The Community Roundtable

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

Shopping for an online community platform?

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The first time I evaluated an online community platform was in 2011 for a large, customer-facing application. At the time there were only a handful of best-in-class providers. The good news for the community platform shopper today is there are more good options to choose from. The bad news is you’ll need to spend more time navigating and examining all the choices.

I recently went through the platform evaluation process for a client and want to share some of my experience and some key steps I recommend you keep in mind as you consider potential community platforms.

First-time shopper?

If this will be your first community the initial item on your to-do list should be to clearly define why you want a community. What are your mission, objectives, and measurement of success? Defining these points will help you identify key platform functionality and analytics required to meet your objectives and measure success. The available metrics measured varies significantly from platform to platform.

Search far and wide.

When you start looking at the available online community platform options, I would encourage you to cast a wide net to start. Look at a wide variety of platform providers and the types of clients they serve. What platforms are deployed for use cases like mine, are they successful and why? Ask your community peers about their experiences. The Community Roundtable Network members are a great resource and utilize a broad array of platforms for all types of use cases. BTW… don’t overlook platforms you may already have in place elsewhere in your organization. Depending on the size of your company, there may be an existing option that you weren’t aware of.

Don’t skimp on the requirements.

Develop a thorough RFP based on the functionality and requirements important to you. I recommend building an Excel spreadsheet with a broad list of possible considerations. Then prioritize the requirements by must have, should have, and would be nice to have. Whether you send the RFP out to a large number of potential providers or just your short list, it’s unlikely any platform with have all the requirements in your list but the ones they don’t provide you can see if they’re on their roadmap.

Sandboxes aren’t just for kids. 

Ask the online community platform providers to provide you with a sandbox that you can explore and test. This ask is becoming more and more commonplace and is a great exercise if you have the time allotted in the evaluation process. Taking a hands-on test drive is a valuable way to see if the platform truly is a good fit.

Who will you be working with after the sale?

Make sure you meet the implementation team, not just the sales team. In most cases, the person you work with during the sales and exploration phase will not be part of the team you’re engaged with day to day once you’ve signed the contract. Make sure you’re comfortable and confident with the team that will be working closely with you during implementation.

Migrating an existing community?

If you’re migrating data from an existing community, make sure the new providers you are considering have experience migrating data from your current platform. Most providers will tell you they can migrate your data, but personally, I feel more comfortable selecting a platform and implementation team that has done it before.

Selecting the right online community platform is an important step in your community journey. As I mentioned at the top, the good news is there are a number of very good platform options to choose from. Just remember to clearly define what you need, take the time to explore and evaluate your options and ask a lot of questions, of both the platform providers and your peers. Happy shopping!

online community platform

More Resources

 

TheCR’s Community Platform Requirements Library & Vendor Comparison Tool

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Vendor Comparison

Do you need to evaluate community platforms?
Are you being asked to justify your existing platform?
Are you looking at platform gaps but are not sure you are thinking of everything?

The Community Roundtable has collaborated with our members to develop two new tools to support this work:

  1. The Community Platform Requirements Library
  2. Community Platform Vendor Comparison Tool

The Community Platform Requirements Library

The requirements library is everything you might want to include in an evaluation – and probably a lot more, categorized by primary and secondary themes and, when applicable, the behaviors they support as defined in TheCR’s Community Engagement Framework.  While many IT groups treat community functionality as one big feature, community managers know better. This tool, which includes over 400 features, helps IT and other stakeholders understand the complexity of a robust community platform.

Vendor Comparison
Community Platform Vendor Comparison Tool

This tool is a high-level comparison tool. It allows the assessment to be weighted by primary and secondary requirements categories (which align with the requirements library), depending on the specific priorities of the organization. This is a great tool to use with stakeholders to help them understand how different vendors address needs.

A note of thanks: This tool was developed by TheCR team with a lot of input from our members – in particular, a set that participated in a requirements workshop at TheCR Connect. Collaboration like this is at the heart of what makes TheCR Network so valuable.

