I’ve been thinking about this post for a long time. It started some time last fall when I was talking with a member of TheCR Network about how they should approach building out their social media/community team. In the course of the conversation, my recommendation boiled down to this… “hire the smartest people with the most experience you can find. People with experience doing this stuff are extremely perishable. Get them while you still can.”

Late last fall at the WOMMA Summit I had the chance to catch up with several hiring managers from top digital agencies. They both were having the same experience. In the social media services game it was a seller’s market and they were having a hard time finding qualified people to fill their ranks. They had more social strategy work than they could find qualified people to deliver, driving up the salaries/bonuses they expected to pay IF they could find the right talent.

Fast forward several months and I’m in Austin for the annual SXSW Interactive festival, catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. Over the course of the week I spoke with 10+ people who had either recently jumped from a brand to an agency/vendor or were in the midst of feeling the “community strategist squeeze.” Those that had made a career move had grown frustrated with trying to sell/implement a social strategy inside a big brand and chose to take a pay raise and move to the agency/vendor side instead.

Just today I noticed on Twitter that my friend Chuck Hemann mentioned “The number of openings I’m seeing for director/VP/SVP of digital/social analytics at agencies/cos is astounding. Welcome to the party, world” and it brought me back to this lingering post. He’s right, of course, and I wonder where we’re going to find all the people to fill these shoes?

Landing a job on the agency side requires enough experience and business savvy to justify big ticket consulting fees. Leading social strategy for a brand requires similar experience, but also a willingness to “push a boulder up a hill” for a long time. It’s often hard, thankless work that doesn’t show immediate dividends and usually takes a long time to get right. But I’m not convinced we can completely outsource social and community to an agency and/or vendor.

We launched TheCR Network to help bring community and social strategists up faster, building a network that will help them learn from others successes and failures, in real time. We also partnered with WOMMA and ComBlu to build the Community Manager Training Program, designed to convey the essential skills and share experiences from community leaders in a relatively quick, inexpensive format. While there’s no substitute for experiencing the role yourself, we think these programs go a long way toward exposing the next generation of community leaders to the critical skills and experiences they’ll need to be successful.

Do you see a shortage of community strategists ahead? Are we doing enough to bring along the next generation?

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TheCR Network is a membership network that provides strategic, tactical and professional development programming for community and social business leaders. The network enables members to connect and form lasting relationships with experts and peers as well as get access to vetted content.

TheCR Network is the place to learn from industry leaders.  Join today

 

There are a number of reasons we started The Community Roundtable, but chief among them is that we care about helping people. That sentiment is directed toward our customers, but it is also directed to others – potential employees, vendors, partners and people we don’t even know. We have some unique experience and expertise in social software, social media, community management, organizational theory, and strategy. We’d like to share what we’ve learned.

That’s from The Community Roundtable’s mission statement.  As a friend and employee I can confirm that Jim Storer and Rachel Happe not only mean it, but they follow through on it as well.  Today we are pleased to be able to give out 3 scholarships to our community manager online training program which starts next week.

Congratulations to Katie Felten, Candis Robinson and Peter Staal.  We look forward to having them learn from this training course as well as share their experiences with our audience.  Each will be doing a guest blog post here to talk about training, why it is important to them, and what their experience with taking this course is like.

Thank you to all who applied.  It was not an easy decision with so many worthy applicants.  And please continue to follow this blog and our twitter feed as we continue with our mission and with advancing the business of community, there is a good chance we’ll have more opportunities like this in the future.

Also, if you’re interested in learning more about our training program watch Jim Storer be interviewed by Tim MacDonald of My Community Manager tomorrow on his weekly community manager Google+ hangout.

The next module in our online WOMM-COM community manager certificate program starts next week.  We’re really excited to bring together such an amazing group of practitioners to teach this course. Check out the instructors and we’re sure you’ll agree.

The community manager course is designed to explore the competencies of the Community Maturity Model in depth and is perfect for

• WOMM-COM Module 1 graduates looking to extend their knowledge and/or begin to explore what it means to take the next step in their career.
• Current community managers looking to round out their knowledge and insure their skills are up to date.
• Executives and managers looking to better understand the community manager role and how to best leverage it in their organizations.

Each session in the course is taught by an experienced practitioner and includes case study examples of key principles. Sessions include:

Market Context - Explore what an entire community ecosystem looks like, including discussion of employee, partner and customer communities. Specific community use cases will also be covered.

Strategy - Deep dive into goal setting, target member analysis, competitive analysis and ecosystem mapping.

Culture and Leadership - Identify common cultural hurdles to successful community and how to handle them. Review of community leadership strategies, including emergent leadership and scaffolding.

