Strategy Archives

Jodi Gersh on “Old School” Journalism and New Media Channels

May 20, 2010 By Jim Storer

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.

Episode #8 features Jodi Gersh, Social Media Content Manager at the Gannett Company, where she helps Gannett’s 80+ newspapers and 20+ TV stations with their social media needs and strategies.

Highlights include:

Meshing “old school” journalism with new media channels
How Gannett coordinates social media learnings and tactics among more than 100 separate entities.
The importance of internal communications in keeping employees at all levels- and in all markets- engaged in using social media, including the use of “old school” methods like email
Upcoming trends: you guessed it, location and mobile
Melding “citizen journalism” with professional investigative journalism

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.

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The Fish & The Sharks

May 14, 2010 By Rachel Happe

Last week was full of fascinating conversations at the Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies conference and the MarketingProfs B2B Forum and I’m just starting to digest it all but one of the concepts that really hit home for me was Adam Zawel‘s analogy for community members. He noted that in most communities there are two key groups to consider when structuring and planning the community – the fish and the sharks. Once a group of any type of people are aggregated into an active community (the fish), other groups will necessarily find that an attractive audience (the sharks). I have always considered part of the role of community management is to protect members – it’s one of the reasons I find private communities often more compelling than public ones but the fish/shark analogy helped clarify my thinking.

Recently, a few members of TheCR have been struggling with the issue of keeping internal marketing groups from pushing direct marketing at community members. They are having a hard time educating their peers that the community dynamic does not succeed if members constantly feel pursued. The internal sharks can be just as dangerous as external ones. What happens if you allow the sharks too much access is one of the following things:

Over-fishing: Fish disappear and stop engaging because they are afraid of being targeted or harassed. This pretty effectively kills the community.

Migration: Fish will go somewhere more hospitable if they feel they are at risk – this is the worst thing that can happen because you can effectively send your community members into the arms of your competitors if they have a better managed community.

Do you have this issue in your community? Who are your sharks? How do you give the sharks an appropriate level of access but keep them from sabotaging the community?

Brian Simpson on Combining Online and Offline Relations in Hospitality

May 13, 2010 By Jim Storer

Our sixth episode features Brian Simpson, Director of Social Hospitality at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City.

Highlights include:

How online extends and combines with the vital offline relations and events in the hospitality industry
A discussion of whether or not being a nimble small business is an advantage over being a big chain when it comes to using social media
How hard metrics and the more “touchy-feely” side of social media mesh
A critique of Roger Smith Life and the value of showing an off-product side of your business; “It’s got to be interesting.”

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Shwen Gwee on using Social Media Tools to Grow Community

April 29, 2010 By Jim Storer

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.

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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.

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Rachel Happe on Social Media Vs Community

April 22, 2010 By Jim Storer

Our third episode features an interview with Rachel Happe, co-founder of The Community Roundtable.

Conversation highlights include:

Introduction of the topic: the difference between the roles of social media manager and community manager. Rachel has been thinking on this topic, with posts such as “Social Media is Not Community“
Rachel discusses social media as content-based, while community is more specifically relationship-based
How should a CMO hire a social media manager? What should they look for?
How the type of company effects the need for deeper relationships or less deep connections (is it a scaling problem?)

Download this episode.

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Ryan Paugh on Tone and Passion in Community

April 15, 2010 By Jim Storer

Our third episode features an interview with Ryan Paugh, co-founder (with Ryan Healy and Penelo pe Trunk) and Director of Community for Brazen Careerist.com. From their web site:

Brazen Careerist is a career management tool for next-generation professionals. It exists to give everyone an opportunity to build and nurture a network of trusted peers. Think of it as a 24-7 virtual networking event, filled with people who can help you get ahead in your career.

Conversation highlights include:

The challenge of managing a community where the community is the product
How much attention to pay to “tone” when your community caters to a specific demographic (in this case, “Generation Y”)
The role of passion for your topic/category when managing a community
The freedom to mix in new tools and technology with a community of early adopters

Download this episode.

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Relationship Inflation and the Role of Communities

March 29, 2010 By Rachel Happe

Umair Haque wrote a very thought provoking post The Social Media Bubble for the Harvard Business Review where he talked about social media’s inflationary effect on relationships and with it the devolution of the value we can expect from them. He argues that while we may have a lot more relationships, they are very superficial. Far from creating a new democratic groundswell, the new channels are just creating new gatekeepers. Added to that, he notes the propensity for hate and exclusion that online environments can create.

I think a lot of what Umair points to is definitely taking place but I also think Umair has not articulated the value that weak links do have and social networks capacity to use that value in efficient ways – even if that value is not huge. I also think he threw the baby out with the bathwater – meaning there are online environments where real and lasting relationships are developing, they may just not be as obvious looking at the majority of activity happening on Facebook, Twitter, and Linked because many of these deeper relationships take place in more narrowly defined online communities.