Would you like access to this and other tools that save you time and make you work smarter?

Jive Acquisition: The End of the Beginning

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When I started IDC’s social software research practice in 2007, the entire market was about $50 million and Jive was one of 10 or more vendors. Needless to say, the market has come a long way in the last ten years, along with lots of twists and turns.

Throughout it all, Jive has taken a leadership role in building a robust platform that could stand up to the requirements of big enterprise clients and address the needs of building communities with both employees and customers. Jive also led the way in selling communities as a business solution, not a technical solution. It was a big vision that worked well in their early market, led by customers who shared their exciting vision.

As the market grew, the big players made their bets and Jive remained independent. Software giants and start-ups entered the fray. Point solutions added social capabilities. Today, the vendor market is quite complex – with a huge variety of approaches customers can take.  While that means there is more money to be spent, it is a lot less clear on where to make big bets. That confusion favors big vendors like Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle and SAP with established IT relationships.

The customers for social software are also increasingly diverse and fragmented in their expectations about what social software will do – even within one organization. Mainstream buyers are often driven less by strategic vision for organizational transformation and more by the more tactical need to upgrade existing collaboration tools. The two needs require very different levels of platform sophistication.

For the strategic buyer, communities are being integrated into the employee and customer experience – requiring complex integrations for platforms. While even the biggest players have not successfully completed these integrations, they have an easy to understand path to do so and can bundle pricing in attractive ways.

With all those pressures, Jive needed to find a home within a broader solution. With the ESW Capital acquisition, Jive will be added to its Aurea solution, a portfolio of technology focused on customer experience. This may be a good match for those of Jive’s customers using it to enable their customer communities but it’s not clear yet where it leaves those of Jive’s customers using Jive to enhance employee collaboration and innovation. Taking the company private may also allow Jive the time and space to focus on customer needs without the pressures of the open market. Time will tell.

Our advice to Jive customers:

  • Pay attention and reach out. Listen carefully to what Jive and other customers are saying but don’t leap to conclusions. Most of the details of this deal are yet to be announced.
  • Take this opportunity, while you have stakeholder attention, to reaffirm your program strategy and goals, independent of your software platform. You will need that to guide decisions moving forward – whatever those decisions are.
  • Work with IT to develop a standing platform requirements document that can be used at any point to evaluate options and educate stakeholder.
  • Use this as an opportunity to take a step back and reevaluate roles and responsibilities. Community teams have long been consumed by platform and technology management. This may be a good opportunity to educate IT partners and shift responsibilities so that community management is focused on engagement, governance, and management and IT is focused on technology.

This news, if you are a Jive customer, will likely shift your time and attention. Use it as an opportunity. Get your ducks in a row and educate stakeholders on what is required to meet their strategic objectives, technology related or otherwise.

At The Community Roundtable, we will be collaborating with our members and clients who use Jive to share tools and approaches in having these critical conversations with stakeholders. We will, as Jive has always championed, work better together.

Tools for Community Management: Trello, Canva, Slack.

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Tools for Community ManagementThe recent Atlassian acquisition of Trello, got me thinking about some of my favorite community manager planning, design and communication tools. Turns out my top three go-to tools for community management were not designed specifically with community management work in mind. Nonetheless, I couldn’t live without them.

Trello

“I have the simplest job!” …said no Community Manager ever. As anyone in community will tell you, no day looks the same and very few projects are one-and-done. Trello helps you manage all the moving parts.

Trello is a list management tool that allows you to categorize your thoughts in a highly customizable way. I kid you not when I say I could not live without it; I currently keep everything from my Editorial Calendar, to my Playbook, to my daily to-do list on Trello. On top of list making, the App allows you to color code, mark check lists, set due dates, toggle to calendar view, and tag team members.

