The Community Roundtable

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

#thankitforward – On community, collaboration and creativity.

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By Maggie Tunning, Learning and Culture Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Thank you to Shannon for highlighting the #thankitforward series again this year! My three picks:

#thankitforward

  1. TheCR Network members. Their experience and insight improves our research and programs. This year I especially enjoyed watching the leaders of our community maturity assessment working group apply the Community Maturity Model to create a roadmap and for internal consulting. They later contributed to a pilot training program for new members learning to apply the model, and not only shared their experiences but helped others working on new ideas for applications.

  2. Co-working spaces that encourage creativity and community. Two of my favorite spots to camp out for a morning or afternoon are the Kaneko Library and the Pilgrimer. The Kaneko Library is a speciality library dedicated to creativity, and in addition to shelves of journals and books in fields that thrive on creative input – science, engineering, advertising, business, design, architecture, the humanities and the arts – they have other resources to fuel creative minds like coffee, Scrabble and Legos. The Pilgrimer is a gathering space supporting local entrepreneurs, makers, artists and non-profit organizations that hosts a retail store for handmade goods and serves amazing pour over coffee.

  3. TheCR team. I feel lucky to collaborate with smart and supportive colleagues every day. One of our traditions that I appreciate this time of year is a Secret Santa gift exchange – the gift of giving and surprising another team member is as much fun as being surprised and receiving gifts, too.

Who are you thankful for this year? We’d love to hear who made a difference in your work and life – just tag it #thankitforward!

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: November 2014 Wrap Up

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.

November was packed with quality programming inside TheCR Network and I found myself joking with members who were attending two (or more) Roundtable calls a week. “Nice to see you again!” I was happy to hear one member respond with, “There’s just so much good stuff happening at TheCR this week.” I love hearing feedback like this! Want a sneak peek of what kinds of programs and discussions were happening inside TheCR Network this month? Take a look:

  • Beyond Engagement: Moving Business & Creating Movements (Roundtable): TheCR member Maria Ogneva originally presented this at JiveWorld in October and I invited her back for a few reasons. Maria had done an call “Building Community from Scratch: Zero to Pilot” last spring and I knew it would be good to get an update and I also knew giving members the opportunity to dig into Maria’s experience and expertise is a valuable opportunity. One of the things we discussed on this call was how to approach ridiculous job postings and negotiate a role that is appropriate for you and the organization. A hot topic with our current Community Manager Salary Research report where we discovered the misalignment of expectations, experience and compensation in the space.
  • Data Visualization Skill Builder (Roundtable): We were grateful to have Tableau’s community manager, Tracy Fitzgerald, in to to share how she uses data to tell her community’s story. And while it was pretty cool to get an insider’s peek at Tableau as a tool, we discussed general best practices for using data to tell the story of your community internally. It was a great call that married some of our traditional storytelling resources together with data collection.
  • Salesforce Dot Com Community (Practitioner Demo): We had a member who recently launched a new community using Salesforce. He offered a demo and while I expected a handful of participants this one really pulled members out of lurkdom. Turns out practitioners really value having the opportunity to receive a tool demo from a fellow practitioner versus a vendor. Glad we can make that happen! We’ll definitely be making these types of vendor test-drives part of our on-going programming.

This is just a small sampling of what we offered members in November. We hosted a Community Maturity Model training, we brought in an expert to teach members about Appreciative Inquiry and how community managers can use this powerful tool, and we dug into the CMSS research. 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 fall programming for the benefit of your community work? Reach out and ask us about membership.

CM Spotlight AMA Archive: Patrick Hellen, CloudLock, Inc.

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager for The Community Roundtable.

When we invited Patrick Hellen, the community manager for CloudLock, Inc  to be our October Community Manager Spotlight we knew we were in for a treat. When HE requested the webinar format be an AMA we knew it was ON. In this 30 minute event Patrick shares his unique perspective on community management while also sharing best practices for job hunting in the community management world.

We ran out of time at the actual AMA and Patrick didn’t get to answer all the questions we received. He was nice enough to send along his answers to even more community questions!

At this new role you’re building community from scratch. Tell us about that experience.