Policies and Governance - Discussion includes developing enterprise standards for social media escalation, triage and response, playbooks, and how to best partner with legal/compliance.

Community Management (Part 1) - Review of recruitment and engagement strategies, return motivators, and recognition and reward systems. Discussion of relationship mapping and it’s important to community managers.

Community Management (Part 2) - Deep dive on your community ecosystem, including examples of a hub-spoke strategy with Facebook, 3rd party and internal community. Review of different social listening approaches and how they build strong community.

Content and Programs - Review of the critical components of a successful content strategy, including user vs. expert generated, evergreen, re-purposing and welcome content. Discussion of program development, including editorial calendars, modalities and capturing content from programs.

Tools - Deep dive on the evaluation, selection and implementation of various social tools. Review of mobile considerations and new tools just hitting the market.

Metrics and Measurement - Discussion that includes aligning measures with business goals, community health, influencer measurement, reporting and storytelling with data.

Program Management - This capstone course reviews key concepts and provides context on how community managers fit in the organizational model, the importance of internal evangelism, developing advocates and building a solid persona as the “face person” of the organization.

Register now or please pass along to someone who could benefit from this training.

Wow!  What a great webinar we were part of yesterday.  I presented alongside Sandy Carter of IBM and we had a great conversation about community management and community managers.  Thank you to the many great people from a wide variety of companies on the call, some of whom are just starting out on this community/social business adventure.  And thank you for all of the great questions.  We had so many, that we were not able to get to them all.  So Sandy and I are answering them on our blogs.  Here is her post.

As always, we are happy to further answer questions and discuss community management anytime.  Just shout!

1) What’s your experience with current managers becoming community managers?

Whether someone will be successful as a community manager has less to do with the title they’ve had in the past and more to do with how they approach work in general.  If they approach work collaboratively, are good listeners, like to make connections, can think on their feet and problem-solve well and enjoy interacting with others with a smile (even when those “others” get cranky) they are already a community manager.  They just don’t have that title and may not know it yet.

2) Shouldn’t community managers have project management experience, or can they learn as they go?

As with any business initiative, project management experience is definitely helpful when managing a community but there are also many things that come up unexpectedly and community managers need to be ready to shift and adapt the plan as needed which can be challenging for people too vested in a formal project management approach.  The level to which project management is helpful is also dependent on the seniority of the role – for the person primarily charged with engagement organization is likely more helpful than project management but as a community manager becomes responsible for planning, budgeting or editorial calendars they will need this skill set.

3) How do community managers justify their costs/salaries and measure their worth?

The best way for community managers to justify their cost is to have a very crisp set of goals for the community and understand the value to the organization of achieving those goals. Some goals can be directly measured in financial gain (support call avoidance, marketing leads, reduced internal meetings, higher response rates and close rates on sales leads) which should make the calculation straight forward and other goals like general collaboration, branding, thought leadership are a bit more indirect. Regardless everyone in organizations – including community managers – should understand what value they contribute in exchange for their salary.

4) What are some examples of how to get lurkers to participate and engage?

As some of you may know there is a long standing “90-9-1 rule” that says 90% of users are lurkers, 9% contribute a little and 1% contribute a lot. This rule of thumb is good for large consumer communities but not as much for closed communities which tend to see a much higher level of engagement. It is first important to understand what engagement level you need to successfully achieve your goal and keep in mind that with anything involving communications, lurking has a great deal of value – it means the content was valuable. However successful communities are about more than content, they are about relationships and that is where engagement is most valuable.

Here are some of the good practices in encouraging engagement:

• Make sure new members are welcomed – depending on the size of the community this could be an email, a special group or a new member event.
• Give new members something to do immediately and don’t make them have to figure it out. Early engagement is a good long term predictor of engagement levels.
• Backchannel to encourage a set of quiet members to step up. This could also be an email sent to anyone who has yet to contribute or it could be an email or call directly from the community manager.
• Ask active members to reach out to their quiet peers within the community.
• Support a level of controversy that incites engagement. Innovation and ideas don’t start in a vacuum – different perspectives are necessary. A community manager is critical in facilitating a constructive and respectful dialog about differences.

5)  Do you find different types of industries use community managers more than others i.e. regulated vs. less-regulated industries?

We find the community management works well for all but interestingly, more regulated industries often have more success with community management because they recognize the need for it earlier.  For example the military was one of the first to figure out how to effect large scale change through community initiatives.  I know it sounds counter-intuitive but it’s not.

6) How do communities serve non-profits?

