View - Higher Logic

Transcription

View - Higher Logic

The Community
Management Handbook
20 LESSONS
From
Community
Superheroes
With support from
THE COMMUNITY MANAGER HANDBOOK would not be possible without the cooperation of the community
manager superheroes who are part of TheCR Network, our network for community professionals. Together with
them we are working to advance the business of community, through demonstrating the value of community and
community management. They come from organizations large and small, in various stages of their community journey.
The Community Roundtable was established in 2009 as a professional development network for community, social
media and social business professionals, providing an extensive array of training, tools, research and advisory services
to members and enterprise customers both in and outside of the U.S. TheCR Network gives members access to
exclusive connections, events, training and resources, as well as immediate support from TheCR and 200 peers in
community and social business roles. TheCR’s Community Maturity Model has been adopted by customers worldwide
as a framework to start, build and grow communities, and the annual State of Community Management provides
in-depth analysis of the growth and maturation of community management. To learn more about The Community
Roundtable and TheCR Network, visit communityroundtable.com.
Higher Logic is an industry leader in cloud-based community platforms, with over 25 million engaged members in
more than 200,000 communities. Organizations worldwide use Higher Logic to bring like-minded people all together,
by giving their community a home where they can meet, share ideas, answer questions and stay energized.
Higher Logic aims to empower relationship building and foster community evolution, which we believe are the
fundamental elements to the long-term relevance of any organization. There’s no denying the power of community—by
fostering its growth, you can open up a world of possibility. Tap into the power your community can generate for you.
Learn more at higherlogic.com.
Design by: Flatfive Design, www.flat5design.com
Table of
CONTENTS
A Letter from Rachel Happe and Jim Storer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Meet the Superheroes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
How to Use this Handbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Defining Community and Community Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Community Maturity Model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The Community Manager Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
The Human Side of Community Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Start
Architecting the Community that Meets Your Needs, Bill Johnston, Autodesk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Understanding Your Members' Needs, Eileen Foran, Limelight Networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Shared Purpose and Shared Value, Jerry Green, H&R Block . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
The Benefits of Starting Small, Rachel Happe and Jim Storer, The Community Roundtable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Creating an Action Plan, Patrick Hellen, CloudLock. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Selecting a Platform, Maria Ogneva, Sidecar Technologies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
The Early Stages of a New Community,
Lesley Lykins, Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Build
Building Stakeholder Support and Involvement, Kirsten Laaspere, Fidelity Investments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Building Enabling Policies, Guidelines and Governance, Lauren Vargas, Aetna. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
The Role of Moderation, Mike Pascucci, Autodesk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Enforcement and Crisis Management, Christian Rubio, SERMO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
The Power of Community Programs, Hillary Boucher, The Community Roundtable. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
The Value of Scorecards, James LaCorte, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Assessing Your Community, Ted Hopton, McGraw-Hill Education. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Grow
Creating a Playbook, Charissa Carnall, Western Union . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
The Power of Advocacy Programs, Matt Brown, Salesforce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Gamification for Engagement, Tracy Maurer, UBM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Sowing Community Across the Organization, J.J. Lovett, CA Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Measuring What Matters, Jeff Ross, Humana. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Benchmarking and Assessing Frameworks, Alex Blanton, Microsoft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Resources and Research from The Community Roundtable. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
The Community Roundtable 1
YOUR
COMMUNITY
IS OUT THERE
They’re your members, your customers, your
enthusiasts. They’re the people who care that
you exist and are passionate about it—they’re
the ones who want to know more and be more
connected. By giving them a home where they
can meet, share ideas, answer questions and stay
energized, you’re empowering them to be part
of your success. There’s no denying the power of
community, by fostering its growth, you open up
a world of possibility.
Bring your people and their ideas together in a dynamic online community:
2 The Community Management Handbook
WWW.HIGHERLOGIC.COM
A Letter from
TheCR FOUNDERS
The idea for a Community Manager Handbook initially came out of a conversation with Bill Johnston,
longtime friend and member of The Community Roundtable and one of the most experienced people
in the community management space. While there is now a lot of research, content and discussion
around the discipline of community management, there are few resources that help someone new to
community management wade in and get a sense of it.
The Community Roundtable was established to help document, research and define what it means to be a
professional community manager. Over the last six years we have collaborated and learned together with
hundreds of community management professionals in TheCR Network. We distill what we learn into research
and content like this handbook. Our hope is that The Community Manager Handbook will be an introduction
to the many areas of focus within community management and to the perspective of some of the leaders in
the space – people we consider to be superheroes.
The Community Manager Handbook is designed as a reference resource – helping address questions, issues
and opportunities, as they tend to appear in the lifecycle of a community. Because communities are complex
and ever changing, there are no simple “5 Things You Can Do Today to Drive Engagement” lists. Instead, you
will find strategic ideas and commentary, research and case studies that give you insight into how experienced
community professionals approach a variety of issues in the lifecycle of a community.
We call them “Superheroes” because that’s what they are. We aren’t saying they are the 20 “best” community
managers or 20 “most successful” ones. But talk with any of them or any number of other community managers
in and outside TheCR Network, as we have the honor to do every day, and you quickly recognize that to be a
successful community manager, you do have to have some superpowers – of patience, perception, balance,
listening, connecting, relationship building and more.
This handbook would not be possible without the years of experience and hard won success of the community
professionals with whom we work – we encourage you to reach out, connect with and thank them for their
insights. It’s been our privilege to collaborate and support them and we hope you find their expertise as
valuable as we do.
Rachel Happe
Jim Storer
Meet the
SUPERHEROES
This handbook would not be possible without the contributions of the 21 community superheroes who told us their
community stories. As part of the conversation, we asked each of them, “What is your community management superpower?”
and used their answer to give them each an appropriate superhero name. There are interesting common traits among the
superheroes—even those from very different backgrounds. Connecting. Listening. Finding common ground. Using humor.
Seeing the big picture. These are all traits that talented community managers use—and they play key roles in their ability
to start, build and grow successful communities.
Bill Johnston
Director of Online Community and Customer Experience, Autodesk
SUPERHERO NAME: The Seer SUPERPOWER: Ability to look holistically at community
Eileen Foran
Senior Online Community Manager, Limelight Networks
SUPERHERO NAME:
The Defuser SUPERPOWER: Humor
Jerry Green
Enterprise Community Strategist, H&R Block
SUPERHERO NAME:
The Senser SUPERPOWER: Empathy
Jim Storer and Rachel Happe, Co-Founders, The Community Roundtable
SUPERHERO NAMES: Jim: The Linkmaster
SUPERPOWERS: Jim: Connecting people
Rachel: The Trendspotter
Rachel: Spotting trends and pattern
Patrick Hellen
Community Manager, CloudLock
SUPERHERO NAME:
The Profiler SUPERPOWER: Ability to read people
Maria Ogneva
Head of Community, Sidecar Technologies
SUPERHERO NAME: The Raconteur
SUPERPOWER: Humor
Lesley Lykins
Director of Member Engagement, Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)
SUPERHERO NAME: The Weaver
SUPERPOWER: Communication
Kirsten Laaspere
Community Manager, Fidelity Investments
SUPERHERO NAME: The Networker
SUPERPOWER: Adaptive Communications
Lauren Vargas
Head of Social Media and Community, Aetna
SUPERHERO NAME:
The Windmill Tilter
SUPERPOWER: Leaning into fear
Mike Pascucci
Manager, Social Media and Community, Autodesk
SUPERHERO NAME: The Wirewalker SUPERPOWER: Balance
Christian Rubio
Community Director, SERMO WorldOne
SUPERHERO NAME:
The Triangulator SUPERPOWER: Finding common interests
Hillary Boucher
Community Manager, The Community Roundtable
SUPERHERO NAME: The Chameleon SUPERPOWER: Adapting to her surroundings
James LaCorte
Social Media Manager, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina
SUPERHERO NAME: The Watcher
SUPERPOWER: Observation
Ted Hopton
Director of Social Business, McGraw-Hill Education
SUPERHERO NAME: The Examiner SUPERPOWER: Optimistic patience
Charissa Carnall
Global Community Manager, Western Union
SUPERHERO NAME:
The Connector SUPERPOWER: Relating to people
Matt Brown
Advocacy Program Manager, Salesforce
SUPERHERO NAME:
The Empowerer
SUPERPOWER: Friendliness
Tracy Maurer
Collaboration Systems Manager, UBM
SUPERHERO NAME:
The Troubleshooter SUPERPOWER: Finding and diagnosing problems
J.J. Lovett
Director, Online Communities, CA Technologies
SUPERHERO NAME: The Bulldog
SUPERPOWER: Persistence
Jeff Ross
Community Manager, Humana
SUPERHERO NAME:
The Zen Master
SUPERPOWER: Calm at all times
Alex Blanton
Senior Program Manager, Microsoft
SUPERHERO NAME:
The Matchmaker SUPERPOWER: Matchmaking
Start
Build
Grow
How to use this
HANDBOOK
The Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community
Superheroes is designed to be a fun and thoughtful approach exploring
the issues community managers face as they try to start, build and grow
communities.
This book won’t answer all your questions, but in the 20 lessons from
TheCR team, our research and our members, we hope you will find ideas
that guide you toward solutions for your particular community.
Each “lesson” features a writeup from The Community Roundtable
on the topic at hand, and a profile that explores how one community
manager tackled the issue.
Defining the Role
Before we get into the “20 Lessons”, what do we mean when we talk about community? First, we’ll define community
and explore the Community Maturity Model and its use as a template for the community journey. Then, we explore the
role of the community manager, and how it fits into larger organizational culture. Lastly, we will look at some personal
pieces of being a community manager in 2015.
The cases that make up the bulk of this Handbook are broken into three sections corresponding to the times when
community managers are most likely to find the situation in their community journey.
Start: Getting a community off the ground begins long before you hit ‘submit’ on that first post. In some cases, you
are the chosen one, empowered to take a community from concept to reality. In others, you are inheriting someone
else’s decisions, and now must either take that vision to reality or skillfully recast it into something that will work.
While every organization’s journey toward a community approach looks different, at this stage companies typically
are using social or community platforms with little coordination across functional groups and business units. There
is also often no formal owner or role to manage the success of communities—until a community manager is hired—
and a cohesive approach has yet to be developed. This section lays out some common challenges you might face in
conceptualizing and beginning a community, from a strategic point of view.
Build: As community initiatives mature, organizations start to bring more structure to their efforts and extend
them to include community management, leadership and cultural initiatives. But with the expansion of community
efforts, community managers face a new set of strategic challenges moving forward that require business integration
and management objectives on top of community engagement tasks.
Grow: As communities grow and succeed, community managers move beyond the basic need to prove the
community has value. In the Grow phase a community often requires community managers to re-evaluate strategic,
infrastructure and management approaches, develop new metrics and create programming that can be adapted to
meet the needs of both new and longtime members of a mature community.
Throughout the handbook, you will find mentions of additional resources and information from The Community
Roundtable. Of course, one of the biggest resources TheCR has to offer is membership in TheCR Network. All
of the community professionals interviewed here are current or recent members of the Network, who have the
opportunity to tap into each other’s expertise, participate in programming and access research and support services.
DEFINING COMMUNITY
& Community Management
Community is a word with many definitions, some place-based, others people-based.
At The Community Roundtable, we define community as:
com·mu·ni·ty (n.): A community is a group of people with shared values, behaviors
and artifacts.
The three shared elements mentioned in that definition all matter. Remove any one of them and the glue
of community comes apart. A community manager is charged with ensuring that the values, behaviors and
artifacts of a specific community are shared in a way that provides benefit both to the members of the
community and to the community’s sponsoring organization.
Community requires investment, from the members, the manager and the organizing entity. So why take a
community approach, in the first place? Because communities are the most effective way we know of getting
members to adopt sustainable new behaviors. That’s not quite as Big Brother-ish as it sounds. Part of what
makes community behavior sustainable is that it is not imposed on the community members, but rather
developed in cooperation with them. Indeed, a strong shared purpose is perhaps the most critical element of
successful communities.
Successful communities drive results. When they come together, communities can:
• Speed information transfer
• Develop shared ownership
• Collaborate on and build shared value
How effectively communities are able to do those things – how well they are able to articulate, adopt and
sustain behavioral changes – depends on how well they are managed. The Community Roundtable developed
a matrix, the Community Maturity Model, that defines community management practices and how they
tend to mature over time. This model is a helpful resource in educating stakeholders about the scope of
community management, for planning community roadmaps, for assessing areas of strength and weakness
and for benchmarking management performance against other communities.
“Why do we need a community manager, anyway?”
Q: What is the difference between a leaderless, self-perpetuating community,
a unicorn and the Loch Ness Monster?
A: One is a myth, and the other two might be animals.
There are some that suggest that with the right tools and inspiration,
we can launch successful communities without someone to lead them.
However, we now know from research that most communities need
managers, and that dedicated community managers have a
fundamental impact on the quality and success of communities.
