The Community Roundtable

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

Renee Vogt, Merck

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podcastWelcome to the latest episode in our community management podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers” featuring Renee Vogt, VTN Capability Owner at Merck.

Join TheCR’s founder and principal, Jim Storer, and director of marketing, Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about a variety of community topics, including:

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

Episode #42 features Renee Vogt, VTN Capability Owner at Merck. Join us as we chat about her team’s community purpose framework, how they help community stewards measure the value and health of each community, and how her background in knowledge management has shaped her community approach.

Check out episode #42 featuring Renee Vogt here:

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TheCR Network August Highlights: Navigating Social Crises

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable

TheCR Network logoAugust, I don’t want to say good-bye! The summer months are so good, but fall is rapidly approaching. I spent most of the month preparing for a busy September and it’s helpful to look back and reflect on highlights from inside TheCR Network:

  • Navigating Current Events & Social Crises in Your Community (Roundtable Call): We pause Roundtable programming for summer, but sometimes an emergent topic is important and relevant enough for us to schedule one. In this case, members gathered to discuss the common challenges they face while navigating current events & social crises in their internal employee communities. The group had an insightful and meaningful conversation and we shared best practices on how to proactively approach governance for our communities.

  • Screen Shot 2016-08-22 at 5.03.53 PMShow & Tell (Discussion Threads): We notice it’s super helpful to peek at others’ community architecture, design, campaigns, and programs. This summer we set up a number of show & tell threads to help curate helpful community examples. Members shared screenshots of their home pages, new member pages, dashboards, and ideation programs. I’m very happy to continue to grow them and have as resources in the network.

  • Gamification (Resource Bundle): One thing is for sure — a network of community practitioners creates a lot of content! We like to curate and organize information topically to make it easier for members to find helpful resources. This month we released a new resource bundle filled with reports, discussions and case studies on how to encourage engagement and reach business and community goals using gamification tactics.

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Want to access our exclusive community programming for the benefit of your community work? Looking for community peers to share with and learn form? Click here to learn more about membership in TheCR Network or feel free to reach out to ask us any questions.

TheCR Network

Just Because You Invite Me, Doesn’t Mean I’ll Come

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By Marjorie Anderson, Community Engagement Specialist at PMI and member of TheCR Network. 

Screen Shot 2016-08-23 at 9.39.26 AMOne of the many wonderful things about an association having a member-facing online community is that there’s something in it for everyone. Maybe one of the most challenging things about an association that has a member-facing online community is getting staff and internal stakeholders to see that there’s something in it for everyone.

You’ve probably heard it all:

  • I don’t need to be a part of the community
  • I don’t want to be inundated with connection requests and e-mails
  • I don’t have time!
  • I don’t see how it can help my department

It’s the old “if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it” way of thinking. Of course, you have ammunition in your back pocket that’s going to settle these concerns, but have you educated yourself with information about staff and other internal stakeholders to find out why they would want to or need to engage?

“Marjorie, what are you talking about? We’ve already demonstrated the value of the community to executive level staff, so people should just be ready to jump on board!”

Not so much.

Let’s just say you want to engage your marketing department. To you, it makes perfeassociation community managementct sense for them to create a profile and get a pulse on what’s going on in the community and what your members are saying. After all, this is information they may not be able to gather through normal market research avenues. But does it make sense to them to be there? Do you know what their business goals are and how their involvement will ultimately help them succeed? If your answer to this is “no,” you may want to rethink who you’re trying to engage and why.

Familiarize yourself with your organization’s business goals and departmental goals. If you don’t have access to this information, have conversations. Talk to your peers about what they are working on and then offer solutions. Community is an essential place that can help your organization meeting its goals. But you can’t stop once you have executive buy-in. If you’re not helping your organization see the value in what the community has to offer, you can’t expect much support for future growth.

What are some ways that you’ve helped your organization realize the value in your community?

Why Doodling, Drawing and Visual Storytelling Are Good For Community

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By Amy Turner, The Community Roundtableblog image_doodling

If we look back in history, we have been using visuals to communicate complex information for years through the use of diagrams, graphs, charts, etc. In today’s complex environment, we need visuals to help us make sense of the world. Raw data is too much of a sensory overload.

TheCR Network had a unique call with Nancy White, Founder of Full Circle Associates, to explore the use of collaborative drawing and visual storytelling across social media and community. Nancy learned that her sense of doodling at meetings was a way to help her pay attention, motivating her to develop a practice of both offline and online graphic facilitation through the use of visuals.