Need to manage a list of users? Trello helps you label them by engagement status. Want to keep an eye on a co-worker’s project? Trello subscribes you to their list activity. Top that off with a sleek interface and endless app integration options and you’ll wonder why you ever wrote your checklist on a scrap of paper.

Canva

This tool is my secret weapon. So much so, that I hesitate to tell anyone about it. Why? I can easily create high-quality graphics that trick people into thinking that I am a graphic design genius with high level coding skills.

As Community Managers, we inevitably end up wearing many hats and often have limited budget with which to work our magic. Canva is your best friend on days when you are asked to step to the fringes of your job description. Design a community logo, event image, or gamification badge – this cloud-based image design app has you covered.

Slack

I’m pretty sure the only email I have ever received from my boss was a letter of employment. That’s because my team communicates exclusively on Slack.

Slack is AIM for grown ups – a real-time messaging app designed for team collaboration. Communicate with coworkers in public, private or direct message channels. The result of using Slack aligns perfectly with the spirit of Community: when questions and answers are worked through publicly, the entire team benefits. Add to that the searchable archive of any term or user, and you are living well beyond the confines of email chains.

Want to bring even more community into Slack? Try it out as a chat space for your users in supplement to your platform.
True Story: I drafted this blog post in Trello (using a checklist to organize my ideas), designed the title image in Canva, and pasted the entire thing into Slack for a coworker to review. Ta-da!

What tools are you using to make your community management easier? I would love to hear about your favorites – the more the merrier!

Engagement and Community Architecture

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By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable

Most of us who drive cars stick to driving on roads. Why? They helps us get where we are going faster – even though the route is rarely a straight line between where we start and our destination. We could try and take a more direct route but at a minimum it would involve driving over uneven ground – at worst we would have to remove barriers like trees, houses, rocks, animals, etc. That would be slightly, um, crazy – even if there were someone that was encouraging us to do so and helping.

My point? Infrastructure matters – a lot.

The online community space is still relatively immature and because of that, we are still blazing trails and paving roads – but like the cow paths that have determined much of the street layout in cities like Boston – we are not always doing so with much forethought or planning. The result is that community managers have to invest a lot of effort to help people get where they want to go because the infrastructure is not helping.

But we actually know a lot about how the shape of networks influence relationships, conversations and outcomes. Experts in the social network analysis space – Valdis Krebs, Robert Cross, Marc Smith, Patti Anklam – have been researching and analyzing the shape of networks long before social technologies became popular.

Recently there has been a little more awareness about network structure and its impact – including the following articles:

However, far too many organizations do little to evaluate and architect their technologies in a way that works with their existing environment and business objectives. Because of that, new social network deployments tend to ignore the existing network of relationships and communication patterns in an organization while adding a new social network architecture on top of it that is often at odds with the network that already exists. For example, an organization that is highly hierarchical in information flows might deploy a open stream-based solution to break down silos. While the intent and goal are understandable it ignores the existing patterns of behavior, which get cut off and punished when they don’t respect the hierarchy. Implementing a boundary spanning solution will likely not go very far because it runs counter to what’s rewarded and restricted in the culture. A better solution might be to look at a group-based solution that still keeps conversations in their hierarchical context, while getting people comfortable communicating in a networked way. Once that behavior is established, smaller efforts to connect similar groups can help broaden and evolve the network.

For the user, deploying a tool that disregards the current network flow adds conflicting extrinsic motivators that can completely stall adoption and use. It is then left to the community manager (if one exists at all) to try and understand how to encourage and reward behaviors that the alignment between the existing and new network structures does not make easy. Sometimes, it’s as if they are asking users to drive right through a building – and because the barriers are virtual and relational they are not visible to the organization, the community manager or to the user no can see what is going on.

