strategy resources Archives

3 Best Practices When Budgeting for Community and Social Programs

September 9, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

2015 may seem far away, but for many organizations Fall is when major planning and budgeting initiatives kick off. For many community and social teams their budget may cover everything from technology licensing, training and staff costs to paid social media advertising, personal branding in order to remain distinct from a larger parent company or consulting services. While every community’s budget is different we’ve identified three best practices to help you plan for the upcoming year.

Apply Sound Justification Principles When Budgeting for Resources

One of the most important feedback channels in any community program is the one between the community team and the executive team. It is important to continually share wins with your executive team – no matter how small the win! Most executive teams want solid statistics – it’s always a good idea to monitor agreed upon strategic metrics and tie them back to revenue. From there you can estimate how much your team could potentially generate in revenue with added content and programming. Of course, every company will be different but consistently setting metrics goals and presenting your results to your executive team sets the stage for future growth.

Budget for In-Person Events

The State of Community Management 2014 research showed that communities that host offline events have a lurker rate at 56%, and communities that host regular online events have a lurker rate of 57%. While the majority of your community programs will take place online, incorporating offline events that are linked to community initiatives can be very powerful. If there is a company initiative that needs to be celebrated or promoted, try to tie-in a community-focused event while your members are already gathered together. Don’t forget to invite your executive team or community sponsors to the event: executive modeling is a powerful community-building tool.

Consider Budgeting for Consulting or Advisory Programs

If you’re just getting started in community, or are undertaking a significant new initiative consider bringing in a consultant or advisory team to cover the basics and ensure that your team is aware of best practices that they should be performing on a regular basis. If your team is bogged down with keeping up with the day-to-day activities and not taking the time to think about longer-term projects and where they should be focusing their efforts to be most effective strategically an outside perspective can provide valuable insights and actionable plans.

Have you started planning your 2015 budget? What best practices do you recommend to get the most out of your budgeting?

Note for TheCR Network Members:

Interested in attending this annual call? We’ll announce the date for the 2015 Budgeting & Planning call soon. Looking for additional resources? Check out these reports inside the Network:

Not a member? Want access to the complete archives inside TheCR Network – including resource bundles, case studies and roundtable reports from over 200 events? Join TheCR Network now!

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Looking to take your career in community management to the next level? 92% of members agree that TheCR Network supports and advances their personal and professional goals. Learn how our research, access to peers and experts, targeted content and exclusive concierge service can help you achieve your goals.

I need to build a community strategy. Where do I start?

September 2, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

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. This can be both daunting and exciting. In our State of Community Management 2014 research we found that the foundation of a successful community really is the presence of a well-defined strategy- one that integrates social tools and methods with business goals and processes. A good community strategy also aligns an organization’s goals with member needs setting you up to succeed in both keep engagement high and provide ROI.

So – we agree a strategy is important, but how do you get there from here? In an earlier post “Building a Community Strategy” we outline the some of the primary tasks related to each competency of the Community Maturity Model as they relate to strategy building and planning. They include:

Strategy

Define the business objective
Articulate the community purpose, from the members’ perspective
Assemble research to help build your business case
Complete competitive audit – what competes for members’ attention?
Build a business case
Calculate and secure investment required

Leadership

Find or develop executive sponsors
Determine what executive and stakeholder education is necessary
Calculate and secure investment required

Culture

Articulate cultural limitations and opportunities
Assess willingness and aptitude for change
Determine if specific training or change management initiatives are needed
Calculate and secure investment required

Community Management

Understand the community management approach needed, based on business objective and member characteristics
Define roles and responsibilities
Calculate and secure investment required
Assign roles and responsibilities

Content and Programming

Define content and programming needed to reach the business objective
Determine gaps in available and required content and programming
Calculate and secure investment required

Policies and Governance

Assess current policies
Amend or develop policies as needed
Audit current governance – or lack thereof – of social media and collaboration environments
Develop a governance model
Calculate and secure investment required