Many non-profits have developed and are growing their own communities.  And some are good at making sure they are managed while others are not.  You can see the danger of not knowing your community or listening closely to them through the recent problems the Susan G. Komen Foundation experienced when they shifted funding priorities.

7) Do you have to be an expert in the community domain to be respected as a community manager?

No.  I think the community will respect someone that shows them respect and becomes part of the community while also listening to it and looking out for both the members’ interests and the greater interests of the community.  While there are skills that make a good community manager (see question 1) I don’t believe they are exclusive to those that are experts in the community space.

8 ) Is it best to bring in older but wiser experts that aren’t really comfortable with social media? 

Honestly, it depends on the community.  Would your audience respond better to an older/wiser community manager who may not be as well versed in the technology or would they rather have a younger more energetic one that knows the tech but not the subject matter as well?  Each community is different and knowing your community is key in picking the right fit.

9) What’s a good source of training for community managers?

Well, obviously we think our training program created with in conjunction with WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) and ComBlu is a great program…and we have a new session starting May 15.  But we may be biased.  Here is a good synopsis of available training courses.

10) What is Community Manager Appreciation Day and where can I find out more information on it?

This event was started in 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang.  Each year people are encouraged to sincerely thank their online community managers for all the hard (and often unseen) work they put in all year.  You can learn more about it here, here and here.

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The Community Roundtable’s core product is TheCR Network, a membership network that provides strategic, tactical and professional development programming for community and social business leaders. The network enables members to connect and form lasting relationships with experts and peers as well as get access to vetted content.

TheCR Network is the place to learn from industry leaders.  Join today

There has been recent discussion in the blogosphere about how some companies are abandoning their blogs. And much of it sounds very familiar and is something we have heard in the online community sphere as well. And it’s not surprising.  Many companies aren’t quite sure what they are getting into when starting these projects and all too often it goes something like this:

• Company hears a case study success story
• Company decides we should “try” that.
• Company puts existing employee in charge of new initiative often without the proper skills and training or without thinking through how much work it will be.
• Turns out, it’s more work than anticipated.
• Turns out, it’s takes a specialized skill set to do it well.
• Results are not easy to quantify early on.
• Employee gets frustrated.  Company gets frustrated.  Initiative is dropped.

The good news? For those who think through their community initiatives there is great reward and their communities can be highly successful and add to the businesses bottom line. Check out our recently updated slideshare on Community Management Fundamentals to learn more. We particularly like slides 14 & 15 which illustrate the long tail and power of online communities that come with proper planning, management and time.

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TheCR Network is a membership network that provides strategic, tactical and professional development programming for community and social business leaders. The network enables members to connect and form lasting relationships with experts and peers as well as get access to vetted content.

TheCR Network is the place to learn from industry leaders.  Join today

It would be too hyperbolic to say there is a crisis in community and social business staffing, but there are definitely some big problems, particularly at the senior and strategic levels. Most people in the space know that experienced community managers are hard to come by generally and if you want to find someone with both community management and business leadership skills, you are in rarefied territory. As a result those people are in high demand. The story could end there, but it doesn’t.

The same group of senior community leaders is increasingly frustrated, over-worked and emotionally deflated in their current roles. They are being asked to rationalize enterprise wide engagement strategies and programs, but without the level of strategic support that would allow them to succeed. Often it feels like these individuals are being tasked with fixing the flaws of a highly fragmented and siloed organization with teams that fit in a small conference room. These strategists face the following pressures:

• To assess, reconcile and coordinate the ‘social’ approach across a wide range of enterprise functions
• To justify not just their progress but the ROI when many are still in a highly fluid and experimental state
• To train the entire organization on social media, internal social software, social business, social processes and workflows and community management
• To educate legal, HR and compliance groups about the dynamics and specifics of online social environments
• To understand and report back what is going on – from a conversational perspective – in the online environment
• To share their expertise both internally and externally with a wide variety of groups
• To hire a set of individuals that are hard to find and which their HR departments don’t really understand and then mentor and educate those groups quickly
• To coach executives individually
• To keep up with the ever changing technologies and analytics options
• To integrate internal social environments with closed communities with open communities and with public social channels and none-hosted communities in their markets
• To set up enterprise-wide governance processes and regularly coordinate efforts and approaches globally
• To help the entire organization see the opportunities that social approaches might bring to specific workflows and functions

Add to all of this the increasing awareness around social software and community management and these individuals are being pulled in a lot of different directions. And yet, most CEOs and executives probably would respond with a blank stare if you asked them about community management and/or social business. Executive sponsors of these programs are a bit ambivalent and waiting for ‘proof’ before increasing investment, but this is both a chicken and egg problem and a lack of understanding of the emerging social risks and how these programs help mitigate them.

