The Community Roundtable

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

  • About Us
    • Our Values
    • Our Team
    • Our Clients
      • Client Success Stories
    • Community Leadership Awards
      • Community Leadership Awards 2024
      • Community Leadership Awards 2023
      • Community Leadership Awards 2022
      • Community Leadership Awards 2021
  • Services
    • Benchmarking and Audits
      • Community Performance Benchmark
      • Community Readiness Audits
      • Community ROI Calculator
      • The Community Score
    • Models and Frameworks
      • Community Maturity Model™
      • Community Engagement Framework™
      • Community Skills Framework™
      • Community Technology Framework™
      • The Social Executive
  • Research
    • The State of Community Management
      • SOCM 2024
      • SOCM 2023
      • SOCM 2022
      • SOCM 2021
      • SOCM 2020
    • Community Careers and Compensation
    • The Community Manager Handbook
      • 2022 Edition
      • 2015 Edition
    • The Social Executive
    • Special Reports
    • Case Studies
  • Events
    • Connect
      • Connect 2024
      • Connect 2023
      • Connect 2022
    • Community Technology Summit
    • Professional Development
    • Resource Bundles
    • Upcoming Events
    • Community Manager Appreciation Day
      • Community Manager Appreciation Day 2025
      • Community Manager Appreciation Day 2024
  • I’m looking for…
    • Community Engagement Resources
    • Executive Support Resources
    • Community Reporting Resources
    • Platform and Technology Resources
    • Community Strategy Resources
    • Community Programming Resources
    • Community Career Resources
    • Something Else
      • Vendor Resource Center
      • Community FAQs
      • Community Management Podcasts
        • Community Conversations
        • Lessons From The NEW Community Manager Handbook
      • Community 101
        • Community Management Glossary
        • Community Management FAQs
      • Case Studies
      • Community Webinars
  • Community
    • The Network
      • Member Login
      • Join The Network
      • Roundtable Call Library
    • The Library
      • Subscriber Login
      • Subscribe to The Library
  • Blog

Friday Roundup: Engagement, Measuring Community Success and Superhero’s Superheros

April 10, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

This week the themes of engagement and community success kept popping up – bothcommunity success inside and outside the Network. Rachel posted an insightful look at the The Business Model of Engagement, this week’s ESNChat focused on tips for measuring community success, and a private working group call lead by Jennifer Honig highlighted mapping organizational values to community success.

In this call, members added their perspectives to further develop the framework outlined earlier. This framework is in the process of being applied by a small subset of members, after which the framework will be further refined. Exciting work! Are you thinking about how to measure the value and success of your community initiatives? We’d love to hear how you define and track your community successes.

Things We Are Reading This Week

The Business Model of Engagement – Engagement is a hot topic. For those of you who have heard me speak, you know I don’t think all engagement is created equally and I think there is far too little focus put on the purpose behind the engagement. You can have high engagement and very little value – look no further than the comments on a general news site. The other common problem is you have no engagement at all, which happens far too frequently inside organizations where people feel like the only outcome of sticking their head up is becoming a good target.

Tools, Schmools: It’s Really About Community Management – “What we really need is our own private company Instagram, or maybe a chat-app just for employees” said no reasonable manager ever.  So why is it that we’re seeing those very tools pop up in the enterprise market?

Is Your Community Approach a Hollow Bunny? – We have learned a lot about communities recently, thanks to a new service we launched last year –  the Community Performance Benchmark. We use the research and knowledge we’ve developed with the annual State of Community Management survey to analyze a community program’s maturity on the eight competencies of the Community Maturity Model.

A 3 Point Plan to Preserve Institutional Expertise – Social learning ranks high today among the priorities of learning and development professionals in businesses large and small. It’s easy to see why — studies have found that informal knowledge sharing among colleagues is responsible for 70 to 80 percent of the information employees learn on the job.

Our Community Superheroes Share Their Superheroes, Part 3 – Our first two installments (#1 and #2) included thoughts from 12 of our superheroes – Alex Blanton,  Matt Brown, Charissa (Carnall) Cowart, Eileen Foran, Jerry Green, Patrick Hellen, Ted Hopton, Bill Johnston, Kirsten Laaspere,James LaCorte, J.J. Lovett and Lesley Lykins. Today we finish up, with the people our superheroes highlighted and the reasons why. If you go back through the three posts, you’ll have a great list of about 40 thoughtful leaders in the community space to follow as you wrestle with your own community challenges.

Can’t Kick a Bad Habit? You’re Probably Doing It Wrong – I had just finished giving a speech on building habits when a woman in the audience exclaimed, “You teach how to create habits, but that’s not my problem. I’m fat!” The frustration in her voice echoed throughout the room. “My problem is stopping bad habits. That’s why I’m fat. Where does that leave me?”

Building Journalism With Community, Not For It – At the end of last year Kristin Hare of the Poynter Institute was collecting tech resolutions for 2015 and asked for mine. Here is what I wrote: “In 2015 I want to help more journalists build with their communities, not just for their communities.”

How to measure the success of your internal social network – This is something we have been asking ourselves from when we started to use social media internally. At Philips, it has been evolved from very basic to more advance data. We demonstrate the power of internal social networking through data supported by infographic illustrations so it is easy for stakeholders to understand how our internal social network is being used.