Tools

Determine required tools – software, applications, templates, and guides
Audit current toolset
Calculate and secure investment required

Metrics and Measurement

Articulate primary value that will enable business goal
Articulate secondary value
Determine metrics for executives, operational management and tactical management
Assess ability to capture metrics
Build capacity to capture metrics, as needed
Calculate and secure investment required

Etienne Wenger’s book, “Cultivating Communities of Practice” is another fantastic resource when thinking about some of the big community building blocks questions . They include questions broken down into categories to help you step back and really evaluate what you are working with, and working towards. They include:

Domain:

What topics and issues do we really care about?
What are the community’s values and goals?
What kind of influence do we want to have?

Community:

What roles are people going to play? Who are the stakeholders, decision makers and leaders?
How often will the community meet and how will members connect on an ongoing basis?
How will members deal with conflict?
How will newcomers be introduced into the community?

Practice:

What knowledge will we share, develop and document?
What kinds of learning activities will we organize?
Where are sources of knowledge and resources outside the community?

The whole book is really worth checking out if you’re feeling overwhelmed and need a primer on strategy building.

Another great resource is our Start Toolkit ($299), which includes a strategy template, but also walks you through the exercise of who, what, when, where & why for all stakeholders with the end goal identifying the overlapping wins for your organization and community members. (Disclosure: as an organization we tend to err towards a simpler strategy that can adapt and be responsive as the community matures and then use the Community Maturity Model as an assessment tool to create a detailed roadmap. This might work great for some communities and not for others, so definitely check out the Toolkit and see if it would be helpful for your needs.)

For those of you building an external community (not an employee or other internally-focused community) our friends at Feverbee have a very detailed community strategy template that you might find helpful if you’ve already sorted out the answers to your main goal-based questions. Other resources that you may find helpful include:

The Basics of Strategic Planning and Strategic Management, Balanced Scorecard Institute
Online Community Strategy Framework, Lauren DeLong
Online Community: Heart of Social Strategy, Lithium
The Ultimate Framework for Planning an Online Community Strategy, Socious

Are you in the process of building out a community strategy? What tools or resources are you finding useful as you tackle this project?

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Do I Need a Community Strategy?

July 10, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

You’ve heard that practice makes perfect, but what about planning? In our State of Community Management 2014 research we found that the foundation of a successful community really is the presence of a well-defined strategy- one that integrates social tools and methods with business goals and processes. A good community strategy also aligns an organization’s goals with member needs setting you up to succeed in both keep engagement high and provide ROI.

72% of communities surveyed indicated that they have an approved community strategy, a sure sign that organizations understand how to justify a community approach. However, of that 72%, only 40% of those strategies are operational and measurable. In best-in-class communities, 100% have an approved strategy and 79% have strategies that are operational and measurable – an indicator of why best-in-class communities are twice as likely to be able to measure value.

You can review more findings related to community maturity in the State of Community Management 2014. This post is the fourth in a 10-part series highlighting some of the most thought-provoking data from the SOCM 2014 – brought to you via a fun poster – perfect for sharing on Twitter, hanging at your desk, or printing out and waving around your next community strategy meeting.

You can view Fact #01, Fact #02 and Fact #03 or download the whole report today. If you are particularly interested in community strategy insights jump to page 26 of the Report.

The State of Community Management 2014 from The Community Roundtable

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Twitter Chats 101 – How to use twitter chats to connect with your community.

June 18, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Image via kenshoo.com

If you’re on twitter (and who’s not?) you may have seen, or even taken part of a twitter chat. We love this medium for connecting with your community – whether it’s a community of like-minded professionals, subject matter enthusiasts or passionate fans or advocates. We wanted to learn more about some of our favorite community management focused chats, so I reached out to the leaders of a few of our favorites – #ESNChat, #CommBuild, #cmgrchat and #CMGRHangout to learn how they got started and to learn some best practices you can apply to your twitter use.

