience and change in behaviors over time.

What that means is that community platforms are great at displaying ‘vanity metrics’ like how many people viewed a page. Activity like this is obviously important – without it, nothing else happens – but it’s really insufficient at helping community practitioners make good decisions. For example, pageviews are unable to tell you that employees are much more likely to read your marketing content than your customers. Insights from pageview data is incremental and it can tell you that something triggered a click through. The insight from the behavior data is monumental by comparison: it can tell you if your content is not appealing to the people it should be – even if it is good content – and that you’ve got a business problem. The value difference between these two insights is enormous.

As a business analyst, I want to see how activities and content affect a workflow in terms of time, cost, or quality.

I want to know things like:

  • What pathways do people take to successfully complete a workflow?
  • How long does it take people to complete steps along that path and does it vary by demographic?
  • What makes that path shorter for one demographic vs. another?
  • Does adding a trigger help or hurt the cycle time?
  • Does the person get more access/better information via one pathway vs another?
  • What impact does the cycle time have on the profitability of the workflow?

Notice that none of those questions are about whether a piece of content is being read, liked, shared, or commented on. While there will certainly be content, various types of engagement, and transactions as part of those workflows, they are the secondary to understanding the behavior. They are a tactic of addressing a larger strategy to improve a workflow.

Strategic analytics should be architected around people.

Most community and enterprise social networking platforms have databases designed to report on content and transactions. It is either time-consuming or impossible to access behavior and lifecycle metrics by individual or user segment. This creates a troubling situation where the blind are leading the blind. Community manager’s core skill set is in community engagement – not data or business analytics. This makes sense, but also means that they typically don’t have the skills to understand and evaluate the data they can access in the platforms. This also means that they do not ask vendors for what they really need either, so vendors carry on and give them more and more meaningless data. This vicious cycle makes it even harder for them to understand and report value back to their organizations.

Community platform vendors should be taking a thought leadership role in analytics, since good community analytics will be able to sell the value of their platform, reducing sales costs and customer churn. But on the whole, they have not sought out the expertise to architect helpful community analytics. This leaves platform vendors floundering, prioritizing the wrong features, spending a lot of effort selling their platform, and investing too much time to convincing internal stakeholders of value. It should not be this hard.

Who is doing behavioral analytics well?

Not surprisingly, social networking platforms like Facebook have their data architected around the individual. This is what helps them focus on creating a superior engagement functionality. It also makes them phenomenally successful at generating the type of engagement that supports their advertisement-based business model. They understand exactly how valuable their data is when it’s reported this way.

This is getting the attention of all sorts of organizations – who are rushing to adopt Workplace – without understanding the value they are giving up that resides in the data. With GDPR, data privacy issues, and no vested interest in Facebook sharing more than necessary, it is unlikely organizations will be able to access the strategic community analytics they need to carefully monitor and modify their community strategies to serve different business objectives.

Another group that is doing behavioral analytics particularly well is the marketing automation vendors – HubSpot and Hatchbuck both have this orientation and visibility. Embedding these tools into your community can give you tremendous insight that is not possible with native analytics or even many third-party analytics tools because the database architecture makes it challenging to reorient the data. These tools, and others like them, can provide amazing insights into how people are experiencing your community and how their behavior is changing over time.

This approach to analytics helps community practitioners see:

  • The average cycle time between when people join the community and when they first exhibit certain engagement behaviors. This helps community professionals optimize their new member welcome processes and fine-tune engagement tactics.
  • What member behavioral segments exist; members who are consumers vs. question askers vs. explorers. This data helps community practitioners target different segments with different engagement prompts that will have a higher likelihood of success.
  • Which members are super users, visiting the community and engaging in a variety of ways; this helps community professionals develop advocacy programs that are purpose-built for the interests and behaviors of different groups.
  • ROI of different member segments. This helps their stakeholders see the potential upside of additional investment.

Community platforms will struggle until they get analytics right.