Overall, it was pretty straightforward, but it was intense. I started off by fully building an RFP, while I also built my inner support system. Before I had a single electron of community built, I had talked to, interviewed, and recruited people to help with set up, configuration, reporting, content creation, etc. This was actually the most important step – to fully ensure that I had a support system, and a pre bought in, internal group to help with the community once it was up and running.

From there, it really was just configuration and building. That ended up being a breeze once I had that system in place.

What are your community management resource must-haves?

Pocket – to save articles that I think are interesting and that I can reference later, Tweet deck – to keep in touch with peers and contemporaries, and a few communities – Salesforce’s success one, the CR, Community Geek, and Reddit.

What is the one thing you wish you knew when you were just starting out in community management?

That there’s a hell of a lot more data management involved than I expected, and that if someone doesnt have community built into their goals or job description, you can pretty much guarantee that when the push comes to shove, you get dropped off the TO-DO list pretty easily.

Thus, my initial support push at my current gig.

What do you do when your community goes “quiet?”

Panic.

Generally my initial push for quiet communities is to ask members for something. A subtle reminder that membership is not a receive info only type system, but does require their input and communication to survive.

So, Polls, questions, feedback requests, etc.

Check out the full archive for more:

This content has moved inside The Network.

Patrick Hellen is the community manager for CloudLock, Inc – a cloud security company just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. He currently runs CloudLock Connect, a customer only collaboration community. Most recently he worked for Rapid7, where he managed their SecurityStreet Community.

He’s an unabashed Twitter addict, plays far too many video games, reads nearly constantly, and considers the internet to be mankind’s greatest invention. Follow him at @patrickch, and say hi.

Our Community Manager Spotlight Series is a behind the scenes look at the diverse world of community managers. View the complete archive here.

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Looking to connect with community peers like Patrick? Join TheCR Network and pull a chair up to the table of the smartest community professionals.

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TheCR Network Sneak Peek: October 2014 Wrap Up

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Oh, October, with your foliage, pumpkin spice lattes, and your community programming. It’s a great time to be a community practitioner and we’ve had a busy month inside the TheCR Network. Here are a few samplings of what’s been going on:

  • 10 Content Curation Techniques for Your Online Community (Roundtable): TheCR Champion Maddie Grant invited Ed Barrett, VP of Members & Marketing at the Global Business Travel Association, to discuss the content strategies he uses at GBTA. This call was a big hit with participants and we appreciated Ed’s focus on metrics driven decision making and practical ideas for sourcing content for your community.
  • The Social Executive Series (Working Group): We have another TheCR Champion, Jennifer Honig,  kicking off a new programming series for members that will focus on cracking the executive engagement nut in your online community. This month she posted a call for working group members, received buy-in from members, and then surveyed the group to find out the specific challenges they want to tackle together on the topic of executive engagement. I’m really looking forward to watching this group progress.
  • Intro to the Community Maturity Model (Pilot Training): We launched a pilot training program for new members of TheCR Network. This mini-training gives participants a crash course on the Community Maturity Model (CMM) and how we organize the network and our programming off the model. Participants are about to hear (today!) from two other members who have applied the CMM to their community work and the training wraps up with participants designing a project where they apply to the CMM to an aspect of their own work. We’re really excited to see how this pilot program is received. Our hope is that the better members understand the CMM, the more they are able to leverage our resources, making them more successful with their community efforts.

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 fall 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.

Introducing TheCR Champions: Maddie Grant

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.

(This is the second post in our series highlighting TheCR Champion program. Read part one here.)

This month we announced a new leadership program — TheCR Champions – for TheCR Network. Today I want to introduce you to one of our new Champions!

Maddie Grant is a long time friend of TheCR and has facilitated Roundtable calls as a guest TheCR Expert a number of times over the past few years. We are thrilled to have her facilitating a working group and helping us to deepen our engagement, content and programming. Lucky us!

Maddie Grant

Want to learn more about Maddie, her expertise, and the working group she is facilitating? Read on!

Maddie, tell us a little bit about your background.