To me, the limited investment in and strategic exposure of social and community teams is one of the biggest risks to progress in the social business and community space right now – both in making progress and in keeping staff. Those organizations that can give these senior strategists the support and authority they need to do what is asked of them (implicitly or explicitly) will ultimately attract and keep the talent that does exist.

One of the reasons we set up TheCR Network as a private peer group is because as a organizational spokesperson, community leaders cannot often talk openly about some of the very real challenges they are faced with – or find encouragement for the small, often imperceptible, but significant wins that represent progress.  And we are humbled by how thankful our members are to have that space to be comfortable, let their hair down a bit, relax their shoulders and get some pats on the back for successes that seem small to their companies but are very large efforts and feel more like pushing a boulder up hill, than traditional work some days.

We are very interested in the future of talent development in this industry which is one of the reasons we launched a series of training courses along with WOMMA & ComBlu.  While those training courses may not be the right fit for individuals with these skills already, they (hopefully) will bring their future colleagues into the market, relieving some of the pressure on experienced individuals to be the sole source of training.

Do you face these challenges?  What does your company do to support you?

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TheCR Network is a membership network that provides strategic, tactical and professional development programming for community and social business leaders. The network enables members to connect and form lasting relationships with experts and peers as well as get access to vetted content.

TheCR Network is the place to learn from industry leaders.  Join today

Recently in TheCR Network we asked members to share how they first encountered and got to know The Community Roundtable and its founders Jim Storer and Rachel Happe.  It was fun to see where people had come from.

There were many ways people came to know The Community Roundtable.

• Past conferences Jim and Rachel attended back when community management and social business were terms only a few understood
• Working together
• Listening to Jim or Rachel speak at conferences and local events
• Coming to TheCRLive events
• Listening and talking and listening more on social media channels
• Sharing a beer and talking about life and work and the challenges we all face there.

Here’s my story:

It was April 6, 2009 and I was working from home.  My husband commuted by airplane to his consulting clients regularly and the adult contact I had been having was with my toddler and her nanny.  Clearly I needed to branch out.  I was fairly new to this Twitter thing but had dived in with both feet and in month two online was discovering tweet ups.  I’m not sure how or who pointed me to a Red Sox opening day tweet up at a bar near me.  But there I was on a rainy April day watching a video of the Red Sox beating the Yankees in 2004 and having a beer and talking social media and life with Jim Storer and other great Boston tweeps.  These were the days just before Jim and Rachel went live with The Community Roundtable, and while I knew nothing about the venture, I followed and listened and talked to Jim & those I met at that event while I was working on my own venture trying to rally support around an idea.  And then I attended the first TheCRLive lunch. I was not sure what to expect and was also not sure what I could add to the conversation but I was sure I wanted to hear and learn more.  This is where I first met Rachel.  And immediately I knew I wanted to stay in the loop with this group.  So I attended as many lunches as I could and subscribed to their newsletter.   I learned that what I was really trying to do was build a community.

And that is what is so interesting about those we have met.  No matter how we first came to know TheCR, we all hold a common interest(s) or context, a shared sense of purpose, and a common set of needs that we help each other with.  Or in other words we are a community.

Now it’s your turn, please tell us how it is that you’ve come to be part of our community and why it is that you stay in touch.

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TheCR Network is a membership network that provides strategic, tactical and professional development programming for community and social business leaders. The network enables members to connect and form lasting relationships with experts and peers as well as get access to vetted content.

TheCR Network is the place to learn from industry leaders.  Join today

The 2012 State of Community Management report has a lot of information in it and at 57 pages it is beefy.  To those of you who have digested the entire document, thank you and nicely done!  But we also know it is a lot to wade through so we will be doing a series of blog posts to better show you the prescriptive, actionable information contained in it. In particular, this year we shared the initiatives we see our members undertaking as they mature in their social and community capabilities.

We also have 2 free webinars coming up that will talk about the report and highlight key findings – please join us!

•  May 2 at 1:30pm Eastern: The State of Community Management in Social Business with Sandy Carter, IBM
• June 6 at noon Eastern: How Strong is Your Social Business? sponsored by Protiviti

In this first post we are concentrating on the Hierarchy stage (Community Maturity Model, Stage 1 or CMM1) of community capability and how organizations move into the Emergent stage (CMM2).

CMM1 is characterized by a chaotic jumble of initiatives and very inconsistent understanding of social tools and community management techniques. Most of the social media technologies and community structures are ad hoc, uncoordinated or experimental.  Most likely there are corporate social media accounts, but typically very few employees and departments are contributing to them (or they have been outsourced to marketing agencies), and most employees are not encouraged to do business on social channels.  Executives are wary of social technologies being more of a distraction than an opportunity and the culture is often distrustful of sharing information socially.

