'The State of Community Management' Report

Community management is all to often underestimated as a core component of successful and enduring Collaboration/Social Media/Enterprise 2.0 roll out. After the aspirations for a wonderful new world of fostering greater interaction, breaking down silos and other noble intents, there's the excitement of vendor selection... and then the real work starts.

Someone has to keep the fires burning and build adoption and usage after the flush of fashion has faded from executive cheeks, and the focus shifts to managing the people selected to manage the community. These people are all to often in a very exposed position, as I wrote in a previous post  'Collaboration Strategy Shortcomings? Whack the Community Manager'

....middle management tasked with running collaboration environments are often in an extremely exposed position politically, with great expectations from their superiors clashing with the realities of corporate cultures.

One of the business challenges for those attempting to deploy 2.0 web technologies has been the realization that consuming case histories of infrastructure strategy and execution by other companies won't necessarily help them.

The issues around strategizing for scale and context can create distortions in thinking, a little like an oasis mirage scene in an old movie.

Someone is expected to run these environments over time after vendor sales folks congratulate the purchaser on their wise decision, but all too often the technology selected shapes and limits the way people interact.

I've heard some very harsh stories recently from managers inside large companies. Exhausted from battling political cross currents as they strive to build consensus and drive adoption in order to meet unrealistic goals set by superiors - who all to often don't prove the air cover necessary to succeed - some are asking if it's worth the trouble.

There are a couple of private forums for these folks that help them share operational best practices and problems: the 'Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council' and The Community Round Table, with the latter releasing a valuable and useful free 'State of Community Management' report this week.

In my opinion there's way to much emphasis on tools and technology as a solution to problems - we're in an era of consolidation in an overcrowded tech sector  - and this report helps expand and understand the underestimated areas.

The Community Roundtable is structured around a Community Maturity Model management framework that incorporates eight competencies required to successfully ‘socialize’ an organization, which are Strategy, Leadership, Culture, Community Management, Content & Programming, Policies & Governance, Metrics & Measurement and finally Tools.

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A telling quote from the report:

Community managers often sit at the fulcrum of competing needs within their organizations and therefore see and feel the organizational friction more acutely than many of their colleagues.

This stress is both a leadership risk and evidence of the need to ensure feedback coming through the community has a leadership channel through which it can be addressed and resolved. If that is lacking, community initiatives tend to act more as band-aids to organizational issues rather than a different way to serve and energize a group of constituents

As I say in the introduction, the report

provides valuable insight into the real world human dynamics and politics, which are instrumental to enduring success in community building. From my perspective and experiences, mapping behaviors to viable business goals and clearly communicating those goals to all participants is enormously helpful in giving people a baseline on how and why they should interact.

Whether you are in the trenches as a community member or manager, or struggling to understand some of the people issues around a successful roll out, you need allthe insight and help you can get.

Intended to improve your community management practices, educate peers, colleagues, and stakeholders, create a baseline for your community strategy or plans, identify topics for further research and investigation and to find additional resources, this report is well worth digesting.