Category: online interaction | Page 28

More on community management (part 3 or “what’s in a name”)

photo credit: os♥to
I hate titling these blog posts with the words “community management.” After writing post 1 and post 2 on this topic (triggered by Chris Brogan), the words just feel wrong. But because this is the label that has been floating across our blog conversations, I’m keeping it in as “connective tissue.” I was actually thinking about “The Giant Ear!”

So why am I writing a third post in three days on community management? (Instead of going for a walk this morning. Uh oh.) It is “in the air.” For those who have had a baby, it’s like once you get pregnant, all of a sudden you notice all the other pregnant women walking around town! Once you start putting blogging your ideas on something, you notice others who have thought/said/tickled around the same thing. The waves of blogging conversations about community management seem to be washing on the shore closer together these days.

While catching up on some feeds, I saw Matt Moore’s bit on
chief conversation officer.

Organisations need Social Media Relations people. And because of the participatory nature of the social media, these people will have to blog. And comment on other blogs. And Twitter. And all that other stuff. They will encourage, advise and look out for bloggers and social media headz in their own organisations. And they will have to believe in what their organisations do (be it curing cancer or causing it) or else they will get found out.
Everyone wants to be Chief Talking Officer. Who wants to be Chief Conversation Officer?

Hm. Matt is talking about something different than this animal we’ve been calling community manager, but some of the functions he lists hearken back to Chris’s list. But do you feel the dissonance that I do? Just the title “officer” shows us the polarities that we activate when trying to reconcile a network activity with a corporate structure.

Control <–> Emergence
Talking <–> Listening
Planned <–> Evolving
Being in charge <–> Being able to be an effective network actor

We are recognizing these polarities or tensions. (YAY!) They are showing up in thousands of blog posts and creeping into books. They emerge from deep roots and cannot be ignored or wished away. Yet it seems to be hard to talk about them within organizations and even the “job descriptions” we see more of every day. (Check the listing of online community manager blogs on Forum One’s site or on Jake McKee’s.)

Let’s make them discussable, and we can discover the way forward. Let’s discuss them — with every boss and leader who will listen. Let’s encourage the network around organizations to tell them how they feel about being managed – or listened to. Let’s find a way to use the power of the network for our organizations, and with it, the multiplied, nested power of the communities that live in and spring from the network. (Oh heck, I’m getting all riled up and haven’t even had a cup of tea this morning!)

To circle back to this idea of “community manager,” and what it is becoming in a network age, the first thing is to be brave enough discuss the idea that it may be “management” in the frame of business structures and some “older ways” of doing things, but in terms of the action in the network, it is not management as we know it. It is is about being connective tissue between an organization and the world/network it lives within. It is about activation, listening, pattern seeking and then bringing that back into the current context of the organization – at whatever stage that organization is in becoming a network organization. It is about reconciling that businesses, in their interaction with the world (customer, vendors, regulators) have opened the door to a new way of being in the system that requires more than management. More than measurable data. More than targets and goals. It requires intuition, intellect and heart.

Heart? Community Managers and HEART she says? INTUITION???

Yes. Heart and intuition, but not in the absence of intellect. Because systems include that beautiful, irrational, impulsive part of human life – emotion. “Community” and “network” both imply human beings. The person you entrust to guide and represent and help your organization learn – this person we have been calling the “community manager” – is your person who stewards your connection to both hearts and minds. Who listens with every available channel, including intuition. How do you measure your ROI on intuition? On heart? I’d ask, what are you losing every day by ignoring them.

So what would you call that role? Magician? The Giant Ear? Elder? I’m currently stumped.

(edited later for a silly typo)

Musings on “community management” Part 2

My last post was on the ground, in-the-flow practical stuff of online community management in response to Chris Brogan’s great post, On Managing A Community . This one climbs up to meta-ville a bit and asks a couple of questions.

Are we talking about communities, or are we embarking on the era of network facilitation?
If you read between the lines and through the comments on Chris’s blog I think he has begun to tease out some of the differences between community and network management! (I’ll come back to that word “management.”) Read through his goals which I think are different than what we have come to expect for what I’ll call “traditional online community management.” In the past this has been about the inward set of processes around hosting, moderation and facilitation of web based discussion communities – large or small. He speaks of outreach, of reputation of an organization in the world, and of mechanisms of learn from and with groups of people and even the wider world. It is an outward looking role, not inward. It is about spawning connections, not keeping existing connections organized.

