As our Community management practice is growing rapidly, we’ve spend some time at the end of the year to further professionalize our approach. One of the things we did was to describe the different roles and activities we see in managing internal communities. In moderating and activating communities we distinguish between 10 types of roles:
- Strategy and tactics: There needs to be a clear vision for the development of the community. This vision needs to be translated to types of activities the members should be encouraged to engage with. You need to develop multiple scenarios because some activities catch on and others do not. If activities do not catch on one should be able to quickly shift into another scenario. It is important to take into account the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question from the participants perspective and to check if there are no barriers that get in the way of these activities.
- Change management: To many organizations, achieving a state where people openly share, connect with each other, collaborate, and innovate requires a significant change in culture. Even though we believe that culture does not dictate our behavior, but it is the aggregation of our behaviour that defines culture; you need to actively promote the right behavior and deal with barriers such as fear, hierarchy, and knowledge as power. Senior management plays an important role by setting examples and endorsing exemplar behavior.
- Reactive moderation: There are numerous standard tasks that need to be performed. Examples are: making sure people have a complete profile, contacting inactive members, managing login issues, dealing with unwanted behavior, etc.
- Proactive moderation: This role is what we often refer to as ‘the magic’. You need to constantly scan the community for activity that, often with some orchestration, can help you realize your strategic vision. This role requires to ‘see through’ a standard question or idea and envisage its potential. Then try and identify and connect participants that can contribute. If the activity has significant potential, we often co-opt a senior manager to publicly endorse the initiative.
- Relationships and stakeholder management: This role lies within the client organization. There needs to be a very well networked person to make the connections with relevant people within the organization or with senior management to find people to further activate initiatives selected through the proactive moderation.
- Role models: You need commitment from senior management to behave as a role model. They should endorse behavior that is in line with the vision of the community, activate people to take ideas they post a step further, and ask the community questions or challenge them from time to time.
- Content management: Communities are enriched by content. Interviews need to be sourced with members, senior management, industry experts or other interesting and engaging people. Content needs to be well planned and prepared in advance so it can be deployed at appropriate times, such as during lulls in platform activity.
- Technical management: A plan needs to be in place to role out functionality related to the maturity of the community. Technical management works closely with the other community management roles to create a road-map of functionality. A close coordination with the scenarios is needed to match the functionality to the scenarios being played.
- Project management: Moderating and activating a community typically requires performing a great number of tasks. These tasks are either dynamic or routine. Dynamic tasks are responses to what is happening in the community and routine tasks cover things such as contacting all people that have not completed their profile. Rigorous project management is a must to make sure all tasks are covered and completed. We have developed software tailored to managing communities and these tasks in particular.
- Champions management: Your community will have members that are more active and set the right example. It is important to build relationships with such users over time and involve them in activating the community. The most important role these champions have, is being an antenna for ideas, problems, or solutions that are worth sharing. They then convince people to take their ideas, problems, or solutions to the community.
If you are interested in how this ties into our methodology and vision, you may also want to check out these earlier posts:
- Successful implementation of communities part 1
- Successful implementation of communities part 2
- Successful implementation of communities part 3
- Community management in innovative projects
- Start hiring guy #3
- Stop pitching social media to management
Great writeup Jaap! And I have a question: Do you think Role models should always be higher management? Although there is certainly something to be said for the ’setting the right example’ factor of senior management, I would argue that role models can (or maybe even must) also be a cross section of what you expect the target audience to.
An example: Rocket Building Inc decides to start a community, focussed on rocket scientists. Here they can share the latest specialist knowledge about building faster and better rockets. While it would be very nice it the CEO of Rocket Building Inc contributes, your goal is to attract specialist knowledge and thereby get the community flying within the group of scientists. Therefore, it would make sense to get a couple of scientist to boost the community early on. They could even talk to the other scientists over coffee: “Did you read my article on the forum?”, or “Did you see the schematics for this new technology I put up?”. Though the CEO’s contribution might be valuable for creating a sense of urgency, the ignition if you will, he might simply lack the specialist knowledge to actually set the pace for achieving the community’s goals.
Another example: At Customer Contact Company there is a community set up meant to share the customer experiences of field agents, sales people and customer care. This experience is shared with the entire company, so that it can be used for various obvious reasons. Again, a senior manager, for instance a CFO, can be valuable for stressing the need for customer insight. But is it credible if he starts adding his opinion about it? He’s not the one talking to customers all year round. The CFO should be the one asking questions, and giving people mandate to act. I realise that this second example is an argument for proper coaching of these senior managers.
We’ve seen examples where senior management has been essential in calling everybody to action, and catalysing discussion. The actual “role modeling” (giving the right example by contributing and actively pursuing other people to contribute) is being done by (a select group) of people from another layer of the organisation.
Or, and this is very possible, i’m mixing up what you mean by “role models”. In that case, maybe a 10th (very important!) role/activity would be the “guerilla contributors” or “champions”: People from the field (so not community managers) that do whatever is needed to activate their colleagues. Naturally, these guerilla contributors or champions need backing from senior management, proper coaching and available time to perform this essential role!
What do you think?
December 23rd, 2009 by Ebbe Nieuweboer
Interesting thought Ebbe. You are right in thinking this group is important for the community. It isn’t part of our list because we don’t start a project by appointing them. They are often active members that you build a relationship with and over time ask them to become champions. I will add your 10th point though.
December 24th, 2009 by Jaap Linssen