This is particularly true in organizational contexts where
communities have a specific business purpose.
Our State of Community Management 2014 research found
that dedicated community managers make a huge difference
in engagement, maturity and ability to measure value.
The Community Maturity
MODEL
We developed the Community Maturity Model (CMM) to help organizations understand, plan for and assess the
performance of community and social business initiatives. Our clients use it as a community management checklist, as
a planning tool, and to assess their progress. At TheCR, we use it to organize our research, our curated content and our
training services so that our clients can easily connect the dots and use our work in their strategic planning.
The Community Maturity Model articulates two concepts required to advance the business of community. First, it
defines the eight competencies we believe are required to build successful business communities. Second, it articulates
how these competencies progress from hierarchical organizations to those that have embraced a networked approach
to their business. First published in 2009, the CMM is widely used today by TheCR Network members and others to:
•
•
•
•
•
Evaluate and assess their organization’s social and community efforts through gap analysis
Understand the expertise and skill sets required for successful community development
Develop a roadmap to advance community efforts in their organization
Educate and manage expectations of executives, advocates and colleagues
Create training for those tasked with working on social strategy and community management
Let’s talk a little more about the competencies and maturity levels.
Maturity levels look at how information is shared and relationships develop within a community. While maturity
is a continuum, rather than specific milestones, certain behaviors emerge as established patterns in particular stages.
In information sharing, this maturity moves from one-to-many, unidirectional information sharing to many-to-many,
networked sharing.
In relationships, the maturity process moves a community from limited experimentation with social tools and isolated
relationships, to one where a community integrates and exposes relationship between employee, partner, customer and
even competitor constituencies.
But just as is true for people, maturity is not a linear path, and organizations are usually at different levels in different
competencies—a reflection of the strengths, weaknesses, priorities and strategies at play in a maturing organization.
We highlight eight competencies in the Community Maturity Model:
Strategy: The strategy competency tracks the way business goals and community goals align. A community strategy
balances the business need to drive revenue or cost savings with the needs of community members, the need to see
short term wins with the required investment to sustain deep and lasting community engagement as well as balancing
the purpose of the community with the direction members may want to take it.
Leadership: Social initiatives flatten the communications hierarchy between executives, employees, customers,
and the public. The leadership competency includes executive sponsorship and participation in a community program
as well as emergent community leadership throughout the community and ecosystem.
Culture: The culture competency addresses habits, intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, unspoken social norms,
communication habits, decision-making processes, development processes and learning approaches in an organization
and/or a community. Organizations that can acknowledge and prepare for cultural challenges and change will be better
able to navigate and reduce risks along the journey to build their community program.
Community Management: At a high level, community management is the discipline of ensuring productive
communities—effectively making progress on business goals without telling people explicitly what to do. It includes a
variety of responsibilities, and depending on the purpose, size, and strategic importance of the community initiative,
one or more people can share these responsibilities.
Often when an organization starts a community program, community management is not a defined, staffed role. As
communities mature, organizations define the need for community management and its impact on business outcomes.
They will formally assign responsibilities—including moderating, developing content and programming, administering
the technology, encouraging member engagement, and evangelizing the effort internally—to individuals, a team or an
external firm.
Content and Programming: The content and programming competency examines the resources and
interactions a community offers to its members. Content and programs are often the first way members engage with
a community. Content strategy can have a significant impact on the cadence of a community, the level of member
activity and the ratio of what is published by you, versus what is published by your members. Content strategy is
likely to evolve as a community matures and begins to generate more content through member contribution.
Policies and Governance: Policies and governance address the regulatory, IP, and organizational constraints
for how organizations use social technologies and how community initiatives are organized and funded.
Tools: The tools competency considers the technical and work architecture of an organization and how social
technologies and tools fit into it. Tools can be anything that provides efficiencies or leverage. Tools require investment
both for the tool itself and for the training, behavior change and changes to the environment needed to use the
tool effectively.
Metrics and Measurement: The measurement of community initiatives helps organizations understand
why they are taking social approaches and what results they are seeing when they do. As a community program
matures, the measurement process does too—typically from activity metrics to more performance—and
behavior-based metrics.
Over the past five years, through thousands of hours of research and writing, we have been able to develop a reliable
set of artifacts that help us measure community maturity across all eight CMM competencies. Communities mature
in different ways, and at different rates. But we continue to see the connection between communities that are more
mature and communities that are better able to deliver ROI and sustainable behavior change.
The Community Manager
DIFFERENCE
Ok, we know you matter—now what do you do?
We define community management as the discipline of ensuring productive communities. What that looks
like in practice varies from community to community but at a high level, community managers are responsible
for ensuring an approach to each of the eight competencies in the Community Maturity Model:
•
•
•
•
Strategy
Leadership
Culture
Community Management
•
•
•
•
Content & Programming
Policies & Governance
Tools
Metrics & Measurement
It's critically important, but much of community management is invisible to the community. We talk about the
‘iceberg effect’ of community management; the work you do that’s visible to the community is supported by a
vast body of work beneath the surface, the planning and coordination done behind the scenes. Without these
important tasks as a base, the rest of the iceberg would topple over, sink or melt (choose your own analogy—
you get the point). We hear it over and over again—more than 50% of a community manager’s time is spent
educating and working with internal stakeholders.
While community managers perform a number of common tasks, there is no single definition of "what a
community manager does." Communities—and thus, their managers—play different roles depending
on the organization, the focus of the community, its size, whether it’s internal or external and how
strategic is it to the organization.
In 2014, The Community Roundtable launched the Community Manager Salary Survey research
to bring greater clarity to the expectations and roles of community managers in organizations of
all types. We looked at community management roles through the lens of four primary skill and
responsibility families:
•
•
•
•
Engagement & People Skills
Content Development Skills
Business & Strategic Skills
Technical Skills
Within those skills families there are dozens of specific and unique skills that individuals
bring to the table and that different roles prioritize in different ways. Some of the variables
that change the skills and responsibility profile of a specific role include:
•
•
•
•
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•
Community goals and use case
Size and industry of the organization
Strategic importance of the community
Maturity of the community
Size of the community
Expertise of individuals in community management roles
Organizational understanding of communities and community management
One thing for community managers to keep in mind is that they likely know more about community and community management than anyone else in the organization. Community managers need
to constantly educate and set expectations for stakeholders—from the first day they are charged with
a community role. This sort of managing up is not easy. Stakeholders will have their own opinions
and ideas. However, it's critical that community managers come into each day prepared to educate,
reset expectations and provide information and data to help all levels of an organization understand
community and its value.
THE HUMAN SIDE
of Community Management
Being a community manager can feel like the renowned poem, “If”, by Rudyard Kipling, which begins:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too…
It can be rewarding—but it can be lonely. It can be invigorating, but it can be consuming.
Before we jump into how to start, build and grow communities— there is one key piece
of any community that needs nurturing. You. Community managers are by their very
nature passionate, dedicated people, but you need to be able to find ways to keep your
work as a community manager from overwhelming you.
In 2013, Maria Ogneva, a member of TheCR Network who now heads up community
at the ridesharing startup Sidecar, helped us assemble perspectives from other
network members on what she called “The Dark Side of Community Management.”
The purpose was to remind the remarkably driven, passionate group of community
managers that burnout is a real but avoidable risk. The presentation boiled it down
to what could be seen as seven dangers for community managers.
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•
We let our passion consume us. Don’t.
We internalize. Don’t.
We are problem solvers. Give people space.
We keep trying to scale ourselves. Stop trying to scale people, and scale systems.
We are change agents. Drop the savior complex.
We celebrate others. Toot your own horn.
This can be a lonely job. Develop a support system.
Experienced community managers can no doubt think of times where they fell into each of these traps. That's no vice—
they are human nature for people with passion, dedication, a desire to solve problems, and a willingness to take on
challenges and change the world. But it’s important that you as an individual community manager and we as the group
of community professionals recognize the traps and together pull ourselves out of them. How?
•
•
•
•
•
•
Disconnect. Don’t let passion become obsession.
Reach out – find support from across your organization and let it go.
Empower others to provide answers.
Design communities that can self-sustain, and think about scaling from the beginning.
Understand what you can influence, and what you can’t change.
Celebrate your own successes – and recognize that by ensuring your success is visible you are strengthening
your own opportunity for resources and support.
• Work out loud. Find allies. Recognize that you are neither alone in your struggles nor unsupported in your
quest for success.
It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Of course, it’s not. But it is possible. And really, it's not asking for anything that different from
the atmosphere we are trying to create in our communities themselves—we want them to be transparent, supportive,
safe, collaborative, empowering spaces for our members. The Community Roundtable is founded on the idea that those
who run communities need a place where they can learn from and connect with others doing the same thing. It’s a
belief shared by other professional organizations out there. Our offerings may be different, but our basic goals are the
same—to provide a community of support for those who help communities thrive.
Start > Build > Grow
ARCHITECTING
the Community that
Meets Your Needs
By now, countless organizations have learned the painful lesson: “If you build it, they will
come,” only works in the movies. But there’s a related lesson that is a core tenet of community
management. How you build it—the shape of the community you create—drives whether the
community meets your goals.
The shape of your community will depend entirely
on what success looks like for the goals you have,
the complexity of those goals and where potential
members are comfortable engaging. Generally
speaking, the less complex the outcome (information
sharing, discovery, awareness) the larger and more
diverse your community can and should be—
suggesting that the shape of the network is loose,
only lightly connected and may cross channels and
platforms. If, on the other hand, you are solving
complex technical issues or negotiating business
terms you will need a much smaller community that
is highly interconnected and includes a high level of
trust and confidence, which means it is very likely
private and exclusive with no explicit links connecting
it to a wider network.
Business goals determine ideal size
for a community
12 The Community Management Handbook 2014
Understanding what kind of community and ecosystem
structure best fits your needs will help you define an
effective community management approach. The more
trust you need to execute on your goals, the better the
relationship between participants will need to be.
The factors that will help you figure out
what kind of network structure you need
for your community are:
◆◆ Complexity of desired outcome
◆◆ Profile of your audience; how open or
private they are and how they communicate
about similar topics already
◆◆ Profile of your organization; how open or
private and how it communicates about
similar topics already
◆◆ How much trust needs to exist, and
therefore how much relationship density
needs to exist within the community
◆◆ The level of existing relationships within
the target community – a community likely
exists in some form already. How does it
connect?
◆◆ How the problem the community is set up
to solve gets solved today
DI
CTO
E
R
RO
FO
E COM
N LI N
MUNITY & CUSTOMER E
the Seer
XP E R
IEN
CE,
Au
to d
es
k
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Communities are networks of relationships - manage accordingly.”
PROGRAMS, PLATFORMS
& PEOPLE
Programs: Editorial planning and
programming, activities and
events, day to day presence on
the community and moderation
provide the core of the
community experience
Communities
Can Be Fragile
Platforms: Platforms need
to be designed to effectively
deliver a community experience
that satisfies customer needs and
business objectives
“I have been astounded at the
rate in which institutional decay
happens—decay of knowledge,
commitment to and understanding
of community strategy. If the host
organization doesn’t commit and
stay engaged and present
mentally, it falls apart.”
In early 2014, it became evident that
Autodesk’s Fusion 360 customer
engagement strategy needed a reboot.
Rather than build a community for a
new generation of product designers,
Bill Johnston saw an opportunity to
co-develop a community with designers
—one that respected their desire for
features, their work styles, the way
they use design tools, etc., while
capitalizing on the unique features
and resources Autodesk could offer.
People: You need people who can
connect with the community in an
authentic way that meets the style
and tone of the community.
Bill sought out where pockets of
conversation were already happening
and identified key interests and needs.
Those interests shaped programming,
content and community management, in concert with the evolution of
community features to meet business
goals. The platform also needed to
support the community’s desire for
ideation sessions to shape the product
roadmap and sharing designs and
projects. Lastly, Bill and team needed
to find the right people, who could
engage authentically in this style of
community.
The community continues to evolve.
“Without regular check-ins with the
people who are the most passionate
you miss opportunities to refine the
community experience or the ability
to react to changes in member needs
or interests” Bill notes, “and if you
aren’t connecting with sponsors, you
won’t have sustainable support.”
UNDERSTANDING
your Members�
Needs
Understanding your potential members—who they are, what inspires them, what they aspire to
and how they learn—is critical to understanding the value a community can offer and how to
deliver that value.
Getting under the hood to really understand the
different types of members your community might
have also has other benefits:
• T
he better you understand members, the more
compelling your community strategy will be.
• M
apping out the various community segments that
have influence over your community’s purpose
allows you to target multiple member segments,
which is typically required to catalyze engagement.
• U
nderstanding different member needs, motivations
and contributions will help you plan a programming
approach that generates value.
