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.   

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.

Weight training and finding your enterprise social muscles

I’d participated in Bodypump classes for years and years before finally getting up the guts to go and train to become an instructor. It was a big deal for me. Ask me to get up in front of a crowd and make a presentation about communications or social and I’m at ease. But when it came time to certify as an instructor, the thought of submitting a video of me coaching a class in how to execute deadlifts, squats and lunges was terrifying. The road of certification was very different to anything I’d ever navigated before.

I wish I’d taken the leap sooner because it’s so much fun! I look forward to every class I teach. My participants and I sweat bucket loads and our muscles burn. Over time, our weights have become heavier, our limbs leaner and more toned. We return for more again and again. We’ve found ourselves part of a wonderful virtuous cycle, spurred on by the great things resistance training was doing for our bodies.

"Building your enterprise social muscle plays out in the same way as it does with weight training in the gym."

McKinsey talks about the evolution of social technologies occurring in three stages, taking companies from trial and error use, to collaboration and managing knowledge and on to the Nirvana of harnessing social to democratise strategy. 

In my experience, building your enterprise social muscle plays out in the same way as it does with weight training in the gym. As McKinsey points out, once you make the leap and use social at work in more purposeful ways, you’ll get a bigger benefit from it. You have the opportunity to get into what I’m calling a virtuous social business cycle.

Here’s how:

• Connect – We make a conscious decision to move out of our silos. We listen. We post, without having an expectation of where a response may come from. We may be excited or anxious about what people will think about our post.

• Collaborate – The social habit forms as we feel the love from colleagues who engage with us. We make our work visible. We share what we know to help others kick business goals. We're adding value.

• Act – We embed social in the flow of our work, making the most of it to solve business problems and tap into new ideas. We’re action-oriented, not passive by-standers.

• Achieve – With the right people doing the right things in enterprise social, organisations committed to getting real work done in open and transparent ways will achieve better business results. The virtuous social business cycle is at work and we return to it again and again. 

Just like my Bodypump experience, getting into a virtuous social business cycle will help organisations find enterprise social muscles they never knew existed. And who doesn’t want great muscles, really?

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.