Six Fun Facts About Visuals:

  1. Visuals can help keep some people more focused, particularly those that have a difficult time in audio-only mode.
  2. Shared visuals can allow people to participate in different ways. Drawing is very social and can help move people out of their comfort zone, activating a different part of the brain to help improve engagement.
  3. Visuals can invite storytelling and meaning-making, whereas the printed sentence can stifle communication.
  4. Visuals can help organize our thoughts better than text in order to help people connect concepts.
  5. Adding beauty to text as a form of communication can actually make people stop and take a breath. This is especially important in blogging, allowing the visual to impact what you are trying to express.
  6. Comics as an online communication and engagement medium are becoming more popular. There are tools that allow people to create their own comics as a method of dialoguing with each other.

Visuals And Community:

  • Visuals can draw people together. When people first went online, a common complaint was Screen Shot 2016-07-08 at 8.50.20 AMthat it was difficult to form relationships due to the lack of body language. Emoticons were the early tools for self-expression. Now, we can embed images and draw together online, which can help us communicate better. Furthermore, video has introduced a whole new way to connect people online.
  • Visuals help clarify communication. When someone writes a sentence, they think that their intent is clear and that it is received by the recipient as clear. However, when we start looking at visuals together, they are much more negotiable. People say: “Well, what did you mean by that?” One person could interpret it one way and another individual could interpret it another way. For some reason, individuals are willing to be open to interpretation within a drawing, but are much more black and white when it comes to text. If you are in a community where you are trying to make meaning (particularly in work communities where people are trying to design or problem-solve), a visual opens up a discussion whereas a statement may close it.
  • Social reporting. Nancy explained that social reporting is “The act of people participating in the capturing of what is happening in a face-to-face event to share with the wider world or as a way to capture what happened.” This could be live blogging, live tweeting, graphically recording, photographing and/or videoing. The key is that it is a participatory process rather than something that is done by an outsider professionally. When a community can capture its own artifacts, some very interesting things can happen. When we participate in the creation of content around something we are learning or doing, it deepens our own learning and locks it in our brains. It is the process of participating in the conversation on one hand and making it concrete on the other. This connects people more than somebody doing it for them.

How do you use visuals to better impact your community and social channels?

 

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: June 2016

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable

TheCR Network logoIt is officially Summer! And while our programming does slow down a little in the Summer months June was bustling with activity. We wrapped up another guided community management training course (free for all members), launched an exciting new group and saw tons of activity in our discussion threads.

Check what else has been going on inside TheCR Network this past month:

  • External Community Fundamentals (Training): Our second official community training class – External Community Fundamentals – just wrapped up and we are delighted with the results. 30 participants contributed to active discussions around the content and people were quick to share their “homework” worksheets with each other to extend the learning even further. Bundling training into our standard membership was one of the most exciting things we’ve done this year – I love providing more value to our members!

  • CommunityToolsandPlatforms_1Community Tools & Platforms Group (Content Group): TheCR Network is organized internally into groups – like mini-communities of practice. This month we launched another interest specific group – a Community Tools & Platforms Group. The Network is already a safe place for members to ask questions, share stories and get great advice. With this new group we’ve taken it a step further – no vendors allowed. While our members have always shared candid advice about their experiences with different vendors this is just a new way to gather that info in one place, and make finding an answer to the questions you have even easier. Our goal with this group is to help members assess and choose community platforms more strategically.

  • Ideation, Challenges & Community (Discussion Thread): Nothing makes my community management heart sing like members helping members. This month we had a lively discussion centered around “Ideation, Challenges & Community” – which resulted in some epic sharing on our members parts. This was a textbook example of community gone right – members sharing program details and lessons learned to help each other learn and grow. Can’t ask for much more than engagement like that!

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Want to access our exclusive community programming for the benefit of your community work? Looking for community peers to share with and learn form? Reach out and ask us about membership in TheCR Network

TheCR Network

A Community for Community Managers

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TheCR Network logoAt The Community Roundtable, we’ve been running a community for community managers for seven years – TheCR Network. Running TheCR Network allows us to learn together every day along with hundreds of the best community professionals in the business, from over 150 organizations.

Our shared purpose in starting TheCR Network was to demonstrate the value of community management. In 2009, very few people understood what community managers did, let alone their value.

Together, our shared value has been to develop and document the evolving disciple of community management, which we do through research, programing and lots of conversations. Together we have helped make  community management more well understood and, according to our research, a strategic enabler for the c-suite. That’s progress to be very proud of!

