The Community Roundtable – like any good community – relies on everyone playing a part to be successful. The great thing about community networks is that very often participants get back proportionally more than they contribute and that is what makes communities sustainable. As a young community, Jim & I have relied on each of our constituent groups – members, facilitators, cheeseheads, and partners – to take a leap of faith with us as we work to create a highly active and valuable community. Communities don’t actually look much like communities with 5 members and so those members that gave us their faith and trust early on that The Community Roundtable would grow to be more than what is was were critical to us. So in this season of Thanksgiving, we are pretty darn thankful to those individuals who believed enough in the vision we had to step up and participate.

While we don’t reveal the names of our members without consent – members who have been active and publicly supportive are the core of what The Community Roundtable is. Heather Strout, Rachel Makool, Dawn Lacallade, Mike Pascucci, Ryan Eades, Naomi Marr, Jamie Pappas, Ken Burbary, Nigel Fortlage, Mark Wallace, & Maggie McGary have been particularly involved and supportive. They are our rockstars (and if you are in community management, you might want to add them to your rockstar list too!). We thank them for taking the leap to join a small network of passionate community and social media managers and for the insight and experience they share with the group.

Another group of individuals who have been incredibly generous with us are our Facilitators. This group includes mostly independent consultants who have deep expertise in one area that is relevant to community management.  They have joined in to share their expertise and help our members think through some of their questions and challenges.  The result has been a rich set of conversations and resulting best practices and lessons learned that we feed back into the community.  These experts are people we trust and recommend to our members as people worth listening to – and we recommend them to those looking for expertise in the areas they cover.  Included in this talented crew are: Francois Gossieaux, Laura Fitton, Leslie Poston, Mark Yolton, Steve Garfield, Beth Kanter, Cynthia Gilbert, Janet Fouts, Nathan Gilliatt, Michael Katz, KD Paine, Len Devanna, and Gia Lyons. We thank our facilitators for sharing their experience and expertise with our members – the personal connection and conversations have been wonderful.

One more group of individuals we want to thank are those people that manage companies with aligned missions and see the importance of community management to the success of their customers. We’ve partnered with Burton Group, Rosetta, KickApps, introNetworks, and Powered through the leadership of  Mike Gotta, Adam Cohen, Michael Chin, Mark Sylvester, and Aaron Strout. We are incredibly honored to be in the company of these individuals and companies and thank them for their enthusiastic support – they provide us with recognition and credibility that would be hard to achieve in isolation.  Look for more in the coming months.

We are also thankful for a whole set of individuals in the Boston area who join us for our #TheCRLive lunches (see the #TheCRLive Twitter List) and some cheeseheads and others who have reached out to us, given us their time and advice, or encouraged us – often without anything particular to gain themselves. When we started The Community Roundtable in the spring I wrote a post, It Take A Village about what it takes to start a business and over the past six months that early hypothesis has been confirmed. A community is all about relationships and we are incredibly thankful to have some great ones with people we respect and enjoy.

As a personal note I’m pretty thankful to have partnered with Jim Storer – while we didn’t know exactly what we were getting ourselves into he and I have found that we compliment each other very well. We wouldn’t be where we are without his thoughtful leadership, excellent community management instincts,  great negotiating skills, podcast wizardry, and fine dry wit.

We hope you have a wonderful (is off-line too much to hope for?) Thanksgiving with family and friends!

The Community Roundtable as a concept was launched at this year’s SXSW.  Jim & I went to SXSW both to meet people and get feedback on our idea to build a private, fee-based peer network for social media and community managers.  Suffice it to say we got enough encouragement to continue and in fact, several people we spoke with considered it an essential component in making the job of community management more recognized and respected.

There have been casual groups and occasional gatherings of community managers for a some time. Great conferences like the Online Community UnConference, Community 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and the Online Community Summit bring together community managers and we see them as valuable options to continue their education. There are communities built by social software vendors for their customers, which provide good information, but can be tilted toward convincing people communities are worthwhile and/or the software itself and what it can do. There are also LinkedIn groups, Facebook pages and Twitter conversations that focus on open dialogue around social media and community, many of which we participate in, but they lack the consistent, ongoing programs we feel are important to strong community.

However, none of these focus specifically on the the day-to-day or career needs of social media and community managers themselves. Topics like coaching executives, educating employees, determining appropriate community guidelines, engaging customers, evaluating tools, defining metrics, etc. Most sponsorship dollars go toward programming covering the why but not the how. This is the niche The Community Roundtable fills.

We are not free because….

1. First and foremost, we are committed to serving the needs of our members. It’s that simple. That means, as a business, the majority of our revenue needs to come from members. In business terms, there is no other way to stay focused on what our membership needs.
2. Good programming and community management is important and critical to the success of any community and The Community Roundtable is no different. Jim & I could fill our time with consulting projects at the expense of the ongoing needs of the community, but instead choose to provide a high level of service to our members. One thing is clear… community managers are some of the busiest people we know and they need all the help they can get sort through the noise and make the right decisions for their company and career.
3. Fees provide an indication of how serious members and/or their companies are about the community management discipline. We want members who are invested in community and social media management. They are more likely to participate and they push us to do better as well.

We’ve very consciously made the membership fee low enough that the value proposition is clear, but high enough that it provides enough revenue to sustain a values-based business. We also want membership to be accessible to non-profit and government members as they bring in complementary skills and experiences to many of our corporate members (and vise versa).

We’ve also consciously worked to provide free content and an aggregation service through our blog and Twitter feed to community managers who may not be able to afford membership or may only be tangentially interested since it is not their core responsibility. Why do we spend our time on that?  It obviously helps us with finding people who are interested in joining The Community Roundtable, but it also helps further the conversation and thinking in the market. We do want to give something back to the community and are appreciative to those that have recognized that.

And what about sponsors?  Well, we’d rather partner with the vendors and consulting firms in the social software space in a way that complements their technology and services with management training and cross-discipline knowledge sharing. We also want to ensure that we provide a safe, trusted environment for our partners’ customers so our partners never feel like we are offering up their customers as prospects to other vendors.  Interestingly, while we do have some conversations about software in the community, it’s by no means a large percentage of what community managers seem to need to talk about (although they do have an intense need during periods when they are actively evaluating new tools).

Interested in what kind of best practices we document on our weekly roundtable calls? We’ve made the summary of our call on member engagement available here. Our upcoming roundtable schedule and past topics can be found here along with the experts who have joined us to facilitate those conversations.

So that’s our story. In the spirit of open dialogue, we’d love to hear from you.

Is education, training and connecting with peers important to you? How important – worth your time? Worth your money? Do you have ideas on how we can add more value to make membership worth the fee for you?

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TheCR Network is an annual membership-based peer network of community, social media, and social business practitioners. We run strategic, tactical, and professional development programming and events as well as an online community for discussions and making connections.  Join TheCR Network