The Community Ecosystem
The first step is to map out your target members’
ecosystem. Identify not only your primary target
member but those segments of individuals that
influence them. If it’s a broad consumer community
that may be friends, family, broadcast media, and
social media. If it’s a niche B2B community, those
segments may be specific peer groups or niche media
publications and thought leaders. From there, it’s
helpful to identify which of those segments have
the most influence over your target members. Think
about how to incorporate those segments into your
community as well, even if they participate in smaller
numbers or as thought leaders.
Next, identify the attributes that will make your
target members more or less likely to engage.
We have found some common attributes drive
people’s motivation. They include:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
A community needs various kinds of members
in order to catalyze action.
Need to learn
Other sources of competing information
Level of technical literacy
Level of online social comfort
Amount of free time
The peer and cultural context
Their level of aspiration to change/learn
The key here is in watching and listening, drawing
out the ecosystem in which your community sits and
understanding the often hidden levers that either
encourage or create barriers to engagement. It’s not
very likely that you can create a community that fits
the entire ecosystem perfectly—so prioritize two or
three segments that might make the strongest targets
and for which you can define a compelling shared
purpose. Start there.
SE
O
R
NIO
COM
E
N
I
NL
MUNITY MANAGER, Li
the Defuser
melig
ht
Net
wo
r ks
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Make sure you have sustained executive sponsorship
and ideally it comes from more than one organization in the company.”
BIGGEST
SURPRISE
How much internal education
was required to generate support
and interest.
If I had to do it
over again,
“I’d focus even more on a
sustained level of relationship
building—greater engagement,
willingness to tackle difficult
issues, and so on won’t
happen unless a strong,
positive trusting relationship
is maintained.”
When Eileen Foran arrived as Senior
Online Community Manager at Limelight Networks, she got to start from
scratch. To meet the business goal of
creating ‘customers for life’, she needed to identify the community need—
and the value a community approach
could bring to the organization.
She did that by asking potential
members open-ended questions,
and listening for insights and trends.
Strategy for learning community need
Interview: Open-ended discussion provides valuable insights
Collect: Get input from all levels, angles
Find themes: Examine what you have heard, surface
common themes, issues, opportunities
Share data: Sharing what you learn shapes community,
provides insight on organizational issues
Survey: Survey confirms findings, summarizes need
“I talked to and interviewed as
many potential internal and external
participants as possible to find the
‛WIIFM’ (What’s In It For Me) factor
even before I began building the
community,” Eileen says. “I needed to
find out what was needed for people
to change their existing habits and
make the community a go-to place.”
Eileen let common themes and
obstacles emerge from the interviews,
themes she shared with organizational
leaders—and then created a survey
to get the need captured in a more
encapsulated form. “I learned something every single time I talked to
anybody,” she adds.
That high-touch approach helped
translate the community need into a
more collaborative tone throughout.
As a result, traditional silos in the
organization are breaking down—and
improving the customer experience.
SHARED purpose
& SHARED value
Want to improve the odds of success with your community?
Think about shared purpose and shared value.
Organizations undertaking a community approach
naturally think of their own goals for the community.
They think about the potential value of community
for the members they hope to attract and engage.
But a surprising number stop there.
To unlock the potential of your community, it’s
most important to look at the intersection of the
organization’s objectives and the members’
objectives. That intersection, the shared purpose,
is where organization and members have an interest
in solving common problems or addressing common
opportunities—creating behaviors that drive the
community’s shared value.
In a legacy organization, that equation can be
complicated by both the historic operations and
goals of the organization (“How we do things”), and
by assumptions about community needs (“What
they want to do”) that cloud the opportunity that a
community approach can provide. In some cases, the
result is that the shared purpose of the community
needs redefinition once the community is launched,
as behaviors change in unexpected ways.
Newer organizations don’t have the weight of legacy
attached to them. Instead, their sense of shared
purpose comes from expectation—what they believe
their community will want and the shared purpose
and value they can derive. Again, that expectation
may shift as the community grows and matures.
with the understanding that the definition is subject
to revision. Interview organizational and community
stakeholders. Use insights you may have from other
communities or earlier experiences.
Even with the best planning, it is expected that
your community strategy will evolve as you gain
new insights. Community is the means to the end of
delivering shared value. Keep your eyes on the prize,
and stay flexible on the process.
The basic behavior equation is still this:
“When a member wants to _________________, they will
use the community to _________________ instead of
doing _________________.”
It takes a wise community manager to understand
and optimize the community to make that behavior
change possible and sustainable.
Community managers
execute community strategy
and ensure shared purpose
What you as a community manager want to do is
get as close as possible to the definition of shared
purpose and value before the community launches,
A meaningful shared purpose is one of the biggest success
factors for a community.
ER
T
N
E
E COM
PRIS
MUNITY STR ATEGIST
, H&R
the Senser
Bloc
k
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Network. In person. The biggest benefit I’ve gotten has been utilizing groups
like TheCR, and conferences. Those learnings were invaluable, and more than I could
get online or anywhere else, from those who had been doing it for awhile.”
If I had to do it over
again, I’d “have gotten firmer
commitments from some groups in
the organization to participate in the
community from the start. It still is one
of my biggest challenges to get
people to spend a little time in the
community to see its value.”
SURPRISING
SUCCESS
The goal for growth from
year 1 to year 2 of the
community was from
2,000 to 6,000 members.
But with effective
marketing, the community
grew to 30,000 members
by the end of year 2.
The Power of Positivity
“(Using moderation and content to reduce)
negative sentiment has been a win for members
and the organization,” Jerry notes. “People aren’t
as fearful of (community), and it recognizes our
80,000 professionals as a powerful asset.”
Organizations often go into the
community journey with a sense of the
value that community will provide—
but observing real member behavior
provides valuable new insights. At
H&R Block, Jerry Green and his team
created a year-round community to
advise clients on products and services
that could help them manage tax issues
around major life events.
support network that serves as a valuable
entry point for customers engaging H&R
Block during busy tax times.
Today the H&R Block community does
that—but it also serves as a vibrant client
The team started working from the
C-suite down to get buy-in to the
Adding that value meant refocusing the
approach, and making the community
a positive, safe space. “We saw the
opportunity our community had to set
a positive tone, demonstrate expertise,
connect with DIY and younger clients,
and learn from them, too,” Jerry notes.
community approach. They then
worked with associates at all levels
in the organization, finding that all
associates played a valuable role in
shaping the concept.
They also worked to ensure everyone in
the organization focused on long-term
value. “We were able to show value in
both the short and long term. We were
able to set the stage for a multi-year
plan of where we could get and we
stayed focused on that,” Jerry says.
The
BENEFITS of
Starting Small
If you are starting a community today – you are both blessed and cursed by history.
Years of research and community development
today offer more advice than ever on the best
practices of community. But the growth of online
communities generally can also set expectations
that new communities should scale quickly and
provide near-immediate ROI.
It’s a nice theory, but as our research and
experience has found time and again, it’s flawed.
The Community Roundtable recommends taking
the long view; to generate sustainable ROI start
small—then grow.
Trying to scale too quickly is perhaps the biggest,
most expensive mistake a community manager can
make. Even if you are working to build a community
of thousands or more, we recommend you start of
with a group of members that you can reasonably
expect to get to know individually.
The reason is simple. You want to start as you mean
to continue.
If you have defined the behaviors you wish to see
and considered what the ideal engagement mix
would be – the percentage of lurkers, contributors,
creators and collaborators you would ideally like
(our research shows the average mix to be 64%,
17%, 11% and 8% respectively)—you should work
with a limited set of early members to establish
that culture before inviting in more members.
By spending time with a small group to establish
the community culture you want to foster—and
learning more about what they want from the
community—you create members who will model
and set expectations for every new member going
forward. New members will quickly acclimate and
conform to the social and behavioral norms that
have been established.
Scaling and then working to change behavior puts
you against the tide of norms established without
you. The community defines its own standards,
which may or may not align with the behaviors and
shared value you hope to achieve. Changing the
behavior of thousands is a very challenging task
and while it can be done, it’s not efficient to take
that approach if you don’t have to.
Starting small also provides you a valuable learning
opportunity—to see the community through the
eyes of members. Taking the time to engage with
members individually and get more personal
feedback often illuminates thorny issues that could
prove especially troublesome at scale. For example,
user interface issues, platform issues, and other
structural problems can be more easily discovered
and addressed in small communities—and you have
a much greater ability to constructively engage your
members in the troubleshooting process.
Starting small means defining success differently. Instead of “growth,” use measures like:
◆◆
◆◆
◆◆
◆◆
Engagement depth – Are members asking good questions, having real discussions
Member satisfaction – How satisfied are early members with the experience?
Membership referrals and renewals – Are they coming back, advocating?
Signs of changing behavior – Are they moving toward your behavioral goals?
DE R S
N
U
O
F
CO
, The Community Rou
Linkmaster
and Trendspotter
ndta
bl
e
PEARL OF WISDOM
Rachel: “Build a diverse personal community. If Jim and I didn’t have good networks
The Community Roundtable never would have gotten off the ground.”
Jim: “Embrace the skeptics—a converted skeptic is much more powerful than an engaged cheerleader.”
MEASURING
SUCCESS
If starting small – look for markers
of success beyond growth, such as
member referrals and renewals –
signs of the community “pull”.
If I had to do it
over again, I’d “place a
higher value on what
we do.” (Jim)
“I would spend more time
documenting and
communicating the
basics of community and
community management.”
(Rachel)”
From the beginning, The Community
Roundtable has been at its heart
about community and community
managers, and their business
strategy mirrors sound community strategy. Building a shared
purpose—using community and
research to demonstrate the value
of community management—helped
inform the structure of the business.
It was decided that The Community
Roundtable would focus on a
specific type of member (community
Benefits of Starting Small
• Ability to define and establish behavior change
• Early members model behavior for the next generation
• Easier to make and communicate adjustments,
get feedback
• Opportunity to ensure that shared purpose,
value goals are met
managers), would include members
as partners in the research and
would rely on a membership fees
to fund its activities.
“We made a bet early on that the
work was valuable in itself and we
chose to have our customers fund
the business,” Jim says. “The model
reduced the size of the community,
but it meant members were invested
and allowed us to set community
expectations.”
Starting small also made it easier to
build online and offline trust, which
was critical to the research value of
the community. Adding members to
a trusting community proved much
easier than establishing trust in a
large community would have been.
"Do the right thing for your members
and your community, and build
the business to support that,” says
Rachel. “Then have confidence and
patience to let it succeed.”
CREATING
an Action
Plan
From values, to members, to tactics. Formulating an action plan for your community is where
the rubber begins to meet the road. Your action plan highlights how you are going to make this
community effective on a day-to-day basis. It needs to take into account the organizational
environment in which you exist, and your relative strengths and weaknesses as you begin your
community journey. Among the things to consider:
Who are your strongest executive sponsors and where are they in the organization?
What is your level of funding and staffing support?
Where is the overall cultural level of support for community initiatives?
How long do you have to demonstrate community impact – how long is your runway?
These answers inform your tactics.
It’s likely that as you create an action plan, you’ll focus most on three of the eight competencies
in the Community Maturity Model:
• S
trategy: Link your community strategy to organizational business goals
- Identify use cases and behavior change needed
- Define shared purpose and shared value
- Take on an active listening strategy
- Articulate budget and resources needed
- Collect and communicate lessons as you go
• C
ommunity management: Assign a caretaker to welcome, support and represent members
- Identify a social listener
- Hire a social media or community manager
- Create workflows and escalation plans
- Document and formalize guidelines
- Build a programming plan
•T
ools: Target technologies and processes to make your collaboration and communication more efficient
- Define and deploy minimum viable solution and “must haves”
- Vet requirements with stakeholders
- Prepare your basic listening toolset
These processes will inform the size and shape of the community you start with, and how the early stages of the
community will operate. It will change over time–that’s the exponential nature of community.
What’s
your
approach?
Frontal approach: Formally launch in a public way
Guerrilla approach: Quietly build small community before moving forward
Pincer approach: Develop pockets of community, setting stage for expansion
ITY MANAGER, Cloud
N
U
M
Lock
COM
the Profiler
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Build your internal support network before you build an action plan for any community—
so you can rely on those people first and foremost.”
Patrick's
Action Plan:
• Start with the customer need
• Think technically for a
technical customer community
• Get internal buy-in early
• Be agile: Start early,
get feedback and iterate
Surprise Successes
• H
igh adoption rates
among early invitees
• Early members coming
back requesting invites
for teammates
• 75% of comments
from customers
When Patrick Hellen arrived at
CloudLock, he started with a blank
slate. Working in a technical space
where customers were familiar with
the community approach, he focused
his attention on finding the right tool
for the job. To find it, he started by
interviewing customers, not vendors.
“I wanted to get past the pieces
I found unwieldy in my previous
experience, so I built out must-haves,”
Why It's Working
• T
rust from stakeholders
in action plan
• Early ownership from across
the organization
• Community integrates well with
other customer systems
• Built from the start with
customer needs in mind
Patrick says. “I wanted to sit down
and make sure I had a full design
and implementation plan in my head
before I started talking to vendors.”