Most organizations and community professionals don’t even see this problem because it is such an implicit assumption of the software. Most platforms, in turn, have relatively defined network architectures because it is easier to understand and deploy. But in making the software deployment easy, they have sacrificed the flexibility to create a network architecture that can be adapted to different environments and different business objectives. It’s also what makes some current platforms better than others for different use cases – the stream dominated tools are better for connecting across boundaries and identifying opportunity but strain to serve as collaboration solutions. Group and space dominated tools are better for collaboration but can easily create more silos. As organizations move toward enterprise solutions they need platforms that can do both – in a way that creates information and relationship flows where they are needed and cut off flows where it’s not helpful or creates too much noise.

So what can community program owners and community managers do to better align their infrastructure?

  • Educate themselves about social network analysis and how network shape affects outcomes
  • Define what their ideal network structure would be given their current culture, business objectives and member needs
  • Analyze their current network architecture and identify where it supports and where it hinders information and relationship flows – and how that effects the value generated for the business and for users
  • Evaluate the UX and feature sets available and how they might be adapted to better serve business objectives and member needs

While in many cases, community professionals will not be able to change the fundamental community architecture of their network, by understanding how it’s impacting behavior and engagement they can mitigate unintended consequences through adapting the UX, creating training or running community programs that help reduce barriers. And hopefully, they can stop asking members to drive through buildings.

Building a Community Roadmap

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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!

 
Building-Community-Roadmap-ebookDownload

Using a Content Management System in Your Community

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

One of the most daunting tasks for a community manager is choosing a community platform. There are lots of options out there (full disclosure – here at TheCR we celebrate and support all community platform vendors. Remaining vendor agnostic allows us to focus on the supporting all community managers no matter what platform their community lives on.) for community managers to choose from. How do you decide what is the best community platform for your organization?

We can’t make that decision for you – but we do recommend starting with a requirements document, whether you are approaching choosing a community platform for the first time, or are looking to migrate from a current solutions. Defining and ranking features will help ensure that you are choosing the solution that best meets your needs.

The State of Community Management 2014 offer us more helpful advice on choosing the right community platform for your organization:

1. Find a platform that can adapt to members’ needs.

Communities hosted on platforms that can be easily changed to respond to the changing needs of the community have higher member engagement levels. A community will grow and evolve over time – planning ahead for that change (even if you don’t know what it will be) will save you time and headaches in the future.

2. Look for content management features that allow members to easily find the information they need.

Well-designed content management systems help members source their information needs, therefore more easily find value in the community. It makes sense that they are much more common in best-in-class communities.

3. Ensure the platform integrates with places the community interacts.

Communities hosted on platforms that are integrated with other places the community interacts have higher member engagement levels than those that do not. Externally this may mean integrating with social networks, and internally it may mean integration with email and business applications. Think about all the way you want your members to participate in the community, and think about all the ways they currently interact with data, information and each other – this will help you provide the integration points that will help your community thrive.

SOCM FACT #08 - Content Management System

Have you recently made the move to a new community management platform? How did you make the decision? Where did you end up?

You can review more findings related to community management in the State of Community Management 2014. This post is part of a series highlighting some of the most thought-provoking data from the SOCM 2014 – brought to you via a fun poster – perfect for sharing on Twitter, hanging at your desk, or printing out and waving around your next community strategy meeting.

Want even more community facts? Check out the full SOCM 2014 here:

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Looking to take your career in community management to the next level? 92% of members agree that TheCR Network supports and advances their personal and professional goals. Learn how our research, access to peers and experts, targeted content and exclusive concierge service can help you achieve your goals.

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: July 2014 Wrap Up

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Flat Hillary

A TheCR Network Tradition – Each Summer our very own Flat Community Manager hits the road and visits members all over the world.

Summer is just flying by inside TheCR Network. I exercised some work-life balance and took a fully unplugged vacation this month thanks to my supportive team who held down the fort while I was out of the office. And while we decrease the number of virtual live events we host due to vacation season the network has been quite busy in the forums. Here are a few samples of discussions, collaboration, and knowledge sharing that occurred inside TheCR Network this month.