It’s been an amazing journey so far and as community management becomes the future of all management and as engagement becomes core to both the customer experience and the employee experience, we are learning together what it means to execute on that vision. We have learned that communities are a key enabler of addressing complex organizational goals – culture change, knowledge management, digital transformation, innovation, collaboration. Communities are what allow organizations to trigger, model and reward new behaviors – and create the supportive and encouraging environment individuals need to believe the change is worthwhile – all of which creates tremendous value for the organization.

So what makes TheCR Network so special?

First, our members are really what make TheCR Network special – individuals who sit in different types and sizes of organizations working on different complex problems all of whom want to solve those problems using a collaborative, community-based approach.

Together, we highlight when community management is done well and help organize and structure community management so it is easier to understand and easier to describe. We do that through our community programs that are designed to create member collisions in a variety of ways:

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Roundtable Calls

We host 3-4 roundtable calls each month on a wide variety of topics related to community management. Sometimes these calls are facilitated by an outside expert and sometimes they are a group of members sharing an approach. A library of over 200 roundtable call reports gives members a wealth of expertise to access as needed.
Community Manager Working Out Loud in TheCR Network

Weekly Work Out Loud

Every week, we ask members to share their weekly goals. This not only encourages our members to step back once a week to think through their tasks strategically, it also helps us understand how to proactively provide connections to people and content they may not know is out there. The biggest benefit, however, is it helps members connect and share with each other.
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Weekly Community Managers Newsletter

It can be challenging keeping up with all the conversations, programs and activity going on in the community. It’s our job to help curate so members can identify the topics and activity that will help them most. Our weekly newsletter is how we help our members sift through what matters the most each week.
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Community Management Training

Twice a year, we run more structured training courses for both internal and external community professionals. This Community Management Fundamentals training provides an opportunity to level set on the basics for newer community managers and an opportunity to step back and refocus for more experienced community managers. It’s comprised of a series of short videos, worksheets and facilitated discussions with other members.
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New Member Calls

New member calls are designed to acclimate new members to both the structure and the culture of TheCR Network so that they feel comfortable jumping in and joining conversations or Roundtable Calls. It’s also important that we get to know and understand them so that we can provide better support.
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Happy Hour Chats

Being a community manager can be isolating – not everyone has a team of colleagues to meet up with for a delicious drink after work and shoot the breeze. Our weekly Happy Hour Chats are a great way for members to kick back, unwind, and maybe even vent about what’s going on in their communities. These are a great way for members to ask informal questions, stay up-to-date on industry trends and share what they are working on.
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Ask Me Anything

Ask and you shall receive – literally. AMAs allow members to receive the answers to their most pressing community questions. Every month we put one community expert in the hot seat and they answer any questions that the Network throws their way. This is a great way to showcase member expertise and help people connect with the info they didn’t know they needed.
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Community Buzz

Life – and content in the Network – moves pretty fast sometimes. The Community Buzz is a weekly opt-in email that provides members with a summary of the top content in the Network – questions that might need answering, hot topics being debated and discussions that they shouldn’t miss.
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Live Networking Events

Our members are located all over the world, and while we believe in the power of connecting online there is something to be said to getting together over tasty food and drink and getting to know someone in person. We facilitate a number of live networking events exclusively for members. These events include lunches, dinners, happy hours and TheCR Connect workshops to bring together members and deepen the connections made inside the TheCR Network.

What does all of that look like on a monthly basis?

Here is an example of a month of events in TheCR Network. We find that different members like different things – like all communities we have listeners who read and absorb a lot but participate only occasionally. We have other members who are more socially motivated who tend to participate in the weekly Work Out Loud discussions and come to Happy Hour more often. We have Roundtable Call regulars who come to just about every discussion we have and others who really like the structured training.TheCRNetwork_April2016_ProgrammingCalendar

TheCR Network offers something for every community professional – and we hope you will consider joining!

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Community Takes Center Stage

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By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable

Without a doubt the highlight of our programming year in 2015 was TheCR Connect. We loved getting community pros together to chat about their work, share challenges and problem solve together and deepen the relationships that are started inside TheCR Network.

So of course we’re looking forward to this year’s big event – TheCR Connect 2016: Community Takes Center Stage. I wanted to share some more details about the event, including who you’ll meet, what you’ll learn and what to expect.

TheCR Connect

 

We’d love for you to join us inside TheCR Network, and in person at TheCR Connect. The early bird discount expires in just two weeks so now is the time to register!! 

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Championing Community Management at SXSW 2017

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By friend of TheCR Kate Baucherel, Co-Founder, ambix.io

sxswAt the 2016 South by South West Interactive Festival’s Community Management meetup, professionals from across the world agreed that our discipline needs greater prominence at SXSW 2017. Sessions tagged as “community” in 2016 were often a heartwarming part of SXgood, not showcases of best practice and cutting edge application for business success. Frustrated Community Management professionals vowed to change this for next year.