To foster shared ownership, he
reached out to engineering, customer
success and other functional teams
to get them engaged. Together, they
agreed to start with key customers
and take a “minimum viable product”
approach to the community—one
that allowed Patrick and his team to
open the community in just 40 days.
Patrick also credits executive trust
for making it possible. “They put
trust in me to select the features and
functionality that customers needed
and would use. They didn’t give me a
blank check, but they did let me start
with customer needs rather than
budget and scope requirements.”
SELECTING
a Platform
Selecting a platform for your nascent community gives many people the same sort of
sinking feeling as buying a home. On the one hand, it’s a chance to make a decision that
should make your life markedly better and different. On the other, you know it’s a major
investment and despite your best efforts, you may not know how smart your decision
has been until you have been living in it for awhile.
We also tend to approach the decisions in similar
ways. We research. We draw up lists of features
we want. We work to see through the sales pitch
from the seller and spot anything they are trying
to conceal. We consult trusted friends and seek
their counsel.
• K
ick the tires on real cars: If you know other
community managers, talk to them and get a
first-hand understanding of how platforms work.
Ask them to show you admin features, customer
interfaces, and more. It’s a great way to better
understand your needs and possible issues.
But the most important factor in each case may be
the questions we ask ourselves about the choice
we are about to make.
• S
tart small: There’s nothing wrong with starting
on a free platform, if it fits your needs to start.
You can learn a lot about what you really need
without a lot of overhead. The only downside:
At some point, migrating likely will be a pain.
Platform questions are common in TheCR Network
—and here are some of the lessons shared:
• S
tart with behaviors, not features: Just as you
should start your community strategy with the
behavior change you want to drive, start your
platform selection thinking about behaviors, not
bells and whistles.
• T
hink about your technical prowess: A custom
community might be able to check all your
community boxes, but what happens when
there is a problem or you need to make a
change? Without the right people, the wrong
platform can become a burden.
• A
n eye toward the present, an eye toward the
future: Pick a platform that can handle your
expected growth, but not at the expense of
your present-day needs. You’ll never get to
use all those nifty features if your platform is
unfriendly to the initial users you are counting
on as a backbone for growth.
• B
ring in the users: If you are working with an
established community, getting members' input
is a no-brainer in principle, but often forgotten
in practice. Ask them about their needs, their
wants, and the good and bad points of their
current experience. Making users part of the
process is a great way to ensure that they
are more engaged during the process and
enthusiastic about the result.
Starting with your needs, rather than
features, is the smart approach.
Different types of community structures will have
very different platform requirements. Size, purpose,
technical skills, support and security needs and
other factors will all play roles in your choice. But
starting with your needs, rather than features, is the
smart approach.
After all, in the end it’s not about choosing
the right platform. It’s about choosing the right
platform for your community.
COMMUNITY, Sidecar Techno
F
O
logie
D
A
E
s
H
the Raconteur
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Focus on behaviors and not features, and really know your community.”
Today's needs,
tomorrow's wants
You don't want to lose sight of your
future needs, but you also don’t want to
get so enamored with possible cool new
features that you pick a platform that's
hard to implement, requires complex
and expensive integrations,
or is hard to get members
to use today.
THE STRATEGY
• Start with community needs,
not platform wants
• Talk to potential members—
find out their wants and
use cases, and what they’re
comfortable using
• Have your must haves and like
to haves before contacting
vendors
• Don’t be shy - ask community
pros for suggestions, and peeks
into their platforms in operation
• Start smart. Let future features
factor into your decision, but
don’t pick a solution you can’t
manage well now.
If I had to do
it over again,
I'd give myself a
little bit more time.
We felt pressure to deliver
quickly. Don’t let (your
decision timeframe)
stretch too long, but give
yourself time to think.
When selecting your community
platform, don’t start with the platform.
As the Head of Community for the ridesharing startup Sidecar, Maria wanted
to create a national forum for Sidecar’s
driver community, while allowing them
to have regional conversations to
share local tips and real-time updates.
She asked them, “What do you need?
How do you want to engage?”
From that, she created a list of musthaves that took into account both driver
needs (like a strong mobile app—after
all, they’re driving) and organizational
realities (with her small team, ease of
page and profile creation was critical).
Only then, armed with a list—did she
approach vendors, as well as managers
from other communities. She asked
peers to see their admin consoles, to
see how the options worked in real-
world settings. She used community
manager networks to find solutions
she may not have even known existed.
In the end, she chose a solution that
wasn’t on her radar when she started.
But by driving the process based
on community needs, she was able
to launch a lean version of the new
community less than a month after
she started the project.
Early Stages
of a NEW COMMUNITY
The
There is no magic timeline for getting your new community up and running and building an
engaged, healthy membership.
There is, however, one guarantee. It won’t happen on Day 1.
Day 1 matters to you as a community manager – but in
the grand scheme of the community, it’s really only the
beginning of a process. Don’t see it as a “launch”, but
rather as an opportunity to build the frameworks that
will support the conversation moving forward.
Your first weeks are a time to get started as you hope
to continue, focusing on engagement and minimal
viable growth, rather than inviting in as many people
as possible. Use the time to pre-seed the community,
get things started and heat things up.
Pre-Seeding: Use a small group of 5-25 people to
start posting content before you open the community
officially. These should be people you can count on to
participate and have an interest in the success of the
community. Work with them individually to ensure
they have completed profiles, have engaged in the
way you would like others to and have interacted with
other early members.
Getting the Party Started: Identify your first group of
members from among the community segments you
profiled during your planning process and roll out
an invite strategy. How will you invite and welcome
them? Focus on getting them to fill out their profiles,
engage, and so on, before expanding further. Use
the first community members to encourage the new
community members to comment, or schedule an
event or time that provides peoples the opportunity
to use the community together.
Heating the Party Up: With a base in place, plan
out initial programming—things like Questions of
the Week, Daily Updates, Weekly Hangouts and
Chats and Member Highlights give people a trigger
and reason to connect with each other. Strong
programming provides opportunities to keep members
engaged in conversation—building relationships
that are critical to creating stronger communities.
Simultaneously, to encourage organic growth get
members of the community to suggest people
to invite, and then empower them to do it. Peer
invitations can be a powerful (and manageable) tool
for expanding your membership.
As the community grows and matures—get to
know your members and the kinds of content that
brings them in and programming that keeps them
engaged. Model the behavior you want to see. Place a
priority on the human side—from getting community
members to update their profiles with faces to
creating a conversational tone that invites people
in. Remember— joining a new community is a new
behavior for members. If it doesn’t feel comfortable,
it won’t become a habit.
Peer invitations are a powerful (and manageable) tool for expanding your membership.
DI
M
ER
the Weaver
PEARL OF WISDOM
sion
als
A
sso
cia
tio
n
“Place yourself in your members’ shoes, and ask if you are giving them sticky,
engaging and emotional experiences that they won’t want to leave.”
(C
A)
XP
O
CT
E
R
F
RO
B
EM
MENT, Customer Experience Pro
E
G
A
f es
E NG
ON GRATITUDE
“It can be a surprise how grateful members
are. When you’re starting a brand new
community, people are so happy about the
benefits being offered and the opportunities.
They build a personal connection with the
community manager and this generates
a wonderful feeling of purpose.”
If I had to do it
over again, I’d set
us up with a better
CRM system early on.
It’s easy to manage 600,
that’s one thing, but with
3500, it’s swimming up a
hill right now.
Lesley Lykins joined the CXPA from
the Navy about six months after both
the Association and its community
were born. That made demonstrating
the value of both the Association and
the network to members a critical
element of her early community plans.
She had other needs, too. As a staff
of one, she needed to corral an army
of volunteers and appeal to their interests, and with two distinct groups of
Tips from the CXPA experience:
• R
ecognize the importance of your active volunteers, and
note their interests
• In person matters – it builds intimacy that is difficult to
create in a new community
• Informal discussions create easy opportunities to connect
people, more formal programming can grow from them
• Make your community manageable for you as a CM –
create a community structure that you can effectively
handle, and only then consider growing it out.
members—practitioners and
providers/vendors—she needed to find
a balance of programming that served
the entire community effectively.
What worked was personal connections—both online and offline.
“There is probably nothing more
important to the community than
in-person events,” Lesley notes,
because those in person gatherings
create the intimacy that fosters
sharing among members. When in
person is impractical, roundtable calls
provide the connections.
What about the online community?
Once connections were made, it
came time to strengthen the platform.
Today it’s a single central forum which
provides vibrancy and makes management easier. As the community grows,
more options will emerge.
Building
STAKEHOLDER
Support & Involvement
Our research has shown time and again the critical importance of executive support and
engagement in community success. Executive support of community projects is critical for them
to move forward without hitting a “grass ceiling”.
Our The State of Community Management 2014 report
found that 58% of best-in-class communities benefit
from CEO engagement, versus just 36% of communities in the survey overall. Communities with executive
engagement also have higher overall engagement
levels and are far more likely to have a fully-funded,
resourced roadmap than those without.
Getting those executives interested and engaged often
falls to the community manager—and having a plan for
getting broad executive support and engagement is a
powerful lever for community success. It takes a personal
approach. Executives have a lot on their plates, and
often as older members of the organization may not
be as comfortable in the social space. Our The Social
Executive research suggested a series of steps to help
executives not just understand the importance of
community but begin to engage with it.
Communities with executive participation:
◆ Are more likely to have a fully-funded roadmap
◆ Have higher general engagement rates
• M
ake it easy – give executives tools that make
engagement simple
• M
ake it relevant - help executives understand both
the power of their participation to the organization
and its positive impact on their specific responsibilities
Setting up time to work with executives on community
also allows you to note the benefits of active listening, not
just participation. Executives can get great insight from
following the community conversation—in some cases, it’s
a safe first step toward broader involvement.
Lastly, while executive support and engagement is critical,
it’s important to remember the rest of the ecosystem, too.
Selling top executives on community without keeping
middle managers or future members up to speed creates
its own problems, and can dampen the enthusiasm you
have worked so hard to build at the top.
Executive participation is linked to
higher engagement rates
The research framework lays out five stages of executive
adoption and the triggers for each stage of adoption—
and within each stage there are strategies you can take
as a community manager to get stakeholders to the next
level. Throughout, you want to:
• K
eep it simple – recognize the time and focus
limitations of busy executives
• K
eep it personal – one-to-one has impact and
is worth the investment
A community needs various kinds of members
in order to catalyze action.
M
CO
ITY M
N
U
M
ANAGER, Fidelity In
the Networker
vestm
e
nts
PEARL OF WISDOM
‟As a Community Manager, you have to treat everyone in the organization as individuals,
with attention and care, whether they’re your peers or senior executives.”
Secret Gardens
One surprise for Kirsten was how many
flowers could and did bloom beyond her
broad reach. When she discovers these
organic groups - she makes sure to offer
her support. “If you commit to it,
we will commit to you,”
Key Elements
• B
e accessible – Be available,
answer questions and
minimize user frustrations.
• Help the most eager—Focus
first on those interested in
the community, rather than
trying to convert non-believers
• Know the business—
Understand the broader
business, what executives are
dealing with and what matters
to them
• Be authentic – Love what you do,
and be a partner to your users in
overcoming challenges.
• Be an explorer – Take time to explore
your own platform – you’ll find things
you didn’t know existed.
When executives at Fidelity Investments decided it was time to commit
to an internal social network, Kirsten
Laaspere had a critical base of support
– but they needed a broader case.
Kirsten and her colleagues launched
a multi-faceted effort to engender
stakeholder support from the top
down, the bottom up, and the middle
out. “We went to key players in every
business unit with our roadmap and
our plan,” Kirsten says.
If I had to do it over
again, I’d ‟do a better job
creating a use-case based
training package specifically for
executives before we started.
We started with feature
how-tos, but ended up
repeating a lot of ‘applied
theories’ that we hadn’t
created (to share).”
Using webinars, established
communications tools and Q and A
sessions, they made sure word about
the community, named Ribbit (after
Fidelity’s unofficial frog mascot), got
out. “We knew we needed to get
executives on board, but we needed
to get the associates excited too,
so that when executives said,
‘Hey, we should try this Ribbit thing,’
they could jump right in.”
After launch, Kirsten targeted “the
people swimming upstream.” Her team
provided support, training, and encouragement to early adopters and anyone
with an interest in Ribbit.
It was a huge task, but Kirsten notes,
“Executives don’t need very much
time—if you spend 45 minutes
figuring out who they are, what they
do, and what they need, it only takes
15 minutes to teach them one transformative activity.”
BUILDING
Enabling Policies,
Guidelines and
Governance
Polices and governance have a marketing problem. It’s not that marketers don’t like them—
although that might be true. It’s that the words conjure up images of fences and restrictions,
when in reality, good policies and governance are like a garden trellis for community growth
and development.