  • Zero to Community: Building Community from the Ground Up (Discussion): We have a number of experienced community managers who have taken on new roles where they are building a community from scratch. A few months ago we held a call to share mini-case studies on getting from zero to pilot, but the collaboration continued this month. A member started a thread requesting a sample RFP as he prepares to tool up and he received incredibly detailed and supportive resources from fellow members who had recently gone through the process. It’s the kind of discussion thread that makes a community manager proud.
  • Community Manager Salary Survey Member Event (Virtual Event): As you probably know we released a new research initiative and are in the process of gathering responses for our Community Manager Salary Survey. We threw a member event as a fun and convenient way to get members to block off some time on their calendar to take the 15 minute survey. We hosted a virtual chat where they could check-in, get a community manager high-five, and connect with our team and peers. It was a great success and a good way to connect and collaborate. All attendees received a digital delight package including exclusive badges and bonus downloads for our summer challenge.
  • Using the Community Maturity Model as an Internal Consultant (Report):  This month we released reports from an extremely valuable demo and case study shared by a member who built a maturity assessment tool off of the Community Maturity Model and is using it to consult across his large company. We love seeing members build off of each others’ work and add valuable resources back into the TheCR Network for their peers. I’m very pleased to add this report to our archives. (Did you know we have 200+ Roundtable Reports archived and catalogued by competency in the member library?)

If you want to get a full idea of what membership is like you can take a look at this extensive overview which shares our general programming opportunities and resources made available to members.

We’re looking ahead to fall and planning a robust programming calendar for members. If you are interested in joining us or have more questions about membership please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask.

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Community Managers – Declare Your Value! 
Have you taken the Community Manager Salary Survey 2014 yet? Your insights into your role are invaluable as we document and define community manager best practices across industries. The survey is short (15 minutes) and we’d love to hear from you. Take the survey now.

Industry Interview: Dennis Shiao, DNN

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By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

dennis-shiao-headshot-croppedWe were able to publish the State of Community Management 2014 through the generous support of our sponsors. We are lucky enough to work with a number of partners in the community space that are helping advance the business of community, including DNN. Today I’d like to share an interview with Dennis Shiao, DNN‘s Director of Content Marketing .

Dennis is a contributing author to the book 42 Rules of Product Marketing and is Editor of the DNN blog. Feel free to reach out to Dennis via email, dennis.shiao@dnnsoftware.com or find him on Twitter, @dshiao.

Hi Dennis, can you start us off by telling me a little about DNN. How do you fit in the overall community market space?

We’re a marketing solutions (software) company based in the Bay Area, California. Our products and technology are the foundation for 750,000+ websites worldwide. In the online community market, what makes us unique is the tight integration between our Content Management System (CMS) and our online community solution.

Evoq Content (our CMS) and Evoq Social (our online community solution) sit atop the DNN Platform. When customers run our “suite” (Evoq Content+Social), their online community doesn’t need to sit on a separate subdomain. Instead, the online community and the website are one and the same. One user experience, one login (for end users) and one integration point to your back-end systems, such as CRM and marketing automation.

As a sponsor of the State of Community Management 2014, you clearly care about community. How do your customers typically use DNN to support their community business?

Our customers typically use our online community solution to solve a problem or to meet a business need. The specific use cases are varied. To start with, we often see customer communities, support communities and product communities (e.g. a community for a product’s end users to ask questions, solve problems and recommend product enhancements). We also have customers using Evoq Social for member communications (e.g. associations) and employee communications (e.g. sales intranet or sales extranet).

That’s a lot of use cases! It sounds like you support both internal and external communities?

Correct!

The SOCM 2014 shares insights through the framework of the Community Maturity Model. Of the eight community maturity competencies, which resonates with you as being most crucial?

Community Maturity Model

I view the eight competencies much like a parent sees their children: you try not to play favorites (and thankfully, I have less than eight children). But if you’re going to make me pick, I’m going to put my content marketing hat back on and select Content & Programming.