Following discussions with the SXSW organisers themselves, we are appealing for all community professionals who are submitting an idea to the Panel Picker to do one simple thing:

Tag your proposal with Community Management.

There are Community Management panel ideas emerging from thought leaders, community professionals, and household name enterprises. The Community Roundtable is also helping its members with submissions to deliver wide-ranging Community Management case studies, best practice, research and, thought leadership.

The Panel Picker process

The Panel Picker opens on 28th June, so this is the time to start planning! Visit the SXSW website to familiarise yourself with the Panel Picker process and requirements. When submitting a panel proposal you will select the stream that your panel submission applies to (branding, content etc), and have the option of adding three tags to give greater context to your talk. Make one of these Community Management, with uppercase C and M. No variations, no substitutions! By using a consistent tag across all panels proposed by community professionals, we can give delegates a clear picture of the breadth of material available when Interactive rolls around next March.

How SxSW handles duplicate content

Where a number of panels are proposed with similar content, the organisers will either select the strongest, or ask several proposers to work together. To deliver a strong Community Management program, talk to your fellow managers: see who else is submitting, what topics are being covered, and whether you can collaborate, or develop a different panel. We have a wealth of experience between us, and it would be a shame to waste any of it.

Food for thought

Could you showcase your expertise in any of the following areas?

  • Delivering business goals effectively
  • Innovation through collaboration
  • How Community Managers influence strategy
  • Community is the responsive front line of your brand
  • Return on Investment
  • Managing customer sentiment: controlling the conversation
  • Branding: Active community management builds loyalty
  • Content distribution and feedback – reconstructed
  • Lessons from consumer communities
  • Planning your intranet
  • Starting out on the right foot: community creation
  • Developing and leading a maturing community.
  • How Community management can fix your social strategy
  • Delivering Community Return on Investment
  • SXgood: community for nonprofits
  • Convergence: film promotion via community
  • Convergence: music fan community management

How to get involved

If you think you’d like to contribute to Community Management programming at SXSW 2017, get in touch as soon as possible. We are trying to reduce the risk of panel duplication, cover a wide range of topics, and put professionals together to share their expertise. Members of The Community Roundtable should email Amy Turner and independent Community professionals email Kate Baucherel.

Best Practices for Content Programming

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Best Practices for Content Programming

Intrigued by TheCR Network, but want to learn more about what membership entails before joining?

Watch Hillary Boucher share a special look inside TheCR Network.  In June Hillary shared a look at the research, programming and professional development available exclusively to Network members and highlighted best practices for optimizing content programming in your community to maximize engagement. It’s a must-see for any community professionals that are tasked with planning, executing and managing content programs inside their internal or external community

Access the Best Practices for Content Programming webinar recording now!

TheCR Network Sneak Peek: April 2016

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By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at The Community Roundtable

TheCR Network logoSpring has finally sprung here and I don’t think that it is a coincidence that engagement has been growing like the flowers in my yard! Have you been seeing lots of new life in your community? Check what’s been going on inside TheCR Network this past month:

  • Internal Community Fundamentals (Training): We’re cranking through our first guided training class inside the Network and I have to say – engagement and participation is wowing even me. Members are sharing ideas, working through the content together and the excitement and growth is almost electric. Honestly, since this was the first time we rolled out a new program like this we were cautiously optimistic – but the interactions we are seeing that totally validated the idea to offer free training as part of membership.

  • Governance Matters: Steering a Community from Hostile to Helpful (Roundtable Call):
    Case Study: Improving Community SentimentModeration and governance, when applied well, contributes to productive and healthy community cultures. On this call we learned how one fast growing community went from hostile and unwelcoming to productive and helpful. The member team shared how they turned their community culture for the better with the implementation of clear governance policies and a no nonsense approach to moderation. (Want to learn more about this? You can download the case study here – even non-members!)
  • Getting Started – Best Practices for New Member On-boarding (Discussion Thread): Earlier this month a member started a discussion thread asking “Does anyone have a “Getting Started” page in their community to help newbies get rolling?” Lo and behold the answer was a resounding YES from other members – and a robust and lively thread took off. I love seeing our members connect, share and help solve each other’s community problems. In this case many members spoke up and posted page examples, UX tips and tricks, and engagement drivers. Definitely a highlight for me this month!

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Want to access our exclusive community programming for the benefit of your community work? Looking for community peers to share with and learn form? Reach out and ask us about membership in TheCR Network

TheCR Network