So how do you address the associated chaos and push that big boulder up the hill in order to move forward with your community initiatives?

Find a Leader
Leadership matters and having a point person who can act as traffic control in this early phase matters a great deal. We see this social business leader identified in a few different ways – sometimes assigned, sometimes they are hired in and sometimes they emerge because of their interest and passion.

Recruit executive sponsors
As well as a primary point person, it’s critical to start cultivating executive level sponsors. Help them understand the community opportunity by focusing on three aspects – the changing market dynamic, the impact on the organization, and how it helps them personally.  Here is a great recent post that tells you how.

Identify cross-functional champions
The social web is exposing inconsistencies within organizations in a way that is critical to address and most functional areas within the organization have a stake in how those inconsistencies are resolved. For example, Is the response from Marketing the same as from Customer Service?  When a customer decides they like what you do and want to work for you, do they get the same experience working with Human Resources as they did when they were a customer?  There is someone in each of these departments that can see the wisdom in having a consistent voice & experience throughout the company.  Find them, encourage them, and involve them so they can represent their group in how social and community initiatives are implemented.

Create an operational framework and roadmap
Executives are afraid that all this social media stuff is simply playing around.  Map it to business goals, show them how it can help them save money and time and then show them how to execute on the opportunity.  The Community Maturity Model has been used to provide this common operational framework and taxonomy. We use the CMM in our work at The Community Roundtable for the same reason.

Complete a social business audit or gap analysis
Most likely there are people and departments using social.  How are they using it?  What are they using it for?  What are they missing?  How do the current initiatives fit in with broader corporate goals? What could it be used for that is not being used for today and why would that be good for business? How could the organization most effectively use communities? What initiatives need to be undertaken in order to do so?  This audit will not only provide the impetus to inventory current activity but it will jump start the enterprise-wide alignment process.

Start a listening program
For those stakeholders concerned about “controlling” the story of your brand it is helpful to show them that people are already talking…and show them what they are talking about. This helps to highlight to senior executives that if all this organic activity continues with zero involvement and little influence from the organization, it represents a big risk. If however, the organization is an active participant and can establish an influential voice, they will be able to better identify potential risks and be able to address them before a crisis emerges.

This process is not easy or quick. But once these steps are taken, organizations begin to have a more structured community approach that brings both a level of visibility and relief and it sets the organization up to contribute to business results.

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TheCR Network is a membership network that provides strategic, tactical and professional development programming for community and social business leaders. The network enables members to connect and form lasting relationships with experts and peers as well as get access to vetted content.

TheCR Network is the place to learn from industry leaders.  Join today

This year SXSW Interactive was bigger than its music festival. Which is interesting as it started as a small community event and has become big business.  As always there was plenty to learn at this event for community management and social business pros and thanks to Fleishman-Hillard’s  Austin2Boston event last month, we in Boston were able to hear from Jim Storer, some TheCR Network members and other pros on what they learned from sessions and conversations at SXSWi.

One of the hardest things that community leaders do is to help executives within their organization understand the value of communities and how to effectively participate themselves. It’s not that executives can’t learn but they are faced with unique challenges:

• Booked Solid: Executives have very little time for unstructured conversation and with it, innovation
• Bottlenecks: Executives are assaulted with requests and issues and find it challenging to be proactive and focused on important (vs urgent) items
• Handled: Executives have a lot of handlers – both in their own organizations and in others. They receive information that is often filtered with a point of view which is largely helpful but can also create blinders
• On-the-Go: Executives are in constant motion which can make it hard to find the time to focus on learning a complex new construct.

Many of our members have found creative ways around this in ideas like reverse mentoring, one-on-one coaching, and peer case studies. I would also add that if you ever get the opportunity to travel with an critical executive stakeholder do not pass on the opportunity… it provides some of the best time to have an extended conversation with them in a relatively informal way.

I recently spoke to a room full of senior executives at a Fortune 500 manufacturing company. They were not brand new to the idea of social business and their interest was piqued but many of them still didn’t seem entirely sure of how all of it impacted them directly. I broke down my commentary into the following three areas:

• Macro conditions that are changing organizational performance priorities
• The role networks and communities play in that organizational performance
• How communities can directly help executives in their daily work

Here is the presentation I used:

I also spoke with Lenny Liebmann during the IBM Connect Conference in January about some of these themes:

What are some of your tips and tricks for helping executives understand and use social methods in their own work? What have you seen work particularly well?