This is not your mother’s discussion board, sweetheart!

When we move to the network, a couple of things happen. The notion of managing becomes even more of an illusion than managing that herd of cats called “community.” (By community, I mean a bounded set of individuals who care about something and who know they are members and interact with each other over time.)

Instead we are talking about scanning for things important for our organizations – conversations about us, niches or needs we can fill, feedback and suggestions for improving what we do. It is filtering and redirecting those messages to where they can do good. It is a little bit like listening to the universe.

Instead of managing conflict or spammers in a walled community, we are seeking to make connections between people that advance our organization’s learning and goals. That includes between disgruntled people and the people who might address that problem, between ideas, links and content to people who might use them, and between communities that exist within the humus of the network garden.

Instead of spawning or archiving threads, we are tagging and remixing. Instead of inviting in or kicking out members, we are mapping the network of relationships, looking for where to respond, and where to catalyze action.

These are not the list of community management skills we have come to know since the first big upswing in online communities in the mid 1990’s. We have moved to from community to network…. what is the word?

If we are talking about communities, are we really talking about managers?
I don’t think it is management in the traditional sense, in the sense of control and mold (or even “facilipulate” – manipulate+facilitate!). It is about sensing, scanning, filtering and connecting. And, it is about learning. Facilitating learning. Living the learning and creating the next iteration of that learning. It is about stewarding technology as wave upon wave of new tools crashes upon our organizations.

It is about weaving between the community and the network.

What the heck would this job be called? Which organizations have the foresight to invest in it — and realize that those who help them weave their organizations in and out of the networks will benefit most from those networks? If we were looking for this person, what skills would they show up with? What would their traces across the internet look like?

Musings on “community management” Part 1

photo credit: CaseyLessard
Chris Brogan has a great post today on online community management – a must read if you have or are considering an online community in your business or organization. On Managing A Community .

I have two “chunks” I’d like to contribute to this conversation/stream of posts/comments. First relates directly to Chris’ observations about community managers. That is the content of Part 1. Check the next post for a more “meta” reflection in Part 2.

Skills, Experience and Qualities of a “community manager”
1. On the practical side, I would add the following things I’d look for in a candidate (Chris didn’t write about this, but it is on my mind, so what the heck!)

Fast, accurate and quality reading/writing skills – I always recommend a timed reading/writing test that involves looking at multiple bits of information (posts, etc.), seeing the patterns of those posts then composing a response.
Ability to think globally, not just in a linear manner. Community is non-linear. A good community manager must be able to skip around, see patterns, scan the whole and then discern if and where to intervene in the system. People who have to go from a, to b, to c often struggle with this and can’t do it fast enough. And alas, speed keeps coming into the picture. (Ah, i still dream of Slow Community.).
Good at multimembership or meaningfully belonging to a number of communities. A community manager is a bridge – finding the opportunities to connect in and out of the community to both build the community and carry it’s ideas/impact outside of the community. So they should be active on other community sites (as noted by Chris suggesting they have accounts on various key systems.)
Head and heart. Community requires the emotional intelligence from the heart side and the analytical/strategic and content skills from the head side. I can’t stress enough that this needs to be BOTH, not OR!
Social network mapping and analysis skills. Today we are not often working in the confines of boundaried communities (see Post 2) so being able to see and understand the larger network is critical.

Adding to Chris’s section on Strategy

Understand our community’s relationship to other communities and networks in our domain. In other words, watch for connections!

Adding to Chris’s section on Reporting

I like that Chris framed this as “in my organization.” Reporting structure needs to reflect who can champion the community manager AND, more importantly, steward relationships with other parts of the organization because rarely is an organization’s community important to just one functional area. Again, connections!

Adding to Chris’s section on Measurement

Quantity and quality of network relationships to key strategic people/communities/other networks.
Where the person is doing facilitation within a bounded community (traditional), clarity and quantification of the managers appropriate role in the community over time. For example, if you are looking to build internal member capacity to manage their own communities, what evidence do you see that the community manager is reducing her/his visible participation and evidence of members taking up key community facilitation activities? Where that person is to be the public “face” of an organization, the strategy and thus measurement would be quite different.