Community managers know (or quickly learn) that
change happens one person at a time and the only
way to ‘scale’ that change is to establish a governance
structure which sets expectations and provides
supports that protects members and the organization.
We see policy and governance as having three pieces:
Policies are elements for which violation could
lead to legal, HR or other organizational action—
examples include violations of corporate HR policy,
confidentiality, etc. In most instances, a community
behavior that violates policy would be a violation in
other contexts as well.
Guidelines are more informal and are not legal
contract. These are community-specific rules
and scope that define the purpose and expected
behaviors within the community, written in
conversational English. Guidelines often include best
practices for sharing information, dos and don’ts,
and encouraged community behaviors.
Governance is the management and process
structure that surrounds the community.
Governance defines who is responsible for what,
what individuals or groups within an organization
are involved in decisions and how engagement and
escalation is handled across those groups.
From the community perspective policies, guidelines
and governance should also provide community
members with a safe place to engage and share—
without bias toward any one individual or groups.
Going it alone is never a suggested strategy
when it comes to policies and governance. Your
role as a community manager may be to lead the
discussion and provide options, but creating an
inclusive process to draw up policies, guidelines
and governance is not only more likely to drive their
adoption, it also builds relationships that are critical
to managing the community in times of crisis.
Some approaches that help create an enabling environment include:
◆◆ F
raming guidelines positively – start guidelines with what you would like people to do and describe to
them how you envision them using the community.
◆◆ Giving the community a voice – if community members feel like policies and guidelines are developed
with them rather than imposed on them, the more likely the policies and guidelines will be accepted
and effective.
◆◆ Being clear – Clear governance provides a level of security and safety for those in key positions in the
organization, giving them a sense of how the community connects with their part of the organization
and giving them a path to address issues. At the same time, a well-designed governance policy can
give community members a sense of their safe space—which allows for a lighter-touch community
management approach as a community scales.
HE
AD
OCIAL
S
F
O
MEDIA AND COMMU
N IT Y
, Ae
t na
the Windmill Tilter
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Don’t think it doesn’t help to bring cookies or ice cream into your legal
or compliance team—they’re human, too.”
If I had to do it
over again,
I’d “map the entire
digital ecosystem from a
holistic viewpoint, and it
would factor in dot-com,
mobile, community and
social, not just social or
community first.”
PRO TIP
When discussing governance, take
the personalities out of the equation.
Examine job titles and responsibilities,
not individuals. You’re building
structures that need to be
stronger than the people
in those roles
KEYS TO SUCCESS
• Understand stakeholders’ needs
and interests beforehand
• Come with an open mind, establish
a safe haven, and bring options to
the table
• Discuss and review regularly—not just
annually or in crises
“The first thing that I do is have
informational interviews before I
bring anyone a problem,” Lauren
Vargas notes. The conversations give
her insight into who they are, how
they approach problems and help her
frame issues in ways that are relevant
to each stakeholder.
Armed with background knowledge
and the ability to speak to a stakeholder’s needs and concerns, she
then comes prepared, with a parent’s
mindset. “Ask your 4-year-old what
they want for dinner, and they will
either not answer or pick something
random. If you give them a few
choices—then they have a better
opportunity to engage with you.”
she says. “They lend their expertise
to that area and control it, but we
manage their options.”
In other words—frame their options
so they can succeed.
It’s not always fun—but when governance is a regular part of the conversation, and bridges are built to the
necessary stakeholders, it makes the
process far more responsive.
“I’ve never had legal, compliance or
HR tell me no because I have given
them things they can easily adapt to,”
“Governance is not often sexy,” Vargas
says. “But governance is very sexy
when it saves your (bacon).”
The
Role of
MODERATION
Policies, guidelines and governance provide the framework and boundaries for your
community, but moderation is where those policies are turned into day-to-day management.
Direct moderation is the day-to-day interaction and mediation that signals to members what
gets attention—both good and bad—from the organization.
Direct moderation depends greatly on the judgment
of a community manager—and because of that, good
personal relationships with members and stakeholders
are an indispensable foundation. First-hand knowledge
of the members, influencers and culture of the community gives you a solid base for understanding issues
and making decisions on where and how to respond.
More importantly, those relationships provide critical
connections for when you are making tough calls.
Another important element in any difficult situation
is information. Reacting quickly is often seen as the
best course of action, but it can backfire if you don’t
understand context, anticipate possible responses or
prepare for any possible blowback. Clarify, inquire and
offer help as a first course of action to gather critical
information.
Three good moderation rules of thumb:
• Assume good intent
• Use a neutral, but direct tone
• Don’t fan emotional flames, good or bad
Moderating doesn’t mean eliminating conflict. In
fact, vibrant and productive communities depend on
differences of opinion between members to create
discussion, generate new ideas and develop innovative
solutions. It is critical, however, that conflict needs to
be respectful. When you see a conflict developing:
• S
tep up your monitoring – spend time understanding the conflict before you get involved
• G
ive it space – often conflicts will resolve themselves, or the community will help mediate
• M
odel behavior – it can sometimes be helpful to
rephrase opinions of others in a more emotionally
neutral tone that allows people to focus on the content of the comment vs. the tone.
• G
et personal – in some cases, a personal outreach,
especially a phone call, will both help you understand
the conflict and perhaps create a space for resolution
• D
on’t take it personally – Remember, your role is to
create a safe space for people to share, not to arbitrate decisions. Getting personally invested in conflict
is a great way to generate distrust and burn out.
Lastly, the best moderators know that time spent
defining community norms and expectations is time
well spent. By setting clear guidelines for both desired
and prohibited behavior, you remove ambiguity that
can make moderation more challenging.
A sample engagement ladder.
Establishing guidelines proactively rather than moderating reactively also has a number of other benefits.
The proactive approach sends a positive message to
the community, by highlighting permitted and encouraged behaviors. It creates an open, non-confrontational
space for discussing appropriate actions in the community where no one needs to be on the defensive. Also,
it helps ensure moderation policies work in support
of, rather than in defense of, the community behavior
norms you are seeking to develop.
GE
A
N
A
M
LM
A
I
C
O
R, S
EDIA AND COMMU
the Wirewalker
N IT Y
, Au
to d
es
k
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Remove emotion from the decision making process as a moderator.
Look at every piece of content for what it is.”
Approaching
Moderation
The power of
“Ahem.”
•S
et guidelines as early
as possible
• Keep a positive tone
•G
et your internal stakeholders
engaged early.
At eBay (where Mike was from 2001
to 2006), that was all a moderator had
to say to send an understood message
that comments were getting near the
line of acceptability.
Good
Moderation
•S
ets a positive tone for
the community
•E
stablishes open, clear
understanding and avenues
for feedback
• Sets you as a forward-thinking
thought leader in the community
•E
liminates the “you never
told me” excuse
Mike Pascucci has spent his life in the
middle of a lot of communities. Having
worked as both a community manager and
a vendor, he has experience establishing
moderation strategies with companies
across the spectrum—and his golden rule
is simple. Set expectations early.
engagement for the community—
don’t just tell people what they CANNOT
do. “Nine out of 10 people are going
to follow the guidelines you set,” he
adds, so the earlier they know those
guidelines, the easier that it will be for
you manage.”
Whether building out a moderation
team or hiring a third-party to moderate
a community, posting public guidelines
on allowable content is essential.
Don’t do it in isolation. Mike advises to
get legal, marketing and other stakeholders involved in your development—
because these guidelines are a publicfacing document that everyone will need
to abide by. In addition, guidelines for
employees may differ from those for
“Put a positive spin on it,” Pascucci
notes, to set a tone of expected
the general community, with respect to
organizational information and tone.
Being proactive also creates positive
momentum. “Reactive management is
by its nature defensive,” Mike notes.
“Proactive gets you seen as a thought
leader in the space—and that gives your
internal teams comfort, and creates a
circle of trust with both internal employees and external communities.”
ENFORCEMENT
& Crisis
Management
In an ideal world, you never have to enforce policy and your crisis plan stays on a shelf or in a
hard drive, giving you more time to feed the unicorns and look at the rainbows. But when the
time comes, having clear plans for enforcement, escalation and crisis management are critical
elements of the successful community.
The amount of time spent on enforcement can vary
widely by community. Some communities need very
little while some large open customer communities
must spend significant resources on filtering,
escalation and mediation.
85% of best-in-class communities
have documented their engagement
practices in community playbooks
so that any individual working with
the community knows exactly how
to respond to common scenarios
Whatever your need for enforcement, having clear,
consistent and firm guidelines are a must. Developing
scenarios for handling minor, moderate and serious
offenses, with consideration for repeat offenses,
can give you (or other community managers) a quick
sense of direction in handling sensitive issues.
A crisis differs from other engagement patterns
largely in terms of time—crises tend to emerge and
grow in scale quickly. That makes having clear crisis
plans developed ahead of time vital in order to keep
a situation from exploding across channels and into
other business areas. A crisis plan spells out how
and when to escalate, ways to gather, verify and
share information, and language and techniques for
responding to the community. Having these plans in
place can help you spend time on the crisis, rather
than on your tactics.
One of the best assets you can have during a conflict
or crisis is trust. By joining your community, members
are placing a trust in you as community manager that
you will provide an experience that is worth their
time and effort. They are investing time, information,
expertise and (sometimes) money to be a part of the
community—and there is an implicit expectation that
you will respect and protect that relationship. Be
transparent about your processes—and about your
rationale for the community. Be open with what you
are collecting from community members and how you
might use that data. And be public and consistent in
how you apply the “rules”, the policies and guidelines
that keep the community healthy and productive.
Crisis plans are still relatively rare
Best-in-class
Can measure value
Average
Best-in-class communities are more than 2x as likely to have
crisis plans, but more than 4-in-10 do not.
M
CO
ITY D
N
U
M
IRECTOR, SERMO W
orld
On
e
the Triangulator
PEARL OF WISDOM
“You have more time than you think initially, so don’t just react emotionally. You also have more
advocates than you think – but you have limited time to get your people internally to respond.
Identify that time window and mobilize people around that.”
Anatomy of
managing a crisis:
• A
nalyze the situation – What
is happening? Who are the
actors? Identify those on
each side of the issue
PRO TIP
Responsiveness really
pays off. “I am surprised by
how consistently responsiveness wins,” Christian notes.
If you continue to engage until
there is a resolution or cutoff
point, and stay authentic and
transparent about your agenda and
role, you get a lot of leeway from
the community.
• N
otify the organization
counsel
• C
onnect with the advocates
on each side – get them to
give the lowdown on what
is happening without “tipping
your hand” about how you feel
• Assess next steps
• C
ommunicate, but don’t manipulate
the facts – because community
members will know from their peers
Trust is a big part of any successful
community, and one of the most
challenging parts of a community
manager’s role is knowing when that
trust has been violated and how to
handle it before a situation spirals into
something larger or dangerous.
Christian Rubio, Community Director
for Sermo WorldOne, says transparency is key to the process. At Sermo,
a closed community for medical
professionals, “If someone is willing
to give you their medical (licensing)
information, they are putting an
immense amount of trust in you that
they will have a good experience,”
Christian notes. “It’s the least I can do
to stand up for them.”
Managing a community (or a member)
with a crisis can require a variety of
skills—such as investigation, mediation, and triangulation—the ability
to pull together sides of an issue and
find solutions where everyone feels
heard and respects the outcome. It’s
also important to build relationships
with those who can help determine
when outside actors—attorneys, even
law enforcement—might be needed.
Community managers also need to
understand the resources members
value, in common—is it their money?
Their time? Something else? Playbooks can vary widely, but starting
with transparency and trust, and
focusing on the most valued needs of
the members drives results, creating
connectedness that survives crises.
The
POWER of
Community
Programs
Content and programming are the lifeblood of any community. They are the elements of a
community that create engagement—and help members find value and make connections.
Your content and programs, however, have complementary purposes in the community.
Content attracts members to a community.
Programming creates opportunities for member engagement.
Content—blog posts, training documents,
reports and whitepapers, photos and videos attracts members to a community—it may
be educational, entertaining, practical, valuable—
and it keeps them coming back to the community. Programming—planned opportunities for
member engagement—gets members “colliding”
with one another, creating connections, dialogue and learning.
analysis and decision-making? Sharing information
and best practices? Rather than thinking, “I need
to create engagement,” start with the behaviors
you want to incent, and derive your content and
programming from that.
Finding the balance between these is critical
for developing productive engagement among
members, and often when a community manager
expresses a concern about generating engagement, it’s because while they might have the
content to get them to the party, they aren’t
creating the programming that gets people out
on the dance floor.
Finding the right mix of content and programs
for your community goes back to the behaviors
you want to see. Are you building affinity?
