TheCR Network Archives

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: August 2015

August 26, 2015 By Hillary Boucher

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Hold onto your pumpkin spice lattes – according to the calendar it’s still summer until September 22. I’ll take it! We’ve had an incredible summer inside TheCR Network. Yes, someone always seems to be OOO, but that has not stopped members from collaborating or our team from forging ahead with exciting new projects (ahem, platform migration).

Here’s a sneak peek into what’s been going on inside TheCR Network

Small Move, Big Change (Book Club): Every summer we host a book club and this year we read Small Move, Big Change by Caroline Arnold. There was a lot of personal interest because the author focused on making micro-resolutions in your personal life to affect big change, but our goal was to discuss how this strategy can be applied to community building within an organization. A perfect topic for practitioners working on adoption and engagement.

Blueprints: Mapping Values to Community Success (Working Group): This working group led by TheCR Champion Jennifer Honig has continued to meet this summer and chose innovation has their use case for mapping business drivers to community success.

Ask the Experts (Forums): With the launch of our member superhero program we began inviting superheroes to host a week long “Ask me anything” in the forums. We are extremely pleased with the level of engagement, the great questions members are asking our superheroes, and the amazing knowledge coming out of these sessions! Happy to see a new program take off successfully!

If you are interested in learning more about what it’s like to be a member of TheCR Network check out this extensive overview which shares our general programming opportunities and resources made available to members.

Want to access our programming for the benefit of your community work? Reach out and ask us about membership.

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Did you know that TheCR Network members work with all kinds of communities? In fact, about 25% work in either internal or external communities and 50% work with both! No matter what kind of community you work with membership in TheCR Network will save you time and improve the quality of your work by connecting you with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

What I Learned about Community Management from Organizing a 1,700-Person Conference

August 5, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Alex Blanton, Senior Program Manager, Community and Outreach – Information Management & Machine Learning at Microsoft, and member of TheCR Network.

On May 28-29, we held our third Machine Learning & Data Science Conference here on the Microsoft campus. This is an internal-only event that brings together our data scientists and engineers interested in advanced analytics, including machine learning and the end-to-end data science process and real-world applications that are leading to intelligent new apps and new insights from our ever-expanding universe of digital data. (If you don’t understand that description, that’s okay–it’s enough to know that machine learning and data science are very hot areas for Microsoft and other technology companies right now.)

This event has grown in popularity each time we’ve held it, and this May our attendance number of 1,706 was double the number of people who attended the event last October. We had more than 80 different talks and tutorials, as well as two executive keynotes, a tradeshow-like reception where more than 60 projects presented their work, and an onsite data science consulting service. As the community manager for our internal machine learning community, I look at this conference as an “anchor” event for the community, and the best opportunity for our members to get together face to face with so many of the people they work with virtually throughout the rest of the year.

Planning, organizing, and delivering the conference would have been impossible to stage without the active participation of many members of the vibrant machine learning and data science communities that we have here at Microsoft. This was my first time leading a conference effort this large, and I learned 5 big things about community management as it relates to putting on an event of this size.

1. Inclusion works.

From a budgetary standpoint, this event was primarily sponsored by my business group. But while we had the money to stage the event, we didn’t have enough people to make the event happen. Also, there are other groups and communities at Microsoft whose audiences and memberships overlap with ours, and who had their own plans for events in this timeframe. Instead of “competing” with those other groups, I reached out to them, explained what we were trying to accomplish, listened to what they were trying to accomplish, and ended up working with most of them to create a combined event that concentrated all our efforts on one big goal.

In the end, seven other groups and communities of varying sizes co-sponsored the event and helped make it a success, with more than 50 people giving their time, expertise, and enthusiasm over the past few months. This mindset of inclusion and cooperation did make some aspects of the event more complicated to manage and track, but the return on investment–in the form of the talents of those 50-plus people–more than made it worth it.

2. Sometimes, you just have to ask.

One of the teams that helped out with the conference was a data science team that works with engineering teams around the company. When the time came for me to find qualified reviewers of proposals and experienced people to give feedback in speaker rehearsals, I didn’t have enough people lined up to do so, because the data scientists on my own team had commitments to Microsoft customers they were busy fulfilling.

