Building and Sustaining Brand Communities

by Rachel Happe on February 3, 2010

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, having a few wicked smart people take what we’ve done and elaborate on it is… amazing. We are always very impressed with the quality of thinking and communication done by the community management team at Radian6 – led by David Alston & Amber Naslund – now with additional strength from Lauren Vargas, Teresa Basich, and Katie Morse. They have done a tremendous job of advocating on behalf of community management and share our passion for its growth as a discipline.

A lot of people are just exploring what community management means and Radian6 has put together a fantastic eBook on the topic – Building and Sustaining Brand Communities.  It covers a lot of ground, including:

  • Understanding what communities are
  • Making a business case for community initiatives
  • How to think about resource needs and what kind of people to hire
  • Best practices of community management
  • Measuring communities
  • The future of community management

In an easy to read and absorb format, they’ve combined the principals of community with the fundamental tenants of good business to create a playbook for companies who want to start engaging more proactively with their communities. I particularly appreciate their emphasis on the resources required to implement a community initiative – it’s not free, even if using public social networks.  Developing a realistic strategy and budget that accommodates one’s goals is a really important initial step.  I also appreciate the importance they place throughout their book on cross-functional collaboration, whether it is with IT to ensure the systems are in place and effective or it is around early discussions with legal teams regarding the risks and boundaries that might exist.  Lastly, predictably, I love how they have interpreted and extended the definition of the Community Maturity Model that we developed.

This is a great eBook to share with colleagues, executives, and customers who may not be very familiar with what community or community management means.

An additional resource that we put together for people to share “Getting your Feet Wet in Social Media & Communities” is geared to be a bit more basic than Building and Sustaining Brand Communities if you want to provide an overview to people just starting to wonder about all the hype around social media.

If you are a community manager or a functional leader working on socializing your processes and looking for more in-depth discussions and best practices, The Community Roundtable is a peer network for that purpose.  More about membership can be found here. We’d love to speak with you if you are interested!

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The Value of Community Management

by Rachel Happe on January 28, 2010

Most community managers know that the discipline has worth (i.e. significance) – our experience shows us that communities without community managers are much more likely to die off, go off track, become thorny stews, or get so insular that they can’t grow or evolve. For sponsoring organizations who want something fairly specific to result in their community initiative then, not having community management comes with some degree of risk. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition, after all – or for your employees to stick cheese up their nose and post the video to YouTube or whatever your community members decide to do next. Not having someone on top of that can lead to some unexpected surprises. So having a community manager is definitely worthwhile.

However, much less work has been done on analyzing the value (i.e. financial benefit) of community management. This is partly due to the maturity of understanding the value of online communities in general and partly due to the fact that it is almost impossible to run a scientifically valid comparison of two communities because no two communities – or community managers – are the same. Taking one community without a community manager and comparing it to a community with a community manager will allow one to observe qualitative differences in behaviors but it is not an apples to apples comparison needed to get at a specific dollar value. Communities are complex systems that defy easy analysis.

Tom Humbarger is one of the few people who has done an analysis of community activity with and without a community manager and the activity drop off, while not a cliff, slows significantly in a fairly short amount of time.

I’ve included his chart here because it is a striking example but his post has more specific stats that are worth checking out. It’s one of the only examples I’ve seen of this type of analysis.  To get at value you would have to compare changes in activity to changes in outcomes (support calls, online mentions – whatever the community’s prime purpose is) for various periods. Regardless, it’s easy to see the cost of community management against community activity and have a good understanding of what type of investment is needed to get the type of activity desired.

We are actively looking for others who have done some type of analysis on the value of community management – if you have a case study that you are willing to share – publicly or confidentially – we are looking to help community managers and executives understand how to think about the value of community management.  Some approaches we are seeing to understand this value are social network analysis and systems dynamics modeling but both require an advanced understanding of the approach to effectively use.

We’re also going to tag a few community management experts here in the hope that they’ll contribute to the conversation and give their thoughts on how to assess the value of community management: Rawn Shah of IBM, Connie Bensen of Techrigy/Alterian, Ken Burbary of Ernst & Young, David Alston of Radian6, Erin Liman of SAP, Rachel Makool, Michael Brito of Edelman Digital, and Dawn Lacallade of SolarWinds.

If you are community manager, how do you think about and demonstrate the worth or value of your role? Please keep in mind, just because value cannot be assessed does not mean the investment is not a sound one. We invest in worthwhile things all the time – political campaigns, charities, sports, relationships – so we’re not suggesting every community management investment needs to be able to assess value but it is something that some communities will be able to track.  For others, being worthwhile will be sufficient.

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Community Manager Appreciation Day #CMAD

by Rachel Happe on January 25, 2010

This is not our idea but we think Jeremiah Owyang is on to something with his call for a Community Manager Appreciation Day.  Community Managers have tough and often under-appreciated responsibilities.  They are the glue that often keeps a community from going off the deep end, metaphorically speaking. They are the person who offers and ear, finds a way to respond, and rallies various participant groups.  At various times they act as a librarian, ombudsperson, therapist, writer, trainer, catalyst, evangelist, policeman, expert, or analyst – sometimes all in one day. It can be both incredibly rewarding and incredibly exhausting work. The people who tend to be community managers are those with limitless curiosity about people, a deep desire to be helpful, a willingness to play lots of different roles, and an ability to deal with a lot of ambiguity.

So here’s to all the community managers out there!  If you have a particular community manager in mind, spend a few minutes today to say thank you, take them to lunch, or put a little surprise in their day.

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Hiring A Social Media or Community Manager?

We recently had a member call on Hiring for Community Management and also discussed the topic at last week’s #TheCRLive. It’s a hot topic for a variety of reasons.  There is growing interest in the field and growing demand for community managers. Our members’ had some additional perspectives:

Community an social media management job descriptions vary [...]

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Looking for a Community Management Job?

We’ve seen the community management discipline mature over the past year – both in terms of how well it’s understood and in the recognition by companies that their social initiatives are more successful if they have a dedicated community manager.  Demand for community management skills has also steadily increased to the point where we are [...]

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What Online Communities Will Expose in 2010

There is a lot of chatter in social media and online community circles about how social initiatives lead to increased transparency – and some of that is definitely true.  Customers and the public can find out a lot more about what others think about a company’s products and service than ever before. However, I don’t [...]

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Orchestrating Emergent Control

I ran across this quote today and it reflects something that I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past few years, namely how to encourage specific activities within communities without explicitly telling people what to do.
Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the [...]

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Community Is A Management Approach, Not Just a Role

The way we currently think about community management – for the most part – is a role played by someone managing a set of relationships often mediated by an online destination.  One of the reasons Jim and I started The Community Roundtable is that we saw it emerging as a career path for many and [...]

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Consistency & Translation in Community Management

Alicia Staley (@stales) pointed me to the following post on the Wego Health community. While the topic of the post was about communicating as a community manager in a health community, the post was full of some pretty complex topics:

Balancing consistency of ‘voice’ with the needs of various groups
Facilitating conflict
Choosing between different communications channels and [...]

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Measure, But Measure Wisely

Two things recently got me thinking about using measurement and metrics.  The first was a post by Bertrand Duperrin who pointed out that just because we don’t want to or don’t measure something doesn’t mean that it can’t or shouldn’t be measured and that every business goal, hard and soft, has an appropriate way to [...]

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