The Community Roundtable

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

Inside TheCR Network: Storytelling and the Power of Why

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Recently, Michael Margolis of The Reinvention Summit and Get Storied  joined members of TheCR Network to discuss the art of storytelling. As described on his website, “Storytelling is the most important skill you didn’t learn in school. But it’s the foundation for everything.” For businesses, this is your ability to convey your brand in a compelling way that communicates and engages. It’s about telling a story your community cares about, thereby building meaningful connections that inspire action.

Your brand is only as strong as the stories people are telling about you. You need to help shape them. The challenge for community managers is to enable community members to see themselves in your organization’s shared stories. Assist people in understanding their role in your brand. Describe your world. Make it tangible, real and relevant.

Michael described his five-step storytelling framework, which he calls “MASTR”: Motivation, Audience, Stakes, Trust and Relationship. Storytellers often neglect these elements, but they are key to creating stories that support and engage your community.

For me, one of the many great themes that surfaced in this discussion was the power of storytelling to communicate why. As inspirational speaker Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. In his TED talk “How great leaders inspire action,” Simon describes how successful businesses—like Apple (of course!)—are able to tell a story that defines their culture and inspires people to act. This is a charge for community managers. How do we tell our stories in a way that inspires action?

Michael himself discussed his affinity for the Apple brand. He has continued to use Apple computers, despite hardware problems he’s had in the past, because he’s loyal to them. He believes in the Apple experience. That, Michael described, is the power of the brand.

In addition, Michael says helping people understand your story is critical. It’s not enough for them to hear your story—everyone has a story. Instead, people need to connect with your story in a meaningful way. They need to believe in why you do what you do. That’s the turning point between a community outlier and an active community member.

As Michael described, your story must break the barrier of expectation, be extraordinary, and elicit an emotional response. He shared a personal story about unexpectedly receiving a flower arrangement with a note from a “not-so-secret” admirer. This certainly caught his attention, but when he visited the website listed on the card and discovered it was an email marketing provider, the compelling storyline broke.

It’s not enough to attract attention if what you offer isn’t relevant. To be effective, your story needs to communicate why you are relevant and why your audience should care. Rather than telling people what you do, you need to convey why you do it.

How do you tell your story? How have you used storytelling to convey your brand and build meaningful connections?

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Rick Allen is a member of TheCR Network and as such gets access to strategic, tactical, and professional development programming and events as well as an online community for discussions and to make lasting connections with fellow community, social media, and social business practitioners. TheCR Network is the place to learn from industry leaders and practitioners.

Is Community Management Strategic?

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If you have been doing community management for a few years chances are you think that it is or should be strategic. If you are a CEO chances are you haven’t even heard of community management let alone prioritized it as strategically imperative. And there is the rub.

The role of community manager is often quite tactical – welcoming members, moderating issues, making connections, curating content – but at The Community Roundtable, we also see community management as a discipline of general management. It’s an operational choice for how people execute on a business goal and it is a choice available to many executives, functional managers and  individuals. We are not the only ones who see it this way – the Corporate Executive Board has also cited community management as a discipline vs. a role.  Taking a community management approach means operating with a system perspective instead of a transactional perspective. It means improving the performance of the whole instead of concentrating on the performance of a piece. It also acknowledges that shared value creation is more powerful than the hand-off of a perfect solution in a transactional way.

So back to the question – is community management strategic? It is perhaps the wrong question. Is community management strategic in a specific organization is a much better question. Right now, the answer for most organizations is no. Community managers are all too often hired to ‘deal with people online’.  Those ‘people online’ are getting louder and louder and so community managers are being hired by all types of organizations and it is becoming a much more common role. As the role of community manager becomes more pervasive, there is also much wider variation not only in what they do specifically but how various organizations view its importance. There is one common theme – after being a community manager for a while, most people in the role understand how powerful a community approach can be and understand the strategic opportunity communities provide.

There are two paths organizations take at this juncture. The more common is that community management still doesn’t get much attention, the community manager(s) get frustrated, and the program stalls or trips along under the radar of most of the organization.  We are now seeing some organizations who had robust community management and then let the programs atrophy re-invest because of issues or crisis that have emerged.

The second path is that the community management group does get increasing amounts of attention and resources and becomes a key enterprise function. In that case, the teams grow and as they do, they grow out of specific community manager roles.  While many people serve the community, they do so in specific ways – in an engagement, content, analytics, events, innovation, or administrative capacity.

From my point of view, community management must be a strategic discipline within an organization if it truly wants to be a ‘social’ business.

Do you agree? Are you frustrated with how community management is viewed in your organization? What might be done to change the perception?

Thank you to Michael Brito who provided the spark for this post.

