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.   

Six lessons about connection from a karaoke night out

Earlier this year, I went to a karaoke night in Chicago with my cousin, Angela. It was at little bar above a hamburger joint. There were props galore, a great sound system, a huge song library, a spotlight trained on the stage and a receptive audience waiting for the show to begin. 

Angela orchestrated the visit, including putting me on the list of people to sing. Without. Asking. Me. First.

After first wishing a lightning bolt would come and strike down Angela, I immediately thought to myself: I can’t do it. Too many people will be watching me. I’ll be judged. What if people boo me off the stage? In that moment, I believed I could in fact die of embarrassment in a karaoke bar.

Let’s park my karaoke predicament for just a second and focus on a different kind of performance.

Imagine I’m at work in my office job. A new enterprise social tool has just been launched to help lift collaboration, improve productivity and so on. My manager says to me: “Our enterprise social network is our new, visible place to get things done. Yes, thousands of pairs of eyes will be watching you, but get out of your email, jump in there and go collaborate!”

In both these situations, it’s little wonder people’s hearts start racing at the thought of others assessing their very visible performance.

There’s a lot more at stake when it comes to performing at work versus performing on the karaoke stage.

For starters, there’s the obvious performance anxiety. According to Gallup, 40% of adults dread speaking in front of an audience. Was it Jerry Seinfeld who said the average person at a funeral would rather be in the casket than give the eulogy?

For the vast majority of people though, there’s a lot more at stake when it comes to performing at work versus performing on the karaoke stage.

According to an exploratory study on employee silence, employees stay tight-lipped about problems and issues at work because they’re fearful of being viewed negatively and they’re concerned about the knock-on effects this will have on their relationships at work. And just as I thought I might die of embarrassment from singing on stage, the research showed employees are genuinely fearful of their career prospects suffering as a result of speaking up.

Yet, there were some forces at work that eventually made me feel comfortable about getting up on stage to sing. Here are six lessons from a karaoke night out to encourage people to fight their fears and try a new social way of working:

1.    Karaoke is valued in a karaoke bar. When you’re in a karaoke bar, you’re immersing yourself in a culture that values singing. The music, lights and enthusiastic audience all contribute to an environment in which you feel it’s safe to perform. Similarly, to encourage people to step out of their silos and connect, design an environment that demonstrates people’s voices matter. Things like open and honest leadership communication and rewarding great ideas show that people’s contribution is genuinely valued in your organisation.

2.    Leaders show you how to sing by doing it themselves. The first thing the lead for the karaoke evening did that night in the bar was to kick off proceedings by belting out a couple of numbers herself. If you want people in your organisation to connect and speak up, leaders had better not just ask others to do it; they must do it themselves. Great leaders show up, ask questions, applaud their people and take action on what they see and hear.

3.    Think about your audience and pick great songs. The key to a fun time in a karaoke bar is choosing great songs you’ll feel comfortable performing and you know the audience will probably enjoy too. In enterprise social, figure out what you want to be known for and how you can add value to others and post on those topics. When you engage in conversations about your areas of expertise or even a personal passion, you’ll feel confident posting and your audience will know you’re the real deal.

4.    Watch others sing for a while before taking the plunge. Watching lots of other people get up and perform can make you feel more comfortable about your own karaoke experience. If you want people to try enterprise social tools, then let new users build their confidence by watching and learning from others. From a communications perspective, highlighting success stories of people using social tools also work well as examples for others to follow.

5.    No one acts like a jerk at a karaoke night out. No one really cares if you can sing or not – karaoke is about having a good time with your friends. No one is there to boo and hiss you off the stage, but I’ll bet if anyone did, they’d probably be thrown out. Don’t act like a jerk in enterprise social - the network will simply do the work to put you back in your place. Be respectful.

6.    The risk is worth the reward. Do a half reasonable job of your karaoke experience and you will most likely be rewarded for your efforts with a big round of applause. So it goes in enterprise social. If you make an effort to step out and connect in a way that will add value, your audience will appreciate it and you’ll begin to build your reputation as an expert inside your organisation.

Having survived my karaoke experience – and dare I say having enjoyed it just a little bit - I may go back for another round at some stage in the future. Likewise, if the conditions are just right for a social way of working, then we should see our people go back for more in their enterprise social networks too.  

