Episode #11 features Alex Plant, head of social media for NetApp. Among his overall social media duties, Alex oversees a video studio and a staff of videographers and editors.

Podcast highlights include:

• The effective use of video for social media content a B2B setting
• While the technical audience for B2B social media is strong, the real growth is expected in the business-level audience
• The intersection of social media and traditional marketing; including calls to action as a crucial part of engagement
• Measurement- tying awareness building measurements such as share of voice and sentiment to traffic generation
• Blogs are very powerful tools for capturing people’s attention (still!)
• The effectiveness of feeding ideas to bloggers and other influencers to keep a constant flow of external content
• Determining whether or not to have separate subject channels for separate audience to maintain high levels of relevance, interest and engagement, while maintaining control over the overall content direction
• Internal culture; the value of support from the top

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Episode #10 features Lisa Beatty, “Chief Jane Advocate” for Jane Nation, one of the first online communities for women to share their opinions and ideas about brands, and information among themselves and with brands about the uniqueness of their community.

Podcast highlights include:

• Running a community that is a hybrid of centrally-produced and controlled content, and more self-moderated forums
• The relationship between a community about brands and the brands themselves, including the need to comply with disclosure guidelines, and how to include the brands as part of the community (with examples from the Mayo Clinic and General Motors)
• Approaching community monetization without ads, with approaches such as sponsored content and access to community members for private conversations
• The challenges of managing a community including people at different stages of their lives (age, careers, parenthood, etc)
• Reconciling running a brand-focused community with a career as an advertising executive, as Beatty does

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Episode #9 features Dave Olson, Marketing Director for HootSuite, which helps people and companies track, monitor and manage their Twitter communities.

Podcast highlights include:

• How the traditional title of “Marketing Director” translates to online marketing, customer service and social engagement
• Turning metrics into meaning by realizing the personalities behind the community members
• Tips on community: making members feel like they belong and are contributing, and that they are being heard and acknowledged
• Stories about communities in the 1970s, enabled by “ditto machines” and other pre social media technology (the roots of Dave’s current personal projects are found at http://www.uncleweed.com/)
• An example of a company (SubPop records) that started their community building in the pre-social media era (pre-Internet, even), and evolved it into the age of Twitter
• Adding value, context and storytelling vs simply “attracting a crowd”

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

PHOTO CREDIT: kris krüg

Episode #8 features Jodi Gersh, Social Media Content Manager at the Gannett Company, where she helps Gannett’s 80+ newspapers and 20+ TV stations with their social media needs and strategies.

Highlights include:

• Meshing “old school” journalism with new media channels
• How Gannett coordinates social media learnings and tactics among more than 100 separate entities.
• The importance of internal communications in keeping employees at all levels- and in all markets- engaged in using social media, including the use of “old school” methods like email
• Upcoming trends: you guessed it, location and mobile
• Melding “citizen journalism” with professional investigative journalism

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

Our sixth episode features Sonny Gill, Community Manager for DeVry University.

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.

Our fifth episode is an interview Shwen Gwee, who works in the health care and pharma industries, and heads up a network called SocialPharmer* and the blog Med 2.0.

Highlights of the conversation include:

• Taking a community cultivated at a conference and continuing to grow it online with social media tools
• Conversely, how online groups (like Twitter chats) can be used to lead to more substantial offline events
• The reluctance in highly-regulated industries like pharmaceuticals to using social media, and how to counter those
• How growth in industry participation has actually taken off in some areas, particularly Twitter, and Facebook, which has seen many popular Fan Pages grow up around support for people with certain diseases
• Lessons learned from live events, including: the ability for people to talk across different verticals, the opportunity to speak with patients in an informal setting, and in-depth discussions of the mutual trust needed to keep social media use growing in pharma

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

* Note: SocialPharmer is currently a Ning group, but with the announcement that Ning will stop support for free groups, Shwen has told us that he is working on moving the network to a new platform, to be determined soon.

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.

Our third episode features an interview with Rachel Happe, co-founder of The Community Roundtable.

Conversation highlights include:

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.

Our third episode features an interview with Ryan Paugh, co-founder (with Ryan Healy and Penelope Trunk) and Director of Community for Brazen Careerist.com. From their web site:

Brazen Careerist is a career management tool for next-generation professionals. It exists to give everyone an opportunity to build and nurture a network of trusted peers. Think of it as a 24-7 virtual networking event, filled with people who can help you get ahead in your career.

Conversation highlights include:

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

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

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

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

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