 

How To Build A Community From The Ground Up

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We learn so much from our network and enjoy sharing that information.  It is what we do, after all, advance the business of community for everyone in our circle.  Many have come to us asking how to get started, or do we think their community might work, or what they might do better. Here are some of the advice that we find ourselves giving out:

1. Will This Work?
Honestly, we don’t know.  Many ideas run by us have been terrific ones that have fizzled and others that seem a remote possibility then take off and go on to phenomenal success.  While the idea is important, knowing your members and what they may want/need is more so.  So we advise you to interview as many members of your potential community to get feedback on the idea. Share the high level idea and then listen, really listen. While you need to hear what the critics and naysayers have to say, you can also combat hollow enthusiasm with requests for people to get involved and spend actual time being part of the new community. Combine interviews with potential members with a look that the target members information and social environment – that will tell you a lot about whether resources to address their needs are already available and how unique your concept is.

2. Become a Valued Resource and Share Content
People join a site for the content, but they stay for the community – something we often say at TheCR. Before there is a community there needs to be a reason to show up.  Begin to curate and create content around the space/industry you are targeting. Once you have content written by others weigh in yourself and ask those that you talked to in step 1 to as well.  Be vocal in the space. Not shamelessly self-promotional, but involved enough that your name/community name gets out there as a trusted resource for quality information.

3. Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
In this stage of community development there are are almost no hard and fast right or wrong answers.  And what works week 1 may seem like an abject failure week 22 – and vice versa.  This is exactly the right time to use trial and error.  It’s how you learn who your community is, what engages them and what community culture is emerging.  Any “failures” at this stage are actually important learning milestones.  Experimentation is an extremely important part of building and sustaining a healthy, strong community.

4. What’s Your Bottom Line?
We don’t mean come up with a budget, although that is important too. What we mean is you need to understand the business model. Is this supposed to be a labor of love, a cost center or a revenue generator? Will your community support that?  One way to figure this out is to ask yourself what your goal is for this community.  If it’s a side project/hobby that’s great, but if you need to keep the lights on, be sure to examine how that will happen carefully. And also ask yourself if you have enough runway to support those goals.  Meaning how long can you go without making money or justifying the cost? If this is a labor of love, how long in to the future do you see sticking with this? How much time can you devote to it? Consider the end before you begin and what might trigger it.

All these questions and considerations will help you understand if this will work for you. And of course, we are here to help.

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This article was originally published in our free monthly newsletter, TheCR News.  If you would like to get TheCR News, join now as a Friend.

Six Risks of Not Having Community Management

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Community management is one of those things that, when working well, often goes unnoticed and unappreciated. It’s a bit like that hostess that always has fantastic parties but no one really understands the hard work that went into the party itself.

However, when community management is bad or non-existent it’s very evident. We bucket the risks into six major categories:

  1. A Ghost Town: This is the most recognized and feared risk of community managers – so much so that they often mistake small communities for ghost towns thinking they need to achieve some level of scale before they can get to value creation. The general approach to keep your community from becoming a ghost town is to offer relevant programming and events that enable members to form relationships with each other and ensure that programming is exposed through other channels that bring people back to the community until it becomes habitual.
  2.  Land of 1,000 Flowers: Content creation and engagement are great… mostly. However, if content is not valuable or organized in a way to make it easily accessible to members, they will have a hard time finding value in the community. Over time, this can cause attrition. One of the key roles of community management is as content curator – making sure content is organized, tagged, and highlighted to increase its value and ease of access.
  3. Drama Central: The community becomes a dumping ground for gripes and gossip. People who want to be constructive leave or don’t engage at all. Issues are never resolved or shut down and the drama continues. An important role of community management is to acknowledge legitimate issues and find the appropriate people to respond or resolve them. Community managers are also responsible for discouraging and shutting down unfounded gossip that makes the community environment unfriendly for productive uses.
  4. A Pile of Tools: Like a pile of Legos, social tools can be hard to understand for those that are not familiar with all the things you can do with them and why you might use them. Community managers can help immensely with this by promoting interesting uses of tools, scheduling training, and offering examples both in the community and in other channels that members frequent more often (‘social media socials’ in the cafeteria or with cookies are always popular!). This can look like a similar problem to a ghost town but is different in that there is a lot of lurking but not a lot of rich engagement or creation.
  5. A Circling Storm: Members with a legitimate issues find that the community is a great channel for finding like-minded peers, support and gaining awareness. If there is no community manager to step in and help facilitate a resolution to the issue, is can grow and tip into a crisis very quickly.
  6. A Clique: Cliques can be very tantalizing, especially if you are included in them because they drive a lot of interaction. However, cliques can be toxic to the growth of communities and they create social barriers higher than any technical issue. The job of community management is to limit the effect of cliques on the community as a whole by discouraging their formation or giving them a semi-private space to interact that limits their visibility.