Creating an environment for collaborative
Empower your community members to help
create programs. Community-led programs:
◆ A
llow community members to demonstrate and
get recognition for their expertise
◆ Provide professional development opportunities
◆ Strengthen bonds between community members
◆ Scale your ability to manage content & programs
The chart illustrates the mix. Too little content or
programming, and you get a ghost town. A community
driven by formal content can become nothing more
than a content channel, while a community with lots
of activity but no organizational focus becomes a
Land of 1,000 Flowers and may not provide the
shared value to the business.
A content calendar is a great way to organize and plan
your content and programming, but most calendars,
made for social media more than community, lack
community elements and events. Add them in, and
remember that content can be repurposed or derived
from programming to get greater exposure and
increase its value.
NAGER, The Community
A
M
Ro u
NITY
U
ndt
M
ab
M
O
le
C
the Chameleon
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Include community members in the development and facilitation of programs—
it's a great way to collaborate with the community on their skills and highlight your members.”
PRO TIP
Get your members to present
programming – it’s a great way to
build their skills and expertise in the
network and drive post-program
discussion in the community.
If I had to do it
over again, I’d
“have mapped out a
strategic approach sooner
– content & programming
is the drumbeat
of the network.”
Bigger is Better? NOT ALWAYS!
Less well attended events can sometimes be the
best ones. There is value in being able to connect
with just a few members, and more opportunity
for them to ask questions, shape the discussion
and really build relationships with each other.
When you run a community for community managers, you better be up to
the task. Hillary Boucher of The Community Roundtable recognizes that
content and programming are critical
to driving engagement and developing co-creators of the research that
drives TheCR’s shared value, which is
to demonstrate the value of community and community management.
At the center of it is a big calendar
and map. It’s a matrix of core competencies, use cases, topics and experience levels that ensure content and
programming appeal to the breadth
of TheCR Network membership.
But while having a well-thought out
calendar and presenting quality content and programming are vital, it’s
how Hillary leverages that content
and programming that amplifies that
impact. “Your content and programs
can be both a reason for you to reach
out to the community and a reason for
people to return.” she says. It also sets
a tone of inquiry, support and shared
goals for the community as a whole—
and the content and programming provide a rich, renewable resource on the
network to inform that conversation.
The
VALUE of
Scorecards
Look up scorecard in some community managers’ mental dictionaries and you may see a
definition something like this:
scorecard (n.) – A labor intensive oversimplification of complex community information for
people lacking the interest or understanding of the needs and value of community, resulting
in half-baked questions and the production of more data errands. (See: dashboard)
While scorecards can seem like a chore, well thought
out ones combine a clear narrative, data and qualitative examples to provide a powerful message about
community effectiveness to critical stakeholders.
Provide context and examples – Data alone don’t
always effectively demonstrate how the community
is changing behavior. A short example can help bring
the numbers to life.
Construct your narrative – What problem is being
solved by the community and what behaviors is the
community influencing that help solve that problem?
Some of the simplest narrative structures are the
most powerful.
Make recommendations – Your data captures a
moment in time on a longer-term strategy. Help your
stakeholders understand how data and strategy fit
together, and recommend next steps as a result of
the performance you are seeing.
Measure what matters, not what is easy – There is a
temptation to either present the data that are most
readily captured or that executives say they want—
but those data don’t always tell the story of the community. Make sure you present the data that does.
Make it a teachable moment – Find time to give
stakeholders a better understanding of the data,
what it says and how it connects the community to
business value. Take the opportunity to teach stakeholders about your community strategy, too.
Talking to the broader company:
The data you share with the broader
company may depend on the type of
community you have. In an internal
community where employees are
members, data about the value members
are getting and use cases across the
organization can have value. In an
external community, the data may
not resonate, but the impact on the
company’s perception can.
The depth of the scorecard needs to match its intended audience. For executives, keep it simple— top-level
data relating to business value combined with an interesting story or commentary highlighting the forces
affecting your numbers may be enough. Always be
available to answer questions and provide context.
For directors, more depth is needed, and you can
expect there might be more questions about P&L,
cost and benefit and ways the community has a direct
impact on finances.
For managers and team members, use the full array
of data at your disposal. Keep an eye out for bellwether indicators of developing momentum or issues
in the community.
And don’t forget about the community! Share data
that give them feedback about their experience and
success—and use it to encourage more of the behaviors you want to have.
SO
L
CIA
M
GER, Blue Cross/Blue Shield
A
N
A
of N
AM
ort
E DI
the Watcher
hC
aro
li n
a
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Find out what matters to business areas and speak to them in their language
when talking about social media or sharing reports.”
If I had to do it
over again,
“I’d identify key areas up
front and interview
them to understand
what they cared about
or needed from social.”
When James LaCorte was promoted
to social media manager at Blue Cross
Blue Shield North Carolina, he wanted
to raise the profile of the company's
external community efforts. But presenting a unified way for executives and
employees to understand the impact of
community was difficult.
“When I was promoted, our internal
report was very successful and I believe
was one of the reasons the internal
THE BC/BS NC
APPROACH
1. Bring together internal and
external dashboards
into a single presentation
2. Highlight correlations between
internal and external
3. Find the stories that bolster the
numbers
4. Develop vehicles for broader
sharing and employee connections
community had buy in at all levels.
Though we had a successful external
presence, I felt like it was not seen in
the same way,” says James
To highlight the connections between
internal and external efforts, they
unified the reports. They also added
narratives to highlight their progress.
“I can create a report with a lot of
numbers” notes LaCorte, “but most
employees won’t necessarily understand
what they mean. But if you tell them a
story, they will remember that a week
from now.”
The overall report goes to key stakeholders, with stats presented in other
forms for other audiences. “We publish
regularly on our Intranet highlight stats,
in the context of stories that employees
can connect with. “They’re getting the
kale with the brownies,” LaCorte notes.
And they’re building a healthier social
business.
ASSESSING your
Community
Most community managers don’t have the luxury of starting from scratch, and even when
you do, it’s easy to get caught up in tactics and lose sight of strategy. Whether you are
entering a new situation or evaluating your current community efforts, assessing is almost
always enlightening – and worth the time.
There are some common approaches community
managers use to understand and assess their
community performance:
• Interview stakeholders: How do they see the community supporting their goals—or not? What piques
their curiosity or elicits their anxiety?
• Review analytics: Even if this is part of your reporting process already, taking extra time to really
explore key performance indicators or look at data
in new ways may give you some new insights.
• Talk to Your Champions: Find the most engaged
community members to take the pulse of the community. What’s working or not working for them?
• Examine Business Goals and Value: Reassess the
community on the key business goals and value. Do
you see those goals addressed in the current community management approach or is there a disconnect?
• Assess management structure: Talk to your team—
or yourself. Are the current approach and priorities
meeting the needs of the community today?
•R
eboot: The community has lost its momentum,
and is seen more as a place for storage than collaboration. Reinvigorate it with new branding, new
technology, new programming or a significant new
strategy element can help give it the energy it needs
to change people’s expectations and behavior.
•R
ecalibrate: The community is active, but is not
meeting its goals or hasn’t supported the behavior
change needed to create sustainable ROI. Seek out
a new management approach or adjust priorities to
help get it back on track.
•R
einvest: The community is moving in a positive
direction. In this case, taking the time to assess creates an opportunity to celebrate success, and perhaps kick off new programming or other elements to
add further strength.
Graphic assessments
• Analyze gaps: Identify areas where the community
structure or management is not translating to the
performance or results you would like. Spell out
how you would address these gaps and what’s
required to do so.
Once you’ve gotten a bit of perspective on where
you are and what you need to do to progress,
you have a range of possible approaches.
•R
estart: The community has either gone quiet,
become a content dumping ground or become
toxic – it may be easier to clear the decks and begin
as cleanly as possible than to refine an entrenched
perspective and use profile.
A 'spider chart' like this sample is one of many
ways to give stakeholders a visual assessment
of your current status.
D
CTO
E
IR
R
OCIAL B
S
F
O
USINESS, McGra
w-Hi
ll
the Examiner
Edu
c
atio
n
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Be respectful, be humble and listen. Recognize that you are not the second coming—
you are just there to understand where they are and help them move forward.”
If I had to do it
over again, I’d set less
ambitious goals for myself
and what I thought I’d
accomplish in my
first year.
Measuring Success
“I return to same things
I had in 2008 – it’s anecdotes
and use cases and success
stories and people saying this
happened and celebrating it.
We want people to tell us stories
because they not only measure
success, they encourage it –
which makes them
doubly powerful.”
HIGHLIGHTS
• CEO involvement got other executives on
board – now many are exploring new ideas
• Leaders and managers now seeking out
community team to get on board
• Growth in participants, active users since
adoption of new platform.
When Ted Hopton arrived at
McGraw-Hill Education, he inherited
a community platform, Spark, which
had suffered from neglect. Without
a community manager or strategy,
the community had become more
of a static intranet than a place where
work was done.
Ted had the support of the company’s
new CEO, but he realized that any
effective revitalization effort had to
respect the culture of the company.
He needed to understand how the
company’s past experience with
community affected attitudes and
perceptions.
He connected with leaders, worked
with the existing community team,
and sought to model the kinds of
behavior he hoped to encourage—
but he didn’t try to push a grand plan.
“I knew I needed to listen first to
define a plan,” Ted says.
What he heard was that the dated
community platform needed an upgrade to get users to give it another
chance. This was an issue he could
lean into, and after six months at
MHE, they got the upgrade – which
improved morale and engagement
with its enhanced features and modern look and feel, and set the stage
for further community development.
Creating a
PLAYBOOK
Community management playbooks are an indispensable tool for community programs.
The playbook for a community exists for the same reason as the playbook for a sports team
– so people understand the game, know the rules and understand what it means to be
successful. Even if you may be the only person in your organization today that interacts on
a regular basis with the community, ultimately you want the broader organization to see its
value and engage with it.
Community management playbooks are a basic
training tools that allow people to better
understand the why, where, what, when and
how of their specific community.
The process of playbook development can also
spark other positive reactions. It often serves
as a trigger to refine—or in some cases define—
community management processes, because
documentation naturally sparks conversation
around standards. We’ve also seen the creation
of playbooks generate an immediate and positive
impact on engagement because when people in
the organization are consistent in their approach,
they drive consistent behavior in the community.
85% of “Best in Class” communities in
the State of Community Management
2014 had developed a playbook for
their communities.
Playbooks provide a guiding structure for the
operation of your community and can serve
multiple audiences. In addition to providing a
shared vision of the goals and objectives for the
community, they lay out strategy and tactics for
the day-to-day operation and management of the
community. The specific contents of a playbook
may vary from organization to organization, but
there are some best practices in your approach.
Treat the playbook as an evolving document –
As your community changes, so will your playbook.
It’s expected for playbooks to be updated annually
(or more frequently as needed).
Make personal interviews part of the playbook
process – Have conversations with anyone who
might use the playbook. It helps ensure that the
narrative and situation mapping reflects the needs
of people throughout the organization.
Keep the structure flexible – The best playbooks
serve multiple audiences and provide approaches
and guidelines but not strict controls or scripts.
Playbooks that are too prescriptive can miss use
cases or create interactions that are inauthentic.
Make it complement existing policies and
processes – Think about the existing policies and
processes in place for the organization as you
put together your playbook. Your work should
complement existing approaches, not supersede
them. If the creation of the playbook uncovers
needed updates to policies, have that conversation
in the larger organizational context.
B
GLO
MMU
O
C
AL
NITY MANAGER, We
the Connector
stern
Unio
n
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Remember that it is always about the customer. The customer needs to be at the center of every
discussion, even as you are putting together an initial idea. Talk about the voice of the company.”
If I had to do it over again,
I'd "focus more on the
nuances of Community Managers
working in different countries.
This is something we plan
to do moving forward.”
Direct, Don't Script
One of the best features of the
Western Union playbook is
what it lacks – scripts. Western Union’s Social Care team
continues to use scripts, but the
Community Management playbook focuses on talking points.
Charissa says the reaction from
customers was immediate and
overwhelmingly positive.
For Charissa Carnall and Western Union,
the time to build a playbook was right
at the beginning of their community
journey. “I was the first Community
Manager at Western Union,” she notes.
The company had a social care team,
but their primary role was transactional,
meaning advocates, general questions,
etc., were not always answered.
Western Union had big plans, so they
did something that many companies do
Tips for a Playbook
• B
e specific, but not prescriptive.
Give people knowledge, not scripts
• Make it a living document. Create, ideate, iterate, revise
• Support the playbook with training and feedback
later on the community journey – they
created a playbook.
“We wanted something we could
physically put in the hands of regional
community managers,” Charissa
notes. “Step by step, day by day, tools,
examples, decision trees and more to
help our customers move through the
customer journey.” Charissa worked
with The Community Roundtable to
bring together research with her internal
knowledge, and the company has used
the playbook in training for a half dozen
community managers as well as social
care team members and others who
represent the brand in communities and
social media.
Evolution is constant – the playbook
is already in its second version and,
Charissa acknowledges, it’s about time
to get to work on version 3.