So I reached out to Juan’s team and just asked, “Is there any way your team could help out since you have experience?” I got an immediate “Yes,” both because they wanted the event to be a success, and because they publish a journal of applied research, and saw the opportunity in taking part with reviews and rehearsals to discover great work to feature in the journal. This was a classic win-win situation, but we never would have discovered it if I hadn’t made the request.

3. It pays to know your superusers personally.

On the morning of the 2nd day of the conference, I got an urgent email from the videographer who was making a short “sizzle reel” video of the event. He needed someone to interview to give some context and voiceover to the video, and he wanted me to do it. I knew I was the wrong person, since (1) I organized the event, and (2) I am not a data scientist. I immediately I started thinking through who would be right for him to interview. It had to be:

Someone who is a data scientist
Someone who understands the event and why we run it (ideally someone who has presented at the conference)
Someone who is articulate
Someone who is passionate about learning and learning from others
Someone who was actually there at the event that day

It’s hard to describe what happened in my mind over the next 10-15 seconds; it was as if I took our 2500-person community and applied all these criteria, rapidly filtering down to two names out of the dozens or perhaps hundreds of possibilities: Ram and Esin. Ram is a security expert, and he runs a special-interest community focused specifically on machine learning and security. Esin works in our Bing Ads business, and she teaches a regular introductory ML class as part of our community. I looked at the event schedule, guessed which room each was likely to be in at that time, and went to track them down. I found them where I expected them each to be, they both agreed, and less than 90 minutes later the interviews were both done.

The time I had invested over the past couple of years getting to know Ram and Esin personally paid big dividends in this unexpected moment, and I have no doubt that the time spent getting to know other superusers will similarly pay off in the future.

4. Content can be your best community recruiter.

Every time we published content out to the people who registered for the conference–whether it was a draft agenda, an online beginner’s tutorial before the conference itself, a Conference Preview webinar, or something else–we included a call to join the machine learning community at Microsoft. And sure enough, during the weeks before the event, we welcomed hundreds of people to the machine learning community.

I think that putting effort into creating valuable content, and then pairing that content with a call to action to join the community, is so much more effective than a simple request to people to join your community. The fact that you create original content shows your own commitment as community sponsors, and it also gives potential members a sense for the value they will get if they join the community.

5. The metaphor of the conductor and the orchestra really does make sense. We started work on the conference in January, and it was daunting. There was so much I didn’t know, and I had no idea how we would get it done! Now it’s six months later, and I still don’t know how to do so much of what it takes to put on an event of this size. But I’ve come to peace with the fact that I may never be able evaluate a strongly technical machine learning proposal, I can’t find a math error in a data science presentation, and I have no idea how to estimate how much food to order for 1,700 people.

What I can do is conduct the overall experience–that is, make sure that I know people who can do those things well, that I have recruited them to take part, and that they are motivated to do so, understand what’s expected of them, have the information they need to do the work, and feel like they’re getting recognized and rewarded in the ways that they want. Being able to orchestrate all of their individual talents so that they work together seamlessly to make this big event a great experience for our attendees is classic community manager work, and it’s something that I’m going to strive to do even better at our next conference–which is only six months away!

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: July 2015 – Working out Loud, Compensation Research, & AMAs

July 30, 2015 By Hillary Boucher

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.

I’m not going to lie; I spent a part of July with my toes in the sand, but alas vacation is over and instead of digging for treasure with the kids, I’m digging out of my post-vacation inbox. Send help (but not by email)!

Before I get buried in emails I wanted to take a moment to review the past month and note a few highlights from inside TheCR Network. Historically, summer is a quiet time in the network due to vacations and nice weather, but this summer we have a lot going on and people seem really busy with their own community work! Let’s pull back the curtain for a moment and take a look what members have been working on in TheCR Network:

Working Out Loud: We host a weekly work out loud thread for members that we introduced in the past year. It’s an easy way for members to keep one foot in the network when they are busy with their own communities. We’ve found that encouraging members to work out loud regularly helps in a few ways: It enables peer to peer support and problem solving, it surfaces common challenges that our team can respond to and create resources around in responses, it creates opportunities for collaboration, and on a very basic level helps members get to know us and each other better. Working out loud for the win!
Community Careers & Compensation Survey 2015 Working Group: We’re gearing up for the second iteration of our CCC2015 research (launched in 2014 as the Community Manager Salary Survey) by collaborating with members! We are working closely with members in the research working group to ensure our research is aligned with practitioners’ needs. I am happy to see members take advantage of the opportunity to influence TheCR research!
Ask Me Anything (AMA) Threads: We’ve recently launched another tier of our leadership program called TheCR Superheroes. One of activities built off this program is giving the network the opportunity to ask our superheroes anything inside the network. The AMA’s are one week long events and are forum based so members can participate on their own time. This is a fairly new initiative and so far we’re quite happy with the quality of questions and answers we’re getting as a result.