Joining our conversation was Jeff Ross, producer of #ESNchat (Thursdays at 2pm ET), Praan Misir, organizer of #CommBuild (Tuesdays at 1pm ET) Jenn Pedde producer of #cmgrchat (Wednesdays at 2pm ET) and Sherrie Rohde producer of #CMGRHangout (Fridays at 2pm ET).

First off, we love all your chats, and try to pop in every week. Tell me, how did you get started in the world of twitter chats?

Jeff: I felt like there was a void in places to gather for those with a specific interest in enterprise social networks. There were other chats for community managers or those involved in social media, but the vast majority were giving most attention to external social media rather than internal. Vendors have their own gathering places for people who use their products, but there wasn’t one open and available place for ESN practitioners to communicate with each other regardless of vendor. After researching last summer and verifying the void, I decided to take the plunge and start #ESNchat.

Praan: I first got started with #Commbuild in early April of this year. I’m new to NTEN in general, but attending the #14NTC inspired me to dive right into engaging with and learning from the network. My first participation with the group was informative, inspiring, and fun, and I’ve met some really cool community builders through this exercise.

Jenn: Kelly Lux and I were relatively new to the world of Community Building and thought we would start a Twitter Chat for Community Managers since we didn’t see one out there already. From the very first one there has consistently been 80-100 people that participate each week so we’ve kept it up and will continue to do it as long as there are people wanting to join. It’s been four years!

Sherrie: I actually got started with #CMGRHangout because I wanted to learn more about Community Management. Tim McDonald originally founded it as a Google Hangout to fill the void of a video based learning place for Community Managers. To expand the reach of those able to interact, he added in the Twitter component with #CMGRHangout.

I love all your stories – the theme of learning and connecting seems to be there for each of you. What made you want to connect with your cmgr peers via this medium, specifically?

Jenn: We had read every book out there at the time on community building and wanted to meet others who were in the same boat.Twitter is such a great medium to pull people in randomly, have a great conversation initially, and leads to a lot of great collaboration online and offline elsewhere.

Sherrie: Video is powerful. It’s face to face communication and you simply can’t replicate that with only text. Tone of voice and body language are such a big part of how we communicate. From a Twitter standpoint, it’s also just a fantastic way to discuss a topic with peers around the world. We always know it will be the same time and place every week.

Jeff: I’ve taken part in other Twitter chats and have been blown away with the ability to make excellent professional and personal connections with people around the globe. The ease of gathering and sharing info and building a personal network around a topic is inviting and effective. I’ve learned more from resources shared on Twitter over the last several years than any other single source, so I believe strongly in the medium.

How you think these kind of chats differ from other community building events online?

Sherrie: The interesting thing about Twitter chats is you can accidentally participate in them. I’m constantly getting glimpses of variousTwitter chats from those I know and follow participating in them.

Jeff: I like the ability people have to easily come and go, to take part or not without a long-term commitment, and that it’s a specific, tiny slice of time we’re asking for on a weekly basis in the case of #ESNchat. It’s narrow in its focus. My goal isn’t to actually build an ongoing community of ESN professionals, although the relationships that happen as a result contribute to that outcome. My goal is to help advance the field of enterprise social networking by providing a means of sharing combined ESN knowledge and having a repository of that for anyone interested.

Praan: I think one of the biggest differences, and strengths in my opinion, is how open conversations can be. Although twitter chats are structured around a few key questions, the chats themselves allow for the conversation to travel in several different directions and tangents almost simultaneously. You can be contributing to the main conversation, participating in a few deeper conversations with other individuals, and even chiming in on other side-chats where necessary. The openness of Twitter also means that you interact with a diverse and dynamic array of perspectives on any given topic, with community builders from across the world. Finally, as events go, participating in a twitter chat is easy to do, all you really need is access to the internet and a Twitter account.

Jenn: Twitter chats are quick, easy to jump in and out of, easy to connect with others on one topic or a variety of issues, and everyone participates. Other community building events online might not have the high engagement that a Twitter chat gets.

