The Community Roundtable

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

Evaluating Community and Engagement Platforms

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Are you evaluating and assessing community or engagement platforms? You are in great company – a lot of people are. This is being driven by shifts in the vendor space, the growing importance of these technologies to organizations, and the maturity of current programs.

At The Community Roundtable, we think about and break down these platforms in the following way:

Each of these layers – the engagement layer, the management layer, and the administrative layer – are important for a mature engagement platform. This structure reveals why community strategy is critical to a successful community or engagement ecosystem – it informs how each of these layers is structured so that the user experience, management tools, and administrative governance are aligned for optimized performance. This structure also helps reveal why a sole focus on the user experience limits the growth, maturity, and value of a community program.

My recommendations for starting your platform evaluation projects:

  1. Start with Strategy: if you do not, the complexity of these platforms will confuse you, your community management team, and your members. A good strategy will help you prioritize and identify the key behaviors that you need to enable – giving you strong guidance as you look at and configure platforms. Without that alignment, the conflict will at best keep you from efficiency and at worst, hamper engagement and value.
  2. Evaluate Analytics & Reporting Next: no matter what your members are doing, if you cannot see it in the data, segment it, compare it, and measure its value and influence on business outcomes, you will not be able to optimize the system. Additionally, the ability to easily get tactical, operational, and strategic reports will impact your ability to manage the community and communicate progress to stakeholders.
  3. Platform Architecture Bites Back: if you do not evaluate the permissions structure, the way in which new communities are provisioned, and the integration and indexing of content, audit options, and ecosystem governance you may be left with a tool that severely limits growth.
  4. Last, Evaluatee User Functionality: if your key behaviors are available in the platform but difficult to use, that will be problematic and it will constrict engagement rates and value. Additionally, design and in particular how graphics and faces are exposed, matters in social systems. Faces are critical to online communities feeling like communities instead of a static website, a content repository, or a transactional ticketing solution.

Are you in the process of looking at these solutions?

TheCR Network offers exclusive in-depth information and unbiased user advice, including our Community Platform Requirements Library & Vendor Comparison Tool and platform-based cohorts for learning and sharing. Learn more.

Lisa Allison on Migrating Community Platforms

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Join the community experts at The Community Roundtable as they chat about online community management best practices with a wide range of global community professional. Topics include increasing online audience engagement, finding and leveraging executive stakeholders, defining and calculating online community ROI and more.

Episode #60 features Lisa Allison, Community Strategist and Enterprise Community Manager at Analog Devices.

Lisa and Shannon Abram discuss best practices for completing a smooth community platform migration on this short community-focused podcast.

This episode of Conversations with Community Managers is sponsored by Telligent.

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Stop the Technology Madness – Organizational Cultures Are Decades Behind

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

technologyRecently the term ‘Digital Transformation’ keeps popping up as the latest buzzword bandied about by analysts and vendors and every time I hear it, I twitch just a little bit. We’ve been here before. Remember the dot-com craze? The term Digital Transformation got batted around a bit then too.

The biggest problem for me is that we haven’t even learned to effectively use the technology we already have. In fact, we haven’t even learned – at the organizational level – to use technology that is three decades old. Witness email. Email’s CC feature has reinforced passivity in our organizational cultures around decision-making. Instead of deciding, we reply and copy five people who have some involvement in the topic. Everyone has an opinion but they often complicate the issue rather than adding clarity, which makes it even harder to actually make a decision. So the decision sits there and everyone moves on to the next email. Email’s BCC if even worse – it encourages passive-aggressive covering-my-ass behavior, instead of forcing people to respond directly and learn how to express disagreement constructively. Unfortunately, organizations never stopped to really think about how that technology was going to affect they way work happened in their organizations. Should we blame the technology? Not entirely but it certainly makes this destructive behavior very easy and that does affect our collective behavior, and culture.

We are getting slightly smarter. These days with things like social media and internal social networks, we have paused to consider that it may not be just about technology. Change and adaptation happens slowly though. It’s frustrating and we seem to eventually get bored of the process or find it too complex to take on. And oh look, there’s SOA! and BIG DATA! and Mobile! and Digital Transformation! There MUST be a technology that can solve this problem, right? So we move on before we’ve really fully digested that last wave of technology – and there are vendors and analysts aplenty to help convince us that a new technology is the answer, because their revenues depend on it.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a technologist and product manager by training. I love technology and it’s come a long way in helping us create new opportunities for our organizations. But technology is moving much more quickly than our organizational’s ability to change or take advantage of it. I tend to think it might be wiser if the CIOs of the world partnered with COOs and focused on structure, management and process change before skipping on to the next shiny object. Our IT infrastructures are such hairballs at this point that people literally cannot get work done – let alone take advantage of collaborative environments and the sharing economy. We have a lot of work to do and only a small part of it is on the technical side.

So, you want digital transformation? Spend most of your budget and time on management and leadership issues.