Analytics, metrics, and dashboards deserve attention because they’re critical to prioritize community investment. This is true for both community program owners and vendors. Strategic behavioral data would help vendors priorities the right product development, help them market and sell, and help their clients be successful, renewing their platform license. When the platform vendors do analytics right, their value will be self-evident.

Recommendations for Community Program Owners.

If you are currently struggling with analytics, the first thing to do is take a big step back. A good community strategy defines the key engagement behaviors you want and the workflows those behaviors enable. We see this as a four-step process:

  1. Your community strategy should help you identify the analytics you need to track your progress.
  2. Once you identify the data you need, consider the engagement path required to get to those key behaviors.
  3. You can then lay out the behavior path and what visibility you will need from the data to track it.
  4. Once you have your desired behavior path and data requirements, review your current data and identify what you can access, what data is not helpful, and what gaps exist.

You may decide at this point to live with what you have or invest in accessing data directly to create a custom dashboard. Either way, you will be in a much better position than relying on vendors to give you what you need in an easy to absorb format. You will also save time by narrowing in on just the handful of metrics that are truly meaningful to you.

It’s time for community platform vendors to get analytics right.

Notes: This is work we do with many organizations in our community strategy workshops. Let us know if we can help you get the most out of your community. If you’re a platform vendor, we’d love to talk with you about how you can better support the data needs of community practitioners. Contact us!.

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.

CMGT 101: Moderation in Online Communities

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Note: This content appears in a slightly different form in our ebook: CMGT 101: 17 Community Leaders Share Their Secrets for Success.CMGT 101 is packed with engagement ideas, governance tips, career advice, and more from community leaders working at innovative organizations like CA Technologies, Aetna, Electronic Arts, SAP, Pearson, Akamai, and Atlassian. Download the ebook here for free. 

Jerry Green is a Community Strategist at The Community Roundtable. He shared his best practices for moderation in online communities.

Why is it moderation important to the overall health of an online community?

A well-moderated community provides a welcome place for members and guests. Good moderation builds trust among the members and ensures that the community is a safe place to engage. Once assured that a community is safe, users will feel comfortable sharing and the quality of the engagement improves.

Moderation in Online Communities Tip #1: Do welcome new members to the community.

This is especially important when launching a new community. Acknowledge new members, reiterate the purpose of the community and encourage them to participate.

Moderation in Online Communities Tip #2: Do show members how to participate. 

Give new members a list of three things to do. These can include: Read the guidelines for participating; like a post, you value or enjoy; search for a topic of interest; respond to a post you can contribute to.

Moderation in Online Communities Tip #3: Do be sure you understand the question or issue.

Before you respond to a member’s post, read the post again. Especially in a customer support community, it’s important to show that you understand the question and are genuinely interested in assisting. Too often I see a member respond “That’s not what I was asking. Did you even read my post?”

Moderation in Online Communities Tip #4: Do establish clear guidelines for participation.

Your guidelines should focus on encouraging the behavior you’d like members to exhibit in addition to discouraging the conduct that is prohibited. Be firm and consistent in applying the guidelines to all members. When dealing with undesirable member behavior, use the guidelines as justification for corrective action.

Moderation in Online Communities Tip #5: Don’t be a robot.

Respond in a sincere, personal voice. Some community moderation platforms provide the functionality of selecting a pre populated response. Avoid using “canned” responses unless volume necessitates it. Even when you’re using an automated response – take the time to make sure it is in the tone of your community so it won’t feel robotic (unless robots are your thing. In which case: be-boop-boop.)

 

Mastering Moderation

Community is not a content funnel: don’t force-feed your members.

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Wondering how much is the right amount of community content? You might be asking the wrong question.

I was at a client meeting recently, where a lot of the conversation revolved around content, and one executive’s general conclusion was this: “More content is better, and more content with targeting is better still.” I left with an image of a content shotgun, with each pellet targeting a specific person in the group. Keep on blasting and they’ll all get what they need, eventually.

The latest research from the State of Community Management 2017 confirms that’s about as wrong an approach as you can get.

