Educator, entertainer, help desk & cheerleader. The many hats of a community manager

“Good community managers need to be able to go back and forth between strategy and execution – they need to live in both worlds. They need to listen deeply to understand, ask powerful questions and not assume all issues are solved by the ESN (Enterprise Social Network). They connect dots that others might not even see.” - Keeley Sorokti

The comments from Keeley were prompted by a question I posted on Twitter several weeks ago, asking people to share their views on the top three tasks performed by Community Managers.

Doing the ‘business of the business’ in enterprise social doesn’t happen by accident. Pinaki Kathiari summed it up well in his response, when he described community management as “part customer service, help desk, educator, entertainer and cheerleader”. Community Managers wear many different hats.

The reality is if you want to have a thriving enterprise social network, you need to have professional community managers leading the effort to ensure communities are strategic, relevant and valuable to the organisation and the people engaging in them.

What follows is a rough role mandate for a community manager, based on input from people in the job. We start with the most important task and move down the ranks. Here goes.

1.    Influencer, connector and knowledge broker

“Know everyone and build strong relationships.” – Tom Boden. Great community managers are skilful connectors, facilitating relationships all over their organisations to improve how work gets done. They identify influencers and enlist their support as ambassadors and champions to demonstrate how community can work. Influential community managers also know how to ‘encourage’ people or groups to ensure opportunities to make valuable and productive connections are not lost.

2.    Strategic business enabler

“It requires … the ability to translate community needs into tangible business value for the company.” – Mary Thengvall. Smart community managers align use cases for enterprise social with the organisation’s goals and strategy – the real work of the business.  Enterprise social networks exist to help organisations and their people to progress. Savvy community managers understand what’s going on in the business and can articulate a clear strategy demonstrating how working in communities adds real, measurable business value.

3.    Community strategist and tactician

“Sourcing content to support the community goals.” – Daniel Leonard. Community managers own and lead their community strategy. This means setting the direction, as well as curating, creating and seeding content aligned to community goals. Strategic community managers moderate their communities and are always experimenting, trying to work out what type of content will engage, entertain and help their audience learn.

4.    Advocate of the people

“Protecting the vulnerable by advocating for their value and insight.” – Jeff Merrell. People are the focus for decisions about communities. Insightful community managers look at who’s in and who’s out of a conversation to ensure the right people are engaged. This could mean finding a subject matter expert to chime in to help sort out a problem or getting the right leader to answer questions about a big issue. They’re skilled at creating an environment in which "people are seen, heard and feel safe to share" (Rachel Happe).

5.    Role model and champion

“Be engaged, observe, lead, guide and be the most enthusiastic participant.” – Catherine Shinners. Community managers set the tone for participation. They know they can’t expect others to adopt a social way of working if they don’t do it themselves. This means being active and open in their enterprise social network and doing it regularly. They also identify and reward people demonstrating the right behaviours, picking great examples to share in reporting and communications so others may learn.

6.    Trainer and coach

“Helping the organisation cross the chasm from early adopters to majority of employees participating – the most critical point in the life of a community.”  - Dennis Pearce. People are at different stages in their journey to become socially engaged, from those who are happy to give it a go, to those who are anxious about working in a fundamentally different way. Community managers address this by providing training, coaching and support catering for different stages of social adoption – and the different learning preferences of people – in their organisation. 

7.    Trouble shooter and technician

Being able to identify, mitigate and manage risks and put out the occasional fire featured on the list of top tasks. Unsurprisingly (for me anyway), working with IT and vendors to ensure your enterprise social platform is fed and watered regularly received but a brief mention. This demonstrates the further we go into the digital age, the more we realise we’re dealing with people’s mindsets first and technology second.

Who’s right for the job?

A great community manager is patient, persistent and resilient. A good networker, strategist and tactician. Curious, open-minded, empathetic and a good listener. They are slow to judge and quick to help.

Clearly, community management is not for the faint-hearted. But it's a rewarding job leading organisations and people to take up an open, networked way of working.   

Make good technology choices. But put people first in the digital workplace

I was catching up with some Twitter buddies at Digital Workplace Experience 2018 in Chicago early last week when I was grabbed to go and record a video on my thoughts about the conference.

Besides the conference hosting a great group of digital workplace experts in one place, the thing I loved most was the overwhelming focus on people and change. Not technology.

Yet shiny new tools are difficult to resist and there are more of them every day. For example, the social business application market alone is expected to grow to be a $37 billion industry by next year, according to tech analyst firm 451 Research. Just like an all-you-can-eat dessert bar, tech vendors are tempting us with the alluring promise we’ll enjoy eating their sweet treats. Without thinking, we rush in for the sugar fix. Feels good in the short term, but how do we feel about our choice later?

Just like an all-you-can-eat dessert bar, tech vendors are tempting us with the alluring promise we’ll enjoy eating their sweet treats.

The irony of the march into the digital age is the further we go, the more we realise being ‘digital’ isn’t about teaching people how to use tools. Instead, the main game is helping people get into the right headspace to want to try new ways of working.

Why does this make sense? Because traditional adoption methods focused on technology won’t work to rally people around digital tools in a modern workplace. As digital workplace futurist Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out at #DWX18: “Adoption of new technology is not automatic, because participation in the digital workplace is optional.”

People choose whether they want to come along for the ride in the digital workplace. So, we need to focus on people and provide them with clear value in order to have them try something new. 

Catastrophe hit earlier this week when Slack, the messaging platform went down. The tweets about the outage were hilarious, but the undercurrent serious. Slack users had embedded the chat tool so deeply into the flow of their day that suddenly life was a disaster without it. Apparently.

There were loads of vendors at #DWX18 and I talked to many of them about their tools and how they were convincing customers of their business value.

Between the content of the conference and the insights from vendors, it’s clear we need to have better conversations about digital workplace tools that are centred on people and enabling real work.

We need to have better conversations about digital workplace tools that are centred on people and enabling real work.

The problem with starting the conversation from a ‘tool first’ perspective is we end up focusing on checklists of functional features, rather than working to a clear and compelling business purpose.

As Tony Byrne and Jarrod Gingras point out in The Right Way to Select Technology, “If you don’t have a solid business rationale for what you’re doing, you will never achieve business value”.

No one will use digital workplace tools if they don’t understand why they should or how the tools will add value. Worse still, an ill-prepared workforce will try new tools and then blame them when value isn’t delivered. Vendors may run a real risk of becoming the nearest throat to choke.

No one will use digital workplace tools if they don’t understand why they should or how the tools will add value.

Here’s a way for us to think about this:

• Start with people. Get in their heads to understand their personal fears or the excitement of trying a new way of working. Could they be champions for you, or are they resistors? How will you address their concerns or harness their enthusiasm?

• Identify a compelling purpose. Help different audience groups appreciate how a new tool will enable their specific type of work. Address the What’s In It For Me to make it meaningful. Create a link to real goals and work to be done.

• Explain how people can get into different ways of working. Focus on behaviour. With enterprise social, for example, explain what it means to listen and contribute value. Simply asking people to do those things doesn’t mean they’ll know how.

• Tools next. A balance of functional training and building digital capability is essential. Build confidence by helping users make the most of new tools. Jump straight to this step and skip over people’s concerns and a clear purpose at your peril.

• Better business outcomes. When people are clear about the purpose of a new tool and feel confident in using it to get real work done, you’ll achieve meaningful adoption.

Of course, rallying people around new technology may happen in an organisation where leadership may not be engaged or where a culture is not ready to take the plunge. We should take more interest in organisational preparedness to welcome change, so we don’t waste time spinning our wheels and ensure the success of new digital technology deployments.

Making good technology choices is important, but is only part of the success equation. For new digital technology to stick, put people at the centre of the action. Solve a problem for them and then you really are giving them something they’ll value.

Why we eat broccoli and how to avoid enterprise social indigestion

Communication professionals are helpful and herein lies the controversy when we start to look at how we help people work in the digital age.

Communicators have been used to giving our people the good stuff - the sweet stuff! - and often building bad dietary habits from a communications point of view. For example, we enjoy helping our leaders communicate messages to their people. However, in the digital age, with social technologies now available to us, it’s time for us to coach people in how to do some of these things for themselves.

We have to let go of the temptation of helping leaders, in particular, in organisations to deliver their messages for them and we need to teach these people how to fish.

The reason I'm including broccoli in my presentation for #EuroComm18 is because it took an awfully long time for my children to learn to eat broccoli. How did they learn? It was put in front of them many, many times and the dietary benefits of it explained. After a little while, eating it became habitual.

This is the landscape we face in communications when it comes to the use of social technologies in our organisations. We have to help people build good habits in the digital age. As communicators, we must stop feeding people ice cream and doing everything for them. We must help them learn to eat broccoli by helping them work out loud and share what they know in social channels. 

When used properly and purposefully, enterprise social technologies are real levers in helping businesses get things done. It’s time for communicators to think more broadly about their role in that.

These are all things that don’t happen naturally, as much as we would like to think we hand over the technology and miracles start to occur. Unfortunately, that's not the case, even in the digital age.

It's time for us to stop looking an enterprise social tools solely as communication tools.

Enterprise social is about far more than just communicating messages. When used properly and purposefully, enterprise social technologies are real levers in helping businesses get things done. It’s time for communicators to think more broadly about their role in that.

So you might be a communications professional, however, if your goal is to help your organisation achieve its big goals and objectives and live its purpose, then it’s time to step into a different pair of shoes.

This means having serious business conversations with people around the organisation to step beyond the boundaries of 'doing comms' and help organisations and their people discover the broader business benefits of using social technologies to get real work done. To crowdsource ideas. To uncover pain points that customers might be having with products. To generate new ideas. This is where enterprise social technologies come into their own. They can help us to be a lot more productive, but we must stop looking at these tools simply as communication vehicles. 

Social technologies can be way more than that and communicators are in the box seat to grab that mantle and run with it.

This is an edited version of my conversation with IABC EMENA Chair, Alex Malouf, recorded for my #EuroComm18 podcast.