Losing control and other myths about enterprise social networking

if you’re not already using social media or your organisation doesn’t value it, taking a leap into enterprise social could feel like jumping out of a plane for the first time. Exciting and terrifying.

People’s concerns about enterprise social are rarely about learning how to use the technology and are more to do with their comfort levels in working openly and feeling in control of their work. It’s one thing to engage routinely with people you know in emails or meetings, but to pose a question or share your views openly for anyone from anywhere in your organisation to see and to comment on can make people feel vulnerable, even in positive environments where there’s really no good reason to fear speaking up.

The positive network effects of enterprise social

Enterprise social networks (ESN) provide a platform for people’s voices to be heard and for serendipitous knowledge sharing to happen. Rather than spin your wheels finding the right person in your organisation to help you solve a problem, working more visibly with social can bring the help directly to you. And quickly.

Then there’s the ‘network effect’ of visible answers to questions saving time for hundreds, even thousands, of your colleagues who have the same problem. This is just one use case. The opportunities are endless when organisations go beyond simple connection and apply enterprise social to dealing with live business challenges.

But…old habits die hard

Despite the obvious benefits of embracing enterprise social technology, there’s still a fair bit of resistance to its uptake. If you’ve been good at your job and have climbed the corporate ladder without having to be social, then why change an approach that’s worked for you? This mindset is then reinforced in organisations through systems and processes that celebrate the contribution of individuals above all else. If you are rewarded only for what you deliver and there’s no value attached to collaboration in your organisation, then sadly people will tend to align with that way of working.

If you’ve been good at your job and have climbed the corporate ladder without having to be social, then why change an approach that’s worked for you? 

Most of this resistance comes from a place of not understanding the true potential of working visibly through enterprise social technology, coupled with the fear of exposure. But many of these ideas are myths. Let’s correct some misconceptions.

Myth 1. People will say or do the wrong thing

If you’re clear with people at the outset about how enterprise social works, they will understand what they post is visible to everyone in the network. This means mischief-making and errors are rare. A common saying in today’s digital newsrooms ‘we may be wrong but not for long’ also applies to enterprise social networks – post something inaccurate or do the wrong thing and the network will do the work to fix it. Catastrophic ESN train crashes are rare.

Myth 2. It’s not real work

If you use your ESN to pursue real work, then it will be treated as a serious business tool. Organisations that succeed with enterprise social don’t limit their activity to chat – they focus on creating business value. This means encouraging people to build a habit of using their ESN in the daily flow of work and putting in place community managers to build communities of practice mobilising people around hard business goals and objectives. Sounds like real work to me.

Organisations that succeed with enterprise social don’t limit their activity to chat – they focus on creating business value.

Myth 3. You can ‘launch and leave’ your Enterprise Social Network

You can’t put enterprise social technology in place and then expect people to figure out why and how they should use it all by themselves. That’s akin to inviting people to a meeting and then not having a clear purpose behind it – a waste of everyone’s time. Helping people understand the benefits of enterprise social and how to make the most of it requires a solid plan, including ongoing communications and training.

Myth 4. Enterprise social will transform a dysfunctional culture into an open one

An ESN is not a silver bullet to address underlying cultural issues. If your organisation doesn’t value diversity of opinion, or it punishes people for speaking out, there’s no tool that will magically change that. Along with introducing social technology, there must be action to address behaviours, systems and processes that run counter to creating an open and collaborative environment.

If your organisation doesn’t value diversity of opinion, or it punishes people for speaking out, there’s no tool that will magically change that.

Myth 5. Lots of Likes, Comments and Activity Means Your ESN Is a Success

It’s easy to get caught up in ESN metrics such as the volume of ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ as measures of success. What’s more important, however, is taking action on what you see and hear in your ESN. For example, if you’re a leader with a mandate to change a process that’s a problem for customers or your people, then you should do so. When positive business change comes about as a result of people speaking up and doing their work more visibly in your ESN, then you’ll know you’re headed in the right direction.

Don’t Give Up on Enterprise Social

If you’re working to make an ESN stick in your organisation, don’t give up. People who are initially hesitant to try enterprise social find the fears and anxieties associated with using it slip away once they give it a go and discover its benefits. As enthusiasm across your organisation grows, the ESN wins across your organisation will snowball.

It’s then organisations previously wary of social realise it can make a big difference to business outcomes.