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to someone joining a twitter chat for the first time?

Jeff: Dive in and have fun. Don’t be overwhelmed by a fast-moving steam of tweets. Strike up a few conversations with others present and add them to your network. Share your thoughts by answering the questions posed. Your opinion is wanted and as valid as anyone else’s. We’re all here to learn from each other.

Praan: Be prepared to multitask. All those conversations and side conversations can get hectic and hard to follow, so you need to be prepared for at least monitoring a few conversations in real time. Although at first it can seem daunting, with the proper prep, you’ll be an expert in no time.

Jenn: Use a tool like Tweetchat or Twubs so you can see all of the tweets in one place and slow down the pace if you need to. Also, don’t lurk, jump in and start talking!

Sherrie: Make sure to introduce yourself! You’ll likely get a warm welcome if you let everyone know you’re new and checking it out.

Why would you recommend your chat (or any other twitter chat) to someone who has never taken part in one before?

Praan: Quite simply, it’s fun! I was a little nervous before my first #commbuild chat, but I ended up chatting with lots of people with great things to say about community building, and learned quite a bit. The community itself is very friendly to newcomers, and you can develop some pretty strong connections with tweeps and colleagues in this field.

Jenn: #CMGRchat is a wonderful community of brilliant people. Twitter chats exist on hundreds of topics, so they all have their own unique feel and expertise, but they’re generally a place where people go to feel connected, learn a thing or two, share their opinions, and feel like they belong. There’s not really a downside to popping into a chat every now and again except that you may become addicted to quite a few throughout the week! #Blogchat, #smmeasure, are all pretty great ones to join.

Sherrie: The moment you stop learning from those around you, life gets really, really boring. 🙂

Jeff: #ESNchat is a great conversation weekly by a group who share similar professional interests. It’s structured but informal enough to encourage friendly chatter. You’ll meet some fantastic people from around the globe that you’d never otherwise meet who will likely become your go-to people when you have questions around that topic.

This has been so great – I hope we’ve inspired all of our readers to either jump in and join a twitter chat or event get out there and start one of your own! We can’t thank Jeff, Praan, Jenn and Sherrie enough for taking the time to answer our questions and provide such great advice.

Do you have a favorite twitter chat? We’d love to hear about it!

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Did you know that 95% of TheCR Network members agree that the content and peer input improves the quality of their work? It’s true! Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

Defining Community Requirements that Scale, Part 1

June 10, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Jim Storer, Co-Founder and Pricipal of the Community Roundtable

Community is subject to the old adage, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” But simply planning isn’t enough. We often discuss that simply building a community is not enough – sadly, the average community is not the Field of Dreams. To define community requirements that scale, organizations need to examine their user segments and account for the external factors which affect community development, both of which influence the optimal design of their communities. If you can successfully understand both your organization’s and your users’ needs in terms of these areas, you can offer the right tools to ensure successful launch and adoption for the long term.

COMPLEX HUMAN SOCIAL INTERACTIONS ARE NOT EASILY CAPTURED IN SOFTWARE

In the early stages of community (the first six to twelve months), users’ requirements are relatively simple; throwing a kitchen sink of features at them when they first join will put off most people because of the complexity and your adoption will flag. But within that first year, most organizations will graduate to what The Community Roundtable refers to as the “One Year Club” (Thomas Vander Wal coined the term), where simplicity is no longer enough, as the community’s requirements will evolve rapidly once it begins its adoption and engagement ramp, and different user types begin to emerge. Start by understanding your four main user types:

Pointer/Gatherers – These users point and link to areas outside of the community, gathering information and bringing it into the community for others to benefit from. This might be anyone from an employee who shares the weekly corporate softball team schedule, to a member you can count on to share interesting and relevant news stories.

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) – These are your community’s experts whose insights are rebroadcast by the community. SMEs rarely engage with the social tools outside of the organization because they already feel overwhelmed and don’t want to add to their workload.

