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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Why Conversations Matter And How Things Need to Change to Support Them

I was very fortunate to both be asked by Gilbane to moderate a panel on conversations and to have a group of really experienced community managers participate in the panel. I was joined on the panel by Chris Howe, Director of Global Online Marketing at Avid; Naomi Marr, until recently Director of Web Marketing [...]

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Finding Time and Working Well

I’ve seen a couple of blog posts recently which made the point that we should never let up and that now is the time to push harder than ever. Andrew Hemingway wrote about how community managers need to do the same thing all weekend that they do during the week and Chris Brogan talked about [...]

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Being Thankful

The Community Roundtable – like any good community – relies on everyone playing a part to be successful. The great thing about community networks is that very often participants get back proportionally more than they contribute and that is what makes communities sustainable. As a young community, Jim & I have relied on each [...]

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Online Community Resources

[This post is one in an on-going series of posts by members of The Community Roundtable, highlighting the voices of experienced community managers. It is cross-posted at Under The Hood]
I believe that, although there are many commonalities between Social Media Marketing and building online communities, they are very different.  First, a few of the commonalities: [...]

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