What I loved about the post is that it forces the question of value – as businesses what value do we really need and/or what from our relationships? It’s a great additional perspective to add to the conversation about the difference between social media and community management. If the goal is to develop awareness – social content that people will share with their weak links is the most useful mechanism. If we want to ensure satisfied customers that will make repeat purchases of products that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, there has to be some kind of deeper relationship – and the deeper the relationship, the better the ability to address issues and delight someone. Social media is not going to be sufficient to build that kind of relationship – it requires the investment of time, building shared experiences, and some face-to-face interaction. Social software is a great way to increase the number of interactions with someone, maintain ambient awareness, and help in building strong relationships but it will not be the social software that binds the relationship – it will be the people involved. Two years ago I wrote a post that addresses this point – Relationship Development is a Process, Technology Can (sometimes) Help.

Understanding what type of relationships are required to meet your business objective and then matching that with the modes of communication – both online and off – that are best suited to build that type of relationship is critical to operationalizing your goals. Building a network map of your organization and all of its relationship needs (with customers, employees, partners, the public, investors, suppliers, etc) will help you see which tools span the various needs. Mapping your relationship needs to your business strategy and priorities will identify where you are likely to see the biggest payoff for your technology investments. Technology, of course, will not be enough – having human resources to manage the relationships that are enhanced or enabled through these new ‘social’ channels is absolutely critical and the deeper the relationship needs are, the more human resources you will need to develop and maintain them.

Clearly articulating business priorities and strategies is the underlying key to effectively investing in relationships that matter – and the associated technologies that will help get you there faster or cheaper than you would otherwise.

The Secret Sauce of Communities

February 25, 2010 By Rachel Happe

A lot of people might say that the secret sauce of communities is conversion, lower cost of advocacy, lowered support costs, faster information discovery, etc and they would not be wrong. Communities – done well – can drive a lot of specific business outcomes in a sustainable way while reducing the long-term costs. And for the most part, that is how they are currently being planned and deployed but there is a much bigger, larger value communities can provide to enterprises. Real-time data. And I’m not just talking about traditional market research which also can benefit from a community approach – see Forrester’s take or this overveiw.

What I’m talking about is using communities to make the interface between the discussions going on within the organization much more permeable to the conversations going on outside of the organization. One of the biggest risks to medium and large organizations is they become relatively self-absorbed – there are so many people with functional roles that never even speak to external audiences and are so focused on the internal processes and politics that it is quite easy to miss the forest for the trees.

My background is in product management and I’ve done it for both enterprise and consumer oriented technologies and both have large cost barriers to customer input. With enterprise customers, customer input often involved visits with our largest customers where I spoke with the business owners and a few of end users. In terms of time and cost I couldn’t visit all my customers or speak to even a good fraction of the end users of the product. That meant my job involved a lot of inferencing to define priorities based on a small sample size. Once the research/input phase was over we typically didn’t go back to customers until we had a working beta product. At that point we could adjust functionality but unless the product was a complete disaster (luckily that never happened), major features were not changed. On the consumer end of things, there were so many customers that we got our input in two ways – testing mocked-up product designs with a random sampling of end users and aggregating issues that came through our customer support and online forums. That too required a lot of infrencing to fill in the gaps and to notice issues that were not even being brought up. In my own way, I tried to ask customers as often as possible when I had a decision to make but I did not have a standing group that I could reliably go to on a daily basis. The result is that there were often long-winded internal debates between marketing, product management, and engineering about what was the best solution and none of us were using anything more than our experience and opinion to argue our position. Some of that will never change – one thing you learn in product management is that people have a difficult time self-reporting and imaging solutions that don’t exist so that will always be part of the role of product management. However, the transactional mode of input is expensive and not just for organizations. Once we identified a customer willing to talk to us, they were often barraged by questions marketing, support, product management and executives. The process was costly on both ends. And this is just an example of how product management suffers because of the high cost of customer input.

Robust customer/prospect/partner communities which are available and can be accessed by all functional areas of a company can bring huge benefits:

Employees who may not otherwise talk to customers directly or are restricted in which customers they speak with and when, can lurk and in so doing get a much better sense of the customers’ perspectives and context which ultimately allows each employee to make better informed decisions.
Employees that need customer input for a decision can ask the community in a way that allows customers to opt-in rather than be asked directly again and again. While this dynamic has some risks to be aware of it does broaden out access to more customers and respects customers’ time and interests.
An organization’s content creators – in marketing, support, engineering – can get almost immediate feedback as to whether their approach resonates. This can reduce an incalculable amount of wasted effort and expense.
If a good percentage of customers and prospects are in the community, behavioral and conversational data will enable early warning of market changes whether that is change in demand or change in need. This benefit will go primarily to the first mover in every market if they are able to aggregate the market conversation.
Inviting in partners and giving them tools to market and transact business within the community will provide organizations a much better understanding of affiliated demand in their ecosystem which is often another way to get early information about market direction.