My second point is about the context – communities — and the word — managers. And I think I need to make it in a separate post as it is quite different and much more meta. I appreciated the tactical, practical quality of Chris’s post, so I wanted to respond in kind. So see you in the next post!
orld?

GEWR Online Event After Action Review

This past January I helped facilitate on online event that used DGroups email list and Wikispaces wikis to enable a global, multilingual online event. The After Action Review (AAR) of the event is now up on the wiki if you are interested! Gender Equity and Women’s Rights Online Event After Action Review

Here is the text:

Reference materials: http://onlinefacilitation.wikispaces.com/Gender+Equity+and+Women%27s+Rights
DGroups site: http://www.dgroups.org/groups/wsf-genderequity/
Event description
A 2-week online event to discuss what individual and groups were doing to mark the World Social Forum 2008 Global Day of Action and to begin considering how to impact and participate in the WSF 2009 global gathering in Belem do Para, Brasil. Participants from groups concerned about women’s rights and gender equity were asked to join the event. They then subscribed to the main Dgroup and, according to their stated language, either an English, Spanish or French breakout DGroup email list. The agenda was developed collaboratively by Megan, Els, Janet and Nancy. The DGroup was augmented with a Wikispaces wiki to enable quick capture, summarization and machine translation of the group emails.
Note: The survey data reported below represents a small sample due to low completion rates (10 respondents, one of whom is an organizer).
What did we intend to do?
There were 3 overarching goals plus one that emerged during the planning:
1. To find out what groups were doing for WSF 2008
2. To find out interest/plans for WSF 2009 in Belem- what are the common interests where we can collaborate, to what extent can we create a common strategy, how to proceed in Belem? How can we put gender equity on the agenda in the best possible way? How can we influence the agenda, make gender visible, not just in separate sessions?
3. Generally, to reinvigorate the group of people who had been subscribed to the Dgroup. Up until now it had been focused on content and information dissemination. Now the thought is we could revive the community and help shift their perception of the Dgroup – not just a tool for disseminating information, but a community building space. If the community had enough energy and focus, it could be used for planning and participating in WSF 2009
4. From a process standpoint, we also wanted to explore how to have these community conversations and interactions across and between languages, so we also wanted to experiment with tools and process to help with multilingual conversations.
So what did we DO?
Towards our three goals
1. WSF 2008
a. We had reports from 17 groups and one individual on what they were doing both for WSF and in general. Some submitted extensive information, others just brief mentions. The summarized list can be see here: http://onlinefacilitation.wikispaces.com/GEWR+Map
b. In the post event survey 67% found the updates very useful, 33% found them somewhat useful.
2. WSF 2009
a. Initially the main thrust of the 09 conversations was around how difficult it is to find funding to attend. But after the official end of the event, a robust discussion has emerged about building a shared proposal for both impacting the agenda and finding funding for participation.
b. We surfaced some face to face networking opportunities that might not have been apparent. These reinforce our online interactions w/ F2f and offer opportunities to keep momentum going
c. In the post survey, 60% found the discussions on WSF09 useful, 40% somewhat useful.
d. It is those who are most interested in moving something concrete forward who are continuing. Whittled down to a smaller group of posters. Backchannel messages support that point.
e. There still needs to be follow up to turn the conversation into tangible outcomes.
3. Community building
a. 22 people posted personal introductions. The summarized list can be see here: http://onlinefacilitation.wikispaces.com/GEWR+Participant+Bios
b. Did people get to know each other better? We aren’t sure. People shared quite a bit of personal information. This helps bring a personal element beyond organizational stuff, and find out what motivated participants personally
c. Getting a sense about the person beyond the org which can help in networking over time
d. In the post event survey, 80% found the introductions very useful, 20% somewhat useful.
e. Some members very enthusiastically added to the conversation while others dropped in and out. Those who participated less often apologized for being late due to lack of time or internet access, showing the diversity of online habits of the group. This is important to keep in mind for future events. Two weeks is probably not long enough for those who are online less frequently. It is hard for them to keep up with the very active participants.
f. A few members reached out to each other via Skype. Megan noted a Skype conversation with Tran from SPERI.
g. The event revealed potential for ongoing community building.
4. Working across languages and tools
a. We spent quite a bit of energy trying to create a multilingual part of the event. The language sub groups were the most utilized, and few reported using the wiki/Google Translate option (80% did not use it, but the 20% who did found it useful. Nancy found it very useful as facilitator.) 78% felt they had enough opportunity to participate in their own language, and 22% did not, but we don’t have demographic data on the survey respondents to really understand what this means. The respondents may have been primarily English speakers.
b. People responded positively to cross language summaries.
c. What about the break out groups? We don’t know for sure. Due to travel and availability we were not always actively facilitating the groups. The French group was only 2 people – maybe too small to get any traction. Although ten women had signed up for the Spanish group, only two of them posted messages during the breakout. Also, although different Latin Americans reconfirmed their interest, their participation remained limited and in the weeks following the event there was complete silence from their side of the world. Taking into account that many will be going to Belem, it is important to try and find out how we can get them more involved (is it the language problem?). We wonder what would have happened if we did NOT have the breakouts. And we wonder if the breakout process was confusing. In the survey, 50% thought the language break outs were very useful, 50% somewhat useful. But does this reflect the diversity of the group with only 10 respondents?
d. We are not sure who was using the technologies, and for whom it is new technology. The wiki has given us, as organizers, a nice overview, but it appears that not many participants used it. 44% did not look at the wiki, 44% used it and found it useful and 11% found it difficult or confusing to use. The overall wiki page view does show a doubling in traffic during the event. To the right are the page views from the event pages.
e. We only know who is posting, but we don’t know who is “listening” so it is hard to come to too many conclusions about participation, particularly participation across language. It might be nice to follow up with some one on one conversation with some of the participants.