I’m a social/digital strategist and serial entrepreneur, based in Washington DC. I consult to mostly associations and nonprofits and my main company, SocialFish, is a large social media blog (about 35 writers) for that industry.  I currently run an Essentials of Community Management crash course.  I also consult through ICF Interactive, and two of my clients are big community management projects, both of which are basically relaunches after failed starts. (Reasons why they failed the first time? Lack of internal support and infrastructure, of course! I bet everyone here could have guessed that one!).

I also have a brand new consulting firm (you heard it here first!) called Culture That Works LLC with my partner (in life) Jamie Notter, who is also my co-author on our book Humanize: How People Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World. We’re currently writing our next book, on millennial thinking, and the company is for the culture consulting work we do together. This relates directly to community building, because a lot of what we write about and consult on is internal and external collaboration, as well as culture change related to technology change.

So, it seems the common thread for all of this is online communities! Yay!

What working group will you be facilitating and what are your goals for the group?

I have been invited to TheCR (thanks Rachel and Hillary!) to facilitate the associations and nonprofits working group. My goals for the association and nonprofit group is first to help connect people to each other; I’ve been described as a “bridger” IRL (so to speak) and connecting the dots between people and between communities is something I do pretty naturally.  Second, my goal is to help bring in expertise related to nonprofits, which will hopefully be relevant to anyone in the CR.  Nonprofits and associations have important community-driven missions –to do with pushing our industries forward and/or changing the world for the better– that are directly tied to our ability to build community online. So connections and learning, those are my two big goals.

Do you have a community that you are especially passionate about?

A community on the side that I am crazy passionate about is this – I run social strategy for Artomatic, a huge nonprofit arts festival in DC. We attract about 75,000 people and 2500 artists and performers to each event, and the whole thing is volunteer run – so part of my job is corralling the hundreds of volunteers, both short term and long term.

Thank you Maddie! We are excited to collaborate with you.

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Want to take advantage of exclusive TheCR Champion programming inside TheCR Network? Join today.

Exploring Engagement: The Dance Floor Theory

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Note: This post is based on a TheCR Network expert-led Roundtable Call titled “Exploring Engagement: The Dance Floor Theory.” The full Roundtable report for this call, and over 200 other community-focused Roundtable reports, is available exclusively to members of TheCR Network.

Since last week’s #ESNchat was focused on driving engagement in enterprise social networks I thought it would be fun to share some excerpts from a popular Roundtable call inside TheCR Network. We were lucky enough to host Kevin Prentiss, the CEO of Red Rover, as he gave an overview of his Dance Floor Theory and how it related to community management.

Pretend You’re Back in 8th Grade

engagementKevin asked everyone to visualize themselves hovering above a dance floor. What they would likely observe is the development of an engagement pattern. Let’s say that the most engaged people are a “five” and the least engaged people are “neutrals”. Those people who are the most engaged will aggregate towards the center. They will move closer together and will radiate the most energy. Conversely, those people on the edge will stand apart from each other with their arms likely crossed; they will not participate at the same level, nor will they emit the same level of energy. This will form a curve of participation. This same pattern of engagement and this same curve can also be seen in community engagement.

How To Increase Engagement

In order to increase engagement, the idea is to move the neutrals up to the ones, the ones up to the twos, the twos to the threes, etc. There are cautions to this, however. Do not try to drag a neutral out into the middle of the dance floor with a bunch of fives. What will happen is that the fives unwittingly, but literally, attack the neutrals. The fives and the neutrals literally repel each other. This is an important insight for community management. The community manager must get to know who their fives are, as well as the rest of the people dynamics, in order to help effectively spur engagement.

The Good Kind of (Community) Contagious

Feelings are contagious through peer behavior. When people get in that conductive dance floor place, it is the actual movement of other people that triggers the mirror self. People feel enthusiasm and it spurs action in others. The key concept here is peer. People are far more influenced by those that they consider to be their peers.

After Kevin shared a (much more!) in-depth look at the theory, members shared their best engagement tips, including:

  • Pick five members of their community at random and send them each a personalized post card as a means of reaching out to touch base.
  • Run community-based programs that coincide with real-life events (i.e. the World Series or the Oscars) and pit the your members against each other – in a fun way!
  • Incorporate video into the forums to increase engagement.

