s @TheCR Quick Case Archives - The Community Roundtable

The Community Roundtable

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

Cindy Melzer on Starting Community Management

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I had a serendipitous intro recently with a couple of different people from Isis Maternity – a local childcare retail and services company – and we got to chatting about online communities. They have operated in a community-centric way in the offline world for quite some time – bringing parents together for maternity and childcare classes and enabling relationships between parents and children. They have just started to explore extending the relationships they build with and among their customers to the online world. It clearly makes a lot of sense.

Cindy Meltzer who is now their community manager, recognized the opportunity to engage more effectively with their existing Facebook Page toward the end of last year.  Like many social initiatives, she started small with some basics and found that Isis’ latent online community was more than ready to engage. She was willing to share with me how she started out and their early results which shows a dramatic increase in members and engagement on their Facebook page as soon as she reached out in a human voice. Community management can start by simply asking questions:

Between October of 2009 and January of 2010, fans of their Facebook Page grew from 699 to 1043 – impressive but not nearly as impressive as the growth in interactions which grew from 7 to 463 per month over that short time.  Cindy and Isis graciously shared these stats to show others who are just starting out what a dramatic difference community management can have and Cindy recently sat down with me to talk a little more about her experiences as a new community manager:

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This post is a follow-up and was inspired by our post The Value of Community Management.

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.

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Practicing What We Preach – One Tweet At A Time

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It is always much easier to say than to do and it takes time and regular recalibration to make sure you are doing what you are recommending to others. In the ‘social’ space particularly, a lot of the recommendations seem like good common sense: be as honest and transparent as possible, listen to your customers, don’t ‘manage’ people, and be modest. Pretty easy to understand and recommend to others. Harder to do especially in a world where the speed of information is increasing because all of those things take thoughtfulness which requires us to pause and think.  The other issue with it is there is no ‘right’ answer with regards to how to execute any of these recommendations – they are almost all judgment calls.

One of this things we believe is that business systems are complex as is the environment of any person in the system. Each person’s environment looks quite different depending on their choices of how they spend their time and resources. In our case by defining our audience as community and social media managers, we know that the networks of our customers and prospects probably overlap a lot on the work/business elements.  That audience likely shares many of the same influencers, the same collection of tools and vendors that they consider, the same information sources and thought leaders. To the extent that our audience thinks of The Community Roundtable, it is only one piece of that complex web.  That networked thinking informs how we do business. Instead of creating our own island we partner, share, and converse broadly. We do add our own thoughts and information to the mix but consider it only one part of what our audience might wish to consume.

This is the perspective that informs how we use Twitter.  Instead of using it as a feed of just our own blog posts and activities (which we do include), we spend time finding and forwarding information from other thought leaders that we think our audience will be interested in. We try to promote people we think have something valuable to say – regardless of our relationship with them. We also often add a ‘voice’ to our tweets and interact like we would from our own personal accounts. We are clear about who is tweeting from the account.

We were asked recently to present how we used Twitter for B2B marketing and what results we were getting. We think it might be useful to those of you either considering using Twitter for business or those of you who may be looking to get a little more traction from your Twitter presence because our Twitter results represent a fairly compact period of time – six months. While we could always do better we are pretty happy with the results given it is only one of the many things we are responsible for every day.

Using Twitter For B2B

View more presentations from Rachel Happe.

What are your tips and tricks? What are you hoping to do with your Twitter account? What metrics do you use to track that? Please share!

Roundtable Call: Tribalization of Business Study

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A big part of what we’re trying to build with The Community Roundtable is a peer network that shares what we learn with our broader community. To that end, we made the Community Maturity Model open source and shared our construct for TheCR Quick Case and continue to figure out new ways to give what we’re doing back to the community at large (we’re currently in the process of launching a public podcast series specifically for community managers… more in another post).

The cornerstone of what we do as a member-based organization are Roundtable Calls. They typically start with a brief introduction by a recognized “expert” and then become a facilitated discussion between members, us and the expert. The best practices and stories that are shared during the discussion often result in “aha” moments for members and lead to deeper bonds between the members. We record the calls and write reports summarizing the best practices that we uncover as a group, never attributing insights to individuals (to maintain their privacy).

We hosted a Roundtable Call last month with Francois Gossieaux from Beeline Labs. He gave an excellent overview of the latest installment of the Tribalization of Business study he’s working on with Ed Moran from Deloitte. Following the call we talked with Francois about “open-sourcing” his intro and in typical Francois fashion he said “go for it!”

In the audio below, Francois compares/contrasts quantitative information from the 2008 and 2009 studies, highlighting where he sees big changes. He also shares several qualitative stories that help illustrate how companies are evolving their business practices to better embrace community. Enjoy!

Interested in learning more about becoming a member of The Community Roundtable? Send us a note or ping us on Twitter.

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Got Examples? @TheCR Quick Case

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One of the consistent themes at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, like at many conferences in this space recently, was the need for more case studies and ROI examples. Both of those are big meaty things to develop and present – when companies are willing to share. It’s partly why so few good examples exist. At The Community Roundtable, over time, we will begin to pull these out and document them but in the short term, we wanted to start off with something smaller and easier. There is a lot of value to documenting smaller techniques and methodologies that may not have the full set of metrics yet but for which something was learned or achieved. We’re calling these @TheCR Quick Cases.

We’ve put a template together for anyone to use – download it here. And yes, it’s in Word, not a wiki – it is still a universal tool for content and these @TheCR Quick Cases are not something that should be open to editing by others.  While we would love to have you fill these out and share them with us (just email to rachel@community-roundtable.com) and our blog audience, feel free to use this template for your own use as well. What types of techniques and methods do we think they are appropriate for?

– How did you get your CxO to blog?

– What role do your community VIPs/cheeseheads play in your community?

– How and why do you recognize community members?

– How do you spend your time as a community manager and how do you articulate the value of each activity to your boss/colleagues?

– How did you divide up your community into groups? What terms and taxonomy did you use?

We’ve included a @TheCR Quick Case to give you an example. While it is early days here at The Community Roundtable, in a short two months we’ve been able to grow our Twitter audience to over 900 people – a few people have asked how we did it. We’re calling the case, How to Be a Twitter Winner.

We would love feedback on either the structure of the template or the content of How to Be a Twitter Winner… and we would love to see your @TheCR Quick Cases!