The Community Roundtable

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

Rachel Happe on Social Media Vs 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 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.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

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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Conversations with Community Managers – Bryan Person

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It’s a little ironic that I’m doing a podcast with Bryan since the first time we met it was to discuss the best practices and lessons learned he’d accumulated in creating podcasts for Monster.com. He taught me everything I needed to know about podcasting, which served me well at SXSWi when Aaron Strout and I recorded 15 interviews in one evening. Ah the memories…

In this interview, Bryan shares what he’s learned working at Monster, building the highly-successful Social Media Breakfast series and with the talented team at LiveWorld.

I love how Bryan answers my question about his time as a community manager at Monster. It sounds like what a lot of community managers are experiencing today – the “tip of the iceberg” effect.

Download the mp3 (19 min/17.5 mb)

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Roundtable Call: Tribalization of Business Study

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A big part of what we’re trying to build with The Community Roundtable is a peer network that shares what we learn with our broader community. To that end, we made the Community Maturity Model open source and shared our construct for TheCR Quick Case and continue to figure out new ways to give what we’re doing back to the community at large (we’re currently in the process of launching a public podcast series specifically for community managers… more in another post).

The cornerstone of what we do as a member-based organization are Roundtable Calls. They typically start with a brief introduction by a recognized “expert” and then become a facilitated discussion between members, us and the expert. The best practices and stories that are shared during the discussion often result in “aha” moments for members and lead to deeper bonds between the members. We record the calls and write reports summarizing the best practices that we uncover as a group, never attributing insights to individuals (to maintain their privacy).

We hosted a Roundtable Call last month with Francois Gossieaux from Beeline Labs. He gave an excellent overview of the latest installment of the Tribalization of Business study he’s working on with Ed Moran from Deloitte. Following the call we talked with Francois about “open-sourcing” his intro and in typical Francois fashion he said “go for it!”

In the audio below, Francois compares/contrasts quantitative information from the 2008 and 2009 studies, highlighting where he sees big changes. He also shares several qualitative stories that help illustrate how companies are evolving their business practices to better embrace community. Enjoy!

Interested in learning more about becoming a member of The Community Roundtable? Send us a note or ping us on Twitter.

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A Peek Inside

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We’ve been working hard to get the technology, content, and business operations in place over the past few weeks and we are making a lot of progress. We have the community up, we are categorizing and combining content sources, and we are reaching out to a number of potential members to review our plans and gather feedback.

Thank you to those of you who have been generous with your time and thoughts – we definitely appreciate it and some areas that we think are good synergies for our original concept have been identified. One of which is to work on standards for things like metrics, processes, and policies. There are potential members who are working on tools and standards already and having access to a bigger group of qualified peers to help is a win-win for them as well as The Community Roundtable.

We’ve also talked to a number of potential partners who see The Community Roundtable as a nice complimentary service to what they already offer and because we are committed to protecting the identity of members, see us a trusted partner which they feel comfortable recommending to their customers. We endeavor to be fair and balanced with sponsors while also being mindful of offering members a safe place to discuss a wide variety of issues and that trust is critical to us – and we are honored that we have it – both from potential members and sponsors.

As we build out our infrastructure we are also mindful of not spending too much on capital ahead of potential success. We are therefore using Ning as our initial community platform. This allows us to maintain some degree of vendor neutrality while offering us a low cost test bed that is stable, reliable, and easy to use. It will have limitations as our community and content grows but it allows us to get up quickly and adapt as customers show us what is most interesting to them.

Take a look at our content models and some screen shots:

The Community Roundtable

View more presentations from rhappe.

We are excited to see things take shape and are interested in your feedback, questions, and suggestions. If you are interested in chatting, please get in touch with us – rachel@community-roundtable.com/@rhappe or jim@community-roundtable.com/@jimstorer

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What We’re Up To

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sir-robinEager to join us and be dubbed Sir Robin? While that might be a dubious distinction, we are looking for founding members who care deeply about pushing their community efforts forward, but also like to have a little fun along the way.

We’re looking for a few good members… but what’s in it for you?

  • Regular roundtable conversations. Join us, your peers in community management and social media strategy and select experts in thought-provoking roundtable sessions. We’re in the midst of building a schedule of calls and online chat sessions. We’ll kick off The Community Roundtable with calls every other week and build in more interactions as we grow.
  • Direct access. We’re committed to creating a robust and valuable community that’s also small enough to allow members to build solid relationships with one other. From an in-depth welcome interview to regular check ins with you to uncover current challenges, we will stay connected as you grow in community and social media.
  • One stop shop. Whether it’s a question you have or our top picks from the hundreds of blog posts we read, The Community Roundtable will be your hub of information and peer guidance on community management and social media strategy. We’ll also transcribe and summarize the roundtable calls so you can stay on top of what is discussed even if you can’t make every call.

The Offer. We’re currently offering fifty 2009 Founding Membership spots in The Community Roundtable for $750 per seat (or three seats for $2,000). Following our Founding Membership drive, membership will be $1,000 per seat (or three seats for $2,500).

Members in The Community Roundtable will have access to the following:

  • Online community. Discussion boards; content library with interviews, call recordings, case studies, and examples; profiles and networking; expert directory and reviews; vendor directory and reviews; reading list; and aggregation of the best blog content
  • In-depth welcome interview
  • Monthly programming themes
  • Two roundtables per month. A combination of experts, members, and solution providers (based on your requests)
  • Two expert online ‘office hours’ per month
  • Transcripts and summaries for all events
  • Peer matching. Based on similar industries, environments, needs, challenges, or experience
  • Quarterly reports. Highlighting hot topics, new content, and programming summaries
  • Annual report. state of the community, community survey findings, annual hot topics, and plans for the next year
  • Discounts on associated products, services, events, and content

If you’d like a seat at table, please sign up here and we’ll contact you to discuss your credentials.

Calling All Knights

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690px-king_arthur_and_the_knights_of_the_round_table-300x260Social media and community are getting a lot of play these days. Depending on the day of the week, the person you are talking to and the phase of the moon, the term ‘community’ can mean any number of things.

Being a community professional can be a tough and an often isolated role. Just try explaining to a senior executive what Twitter is, right? It seems so powerful and yet the best of us have not figured out how to describe it succinctly. Try to that twenty times in one week and you might just feel a little crazy.

All the vendors, consultants and agencies are eager to help and offer great services, but the more hyped the space gets, the more options there are to evaluate. Sometimes you just have trouble convincing your boss that apologizing to a major customer publicly is a good idea, but what are the right words to use?

To that end, we are creating a peer network just for those of you managing communities and social media efforts. We believe your success depends on:

  • Your ability to share with your challenges in a private setting with other experienced professionals
  • Access to content focused on all of the issues you are facing
  • Regular interactions with a small group of specialists

The Community Roundtable will focus on monthly themes aligned with the eight operational elements we believe need to be managed in order to run successful communities and social media programs:

  • Strategy
  • Leadership
  • Culture
  • Community Management
  • Content & Programming
  • Policy & Governance
  • Tools
  • Measurement

We are passionate about helping people, making connections, and telling stories…and we both have a long history of managing communities, both on and offline. We love creating compelling content, bringing untold stories forward, drawing people out, and creating connections.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in joining, please sign up to learn more about membership. We are looking forward to a great adventure and want to invite you to join us at the table.

Jim & Rachel

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