What other risks have you seen and what can community management do to limit them?

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Members of TheCR Network discuss issues just like these with peers who have been there, tried that, and share success stories as well as lessons learned and errors to avoid.  Join now to get access to great minds and wide-ranging experience in community management and social business.

Leaving People Well – A Community Strategy That Pays

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In the social space we talk a lot about relationships: Finding them, developing them, keeping them. But what about leaving them? People don’t much like talking about the end of things because it often feels like a reflection of our own adequacy or value, which in turn makes us treat the process awkwardly.

Relationships, however, are temporal – they wax and wane as needs and circumstances change. People we want to be our friends don’t have the same desire or the time to invest. Organizations that we feel are perfect customers (or employers) for us don’t always feel the same way, or are focused on something else, or they don’t have the resources to work with us. Employees leave because their interests or needs change. Enthusiastic customers change their strategies and no longer need us. This is a natural rhythm but so often instead of accepting that, we take the change personally which is when we start either trying to hang on or defensively rejecting the other party, removing them entirely from our frame of reference. Both of those approaches miss an opportunity.

The ability to support the waning of a relationship is just as important as the ability to support the growth of one. Why? If you make it comfortable for someone to leave you behind as they move forward, you make it comfortable for them to re-engage you later. Additionally, if people continue to feel great about your relationship, even if it is weaker, they are more likely to advocate for you with others.

It is scary letting go of a relationship but what I’ve found at The Community Roundtable is that we receive a ton of value by leaving people well, in the following ways:

  • Some community managers are not interested in being members at TheCR Network. We point these people to all the free content we publish (as well as to other resources) and hope it is valuable to them. We want to be an industry resource and those who get value from our content often become advocates for us. A lot of people in this group refer others to us as a resource. It is a great win-win for us.
  • Some individuals interested in becoming members don’t have the budget. We also point this group to our free content but we also often stay in touch with them and engage them in various ways: ask them to present a case study on one of our member calls, do a podcast with them, refer them to speaking opportunities, engage them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.  A portion of this group does become members when it becomes feasible for them and they are often advocates. It is a great win-win for us.
  • Some of our members change jobs or are not able to participate actively and so they do not renew their membership. While we wish everyone could stay, we know that is not realistic. We still keep them in our circle and engage with them in public spaces or help them with career transitions if we can. Some of them have returned as members after moving to different organizations and many of them have continued to be fans. That’s a great win-win too.

So often in the business context it seems we will do anything to find and convince someone to buy our products and then trip over ourselves to try to convince them to stay. From my perspective, when we push too hard to establish or keep a relationship, the other party ends up resentful or unhappy, neither of which endears you to them and is unlikely to encourage them to recommend you.

The community manager is often the most logical person to keep the connection with people who have receded in their interest – however loose that connection is  – and understanding how to let someone gracefully bow out can help create committed advocates. Do you have a good story from when you let someone fade only to find them come back, more enthusiastic than ever? We would love to hear it!

 

Lauren Vargas on Vertical-Focused Communities

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The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management. Our series continues with episode #24, featuring Lauren Vargas, Director of Community at social media monitoring software company Radian 6.

Podcast highlights include:

  • Building vertical-focused communities to better serve the customer community
  • Can community operate without a dedicated, “gated” platform?
  • The importance of organizational commitment to community, right up to the C-Suite
  • Content as the starting point to create engagement, with blogs as the focal point
  • Finding your “influencers;” why and how, and finding them outside your direct community
  • A discussion of tools for finding influencers (not just Klout)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

When Being Helpful Isn’t Helpful (to your community)

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Last week I had the opportunity to share how we’re thinking about @TheCR with an undergrad class on eMarketing at Bentley University. It was a fun discussion and the questions that followed my presentation really got me thinking. While I focused on community management best practices for a good portion of the class, one of the students wondered if I could offer up some community management worst practices.

The simple answer is to just turn some of the best practices around. Instead of welcoming new members, ignore them. Instead of clearly articulating community guidelines, make them secret or don’t have any at all. Instead of not being helpful, be helpful. Wait…. what?!?!

Being helpful is great way to frame most community manager activities… except one. In fact, being too helpful in this case may actually do irreparable harm to your community. So what is it?

Instead of being helpful, take time to pause and let members help one another. Why is that so critical?

  • Peer response is more powerful & influential. Encourage that.
  • Seeing other members reply models behavior for others. If the norm is for the community manager to respond, it can easily remain the norm.
  • Once a perceived authority figure (the community manager) has spoken it shuts down further conversation and engagement.