The
POWER of
Advocacy
Programs
Advocacy programs have the potential to be a remarkable win-win for organizations and
community members. At their best, advocacy programs reward and empower your most
valuable members. They provide organizations with a powerful focus group to shape future
programs, products and services. Lastly, they create advocates – members who serve not only
as fans but as defenders of the organization.
It’s no surprise that communities with advocacy
programs have higher engagement rates. Those with
multi-tiered programs enjoy the highest engagement,
and the highest percentages of members working
together as collaborators in the community.
Multi-tiered advocacy programs
drive higher engagement
It’s also no surprise that those communities require
the highest number of community managers.
Establishing an advocacy program is a significant
investment in your community that can pay significant
dividends. So where do you start?
Start with thank you – If members feel like they are
being used as nothing more than marketing pawns,
you run the risk of alienating your biggest fans and
contributors so make sure they know they are seen and
valued for their contributions.
Be transparent – Be upfront about why the program
makes sense—for both the organization and the
advocate—and what you hope to accomplish. Set
expectations, have plans for removal of noncontributing
members, and ensure that your advocates feel like the
approach is a win-win scenario.
Community advocacy and leadership
programs correlate to the ability to
measure value, higher levels of executive
participation, higher levels of product team
and subject matter participation, more
user-generated content, higher levels of
conversation vs. content sharing and more
robust community tools.
Build the program with your ambassadors – Some
of the most successful advocacy programs started
by selecting a round of advocates, then building the
program with them. Start small and grow your program
with your advocates—it will help ensure the program
works for advocates and has legitimacy.
Rewards are nice – trust is better – We all love free
stuff, but advocates need more than just tchotchkes.
Giving them training, information and access that can
enable their success inside and outside the community
demonstrates you aren’t only expecting things from
them, you are investing in them, too.
Educate up – Advocates are a powerful opportunity for
the entire organization, not just the community. Help
executives see that advocates can provide powerful
insights. Executives benefit from the information—
advocates benefit from access and the opportunity to
connect with leaders.
VO
D
A
OGR AM MANAGER,
R
P
Y
Sale
CAC
sf
the Empowerer
orc
e
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Never come into a community with preconceived notions.
Every program, every group is going to require different things and have a different perspective.
Always go back to your community and use them as your sounding board.”
MVPs for MVPs
Four teams of MVPs take on
engagement, care, mentoring and
strategy for the MVPs and the overall
program. They give MVPs both
support and a stake in the future of
the program
Biggest Surprise
"The absolute delight
that our community and the
MVPs have around how
Salesforce views them and
continues to view them. Any
time we do something for
them, there is a real delight that
a major technology company
is really listening and
responding to them.”
ELEMENTS OF SUCCESS
• Make sure the benefits for advocates match their
responsibilities
• Transparency is critical – get the community involved
in its own design and operation
• Get advocates involved in program design & operation
• Your community is a powerful resource for
your organization, cultivate that knowledge with
executives
The Salesforce MVP program brings
together the top one percent of Salesforce community members – 145
members who make up 7 percent of the
company’s brand mentions.
across platforms, In exchange, they get
the discounts, badges and rewards you
might expect. They also get access to top
executives at an annual MVP Summit.
and executives get access to them.
Salesforce MVPs provide more than
volume – they answer questions,
propose ideas, connect users and serve
as de facto ambassadors for Salesforce
“(Executives) were agnostic to the idea
of community,” Matt says. “It was a
challenge to get in front of them and get
them to engage with our customers in
this way… (but) it was a turning point in
how senior executives thought of and
engaged with our customers.”
Today, Salesforce has added regional
events, and special teams of MVPs have
formed to onboard new members, support
current ones and help to the future of the
program. The rewards and recognition are
valuable, but it's the voice that Salesforce
gives the MVPs that provides powerful
benefits to both MVPs and Salesforce.
Start / Build / Grow
GAMIFICATION
for
Engagement
Before 2010, “gamification” was a niche topic championed by a relatively small handful of startups.
Today, gamification has gone mainstream – nearly half of our surveyed communities in the
State of Community Management 2014 employ some form of gamification (and more than
60% of best-in-class communities do). As gamification becomes more common, how you use
it and how you structure your rewards, badges and levels have a significant impact on the
effectiveness of your effort.
Before launching a gamification initiative, community
managers should think about a number of things
beyond the technology they need. Ask yourself some
critical questions.
What are your goals?
Be specific with the behaviors you are trying to
incentivize in the community. Simply “increasing
engagement” is not enough. You want to reward
constructive engagement that results in increased
comfort, trust, collaboration or solutions and
ultimately generates value.
It’s also important to make sure those behavior goals
are attainable, taking into account the maturity of the
community and the general profile of your users. New
users and immature communities won’t benefit from
the same goals as mature ones—your rewards system
should reflect those differences.
Research and conversation from inside TheCR
Network suggest that gamification:
• Is more effective at establishing new behaviors than
rewarding existing ones.
• Works better when used sparingly
• Needs to include plans for resetting levels or integrating
new members
What are your levels?
Setting levels based on the business value you connect
to certain actions can provide a rationale for your
system. Using community members to help level set
can also make sense—after all, if they are playing the
game, you may want to give them a stake in the rules.
How does it fit your culture?
Will your levels, goals and point system resonate
equally well throughout the community? This can be
especially challenging in global communities where
behaviors, language and even symbols and badges
may be perceived very differently in some places than
in others.
How will you tweak—and exit?
Every gamification effort will need tweaks and
eventually a reboot or a reset. Give yourself time
during the effort to reflect on your successes and
failures. Let the community know those tweaks will
happen and have a plan for making them.
What about your data?
Gamification efforts can provide a lot of rich data on
activity and interactions. What will you measure? How
will you look at it? How does the game data tie into
the overall community data? Are there pockets within
the community that are embracing or rejecting the
game? Having a strategy and tools for data analysis
are critical in managing the effort.
CO
ION SYSTEMS MANAG
T
A
R
ER,
BO
UB
LLA
the Troubleshooter
M
PEARL OF WISDOM
“Make sure you understand how well the technology will support what you are trying to accomplish.”
(A technical limitation meant UBM couldn’t connect their old data into their new system.)
If I had to do it
over again,
“I would have not tried this
when there were a lot of
transitions in the team.”
PRO TIP
The UBM team timed the
reset to happen shortly
before a platform upgrade,
a time when getting users
engaged and aware had
greater value.
Signs of Success
• Reengaged top level users at a new level
• Provided a forum to tap into key users’ insights
• Avenue for new users and those who didn’t join
the community early to enter on an even field
What happens when your system has
been in place for long enough that
the points leaders are out of sight for
most users—leaving top users with
nothing to achieve and new users
unmotivated?
They developed a well-designed
badge to reward all members who
had reached top-level status, and
brought top points earners into the
process as partners in developing the
new system.
Tracy Maurer and her colleagues at
UBM decided to hit the reset button.
The strategy diffused much of the
potential blowback, and gave the
team a focus group with whom to
share ideas and from whom to gather
strategic feedback. “Asking everyone
in the community for feedback would
To keep the reset from infuriating
their most active members, the UBM
team started planning months ahead.
have either gotten us way too much
response or none at all,” Tracy notes,
“This way gave us the right amount of
feedback, and feedback with value.”
The reset, which the UBM team
scheduled shortly before a platform
upgrade, reinvigorated conversation
about the community and reignited
the competition, while the newly-set
levels for points gave community
members a longer ramp for moving
up from Level 1 to the top.
Sowing Community
Across the Organization
Communities are often applied to solve a specific functional problem. One of the risks facing
even the most successful communities in that situation is isolation and with it, irrelevance to
most of the organization.
Isolation isn’t always bad. It may provide great
protection from organizational politics as you
shepherd a young community still figuring out
how to collaborate. Once your community is
more mature, however, it may make it seem your
community has a tactical role, but not a strategic
one. Your community may be dynamic, active,
and powerful, but if it doesn’t connect with the
larger organization, its potential is limited, and
the organization misses out on the immense
value that a community approach provides.
As a community owner, it’s your job to demonstrate
the wider impact that the community can have on
the organization – to ensure both the long-term
success of the community and your own value. To
convince uninvolved stakeholders that they have a
role in your community efforts, there are a number
of elements to take into account.
Understand your organizational and community
culture: To strategize your approach, you need to
understand both the culture within the organization
and the culture within the communities. Internal
stakeholders may be unaware of or uncomfortable
with the community; community members
may enjoy the autonomy of being “outside the
system.” Interview as many people as possible to
get your clarity around the disconnects. How do
organizational stakeholders view the community
(if at all) and how do community members perceive
different groups within the company?
Connect with what stakeholders value: As the
community leader, you have a front row seat to
the potential value the community has to other
parts of the organization. Put the benefits in terms
that the stakeholder can understand. What’s in it
for program/HR/finance, etc.? Think beyond ROI,
and share the other benefits of behavior change
derived from community.
Community 101: Assume those who have not
been a part of the community effort may simply
not know much about communities, and take the
time to bring them up to speed.
Think of it as an investment: This work takes
time and effort, but it is vital to growing your
community efforts. It’s also a best practice in the
most community-minded organizations. Community
leaders need to proactively reach out to and talk
with the rest of the organization on a regular basis,
and continually refine the case for community to
reflect current issues.
Building partners and allies
in organizations
D
CTO
E
IR
N LI N
O
,
R
E COMMUNITIES, CA
the Bulldog
Tech
n
olo
gie
s
PEARL OF WISDOM
"You are going to want to give up. Don’t."
Make or Break Moment
We migrated platforms to a best of
breed SaaS based platform instead
of developing our own. This has
changed the perception of the
communities quite a bit and
allows for easier integration
with other best of breed solutions in house without extensive customization that often
inhibits platform upgrades or
other necessary work.”
BIGGEST
SURPRISE?
How long it would take
to get things going in the
right direction—as we
simultaneously evolved a
user group program into
online communities while at
the same time CA was going
through culture and process
transformation.”
CA Technologies has had communities
in one form or another since 1981 –
but after more than two decades, those
groups, mostly regional in nature, had
become less cohesive. J.J. Lovett’s job
was to continue to bring together the
more than 300 user groups into a more
cohesive system, and spread the sense
of community throughout the company
to unite the company and customer
base through online communities.
"We needed to get people to step out
and engage with our customers—to
Highlights
• Executive support “a huge win”
• Increased internal support and engagement
with customers
• New platform integration moving forward, able
to shift focus to content and engagement
get some champions out there to
show how community could generate
business value,” J.J. says.
Because community members
felt more strongly connected and
engaged, CA found that they were
far more likely to recommend CA
as a company to do business with.
Additionally, the community was
providing valuable intelligence to
inform business decisions, and
questions were being answered
more quickly.
Armed with this information—J.J.,
business architect Sam Creek and
their team are taking their community
lessons to the broader company,
and reiterating playbooks and
business strategies with community
engagement built in.
The strategic shift is being coupled
with a technological one; A new
user-friendly platform, improved
technology for search, translation
and information access are helping to
expand engagement.
MEASURING
What Matters
It’s likely no piece of community management creates more headaches for community
managers than wrestling with measurement and metrics. In part, that is because many
traditional metrics of “success”, such as reach, engagement and frequency don’t capture some
of the greatest benefits of a community approach. Also, while you can measure almost any
element of a community, determining what to measure and having the time and resources to
collect the right data are not always easy.
Start with your goals: Unless your goal is “build the
biggest community possible," community growth likely
is not the best measure of your success. Pick a simple,
meaningful business goal and work backwards from
there. What behavior changes can the community
deliver that would have an impact on that goal?
Communities require different
management techniques at different stages
For example: If your goal is to reduce customer
support costs by reducing call volumes, the number
of questions posted to the community is a metric that
measures the desired behavior change. The number/
percentage of those questions answered is also an
important metric.
Prepare to Evolve: Your community goals, and
thus your community metrics, will evolve as your
community matures.
How do I report my data?
•Don’t overload – report the key data that
demonstrate results.
•Context and qualitative data – Narratives and
qualitative data can provide valuable context
and illustration. Use them!
•Make recommendations: Recommend actions
or suggest decisions based on your analysis, so
stakeholders have a menu from which to choose.
In early phases, the organization just beginning
its community journey will want to track behavior
change, because that is what changes economics. It
is much easier to get a growing community to adopt
an established set of new behaviors than it is to bring
together a large community and then convince them
to change.
In the emergent community, you can track “pull” and
growth metrics—metrics that demonstrate the strength
of the community members to bring in new members,
and then community growth as a percentage of past
growth. With your behavior change established, now is
the time to demonstrate scalability.
And in Phase 4 above, the “networked” business
actually turns back toward performance—in terms
of processes and business model elements that have
been transformed by the community approach.
MUNIT
M
CO
Y MANAGER, Huma
na
the Zen
Master
PEARL OF WISDOM
"Set a reasonable year over year goal and work daily at something to achieve it.
Don’t worry about the short-term fluctuations along the way.”