How do you drive engagement in your community? We’d love to hear your best ideas!

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Looking for more resources to help drive engagement in your community? Join TheCR Network and access exclusive templates, research, tools, networking and more!

 

Friday Roundup: The Champions Edition

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

apple orchardHappy Friday! It’s shaping up to be a beautiful Fall weekend here in New England. We’d still buzzing about our latest announcement – the introduction of the TheCR Champion program inside TheCR Network (check out this summary from our community manager, Hillary Boucher for all the details).

Fall 2014 is really shaping up to be an exciting time here at TheCR – and it’s not over yet – we are still sorting through the data from the Community Manager Salary Survey and can’t wait to share the results with you!

What are you looking forward to this long weekend (if you’re in the US)? I might get out and do some apple picking (and apple cider donut eating!) Have a wonderful long weekend and we’ll see you back here on Tuesday.

Our favorite news and articles from around the web: 

Introducing TheCR Champion Program – Turns out Fall 2014 is a pretty big season here at TheCR. (In case you missed it we announced a new service last week and announced our new partnership with #ESNchat the week before!) Today, I’m excited to share some news from inside TheCR Network.

The Anatomy of an Enterprise Community Manager – Last week I hosted a Sitrion TALKS session with a panel of awesome community managers. The basis was one of my favorite infographics, Inside the Mind of a Community Manager. We had a great conversation on internal and external community management and some of the synergies and differences between the two.

Upcoming Crowd Companies Summit: Fall 2014, NYC – Crowd Companies is hosting our next Summit in NYC hosted by Polycom at their amazing office near Madison Square Garden. Crowd Companies council, which now comprises of over 41 large corporations will focus on “The Future of Money” and “The Future of Finance”.

Community Manager AMA with Patrick Hellen – Don’t miss this free webinar on 10/29 with Patrick Hellen, Community Manager at Cloud Lock Inc. Be prepared to ask him anything! (Or send us your questions now!)

Enterprise collaboration tools encourage communication, inside and out – Companies are increasingly using enterprise collaboration tools to brainstorm ideas in a secure, recordable fashion, internally and beyond the perimeter of a company’s four walls.

Inside The Ropes: The Rise Of The Super Fan – Lady Gaga has her Little Monsters. Justin Bieber has his Beliebers. True Blood has its Truebies. Today’s super fans are the digital, hyper-empowered version of the ’90s street teams who passed out flyers and requested singles from radio stations.

Reframing Volunteering In Online Communities – Tell someone you volunteer your time to help your community. The response is positive. If you add the word ‘online’ to that sentence, the context changes.It feels less meaningful, less valuable, a poorer contribution to society.That’s the problem with online volunteering, it’s hard to visualise what this means.

New community and social media jobs: 

  1. Community Manager Intern – Attivio Inc. – Newton, MA
  2. Community Manager – Centrify Corporation – Santa Clara, CA
  3. Marketing and Community Manager – Creative Circle – New York, NY
  4. International Community Manager – Blasting News – San Francisco, CA
  5. Manager, Social – Resource Interactive LLC – Columbus, OH
  6. Community Manager – FirstService Residential – Las Vegas, NV
  7. Sr. Communtiy Manager – FirstService Residential – Irvine, CA
  8. Community Engagement Manager – Open Forum – Harvard University – Boston, MA
  9. Social Media Community Manager – 87AM – New York, NY
  10. Online Community Manager-The Science Advisory Board – BioInformatics, LLC – Arlington, VA

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Looking to jump start your community initiatives? Check out the research, resources and networking exclusive to TheCR Network.

Introducing TheCR Champion Program

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager The Community Roundtable.

Turns out Fall 2014 is a pretty big season here at TheCR. (In case you missed it we announced a new service last week and announced our new partnership with #ESNchat the week before!) Today, I’m excited to share some news from inside TheCR Network.

ChampionsAfter months of work, we are launching a leadership program for TheCR Network called TheCR Champions. This program serves to:

  • Deepen conversations among special interest groups who share a common use case or characteristic 
  • Enhance our content and programming by having community leaders, who have deep expertise in their domain, lead conversations
  • Connect you more closely with similar peers and industry experts

We’ve sought out Champions who are experts in the space and who can add depth to the conversation in their respective domains, introduce members to the others within their personal networks, and facilitate a special interest group within TheCR Network.