This is just a small piece of what TheCR Network members have access to inside our peer network. If you are interested in learning more about what it’s like to be a member of TheCR Network check out this extensive overview which shares our general programming opportunities and resources made available to members.

Want to access our programming for the benefit of your community work? Reach out and ask us about membership.

Patrick Hellen, Part Two on His Community Superpower

July 28, 2015 By Jim Storer

Welcome to the latest episode in our community podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.”

Join TheCR’s Jim Storer and Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about their community journey. They ask the community questions you want to know the answers to, including:

What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
How would you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

This is part two of Episode #29, featuring Patrick Hellen, Director of Community and Engagement at Deep Information Services. Listen in as we chat about his community superpower (hint: it’s not humility) and what he learned about community management by growing a sketchy moustache.

Don’t miss Part One of our conversation with Patrick.

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Join the community conversation in our facebook group!

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Patrick Hellen on Humor as a Community Superpower

July 15, 2015 By Jim Storer

Welcome to the latest episode in our community podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.”

What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
How would you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

Episode #29 features Patrick Hellen, Director of Community and Engagement at Deep Information Services. You’ll find part one (of two) below, where we chat about getting unlikely folks active in your community and how humor can be a community superpower.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Friday Roundup: TheCR Connect

July 10, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Have you ever wanted to crawl inside your computer and meet up with all the amazing community folks you know to chat about your challenges, vent your community frustrations and walk away energized and inspired by their stories?

Well now you can – sort of.

This week we announced our new workshop series – TheCR Connect, coming soon to a city near you. We’re kicking things off in Boston this Fall. To learn more visit TheCR Connect and join us this October!

Things We Are Reading This Week

The Parable of Reddit or How Traditional Business Models Fail Communities – If you work in the community or digital space, it’s been impossible not to follow the turmoil at Reddit during the last week. It is cause for a lot of anxiety in the community space because until this turmoil hit, Reddit was viewed as community success story – growing geometrically over the years. If Reddit can’t make community work, than who can?

State of Community Management Monday Fact #4: Executive Engagement – Getting executives engaged in community has been a challenge for community managers since the beginning of community management. For every social CEO out there, there are dozens of C-suite members who “don’t have time,” “don’t feel the need” or “don’t see the point.”

Engagement and Community Architecture – 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.

Announcing TheCR Connect – A Workshop for Community Managers – TheCR Connect is technically a workshop for community professionals, but our goal is to have it be much more that that. By bringing together an intimate group of community practitioners we want to facilitate conversations, share knowledge, solve problems, inspire action and provide the tools participants need to go back into their communities and create real, meaningful change.

New Social Media and Community Jobs

Social Business Executive – Marketing Communities & Advocacy – USAA – San Antonio, TX
Technical Marketer – Godaddy – Sunnyvale, CA
Community Manager, Condé Nast Traveler – Condé Nast – Entertainment and Media Industry
– New York City, NY
Marketing Community Manager – Cultura Technologies Inc – Minneapolis, MN
Community Manager – HourlyNerd – Boston, MA
Community Manager – Freaks 4U Gaming GmbH – Los Angeles, CA
Community Manager – Revivn – Brooklyn, NY
Community Manager – Superpedestrian – Cambridge, MA
Social User and Customer Experience Manager – Alternatives – Dublin, Ireland
Editor/Community Manager – Truth In Aging – New York, NY
Community Manager (Intern/Co-op) – Fairchild Semiconductor Incorporated – San Jose, CA

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Looking for a new community event to connect with peers, get hands on community training and workshop your biggest challenges? Join us for TheCR Connect – a workshop for community professionals.

