Top community manager tips, from mastering the basics to gaining software platform exposure, ensuring new managers are equipped to enhance community performance.
We're excited to announce that Senior Community Manager extraordinaire Dori Gray has recently joined the Social Edge team! In honor of Community Manager Advancement Day, she’s sharing her tips on how to avoid the “community manager trap” and the key to being successful, even while juggling many roles and wearing many hats.
At the start of a new year, people tend to create resolutions for themselves, generally focused on things they want to do more, or less, of going forward. From new exercise regimens to kicking bad habits, these resolutions are typically focused on accomplishing new goals and overall self-improvement, providing a clean state to kick start their year. But why stop there?
This is my second time celebrating Community Manager Appreciation Day (#CMAD), but my appreciation for the role and my company has grown exponentially since last year. When I accepted the community manager position at Social Edge, I knew I'd see a side of social collaboration and Jive Software that I'd never experienced as an end user. I looked forward to learning new skills and facing new challenges. But this year, I learned one of the best parts about being a community manager in Jive is the continued support you receive from your colleagues.
Engagement is key to a community's success - both internal or external. Some common external community goals include awareness, information sharing, trust, loyalty, feedback, happy customers, and informed internal stakeholders, to name a few. All of these goals are achieved through different levels of engagement. So how does one engage members?
Consultant and community manager Meghan Connor has been working as an interim community manager at a Fortune 50 healthcare company for the last nine months. In her role, Meghan works directly with the organization's enterprise communications team to provide daily support on all community initiatives while driving employee engagement and new member adoption.
As community managers (CMs), we wear several hats in our Jive communities. Whether it's training new members, driving engagement, implementing governance standards, or gathering metrics to measure success - CMs have a lot on their plates. As one of the many Jive community managers here at Social Edge, I feel that building a strong advocacy program goes a long way to creating and growing an active, thriving community. What are advocates? Glad you asked!
In the 2015.2 release, both internal and external cloud customers will be able to utilize a Support Center feature to gather all your help and support information in one place. Unlike a spotlight search that searches the entire community, you can select which places and will be filtered into this feature. So, instead of your community members guessing the information they might need to find an answer to their question, you can select and prioritize their results, which will lead to greater success in quickly getting them the support they need.
While numerous new features were announced in Jive's 2015.2 release, we dug deeper into a few of the enhancements behind the curtain, focusing on the new reports added to the Jive CMGR's best friend - the Community Manager Reports (CMR). The recent updates to the CMR have allowed community managers to dig deeper into the data to see not only how the community is being adopted and used, but how engaged the members are.
During the launch of a community, every aspect of making the community successful is considered, from system settings to design. A major aspect of launch is also training everyone involved, from system administrators to community members. While plans are laid out to provide education during launch, one aspect of management of the community that is often overlooked is designing an ongoing education program.
No one wants to work with a zombie. But it seems that zombies are prevalent in the corridors of many companies around the world. Well, not actual zombies, but employees who are disengaged and dispassionate about the missions of their companies. And the results for can be devastating. In our current knowledge economy, ignoring employee engagement is extremely costly.
Planning for the launch of a community can be overwhelming, to say the least. There are many moving parts from technology to design to strategy and community management. All are important in their own right, because each contribute to a successful launch. It's easy to look at the big picture and feel like you're being asked to climb Mt. Everest (and if you have, kudos to you...this should be much easier ). In over a decade of community management, I've learned a few tips that will make the climb seem more like Mt. Hood. It's still intimidating, but much more do-able.
Community Managers are awesome! At Social Edge not only do we have a great team of dedicated and passionate community managers, and we are lucky to get to work with other community managers every day in our client work. To celebrate #cmad2017 we asked our team to share what they love about being a Community Manager.
Unlike your typical Jive collaboration scenarios, best practices for knowledge management dictate a tighter, observed process. This usually involves content templates, guidelines and an editorial process. Here are a few examples of how we handled this in internal and external communities.
At Social Edge we know that thoughtful and well-executed use cases are the foundation of a successful community, so important that we’ve blogged about it here. A simple search of “use case” in JiveWorks also yields dozens of informative results. While information on use cases and their importance is plentiful, here is what you really need to know.
Senior consultant and community manager Kaitlin Connor was involved in the rollout of a Fortune 100 investment bank's enterprise collaboration platform powered by Jive. From 2013 to 2016, she worked as an embedded community manager onsite at their offices in New York City.
Andrew Kratz recently sat down with Kate Weaver, a community veteran and former Director of Extranet Communities at Health Catalyst. The purpose of their conversation was to discuss her experience migrating from one community platform to another. Kate’s story and insights will prove helpful to other community owners considering a similar path.
On June 19th Social Edge hosted our first Customer Panel: Building Better Use Cases, featuring panelists Dina Vekaria and Dori Gray, Community Managers at Pearson and Medidata. They shared their use case best practices and presented live demos of their internal communities, Pearson Neo and Medidata Express. Check out the recap to learn more!
Last month, Social Edge was proud to be part of The Community Roundtable's CR Connect conference in Boston. The CR Connect is a three-day learning conference exclusively for online community practitioners - those engaged in the development, implementation, management, and measurement of community initiatives. Learn more in our conference recap!
Community Managers are the heart of any online community. As CMGRs, we love our jobs and are used to wearing many hats - from fostering engagement to facilitating member training sessions. In keeping with the theme of #CMAD2020, self-care, we wanted to share a few ideas from our team on how you can set your self up for success and prevent burn out.