We have launched three special interest groups to start:

  • Associations & NFP/Non-Profits: exploring issues related to associations and non-profit organizations in the social and community space
  • The Social Executive: to explore and curate best practices for gaining executive support and coaching executives to get started and succeed in their communities
  • Business Model Innovation: to explore the critical role of community elements in the development of new business models at enterprises large and small

We have groups on social support and governance launching soon, with groups on ESN/collaboration and social media in the works.

What does this mean for our members? They’ve seen (and will continue to see) more content and programming (available to the entire network but tailored to specific groups) with a variety of quality facilitators and guest experts that address special interests. 

For me, it’s the culmination of months of work below the visible surface of the community – the iceberg effect of community management – and over the next few weeks, I’ll be introducing our first TheCR Champions on the blog. We are honored to work with them and excited to have them invest their time and expertise inside the network, and we want to give you an idea of the special work they are doing.

Thanks for reading along. I love sharing the cool stuff that happens inside the Network, and I’d love to chat with you if you think membership might be a good fit for you and your community journey. Drop me a line!
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Want to take advantage of programs like TheCR Champions? Join the Network today!

Guest Post: The Anatomy of an Enterprise Community Manager

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luke sinclair, Enterprise Community ManagerNote: This is a guest post by community professional and TheCR Network member Luke Sinclair. 

Last week I hosted a Sitrion TALKS session with a panel of awesome community managers. The basis was one of my favorite infographics, Inside the Mind of a Community Manager. We had a great conversation on internal and external community management and some of the synergies and differences between the two.

Afterwards, I got thinking. Is there a graphic to represent the make-up of an Enterprise Community Manager? Not that I’m aware of. Since then, I’ve been busily whipping up my latest creation: “Anatomy of an Enterprise Community Manager.”

I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments and feedback! Does this sum up your role as an Enterprise Community Manager? Are you thinking about hiring one and now feel clearer about the role?

Enterprise Community Manager

 

 

Note this post originally appeared on the Sitrion blog, where Luke blogs regularly about community management challenges.

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Interested in how TheCR Network can connect you with like-minded community management professionals like Luke? Learn more or drop us a line.

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: September 2014 Wrap-Up

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable.

September is a big month inside TheCR Network, and as the community manager of this fine community I have been feeling the burn! We launch a robust programming schedule for the Network every September and members took full advantage of the live, interactive sessions offered to them as part of their membership. Here are a few samplings of what was discussed:

  • Undeniable Story: The Science & Intuition of Engagement (Roundtable/Skillbuilder): I considered this session the opening keynote of fall programming. Michael Margolis, CEO of Get Storied, and friend of TheCR came in to share his expertise of storytelling in business. Some folks came to learn how to better tell the story of their community and its value internally and others were focused on how to create great stories about their organization and its products and/or services to facilitate engagement in external customer facing communities. No matter the use case, Michael held us captivated and offered a number of strategies and exercises to help us become master storytellers. In the words on one community leader, “I felt like he was holding the missing puzzle piece I have been seeking for some time now :-).”
  • A Tale of Community, Intranet Integration & the Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow (Roundtable/Case Study): One of the things our members find consistently helpful is to hear the stories of community programs that are more mature and well established. It helps give perspective and they have a chance to ask important questions to fellow practitioners (How did you gain executive support for that? What were the triggers that preceded the need for that program? How did the team restructure as a result of this initiative?). On this call we learned first hand from an EMC practitioner what it took to undergo a community and intranet integration and the ROI it brought the company.
  • Introduction to The Community Performance Benchmark (Webinar): We’ve been putting the finishing touches on a new service offering. I can’t go into too much detail here, because it’s still in top secret mode, but membership has its perks and we like to make sure our members have first access. And since this new service is built upon the State of Community Management research we’ve worked on collaboratively with our members it was created with them in mind. On this webinar, Rachel shares with members and their special guests more about this new service and an offer for special member pricing.

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.

Want to access our fall 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.