Announcing TheCR Connect – A Workshop for Community Managers

July 7, 2015 By Jim Storer

By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

After over six years of connecting community folks online we are taking this show on the road! I am thrilled to announce our latest venture – TheCR Connect! TheCR Connect is technically a workshop for community professionals, but our goal is to have it be much more that that. By bringing together an intimate group of community practitioners we want to facilitate conversations, share knowledge, solve problems, inspire action and provide the tools participants need to go back into their communities and create real, meaningful change. Basically, TheCR Connect is what our online community – both here and in TheCR Network, would look like if we were all sitting around a big roundtable in a room together, instead of behind our computers and devices.

Our first event takes place on October 1 in our hometown – Boston, MA. You can join an intimate group of people who live and breath community for this day of inspiring speakers, actionable planning sessions, engaged networking and expert case studies – plus some fun surprises.

Participation is limited to just 50 community enthusiasts to ensure that real conversations happen, that every participant can contribute and that everyone walks away with the connections and inspiration to create real change.

If you’re not close enough to Boston to make it in for the event don’t worry – we are targeting a West Coast event in the Winter, and a Mid-West event in the Spring. Stay tuned for a full agenda in the coming weeks.

I hope we’ll see you there, and that you’ll bring your enthusiasm for community building, your passion for connecting with others and your sense of humor! To learn more visit TheCR Connect or request an invite now!

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Did you know TheCR has a facebook group? Join us to chat about current community issues, share advice and connect with other community professionals.

Erin Winker on Transitioning into Community Management

June 30, 2015 By Jim Storer

Welcome to the latest episode in our community podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.”

What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
How would you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

Episode #28, features Erin Winker, a community manager at Aetna. Podcast highlights include:

Advice for transitioning into community management from a more traditional marketing or communications role
The differences between traditional communications and community management
An overview of the power of plain language in community management

Download this podcast.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

Know someone we should have a conversation with? Let us know!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Jerry Canaday on Applying Community Management Principles to Non-Traditional Community Roles

June 16, 2015 By Jim Storer

Our community podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers” is back!

What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
How would you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

We pick up where we left off with episode #27, featuring Jerry Canaday, Solution Architect – Internal Systems at MasterCard. Podcast highlights include:

Applying community management principles to non-traditional community roles
The intersection of the future of the intranet and mobile, and community management.
How community management has a natural analog in professional sports

Download this podcast.

Subscribe to this podcast series.

Know someone we should have a conversation with? Let us know!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Energize your community: the generative power of co-creation

May 21, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

Ever have a conversation with someone who was focused solely on their needs and wants? Of course you have. It doesn’t make for great engagement.

So why do we expect to engage members when we focus solely on our organizational needs?

ChildrenWiPad In a nutshell, that’s the message of a new whitepaper from Anna Caraveli of The Demand Networks and Elizabeth Engel of Spark Consulting that features TheCR Network’s Community Manager (and force of nature) Hillary Boucher. The target audience of “Leading Engagement from the Outside In: Become an Indispensible Partner in Your Members’ Success” is associations, but there are plenty of good points for anyone running a membership network that is striving for engagement.

TheCR Network case study highlights the co-creation of content and programming that Hillary champions with members of TheCR Network on a daily basis in the network. Virtually every project The Community Roundtable has developed in our history has been built in collaboration with our Network members. Indeed, we say the shared purpose of our network is to demonstrate the value of community management, through the co-creation of research that demonstrates its impact.

But true collaboration means much more than expecting free feedback from members. It’s an authentic investment by the organization in supporting the needs, desires, and values of the community members. Our State of Community Management research, for example, is a “Community Roundtable” publication, but the research focus each year is shaped in collaboration with members, and informed by the dozens of Roundtable events planned, created and archived by and/or for the membership.

This approach recognizes that the value of a community is not the network, it’s the relationship between and among the organization and community members. Improving engagement is often less about the mechanics of connecting and more about the value of the relationships to members and the organization.

It’s also great to see the work of one of our community superheroes from the Community Manager Handbook highlighted as well. TheCR Network member Christian Rubio is the Community Director at SERMO, a for-profit, private social network of more than 300,000 doctors, which represents approximately 40 percent of MDs and doctors of osteopathy in the United States. SERMO strengthens the community by building trust among members, creating a network where member contributions serve as a powerful value generator and focusing on ensuring that the valuable data the organization gets from the community is also shared within the community – a generative business model that enhances the value for both SERMO and its members.

Creating valuable engagement, rather than simply generating responses, is at the heart of the work the best communities do each day. It serves us well to follow the lead of organizations that have tapped into the shared value promise of community approaches.

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