Gardeners – Some curators “garden” by discovering information, insights and content and then “plant” it where it will be most likely to be easily located by those who will benefit most from it. These members also tend to be good connectors – both of people and of ideas.

Doubters – These members are always questioning and challenging assumptions of the community. They are particularly useful in innovation systems as they are adept at identifying capability gaps.

Make sure the structure you create balances those who do the questioning with those who contribute. The framework should be designed with an understanding of the different stages at which these groups interact; don’t try to force-fit the community to the tool. Don’t forget though: individuals may play one role in one group and a different role in a different group. Make sure they have the capabilities available to them to switch between roles as needed.

In addition to these roles, users will also come in at varying depths of use and contribution:

Outsider with no accountability –lurkers who consume the content generated by the community but don’t contribute. Once they create a profile or account they transition from a non-contributing user to a non-contributing member and begin developing an understanding of the breadth of offerings of the service.

Realizing the service has a selective interface – At this stage, users see that they can self-select a way to consume the content in the community and explore their areas of interest.

Light Contributor – This phase begins with high-level contributions to the community such as commenting. Users in this stage are not yet contributing content to the community, but rather are responding to content posted by others.

Heavy contributor – At this stage, the person actively curates content from the outside to share with the community.

A well-designed community will help people feel comfortable moving along the journey from anonymous lurker to full heavy-contributor. The more users you can get to graduate to the sharing and curation stage, the more likely you will realize your ultimate goal of a vibrant, self-sustaining community that benefits both your organization and your users.

How far along the path to maturity is your community? Have you run into similar challenges as a member of the One Year Club or are you still in the initial or planning stage? We’d love to hear about your successes and struggles in mapping out your own requirements for a successful community.

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Note: Check out Part Two of this post over on Enterprise Hive’s blog. There we discuss two other critical factors for designing communities that scale: the importance of outside influences and mapping community to your organization’s culture.

Is Having a Community Strategy Important?

June 5, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

This year’s State of Community Management research showed what we’re suspected for along time: the foundation of a successful community is a well-defined strategy that integrates social tools and methods with business goals and processes. It follows that a community’s strategy also aligns an organization’s goals with their member’s needs.

Another prevalent idea that was confirmed by our research is that overall community strategies are maturing. Of course this makes sense – as more companies define and grow their practice of community management the industry becomes increasingly developed. This brings us to our community management fact of the week. We found that 72% of communities have an approved community strategy, signaling that organizations increasingly understand how to justify a community approach. That’s the good news! We also found that of that 72%, only 40% of those strategies are operational and measurable.

Fewer than 50% of communities with an approved strategy have an approved and resourced roadmap, suggesting a significant gap between community ambition and the ability to execute on it. This gap in understanding what is required to fully realize a community strategy is a barrier to community success. Best-in-class communities have a smaller gap between those with an approved strategy and those with a fully resourced roadmap – only about 25% of those with an approved strategy lack a roadmap.

Looking for more insights into community strategy? Download the State of Community Management 2014 report and check out the section on strategy – starting on page 26.

The State of Community Management 2014 from The Community Roundtable

Does your community have an approved strategy? We’d love to hear more in the comments!

This post is the fourth in a 10-part series highlighting some of the most thought-provoking data from the SOCM 2014 – brought to you via a fun poster – perfect for sharing on Twitter, hanging at your desk, or printing out and waving around your next community strategy meeting. You can see the first three posts here: Fact #01, Fact #02 and Fact #03 or downloadthe whole report today.