Highlight
If I had to do it again,
I'd "benchmark
everything. (Today)
I have speculation
but not numbers to
compare to from the
early years. Some things
would have been hard to
calculate but it would be
nice to know how things
compare now.”
If you’re looking for an example of measuring what matters, Humana’s internal
community, Buzz, and Jeff Ross are a
good place to start. “In our early days, we
were so new that we didn’t know what
we might want to accomplish in terms of
things that were measurable,” Jeff says.
“Now I publish a quarterly one-pager to
the community that is a scorecard on
91% of Humana associates are
active on the Buzz community
this year – with more than
half active on the site
each month.
Developing Behavioral Metrics
• Start by thinking about the behavior change,
not what you can measure
• Be proactive – measure key indicators before
you are asked to do it
• Think about overall business objectives, not just
community objectives
• Use all the tools you can to understand key issues
and highlight opportunities
seven specific business objectives—each
with one or two metrics tied to it.”
Jeff and his team have defined metrics
that get to the heart of the behaviors
the community is striving to change. In
each case, the desired behavior change
inspires the measure chosen against it—
from public thanks and kudos (for associate recognition) to questions asked and
answered (to measure social learning).
Jeff also relies on other tools to surface
company-wide issues the community
might help solve—with a monthly sense
of community survey distributed to as
many as 4,000 members. For example,
he says, “If the lowest score is on ‛I feel
like people know me,” we need to devise
ways for people to get more public information out there to overcome the feeling
they aren’t known.’
BENCHMARKING
and Assessing
Frameworks
For community strategists or those consulting a number of communities, developing frameworks
through which to better assess community maturity can provide great value. Assessment
frameworks create consistency and build stronger relationships across communities, even
as the assessment itself helps identify common challenges and opportunities.
The most structured assessment method is a
benchmark analysis. Benchmarking can provide
powerful insights into the strengths and weaknesses
of a community strategy – plotting where a
community sits relative to its roadmap and to peer
communities. Benchmarking can be done by tracking
the performance over time of one community,
internally across multiple communities within the
same ecosystem, or through a third-party tracking a
broad set of communities.
Removes bias that is often injected or assumed in
first-person evaluations: Getting to key data and
qualitative measures removes personal or political
bias, and provides an objective look at performance.
Benchmarking is a powerful communications and
education tool that:
Benchmarking analysis can be applied to three areas
of a community: to community management, the
behavior change it has established and the ROI that
has been generated. Before benchmarking behavior
and ROI over time, however, make sure you have a
system in place that provides reliable measures of
these outputs. Without that system, you may see
variability in your results, or it may be difficult to link
your results to community behaviors.
Focuses the conversation: Benchmarking triggers
conversations about what really matters to the
community, and provides concrete and actionable
guidance that helps translate your strategic ambition
into strategic reality.
Four Elements of Benchmarking
Define: How will performance be captured?
Baseline: Track your current state so you have a
starting point
Compare: Compare results to prior periods or other
communities
Use: Let analysis drive reframing of perspectives,
roadmap and priorities
Increases confidence in decisions: Seeing an
unbiased analysis of your performance helps you
understand how you compare and where you are on
track, providing feedback impossible to see without
that neutral perspective.
Because benchmarking can provide such great value,
in 2014, The Community Roundtable launched
the Community Performance Benchmark service,
using data from our annual State of Community
Management research to benchmark community
maturity relative to goals and peers across the
competencies of the Community Maturity Model.
ROGR AM MANAGER, Mi
P
R
cros
IO
N
oft
E
S
the Matchmaker
PEARL OF WISDOM
If you are going to start (a consulting model), take the time to see what the real needs are of the community
leaders in your organization, and build your plans to address those needs.
Creating a Jumpstart
To help brand-new community
managers, Alex created a “Community
Jumpstart” toolkit, which gives new
community managers 8 actions they
can take to move their community
efforts forward immediately.
If I had to do it
over again,
“be more aggressive
about advertising the
service. It took me a long
time to gain confidence
that people would find
value in this.”
As engineers and others at Microsoft
saw opportunities in fostering internal
communities, they turned to Alex
Blanton for training and consulting help.
Without a system, Alex’s consulting had
limitations—it was person-to-person,
so it was inconsistent and not scalable.
But Alex had another resource at his
disposal. As a member of the Community
Roundtable, he recognized that he could
use TheCR’s Community Maturity Model
Lessons from Alex
• Structured models can have great value,
especially in newer community efforts
• Pick an approach when possible that clients can
relate to – in Alex’s case, the concept of a maturity
model worked well
• Use the common framework to help yourself see
big-picture issues across communities
to build a framework to guide community
managers at Microsoft. The model created
a common vocabulary and approach for
communities, which created opportunities
to network them. The CMM also used a
vocabulary and approach that made sense
in the engineering environment.
The internal framework Alex built off the
Community Maturity Model had another
benefit—it allows he and his community
managers to see where they stand on
a relative scale, and where they should
focus their next steps.
As the process has continued, Alex has
been encouraged to see the lessons of the
assessments turned into actions, and has
developed longer-term, more interactive
relationships with a number of his clients,
which he relates directly to the base that
the Community Maturity Model-based
framework established for him.
Our mission at The Community Roundtable is to
Advance the Business of Community. We do that by:
RESOURCES
• Enabling community and social business leaders to
succeed through professional development, peer
learning, tools, research and advisory services.
• Championing individuals and organizations working
to advance the business of community.
• Capturing and documenting the value of community
and community management.
Professional Development
TheCR NETWORK
TheCR Network is the foundation for all of our research and advisory work at The Community Roundtable.
Community professionals from more than 100 organizations have joined TheCR Network and benefit from our
members-only programming, content, resources and networking opportunities, as well as a powerful cohort of
peers who provide advice and expertise on the critical topics facing community managers today.
TheCR and the TheCR Network collaborate on a simple shared purpose: To demonstrate the value of community
management, through the co-creation of research that demonstrates its impact. We also share the benefits of more
than a millennium of collective expertise in community management among our members.
Community Management Training
The Community Roundtable has developed training for community managers around a number of topics,
including online trainings for internal and external community managers. TheCR training assets are built for
full- and part-time internal and external community managers and include on-demand videos, worksheets
and case studies.
#ESNChat
The Community Roundtable is proud to host #ESNChat, a weekly tweetchat focused on best practices
in enterprise social networks and internal communities. Join the conversation each Thursday afternoon
at 2pm ET. TheCR produces summaries of each chat on Storify and presents key elements on Slideshare.
Assessment and Advisory Services
Community Performance Benchmark
TheCR’s Community Performance Benchmark provides a valuable assessment of where your community actually stands—
benchmarking your management processes and providing you with recommendations. It’s information that gives you the ability
to set priorities, make decisions and manage budgets with confidence.
The Community Performance Benchmark evaluates a community’s management maturity on each of the eight competencies
of the Community Maturity Model, compares the community with the communities that took part in The State of Community
Management 2014 survey, and makes recommendations for how you can strengthen your community performance.
The Community Performance Benchmark compares your community with average and best-in-class communities—giving
you a multi-dimensional plot of how you are doing, relative to other communities.
Advisory Services
The Community Roundtable offers a full array of advisory services for organizations of all sizes and in all places on their
community journey. Our advisory services tap into our wealth of research on community management - both qualitative
and quantitative - and our perspective on what works well in community and what does not.
Strategic Advisory
Strategic advisory sessions can be beneficial to teams going through planning processes by providing our expertise and
perspective. We’ve worked with over 80 organizations big and small and understand how social approaches are contributing
to their business goals. A strategy session can be structured with an agenda similar to the following or it can be an ongoing,
retained service for periodic feedback and advice.
Executive Assessment and Coaching
Through our research and client work, we have developed a unique and valuable perspective on how social approaches
contribute to strategic business goals and how the use of social technologies can help executives personally. Our executive
assessment involves interviewing executives, mapping their perspectives and behavior The Social Executive research and making
custom recommendations. Ongoing coaching can be customized to the needs, priorities and time frame of the executive.
Community of Practice Enablement
Do you need to create a full suite of training, research and programming around community management? Our services,
content and training resources can get you started quickly. To learn more about how The Community Roundtable could
work with you and your organization – we’d love to connect.
RESEARCH
Our growing research portfolio includes The State of
Community Management, a research platform that annually
tracks the performance of communities and community
management, gathered from our broad network of community
and social practitioners. The reports track trends and
changes in the community space, while each report also puts
a different lens on the business of community and its critical
place in overall business and organizational strategy.
The State Of Community Management
Launched in 2010, The State of Community Management has become a highly anticipated look at the trends
shaping community management. As a series, the reports provide a window into the evolution of community
management strategies and practices in organizations large and small.
All reports are free to download and share.
The State of Community Management 2010 was our first attempt to capture community management practices.
We organized those practices by the competencies in the Community Maturity Model – using the model as a
framework to articulate the competencies required to effectively manage communities and build social businesses.
The State of Community Management 2011 explored the strategies and tactics of community management
through the perspective of the members of TheCR Network. Our survey found both the importance of community
management and the challenges of addressing it within traditional organizations.
By The State of Community Management 2012 developed a more prescriptive view of the path organizations
take as they operationalize a community approach. We laid out the artifacts, organizational patterns, initiatives,
and resources we see organizations use as they move from wobbly early days to a structured and methodical
approach to real impact and then finally, to transformative business changes.
The State of Community Management 2013 built on previous qualitative research to offer a more quantitative
look at how community and community management functions within organizations and the value to expect from
those efforts over time.
The State of Community Management 2014 assessed the maturity of online business communities based on the
competencies in the Community Maturity Model. In this research we were able to define and capture objective
measures of maturity enabling us to benchmark community management performance.
The Social Executive
One of the major challenges of the community and social business teams with whom we work is the
education of their executives. The Social Executive research is designed to better understand:
• H
ow executives connect business strategy and social tools and approaches
• How executives use social tools and approaches for their personal goals
• The process and triggers that move executives to a more mature use of social tools and approaches
The Community Manager Salary Survey
The Community Manager Salary Survey brings more awareness to the emerging career path in
community management; detailing what community professionals can expect from different
roles and what hiring managers should know to grow effective community programs.
This new research platform takes a comprehensive look at community manager roles to:
• Document the responsibilities of community professionals
• Create a skill framework that can be used to hire, assess, demonstrate or grow skill sets
• Understand what community managers are worth financially, by context, and how
compensation is structured
Research Presentations
In addition to our key annual research initiatives, The Community Roundtable produces eBooks, white papers and
presentations on a number of topics related to communities and community management annually.
Many of those are posted on Slideshare, where presentations such as our "Community Management Fundamentals"
deck have been viewed tens of thousands of times. Other research-related products are provided for members of
TheCR Network and our partners.
To keep abreast of our latest research and work, sign up for The Community Roundtable newsletter, subscribe to
TheCR blog and follow us on social media.
Our Superheroes’
SUPERHEROES
As part of our conversations with our Community Superheroes, we asked them to name their Superheroes—
those whose work on behalf of communities they wanted to thank for inspiring, motivating and/or educating them.
Here’s who they highlighted.
Our Superhero
Their Superhero
Bill Johnston, Autodesk
Randy Farmer (Founder, communities.com)
Eileen Foran, Limelight Networks
Rachel Happe (TheCR), Caty Kobe (FeverBee)
Jerry Green, H&R Block
Lauren Vargas (Aetna)
Patrick Hellen, CloudLock
Hillary Boucher (TheCR), William Gibson (author)
Maria Ogneva, Sidecar Technologies
Rachel Happe (TheCR), Douglas Atkin (Airbnb)
Lesley Lykins, CXPA
Kurt Vanderah (socialmedia.org), Peter Shankman
Kirsten Laaspere, Fidelity Investments
“Myself in five years: I work toward who I want to be.”
Lauren Vargas, Aetna
“Those who are unafraid to tell it like it is.”
Mike Pascucci, Autodesk
“The unknown community manager”
Christian Rubio, SERMO
Rebecca Newton (Mind Candy)
Hillary Boucher, The Community Roundtable Rachel Happe (TheCR), Maria Ogneva (Sidecar)
James LaCorte, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of N.C. Doug Patton (formerly KOZ.com, now Family Health Network)
Ted Hopton, McGraw-Hill Education
Claire Flanagan (Jive)
Charissa Carnall, Western Union
Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library)
Matt Brown, Salesforce
Erica Kuhl (Salesforce)
Tracy Maurer, UBMClaire Flanagan (Jive)
Ted Hopton (Formerly UBM, now McGraw-Hill Education)
J.J. Lovett, CA Technologies
Sam Creek (CA Technologies)
Jeff Ross, Humana
Rich Millington (FeverBee)
Alex Blanton, MicrosoftAllison Michaels
(formerly Yammer, now Hootsuite)
THE END
www.communityroundtable.com / [email protected]
@thecr
The Community Roundtable

View - Higher Logic

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