Sometimes with online communities, it becomes all too convenient to think that “user-generated content” will fuel the flames (of engagement) over the long term. Well, sometimes those flames start to die out and a little bit of kindling is needed to resuscitate it. That’s the role of content, as organized by the community manager. I wrote about this topic in a CMSWire article, “Online Communities Need a Spark? Turn to Original Content.”

We’d love to hear your take on some of the findings from the SOCM 2014 – what research surprised you the most?

The fact that internal communities have 33% more full-time community managers (on average) than external communities. I’ve always thought of internal communities as those that “managed themselves,” or were shepherded by a set of internal champions.

I’ve thought of external communities, on the other hand, as growing children who need a fair amount of supervision, direction and hand holding. Your research seems to show that the exact opposite is true: that external communities may be more effective at “self-management” (by its members), whereas the internal communities are ones that need a bit more hands-on management.

You mentioned that DNN provides a platform, a CMS and a community solution. How would you say DNN specifically supports community and social business professionals and helps them achieve their goals?

I’m responsible for content marketing at DNN, so my first answer is going to be “content.” In the past nine months, we’ve created a lot of content for community managers, in the form of blog posts, SlideShares, webinars, e-books and playbooks. Last year, we collaborated with TOPO on an Online Community Playbook, which was a popular resource for community managers.

At the same time, our products and services are well suited to community managers and business professionals. In the latest release of our online community software, we created a “Community Manager Experience,” a set of analytics dashboards that were uniquely designed for the community manager.

Last (but not least), we partner with leading organizations (like The Community Roundtable!) to collaborate around community management topics and research. We participate in online and face-to-face events as attendees, speakers and sponsors.

We talk a lot about company culture – what is something about DNN that makes it a unique place to work?

It’s the way in which disparate groups work and socialize so naturally with one another here. During my first month at DNN, we were at a social outing. I glance across the room and see our CTO and Co-Founder (Shaun Walker) casually chatting with three sales execs. At many companies, inter-group conversations don’t happen as naturally as they do here.

Also, we’re distributed geographically. Our main offices are in the Bay Area (headquarters) and in Langley, British Columbia (Engineering and Customer Success). But that doesn’t stop us from keeping everyone informed, because we use an internal community. We call our internal community “Catalyst.” My colleague Clint Patterson wrote about how it improved our internal communication.

We’d love to hear a case study about a client that uses DNN.

Microdesk, a leading information technology and software consulting provider, runs an online customer support community using Evoq Social. In the community, Microdesk customers are able to help one another. When needed, a member of Microdesk’s consulting team will jump in to help. Microdesk sees the community as not only a customer support channel, but one that builds thought leadership for its expert consulting team. It also drives higher customer retention.

Visit our website for more details from Microdesk.

If you were’t working at DNN what would you be doing?

I’d be the starting center fielder for the New York Yankees. Short of that, I’d be the Yankees beat writer for a New York newspaper.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given? It doesn’t need to be community related.

I had a third grade teacher (Mrs. Brannick) who encouraged us to go the extra mile. She did this by instituting an “Extra Credit Award,” which was given out a few times a year. Participation was optional. But I just HAD to win this award! So I worked hard and made sure to always do more extra credit than anyone else. Classmates started to ask me if I’d let them win just once. That early exposure (to working hard) helps drive me to go the extra mile, even today.

That’s such a great story! I bet Mrs. Brannick would be proud of you! One last question – we joke a lot that successful community professionals are like super heros. So, what’s your super power?

I have an unheralded sense of humor. You might spend an entire week with me and never see it, but then it’ll catch you during the moment you least expect it. Please laugh when it happens.

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We are also very excited to be co-hosting a webinar with Dennis and the DNN team focused on highlights from the State of Community Management 2014. Learn more:

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The Community Roundtable is pleased to work with some of the best names in community and social business. Interested in working with us? We’re always looking for unique partners across the community ecosystem. Drop us a line if you’d like to explore partnership opportunities.