We are hearing from companies that have dramatically improved their products, reduced excess inventories, and reduced waste at the end of the supply chain simply by using relatively small customer communities to provide real-time insights at every step in the process – it’s as simple and as complex as integrating customers into the process.

It will require a number of things:

Broad employee training on listening, empathizing, how to ask questions, and on corporate policies and boundaries.
The trust of executives in their employees judgment in speaking with prospects and customers (this in turn, over time, will shape hiring priorities and practices significantly).
A rethinking of major operational processes. Really listening to customer feedback requires making changes that disrupt predictability which is the primary tenant of many corporate processes. How can you incorporate some flexibility while still managing complex and expensive corporate processes?
A change to corporate incentive structures to something more collaborative is needed. All functional areas should primarily be oriented toward customer success and renewals vs. more myopic functional-specific targets.

The first step, however, is aggregating and reporting on the current information coming out of communities in a way that is useful to a variety of employees. We’ve got a long way to go but strategically, if you are not considering real-time data integration from the external market into your organization’s daily decisions as your ultimate goal, you will be limiting your vision of value communities can generate.

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The Community Roundtable is committed to advancing the business of community and being a valued resource to community management and social media professionals through our monthly subscription report, membership based peer network, community management training program and customizable advisory services for corporations and individuals.

A Community? A Network? An Audience?

September 9, 2009 By Rachel Happe

We have a lot of semantic issues in the social media/online space. The term community is particularly problematic because people tend to throw it around for any online group that interacts with content. The problem for me is that communities are not about content, they are about relationships. Relationships do need content/programs/conversations in order to develop – just like they do in the real world – but just because a large group of people come by regularly and comment on online content doesn’t mean there is a true community.

Now I know, a lot of people are not going to agree with me on this but here is how I roughly define some terms for collections of people:

Group: A relatively small collection of people, most of whom know each other. I would say 80%+ of group members have interacted and formed a relationship with one another.

Community: A moderate size collection of people, a large percentage (somewhere between 30 – 70%) of which know and have interacted with each other.

Network: A large collection of people who are accessible to each other in a particular location but only a small percentage of whom know each other personally – perhaps 30% or less. Networks typically contain groups or communities.

Ecosystem: Intersecting networks, communities, groups, companies, individuals, and other organizations within an environment.

Audience: A large collection of people who experience the same content and may react to it but who don’t have relationships with each other (except for those people they bring with them).

None of these collections of people are good or bad, but they each are effective for different outcomes and trying to get an audience to collaborate with each other will be challenging (not impossible, but challenging). Getting a community to drive traffic is not the most efficient mechanism. For organizations, this means understanding what outcomes are needed and what activities the target population is likely to participate in is absolutely critical. And like the image suggests, you can have groups within audiences or communities within networks – architecting your management solution (which includes tools, processes, guidelines, metrics, people, etc.) to fit your strategy is key – as well as understanding the cycle time and investment that will be required to build out that management architecture.

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The Community Maturity Model

June 16, 2009 By Rachel Happe

Community management is becoming a lot more common at all sorts of organizations – driven by adoption of people doing more and more online and the social media tools that allow for easy conversation and collaboration. As that happens, however, there is a lot of friction due to lack of standards – not just technical standards but also standard expectations and understanding of what community management is and what should be expected of it.

This lack of standards is causing a lot of friction and frustration – particularly for community managers themselves. Companies have bought intosocial media and online community to the extent that they think it’s important and have put some resources into funding community management positions and tools to enable community but there is still a lot of uncertainty about what to expect of both the roles and the tools. That lack of clear articulation can create a lot of pressure and/or missed expectations for community managers.

One of our missions at The Community Roundtable is to further the discipline of community management – not just in our own community but more broadly in the marketplace. Our first effort to define the discipline is our Community Maturity Model:

This model does two things. First, it defines the eight competencies we think are required for successful community management. Second, it attempts – at a high level – to articulate how these competencies progress from organizations without community management that are still highly hierarchical to those that have embraced a networked business ecosystem approach to their entire organization. We use this model in a number of ways:

As a mental model for understanding all the areas and skill sets required for community management and hopefully, to remind community managers that it is about assembling a internal team to gather all the required skills – not to try and be the expert in all of them individually
As a tool for community managers to educate and set the expectations of colleagues and advocates within the organization
As a roadmap for community managers looking to understand what is important to do given their current state of evolution, and in what order
To organize content, programing, and conversations within The Community Roundtable
As a way to categorize and find best practices and case studies – we will be working with our members on both Quick Cases (techniques and methodologies) as well as full case studies and be matching those with the appropriate box on the matrix
As a good model over the long term to develop training

While the Community Maturity Model is something that is core to our services, we also want to ‘open source’ it for those that find it useful. Feel free to use it either for internal or external presentations – we just ask that you attribute it back to The Community Roundtable.