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Did you know that 95% of TheCR Network members agree that the content and peer input improves the quality of their work? It’s true! Membership in TheCR Network saves community and social business leaders time and improves the quality of their work by connecting them quickly with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

The Key to Community Success: Behavior Change

July 22, 2013 By Rachel Happe

by Rachel Happe, Co-founder of The Community Roundtable

I often get asked whether a specific use case is a good candidate for a community approach but to me, I think about it a bit differently. A community approach is a strategic operational choice for achieving almost any organizational goal. For many processes, you have the choice to either execute it in a traditional, transactional way with a high level of control and predictability, for which you will pay a lot or you can choose a community approach which you will have less control over, will not be as predictable and, if you do it well, will engender buy-in and advocacy that will dramatically lower the cost structure of execution.

The management nut to wrap executives’ heads around is that building community is an organic process, not a transactional one. In organic processes, you have to invest to get to a tipping point but then the cost structure changes dramatically. In transactional processes you have more predictability, you pay as you go and the cost structure does not vary dramatically as you continue to execute. So making the decision to take a community approach is in essence a pay now or pay later decision. There are quite a few other influencing factors but at its core, that is the financial decision.

Because of this dynamic, communities (from an ROI perspective) look like failures for a while before they look like successes because you are investing value to get your community to a tipping point whereby it starts creating value on its own. The obvious question is, if this is the case how do you determine whether you are failing on your way to success or failing on your way to failure?

In the initial stages of building a community, the ability to change behavior is the primary success metric. If you can orchestrate behavior change, you can fundamentally shift the economics of a process. Typically this behavior change is also seen as valuable to community members and that generates a pull effect that grows the community and normalizes the new behavior.

The challenge is that inspiring behavior change is complex and not linear so it’s hard to know what’s required without experimenting. One of the things I have been doing over the past few years is experimenting with my own behavior and trying to crack the nut of getting myself to do things that I’ve had great intentions around, sometimes for years, but never fully habituated. This summer, as part of the summer programming in TheCR Network, we read The Power of Habit which articulated three things required for habit change:

The mechanics of the habit change
The faith that change is possible
A community of peers that support the change

We’ve had members choose a habit that they want to start changing over the summer and we are using weekly happy hour chats and our online community to help reinforce and support each other. While this has benefits personally to our members, the goal is to help us all better understand the requirements of behavior change because as community owners, inspiring behavior change in others is the lock that opens community value.

The questions for every community manager are these:

Do you know what behavior you are trying to change and what that looks like?
Do you know if community members believe in the change for which you are looking?
Have you set up your UX and community management practices to encourage and support the change?

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TheCR Network is a membership network that provides strategic, tactical and professional development programming for community and social business leaders. The network enables members to connect and form lasting relationships with experts and peers as well as get access to vetted content.

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How Do You Build A Thriving Community?

November 8, 2012 By Leanne Chase

By Rachel Happe, Principal and Co-Founder of TheCR

No matter what stage your online community is in, there are basics of community management to be followed. It is helpful to go back over them again and again to be sure that you are staying on track. This is probably the reason our slideshare presentation “Community Management Fundamentals” has over 92,000 views and is often shared through social media channels. Today, I thought it would be good to take a deeper look at one part of that presentation that involves building a thriving community from slides 30-41.

So how do you build a thriving community? Here are some tips:

Observe Your Audience
Get to know your community. What are their likes, dislikes? Where do they hang out online? When do they hang out online? What do they value? What questions do they ask most often? All these questions will help you better understand who your community is and how you can make their experience more frictionless and pleasant.

Keep a Regular Schedule
Isn’t it disconcerting when you head to your neighborhood convenience store and it is closed in the middle of the day? So, too would it be if your community was closed unexpectedly. However, community managers are asked to do a lot. You do not have to operate 24-7 to please your members. But keeping a regular schedule of when questions can be answered and giving your community a heads up if you will be “closed” unexpectedly will go a long way toward gaining their trust and loyalty

Be Welcoming
We all know what it was like to walk into the cafeteria in a new school. It was noisy, and unfamiliar and you weren’t quite sure how it worked. You knew no one but it seemed that everyone else knew each other. It did not feel good. Wouldn’t it have been great to be met at the door of the cafeteria by a friendly face who showed you around and introduced you to others with interests in common? So do that for your new community members. It isn’t hard. A welcome email, a quick introduction to another member in the same industry or with similar challenges, an introduction through a weekly newsletter is all it may take.