First of all, it ignores member programs, which we know from our research is a critical counterpart to traditional content approaches. And second, the idea that we need to simply turn up the firehose finds neither qualitative nor quantitative support. In fact, the best communities do about the same frequency of content and programs as the average in our SOCM survey.

What’s the difference?

They provide their content and programs strategically. They shape their content and programs with the community and organizational strategies in mind, to make sure that the community and organization are working in sync as much as possible.

Best-in-class communities were about twice as likely as the overall sample to align and integrate content and program strategies with the overall strategy. That doesn’t just help with “messaging”, either. By keeping major organizational themes in mind as you develop content and programs, you are, in effect, putting the entire organization’s communications effort at your disposal. You’re also making it that much easier for people just coming into the community or potentially leading community programming to connect with the discussions inside the community. And you may be able to leverage other resources in the organization for your community efforts, or use the organizational priorities, things like organization-wide HR efforts, to get new members to visit the community.

The finding doesn’t suggest that you should forget about reacting to community needs and desires. In fact, aligning strategies helps you understand better where and how to fit community-generated or community-specific content and ideas into your overall content and program strategy.

As we have said in many other places, starting and staying strategic with your community can make a major difference in how much you are able to accomplish, and the kinds of resources you can tap into in order to move the community forward.

Working Out Loud and Community Management

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Note: This post was originally published here. 

Working out loud (WOL) is essentially any behavior where you share your work transparently with a network of people.

That network can be as small as a work team and as large as the Intranet. From my perspective, it is the act of sharing done with the intent of soliciting feedback, providing value to others, or building relationships with people beyond your current network.

My work out loud journey started in January of 2008 with my first work-related blog,The Social Organization. Initially, I wrote mostly for myself, to work through my thoughts. I soon found that it, combined with Twitter, was the best way to find people who cared about the same things I did, which allowed me to build a strategic network that made me smarter, supported my work, and enabled my success. I would never have started The Community Roundtable without first having that blog.

Like my experience working out loud, it can be done in many places and it doesn’t need to happen in within the boundaries of a community. However, I would argue that it is much more effective when it is done within a community.

Communities create a shared context and, when done well, increase the level of trust between members. That increases a few critical things:

  • Relevancy and resonance of what is shared
  • Likelihood and quality of validation and feedback
  • Percent of people who feel comfortable sharing
  • Complexity or ambiguity of what is shared

Because of this, great communities create spaces where deep conversation and innovation happen – or in business terms, it increases the value generated from working out loud.

So what is the role of the community manager in working out loud?

Simon Terry said it quite succinctly: community managers are the architects and agents of strategic value. They ensure working out loud is easy to do and is rewarded with peer recognition and response. That sounds easier than it is in practice but it is the role of community management in a nutshell.

Why is this so complex to actually do? Because it requires:

  • Developing a shared purpose and value that is compelling and attracts people aligned with that purpose
  • Ensuring people are welcomed and acclimated into the community
  • Developing both value-gained and value-added ways for members with different personality types to participate
  • Creating strategic triggers that ask people to engage in ways that are just a little more involved than they do already – moving them up the engagement and trust curve
  • Measuring the breadth and depth of behaviors across the community and adjusting or realigning the approach as behaviors change, the culture of the community matures, and the purpose of the community evolves
  • Developing peer leaders as advocates for different stakeholder perspectives
  • Moderating and modeling the language of engagement to ensure people feel supported, even when they are challenged
  • Ensuring the community sponsor or host understands and realizes the value of the community’s outputs
  • Managing platforms and channels to align with strategic goals and member needs, to make key behaviors as easy as possible to do

Community management is often seen as a tactical role with member engagement as the primary responsibility. Done well, however, it is far more strategic and responsible for creating the conditions of engagement; building trust in a scaled way, and developing a culture that is agile, engaged, and innovative. A big part of creating the conditions of engagement is supporting individuals on their work out loud journey and helping them understand what possibilities it unlocks for them personally.

It is why I believe that the future of all leadership and management is community management. It’s not about what we do ourselves – but what we support and enable others to do.