The State of Community Management Report

Best Practices from Community Practitioners

Community management is emerging as a critical discipline for managing social initiatives. The State of Community Management is our groundbreaking work in aggregating the best practices and lessons learned from our members, who have been leading the practice of community management in a variety of contexts – with B2B, B2C, marketing, support, and employee communities.

Our members work in over 35 companies ranging in size from SAP, PerkinElmer, Ernst & Young, Allstate, & EMC to smaller ones like TripAdvisor, SolarWinds, Immaculate Baking, and GHY – provide a rich range of experience and perspectives to share and we are grateful to them for their participation, questions, suggestions, and experiences. You’ll hear their collective voice in The State of Community Management and it represents over 180+ years of community management experience and comprises everything we learned over the course of 2009.

The State of Community Management is structured around the competencies in the Community Maturity Model – a management framework that articulates the competencies required to effectively manage communities. The report uses this model to link high level analysis to very specific tactical lessons learned about how to execute social programs. It provides guidance that can be used to:

• Improve your community management practices
• Educate peers, colleagues, and stakeholders
• Create a baseline for your community strategy
• Identify topics for further research and investigation
• Find additional resources

We would like to thank our sponsors – Fuze Box, Powered and Rosetta – who made it possible to widely distribute The State of Community Management.

To download the 60+ page report, please tell us a little bit about yourself:

You can find out more about The Community Roundtable here.

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Industry Perspectives

Community management is emerging as a powerful force as organizations adapt to the new information environment. To be successful, companies, and their internal cultures, need to empower community managers to help customers and employees – just as they would in a physical store.   They need to be able to connect with their constituents in real time, make the right decisions and engage in conversations that build trust.

The State of Community Management documents a comprehensive set of lessons learned to help define this emerging role and give you the tools to be successful in your social initiatives.

Jeremiah Owyang – Altimeter Group

People and their processes are front and center to the whole reason for business computing, but all too often technology solutions are allowed to shape the way people interact.
This report provides valuable insight into the real world human dynamics and politics, which are instrumental to enduring success in community building.

Oliver Marks, Sovos Group

I find a key takeaway from this report quite revealing: it contradicts the common belief that all communities develop into a 90-9-1 rule (90% lurkers, 9% contributors, 1% authors). Per the report: “As the community management discipline matures, there is increasing understanding of where certain rules of thumb like this apply and where they do not.” That is a distinguishing mark that elevates the level of insight that this report brings above others.

What thrills me is that of the eight competency areas within, only on area focuses on tools. The majority of the focus lies in business principles: strategy, leadership, culture, policies, etc…. Each of the sections on these competencies specifically identifies lessons learned directly from the real life experience of members of The Community Roundtable.

Rawn Shah, IBM