An over eager community manager might jump in too soon, offer their perspective and unknowingly shut down further discussion. It sometimes takes a suggestion behind the scenes to get another member to respond and that’s perfectly normal. Taking time to pause can be painful, because you may have a great answer and want to be responsive. It may also seem counter-intuitive, but in my experience it’s an important best practice for community managers.

What do you think? Do you practice “the pause?” Have you ever seen it backfire?

Photo credit: Annie Roi

Want A Successful Community? Don’t Be A Social Media Manager

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I’ve held the position that social media management and community management are not the same thing for a while. This morning, a blog post by Maggie McGary (and the subsequent comments) about the value of Klout for community managers made me pause again. There has been a lot of attention on defining and finding influencers lately and to me, everyone is an influencer in the right context. Looking at influence independent of context is a fool’s errand but it struck me that marketers may be after channels instead of influencers per se. They want the most bang for their buck to drive awareness and that makes sense.

Aggregation of content. Ratings. Word of Mouth. Awareness. The more you get individuals with a lot of attention to share your content, the more awareness it receives. That’s great social media marketing.

Once you have people’s attention though, how do you get them to actually change behavior? Pushing more content from well known people is not likely to help except to the extent that it keeps them aware. As a pretty basic example,  I’m not going to trade in my current TV just because well known people that I respect share a lot of information about new 3D TV. What will get me to switch? If half of my friends starting telling me stories about how much clearer, cooler and energy efficient (whatever the case may be) the new product is, over time I am likely to consider switching. That behavior change takes deep peer relationships, context, and time – factors that are not abundantly present in fast-paced social networks.  However, behavior change DOES happen in communities of peers – whether online or offline – through a flow of influence. The more complex the desired outcome, the more defined the community needs to be.

The same things that work brilliantly to grab people’s attention in large social networks can kill communities.  Why? Focusing on just the most viewed content and most active members leaves little room for the contributions of others and little reason for them to stick their neck out to participate or create content. I recently re-read advice given to our CR members from Burr Settles about building a community for FAWM and how instead of aggregating content and highlighting the most popular things (which were not necessarily the best), he works hard to highlight content that has had no feedback. Why? Because highlighting the least reviewed content encourages content creation and participation from every member. Highlighting the most popular only reinforces for the majority of members that their voices don’t matter because they don’t have popular attention. It is why using the 90-9-1 rule of engagement can subconsciously cause community managers to ignore 90% of their members – assuming that they just won’t be converted. Communities are about maximizing engagement and relationships to encourage learning and with it, behavior change.

Good community managers intuitively do some of the following to encourage broad participation:

  • Break up cliques or ask people to take those groups private/semi-private
  • Proactively seek out and promote involvement, particularly from people that have not yet participated
  • Encourage lurkers and quiet community members to get involved by asking their opinion or giving them specific roles and tasks
  • Encourage less active members by asking other members to reach out to them
  • Welcome new members and invite them to participate in a ‘baby pool’ before getting involved in the general community
  • Generally staying behind the scenes and letting members do the majority of the talking

For social media managers it is much more important to be front and center, build a core group of followers that are broadly ‘influential’ in their own right and contribute a lot of content.

Both of these roles are important and serve different purposes in the new flipped funnel of the customer lifecycle. But confusing the roles can make it quite difficult to build a robust community that has long term impact on member loyalty.

What’s your experience been? Have you mixed up the two approaches and had success? The comments are where the action is… let me know.

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The Community Roundtable  is committed to advancing the business of community. We offer a monthly subscription report, a membership based peer network, a community management training program and advisory services for corporations and individuals.

Shwen Gwee on using Social Media Tools to Grow Community

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The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.

Our fifth episode is an interview Shwen Gwee, who works in the health care and pharma industries, and heads up a network called SocialPharmer* and the blog Med 2.0.

Highlights of the conversation include:

  • Taking a community cultivated at a conference and continuing to grow it online with social media tools
  • Conversely, how online groups (like Twitter chats) can be used to lead to more substantial offline events
  • The reluctance in highly-regulated industries like pharmaceuticals to using social media, and how to counter those
  • How growth in industry participation has actually taken off in some areas, particularly Twitter, and Facebook, which has seen many popular Fan Pages grow up around support for people with certain diseases
  • Lessons learned from live events, including: the ability for people to talk across different verticals, the opportunity to speak with patients in an informal setting, and in-depth discussions of the mutual trust needed to keep social media use growing in pharma

Download this episode.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

* Note: SocialPharmer is currently a Ning group, but with the announcement that Ning will stop support for free groups, Shwen has told us that he is working on moving the network to a new platform, to be determined soon.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS