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Community Management Skills That Matter: Strategy

March 28, 2018 By Jim Storer

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.

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

November 16, 2017 By Rachel Happe

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.

Community Hiring Is Not Keeping Up

October 24, 2017 By Rachel Happe

Community management skills are increasingly required for all management roles. That has not resulted in a corresponding increase in community hiring.

Communities Are Now Strategic

Executives finally see communities as intriguing options for solving their organization’s hairiest issues – from streamlining the customer and employee experience to increasing market relevancy, spurring innovation, and transforming culture for a digital era.

Community Hiring

Community approaches are now applied to more use cases across organizations, resulting in a strategic urgency to make community management a core skill of all organizational leaders and managers.

However, executives are putting their community efforts at risk because they are resistant about hiring senior community program owners and strategists.

 

Still Too Many Lone Community Managers, Often Reporting to Executives

Community Hiring

In 2017, 59% of community programs report to a VP or higher and 47% of communities are reporting up to the C-suite. However, only 38% of community management professionals are Director-level or higher.

While it is exciting that communities are now seen as a mechanism to transform organizations for the digital age, it’s causing a lot of stress and anxiety for community professionals themselves. 27% of community programs still don’t even have one full-time community manager and another 43% have only one full-time community manager.  This is not the kind of staffing profile that is going to transform an organization’s culture and leadership approach.

Community Hiring

This gap between strategic ambition and community hiring is causing some predictable outcomes. Many community managers are under a lot of pressure both to satisfy the strategic interest of their executives and execute the tactical responsibilities required for successful communities.  Those individuals are scrambling to grow their strategic skills without the air cover of more experienced program managers and it’s a lot to take on while still executing on tactical engagement goals.

Organizations are not moving more quickly on senior community hires because they currently don’t have the capability in-house, are not confident in their ability to hire the right person, and know that there is a strategic risk in making the wrong choice. Another reason is that because it’s now seen as a skill set needed for all leaders, it’s unclear whether hiring a handful of individuals is even the right approach.

Measuring Community Value Helps Make the Case for Hiring

Community Hiring

The good news is that because more community programs are demonstrating that they can prove value, community budgets are growing.

In the short term, much of that budget is going to contractors and consultants that can help shape community programs and train internal resources in community management skills.

In the long term, I believe that will open up community hiring for more roles. Those hires will more often be responsible not for individual communities, but as staff for internal centers of excellence that help coach, train, and support staff across the organization. We are seeing this more in client work, where we are helping to build and support centers of excellence in community management.

 

 

Community Management FAQs – What is community strategy?

August 1, 2017 By Jim Storer

What is community strategy?

A successful community strategy 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.

We recommend using the Community Maturity Model to help in building a community strategy. Below are some of the primary tasks for building a community related to each competency of the CMM:

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

Further Reading on Community Strategy: 

Community Strategy Needs Resources

Community strategy is YOUR job

Building a Community Strategy

Social Media is Broken…Communities Can Help

November 15, 2016 By Rachel Happe

 

Social media is broken – you need only look at political discussions on Twitter, gamer gate, or online bullying.

In 2015, organic reach on Facebook page posts was 2.6%. Social media is, at its heart, a media model that thrives off of more; more content, more clicks, more attention. Because of that, social media sites wants more content and more engagement – not necessarily better content or better engagement.

This media frenzy, designed to trigger our emotions, assaults and overwhelms our fight or flight response system – increasing our anxiety, depression and anger. “Individuals with higher levels of emotional reactivity may be prone to anxiety and aggression, which illustrates the implications of appropriate emotional reaction in the fight or flight response.” It also fractures our society into splinters – making us retreat to our corners to feel safe.

The tail is wagging the dog.

What went wrong?

Remember a decade ago and the promise of social media? It was going to connect the world and offer boundless opportunity. That’s nothing close to what you are likely seeing on your Facebook wall in relation to the election. That’s not bringing us closer together…

We mistook what was easy for what was meaningful – either to our organizations or to individuals. We reduced ‘engagement’ to a switch – either people are engaged, or they are not.

In reality, engagement is a huge spectrum of behaviors – some more valuable and meaningful than others. But there are few standards or definitions around what engagement is.

Community managers have been unpacking engagement for decades and unlocking its secrets. We’ve turned what community professionals know about engagement into TheCR’s Work Out Loud model, which categorizes different types of engagement based on their core value – validate to increase comfort, share to increase connection, ask & answer to increase trust and explore to increase partnership.

screen-shot-2016-11-15-at-9-42-05-am

This more sophisticated understanding of engagement allows community managers to measure the culture of a community and, more critically, to orchestrate higher levels of higher value engagement. It also helps stakeholders understand the value of different types of engagement and, with it, the value of strategic community management.

Communities can do that because they create contextualized, trusted dialog that brings people together – reducing segmentation and extremism, as shown in this Harvard Business School case study of the Wikipedia community.

We’ve been working on a community ROI model at The Community Roundtable that is focused on the value of answers and the networked value of answers – because answers form the core of any relationship and all knowledge workflows.

Communities – by providing a trusted peer environment – create a business model that scales the most expensive workflows in organizations; sales, product development and innovation, team collaboration and learning and development.

In this simplified example below, you can see how a community approach can reduce the cycle time and increase the profitability of your marketing and sales process.

screen-shot-2016-11-15-at-9-46-19-amSocial media has proven superficial – and because of that weak. Communities generate more tangible value without as many risks.

If you are interested in more, here are my slides from a presentation I delivered at Inbound 2016

Social Media is Broken… Communities are Your Duct Tape from The Community Roundtable

Want even more? Follow Rachel and The Community Roundtable on Twitter and join our Facebook group.

Digital Culture Run Amok: The Case for Community Management

September 19, 2016 By Jim Storer

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

The complexity of the world is at our fingertips. It’s in our faces and on our screens. We are deluged daily with information we don’t have time to process. Anxiety drugs and self-medication are rampant. The political climate has become angry and destructive.

screen-shot-2016-09-16-at-10-42-55-am

Some days it seems like the world is broken.

We are technically more connected than ever, but emotionally more isolated.

Untethering ourselves from geographic limitations has not brought us closer together. Instead, it’s allowed us to find and surround ourselves with those like ourselves, creating echo chambers of truths that others can’t see. When we do disagree, we feel OK saying awful things to each other online, because we no longer see the effect of our words on people’s faces. Our collective empathy has diminished.

You need only go to Facebook, Twitter or Reddit for examples of awful behavior and language. At best, it’s enough to make you forsake social media; at worst, it is destroying lives – allowing bullying, racism, misogyny and hate to share the same channels as dialog, empathy, constructive solutions and interesting ideas. And what is happening online has spilled out into the real world – in both wonderful and catastrophic ways.

How did this happen?

More importantly, how can we fix it?

If you are a student of complexity theory and systems, you start to see the simplicity in what looks like an impossible tangle. Complex systems are made up of fractals – small, similar elements that, when aggregated, create something that seems much more complicated. In human systems, those fractals are our small – seemingly insignificant – behaviors: how we speak to and interact with each other. These fractals, because they are active vs. inert, are also catalysts, triggering other compounding behaviors in response.

In the digital world, behaviors go viral – and quickly trigger shock waves of reverberating behaviors, which are often more impactful and wider spread than the original behavior. In person, it is much easier to curtail extreme behaviors because of the limited audience. Online, where one person can speak directly to millions, extreme behaviors – and the reverberation of responses to them – spread like wildfire and are all but impossible to contain.

The strategies that society used to limit the influence and impact of extreme behavior – parental discipline, school & workplace harassment procedures, tuning out the town crazy person, isolating socially offensive behaviors – are grossly insufficient for the digital world. In a world where vitriol can spread so quickly, reacting after the fact is insufficient. The damage is done.

So what’s the alternative?

Instead of reacting, we need to proactively define the cultural, communications and behavior norms we want and that will create something meaningful – and ensure that those norms are the easiest to exhibit and most rewarded. This is the discipline of community management.

Strategic community management orchestrates environments in such a way that negative behavior is squashed and constructive behavior is highlighted, mirrored, encouraged and enabled. Community management is cultural risk management in a world where your culture is what attracts and retains customers and employees. The culture of the ecosystem you cultivate is your digital calling card – and more powerful than any single piece of content or product you can create.

The large public social networks and communities have, in my opinion, done our society a disservice in washing their hands of responsibility for the behaviors and language used on their sites – and ensured that legally they are not required to. These social networking sites and companies see themselves as technology companies, responsible primarily for reducing the friction of communication. But we know how much impact infrastructure has on behavior. Social networks make it as easy (maybe even easier) for those who behave badly as for those who use the technology constructively. To claim no responsibility is disingenuous at best and, from my perspective, the biggest longterm risk to their business, at worst.

This move by Nextdoor, then, was a welcome departure. It is an acknowledgement that easy (‘frictionless’) is not always better and that the technology plays a major role in the behavior of people on its social network. It’s an acknowledgement that some types of engagement are not always better than no engagement at all. This is no surprise to the legions of parents who extol their children that ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all’.

One of the 5 risks of not having community management is what I call ‘a circling storm’ and it’s when legitimate issues are percolating in a community and there is no one stepping in to acknowledge the issues, ensure the right people are involved in the conversation or helping to address them. This is what is happening at a broader level online – and digital culture poorer for it, letting the loudest but not the most constructive voices too often overwhelm the conversation, making it an uncomfortable place for too many.

We know from our work in community management that you can orchestrate culture. It takes a combination of design, governance and programming. It’s the heart of community management. It is possible – and now that digital culture is increasingly ALL culture, it’s becoming more urgent than ever.

Community Best Practices: Creating an Action Plan

October 19, 2015 By Jim Storer

From values, to members, to tactics. Formulating an action plan for your community is where the rubber begins to meet the

action

road. Your action plan highlights how you are going to make this community effective on a day-to-day basis. It needs to take into account the organizational environment in which you exist, and your relative strengths and weaknesses as you begin your community journey. Among the things to consider:

  • Who are your strongest executive sponsors and where are they in the organization?
  • What is your level of funding and staffing support?
  • Where is the overall cultural level of support for community initiatives?
  • How long do you have to demonstrate community impact – how long is your runway?

These answers inform your tactics.

It’s likely that as you create an action plan, you’ll focus most on three of the eight competencies in the Community Maturity Model:

Strategy: Link your community strategy to organizational business goals

– Identify use cases and behavior change needed

– Define shared purpose and shared value

– Take on an active listening strategy

– Articulate budget and resources needed

– Collect and communicate lessons as you go

• Community management: Assign a caretaker to welcome, support and represent members

– Identify a social listener

– Hire a social media or community manager

– Create workflows and escalation plans

– Document and formalize guidelines

– Build a programming plan

• Tools: Target technologies and processes to make your collaboration and communication more efficient

– Define and deploy minimum viable solution and “must haves”

– Vet requirements with stakeholders

– Prepare your basic listening toolset

These processes will inform the size and shape of the community you start with, and how the early stages of the community will operate. It will change over time–that’s the exponential nature of community.

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

—

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

Why is a Community Roadmap Important?

October 8, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager, The Community Roundtable

Note: the following post is an excerpt from Building a Community Roadmap, a free eBook published by TheCR. Download your copy today. 

Community Roadmap

Building a community is not a linear path. A roadmap documents milestones to keep the community on the growth curve to success.

What is a Community Roadmap?

A community roadmap gives direction to your community program. Your community strategy describes your destination. The roadmap helps steer you there. Roadmaps often look like project plans, detailing specific activities and the resources required. Roadmaps mark milestones in a community’s journey, making tracking progress easier.

What a Roadmap Can Do for Your Community

Align priorities.

A roadmap highlights your community’s objectives and how you will achieve them. When you have a roadmap, your conversations with stakeholders become more productive. Instead of talking about “why we should invest in community,” you can discuss where to target your investments.

Communicate value.

A roadmap shows which activities are important to invest in to grow your community. As a communication tool, it documents community decision making.

Organize planning.

Roadmaps translate strategy into action because they itemize the resources needed for effective outcomes. Connecting resources to how they will advance the community strategy makes it easier to measure value.

Download the eBook and get started building your community roadmap today. The eBook provides an overview of the basics of building your community roadmap, as well as a help worksheet to help you get started.

—

Perfection is the Enemy of Engagement 

September 22, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

gift

By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.

How do you react when you receive a perfectly crafted report? Hear an adamant and decisive opinion from an expert? Read Ikea instructions? Watch a TV show?

Do you jump in and edit it or immediately mash it up into something different? Unless you are unusual you accept it or reject it but you probably don’t engage deeply with it and make it your own. It’s not structured for interaction. The subtext is that the work is done, the messiness has been cleaned up and it has been delivered to you in a perfect state. It is a product, not a discussion – take it or leave it.

But this zeal for perfection might just be our undoing. It is certainly part of what steals our joy as individuals. I think it is where a lot of our education, processes and perspectives go wrong. Instead of including the recipient of our work in the process we try to craft something perfect to give to them. We have the arrogance to think this is even possible. But no matter how well-crafted, something given to someone else is something open to rejection. It’s a transaction.

At the Business Innovation Factory Summit listening to Barry Svigal, the architect of the rebuilt Sandy Hook Elementary school, this hit home in a visceral way. Any architectural firm could have built a fine school but those kids were scared and scarred. Any school would not do. They needed a school where they felt safe and comfortable in their environment so they could heal. The process was as important as the outcome. Barry’s Svigal’s team included the whole community in envisioning and building the school. Being part of the solution gave the community a vital sense of control over their destiny, which had been ripped away.

Most CRM, customer experience and employee experience approaches try to envision and deliver a ‘perfect’ solution – completely missing the opportunity to collaborate. We miss this opportunity when building products. We miss this opportunity when we market and sell. We miss this opportunity in employee on-boarding and training processes. We miss this opportunity in children’s education and sports. We attempt to be smarter than the people we deliver solutions to and, in so doing, deliver transactions and not shared experiences. Theses solutions can be easily accepted or rejected – or accepted and then rejected later. They are nicely packaged gifts, not a journey requiring the investment of time and energy – the building blocks of establishing trust and shared ownership.

This perfection is the enemy of engagement – but we are too scared to offer partial answers because we fear being seen as incompetent. We risk being seen as incompetent when we don’t have a trusting relationship. Poor engagement is a symptom. Poor relationships are the cause.

Poor relationships also leads to critique and judgement in response to delivered solutions or information and reinforces a transnational dynamic; one side delivering the other side critiquing in a never ending game of ping pong.

Mentoring children in my 20s helped me see the problem with this – critical feedback is both ineffective and harmful if children don’t believe you love them and have their best interest at heart.  This is true of adults too – leading with criticism makes people ignore you or defend themselves, neither of which leads to constructive collaboration, change or trust.

When you trust the person you are trying to help and vise versa there is room for incomplete thoughts and critical feedback. You can also throw a lot of half-a**ed ideas around, which is often what triggers playing with new ideas, joyful riffing off of each other and the generation of something interesting and valuable out of something very rough. It is where the magic of innovation happens. It’s messy process that in the beginning seems like a waste of time because it is not predictable and not linear.

In our organizations we try to be relentlessly efficient regarding day-to-day activities – but that leaves us wholly inefficient at evolving in meaningful ways that address rapidly changing markets. People are not explicitly given time to play with ideas or to build the trusting relationships required to really innovate. Why? We don’t budget for it.

Our culture tends to reward the perception of perfection. It often disappoints. We need to learn how to appreciate the process and reward those who can help us connect to others who matter to the problems we are trying to solve – if we don’t we may find that we very efficiently become obsolete.

Building a Community Roadmap

November 12, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

building a community roadmapWe are excited to share with you a free eBook based on the findings in the State of Community Management 2014 report – Building a Community Roadmap. The State of Community Management 2014 research found that the best–in-class communities are more likely to be able to translate an approved strategy into realistic planning. As a result, 85 percent of them can measure their value, however building a roadmap can be a daunting task for any community manager. This new eBook answers the questions:

  1. Why are community roadmaps important? First, we take a look at what a community roadmap is and its place in your community program. We’ll review how a community roadmap sets your community up for success, along with actionable advice about aligning priorities, communicating value and organizing planning in your community programs.
  2. What is the Community Maturity Model?
    Next, we’ll review the Community Maturity Model as a framework for productive communities. We also consider the elements of a productive community in order to help you start, build and grow a productive online community
  3. How do I build a roadmap using the Community Maturity Model?
    Lastly, we’ll give you some examples, templates and instructions for building a roadmap for your community. You’ll be able to use these provided resources to get started on drafting your community’s roadmap today.

This eBook, Building a Community Roadmap, is sponsored by Enterprise Hive.  You can download the eBook for free today!

 
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