Provide A Guide
We are all crunched for time and trying to learn new systems is time consuming. At TheCR Network we have new member orientation calls. This is where Hillary Boucher, our online Community Manager walks new members through how TheCR Network works, learns more about what each member’s challenges are and suggests specific resources within the community that can be helpful. It is also where we suggest reaching out to existing members of our community that could be helpful and who already know the ropes at TheCR Network.

Be Valuable
Communities are about relationships, and are not one way streets. If the community is getting something from the member but the member is not getting something of at least equal value from the community then it is no longer a relationship and chances are that community member will come into the community less and less often until they disappear. By sharing what is valuable with your members – be it curated content, discounts, thought leadership, access to experts, or something else – you ensure a healthy community.

Be a Connector
Too often in business people are afraid to share information or help each other out. But that is at the essence of a community. Connecting those that may help each other with each other is key. In our case often this means connecting TheCR Network members with each other, but sometimes it means connecting them with those outside of the network.

Bring Catnip
All work and no play is dull. And while we need to work…we also need to play. What sort of activities can you think of that may not be purely business for your community but will help them better connect? We find engagement in TheCR Network goes down with everyone’s busy summer schedule. And that’s okay. But we don’t want to totally lose connection with members and we want to bring some fun of summer into the community. Last summer we sent out “Flat Hillary” a play on a project many school children undertake. “Flat Hillary” had some great adventures with our members around the country. It was fun and it kept us in touch with our members and our members in touch with each other.

Have Rules
While you may think your community will bring out the best in people that is not always the case. As many a community manager has experienced, some community members don’t treat everyone as they would like to be treated themselves. So have rules. Here’s a great example from Career Builder.

Lead From The Back
Community managers do not need to do all the work. It is great to watch members of the community take over building relationships, adding content and making connections themselves. But community managers do need to nudge members in the right direction and be sure the community stays on course – much like a shepherd.

Encourage Your Cheeseheads
Once you know who are your biggest champions give them reasons to continue to champion you. Thank them, tell them how much you appreciate them, help them out early and often and be sure they feel appreciated.

Ride The Waves
Not all will be smooth in your community so be sure to revel in the smooth times so that you may be ready for when the wave crashes. And don’t panic. This is how life and communities work. Not all will be smooth but also not all should be overly drama-filled either. Often the tone you set will be the tone the community follows.

Don’t Ignore
It’s okay not to react immediately to everything that appears a be a problem. It may work itself out. But then again, it may not. If it is persistent or is something that you already know is a problem but you may not have been transparent with your community about, don’t ignore it. Acknowledge it, figure out what steps to take, take them and evaluate how it went.

Be Multi-Modal
Not everyone in your community will think and act the same way. You need to be where they are. This goes back to the first item on this list. If you get to know your audience you will Screen Shot 2016-02-16 at 4.11.01 PM learn where they hang out and how they like to operate. But this is not a one-time only process. You need to do this regularly. Your audience may shift their likes and dislikes and you need to be ready to shift with them.

Protect The Fish
Congratulations you have built a great community! Now watch out. Others will want access to what you have built for their own purposes. The rules you have set up and communicated should help you here, but be vigilant. Make sure your members are getting value from you without fear of sharks preying on them.

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Need community management resources? Check out our online training courses, our community benchmarks and TheCR Network – a private community for community pros.

Content Tips For Busy Community Managers

July 10, 2012 By Leanne Chase

Today’s guest blog post comes from Peter Staal, the online communications manager for LeasePlan in the Netherlands who was one of The Community Roundtable’s scholarship recipients for our most recent community manager training course. Here is some of what he learned:

Content is king. Basically for me this is why I like being in communications. I like tailoring messages to meet the needs or demands of a specified target group. Therefore I was very pleased there was a specific presentation during the 10-session community manager training course entirely devoted to content. I would like to explain how I see that community managers working in a busy corporation should approach a topic such as content.

I work in a busy corporation where most employees are stacked up with work. I myself am as well. For me this means when dealing with content you have to be creative. There is a limited amount of time available to address people and to produce new content. Now how does one deal with circumstances like these?

Recycle

One of the ideas mentioned during the community manager course was to recycle your content. That one really struck me. Now recycling to me can mean various things. One of the themes that surfaced in the course is repackaging already existing content. If your company for instance has an eBook with company information, think about restyling this into a presentation or different info graphics. Not only does it turn one piece of content into multiple pieces, it also gives you different content to spread out over a longer period of time.

Another way of recycling is to create new combinations of all the numbers and figures. Think of yourself as a statistician. Your company is a source of all kind of numbers (product, financial, employees). These numbers can be combined in a lot of ways to produce significant results. Now try and use this information as much as you can to produce different output.

The third way of recycling is producing an ad, event, or campaign specifically so that it will create spinoff content. Check this Twitter campaign by Smart Car Argentina for example. It had its first life as the actual Twitter stream. It then received a second life on Youtube in the form of a video. Obviously the people who had created the campaign knew that it would even look better as a video. Another example: Organize an event for your community members. Most members are web savvy people, so there will naturally be a lot of Twitter, Youtube and Flickr output after their respective visits. There are interesting articles available on how to re-purpose that content.

And finally you can use one piece of content to cater all your social media tools. One text can generate five tweets, one video on Youtube, one link on Facebook, and perhaps multiple pictures on Pinterest or Flickr. All your accounts have different audiences and different tones of voices. Use this element to your benefit by leveraging all of your accounts with what is actually the same content.

Curate

Curate is currently the magic word everyone’s talking about. There are so many curation tools out there it is almost dazzling. I would like to discriminate between the very time consuming curation and the one time set up tools for curation.

To me the first category is actually combining existing content so that you create new meaning. Visit the Storify website to find many examples of that. The White House is doing a good job at it. Just like a curator in a museum, community managers are redefining already existing content. Although this does not necessarily fit in a post about time efficient content production, I did not want to exclude it.

The second category does indeed help the community manager in distress. Using tools like Google Reader to aggregate a lot of different RSS feeds, requires a single time investment. After that it automatically updates itself. Same goes for Paper.li. Set it up once and let the tool do the rest. Your community members will be thankful. A final idea is to use Google Docs to create the beginning of an extensive list and let your community members fill in some of the blank spots. A great example of this is the list of Tweetchats.

Use Humor

Humor works like a charm, no matter what company you are working in. How does humorous content relate to time efficient content? To me, humor is about giving a twist to existing content or existing topics people are talking about. When done right, it provides a new angle to a story that is so unexpected that people will generally love it.

When I engage on social media personally I like to share content that puts content or trending topics in perspective. Think about an iconic image everyone is talking about, redecorated in Photoshop with text balloons, an old movie clip that is redone in an animated GIF., or a mashup of an audio and video. An included bonus is that this content even has the potential to go viral.

Also think of ways to link your product or service to what is in the news or in the general topics of interest of that day. Because this is –most of the time- an unlikely combination it will generate the kind of unexpectedness people love. It will also stimulate your creativity into finding ways of looking at your content. And most importantly it is just great fun, trying to produce content this way.

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I want to thank The Community Roundtable for the opportunity to take this course through their scholarship offer. I was impressed with the course and especially with the way they walk the talk, including with their content. There was a live webinar for each class that was recorded so you could re-visit it later, there was an active twitter conversation using the hashtag #CMTraining where those taking the class could chat with each other and ask questions during the live sessions or give feedback to the speakers and there was a private Facebook group where we all will be able to continue to connect with each other and share content long after this training is done. The Community Roundtable doesn’t just explain how to do things…they lead by example.