New Social Media and Community Jobs

  1. Social Media Manager – Brook Street Inc. – Chicago, IL
  2. Operation & Community Manager – F14 – Oklahoma City, OK
  3. Teanaway Community Forest Manager-WMS Band 1 – Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs – Cle Elum, WA
  4. Community Association Manager  – The Management Trust – San Luis Obispo, CA
  5. Community Manager – Bitly – New York, NY 10003
  6. Community Development Manager – Habitat for Humanity – Appleton, WI
  7. Associate Community Manager – WeWork – Washington, DC
  8. Platform Evangelist / Community Manager – NoshList – San Francisco, CA
  9. Alumni Community Manager – Global Women’s Leadership Network – San Jose, CA
  10. Customer and Community Marketing Manager/Specialist – SmartBear Software, Inc. – Somerville, MA
  11. Community Manager – Eaze – San Francisco, CA
  12. Senior Community Manager – Wargaming America – Emeryville, CA
  13. Manager, Editorial and Community Engagement – PillPack – Somerville, MA
  14. Chief Blog Editor – Rackspace  – San Antonio, TX
  15. Marketing Internship – Chicago Pneumatic – Rock Hill, SC
  16. Web/Social Media Communications Assistant – Susquehanna University – Selinsgrove, PA
  17. Social Media Editor – NBC Universal – Miramar, FL
  18. Social Media Specialist – Wayfair – Boston, MA
  19. Social Media Coordinator – Hendrick Motorsports – Charlotte, NC
  20. Digital Marketing Strategist – GREENLEAF CREATIVE LLC – Centerville, OH
  21. Social Media Advisor – Seed – Detroit, MI
  22. Advisor, Social Media – AppLabs – Falls Church, VA
  23. Social Media Communications Specialist – DeKalb Workforce Development – Decatur, GA
  24. Advisor Social Media – Computer Sciences Corporation – Falls Church, VA
  25. Digital Marketing Manager – Dallas Cowboys Football Club – National Football League – Irving, TX

—-

The Community Performance Benchmark uses our extensive research database to provide organizations with a comparative community maturity analysis and recommendations to enhance community performance. Learn more about the CPB and other services from The Community Roundtable on the Services page of communityroundtable.com.

Celebrating Community Success – Ian White (Rackspace)

March 10, 2014 By Hillary Boucher

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at TheCR Network.

Screen Shot 2014-03-04 at 3.59.49 PMAs community manager of TheCR Network – our peer network of social business and community leaders – one of the things I love is celebrating our members’ successes with them. We know the many challenges our members face as they work to implement community models into their organizations’ infrastructure and it’s great when there is validation for all of their hard work. In this case, we were thrilled to hear that one of our members, Ian White of Rackspace, and his community team was awarded a silver award for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service at the eighth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. I caught up with Ian to get more details.

Hillary: Congrats on your big award! Tell us more about the award and why you and your team was chosen to receive it.

Ian:  The Stevie Awards are considered the Oscars of the business world, and the Sales & Customer Service awards honor companies across sales, contact centers and customer service. More than 400 nominated customer service and sales executives from the US and several other countries attended.

My team, the Rackspace Community Team was honored for its contribution towards providing Fanatical Support®. One of the tenants of Fanatical Support is proactively serving our customers – providing solutions to problems before customers know they have them and before they even have to ask. The team took home a silver award for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service – Computer Services at the eighth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Hillary: Sounds like your customers enjoy this more modern form of support – can you share some feedback you’ve received from users on the community support model?”

Ian: Our customers are primarily business owners, and they’ve told us that they appreciate the ability to have a library of solutions at their fingertips that is accessible when they want it. They are delighted at the speed and quality of our specialists’ responses in the Community. Additionally, our customers enjoy the access that the Community gives them to have transparent communication with Rackspace leadership about big issues such as security in the cloud.

Hillary: We know it’s a pretty big deal for a community team to win this over traditional support teams. Can you share a little background about your community and how you ended up at this point of achievement?

Ian: We started the Community on February 4th, 2013 with the goal of expanding our Fanatical Support to a digital audience that prefers self-service. In the current market, many people prefer to google an answer to a question rather than speak to a human, so expanding that concept to include support for Rackspace customers was a key objective. It was also important that our Community provide access to specialists in a wide variety of technologies that can address specific concerns. After one question has been answered, it can be viewed and provide insight to other customers who are experiencing similar problems. This allows us to create a comprehensive support experience for our customers with information that is constantly evolving and growing.

Hillary: Thinking back at the process of standing this community up, what was a major obstacle and how did you overcome it?

Ian: The biggest challenge out of the gate was trying to find content that would be valuable to our audience. It’s something we continually debate as a team, and we challenge each other to find the best content, through the right channel, for the right member. Fortunately our customers are very open about what they want, so we have the advantage of learning from them and adapting our processes along the way.

Hillary: What’s next for your community?

Ian: In 2014, our focus is targeted at expanding the self-service options for our customers through a redesigned Community and a unified customer experience for all of our digital portals. The concept of proactive Fanatical Support will continue to inspire any and all projects moving forward. I’m really excited to see how customers react to the updates we are planning, and I hope that they love it. If they don’t, I hope they will tell us so that we can improve it!

Hillary: Great job, Ian! We’re all really proud of the work you are doing and we look forward to keeping up with your efforts inside TheCR Network!

IanWhite

Ian White is the manager of support at Rackspace and has 19 years of experience leading large scale cloud hosting programs and teams. He identifies strategic opportunities and grows them into sustainable business models. He specializes in creating digital self-service channels to connect people with online solutions, knowledge bases, communities, and social learning environments. His passion is creating customer delight.

Community best practices

Resources for the people who build online communities.

ABOUT US
Our Values
Our Team
Our Clients
Careers

RESOURCES
Vendor Resource Center
Podcasts 
Community 101
Case Studies
Webinars

PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Benchmarking and Audits
Models and Frameworks
Research
Professional Development

QUICK LINKS
Blog
Newsletter
About The Network
About The Library
About The Academy

LOGIN
The Network
The Library
The Academy

Contact
Support
Partnership
Inquiries
Subscribe to
Our Newsletter