Did anything unexpected happen?
• There was a very wide range in people’s level of participation. We expected that some would only participate a little bit, but less expected the few very strong participants, even when the discussion was not that active
• We were startled by one individual’s energetic participation, particularly since she was new to the group. We wonder who else is out there but whom we did not reach who might have enjoyed/benefited from participation. This raises the issue about how to market the group and such events.
• We wonder about how much people do or do not feel the need to engage beyond one’s local context.
• We went beyond the initial 10 days. Clearly 10 days was too short. In the survey, for 90% it was not enough time, 10% said it was.
• We wonder about what level/kind of engagement do people need to see before they jump in and commit to participation. What unmet need does it fill?
What would we do again (what worked)…
• The bios and introductions were good and we’d use them again. As a follow up, we should put the bios in a word doc and upload it to the DGroups site. For future, keep offering people the chance to introduce themselves, point back to event intros, and add to the “introductions” document.
• It is good to start off with general questions such as “What kind of activities are you doing” then “what would you like to do.” Initially we thought the questions were broad and vague, but we got pretty detailed responses. Some people discussed it in their organization like Leonida’s.
• It is important to find ways to let people participate in their own languages, and then build translation and interpretation bridges across them, even if this means volunteer or machine translation. Those who could not understand frequently asked for translations, demonstrating need.
• Even though not many people looked at the wiki, it was a cool format for sharing and looking at the information. Quite a few people shared bios there. (Nancy also copied and pasted many of them in from the DGroup email thread.)
o It was a good way to introduce a tool
o It was a pity that people didn’t use the map to locate themselves, but it was probably “gadget overload” and not that intuitive to use.
What would we do different next time? (And next steps)
• Focus on fewer gadgets and options, and introduce the options gradually. We got overexcited
o Attend to the balance between the number of conversational and technical options compared to the length of the event.
o Do a tool training call about Skype or other tools.
• Explore more deeply what is “critical number” of participants for both the full group and the language sub groups.
o Think about what we can do differently with outreach to get more participants.
• Timing. Try and figure out both the length of the next event, and when it should be held.
o Past experience is that African online work habits are less online and need a longer time frame.
• Seek to understand better what is nice to know but not NEED to know.
o We want to focus on things that people say “this is worth my time and attention”
• Contact and follow up with those who might be key people for contributing and participating

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.