8. In the beginning you need to…
Learn your platform
Engage the business
Build use cases
Set up your general support & help model
Build your advocate group
Manage the community
Network
9.
10. Here and now…
Keep doing what you were doing plus…
Pruning and reviewing
Measurement
Upgrades and research
Re-launch & refresh
Community best practice
Additional communities
11.
12. The Future…
Keep doing what you were doing plus…
New features and functionality
Remind and refresh
Advanced user training
13.
14.
15. Advocate Programme
Be clear about your objectives
Don’t be afraid to let people go
Pick wisely
Look after your advocates and they will look
after you!
16.
17.
18. Gamification
Link it to your strategic objectives
Have missions to support your community goals
Use it to engage colleagues in the drier less
engaging activities
Kim England
Head of Internal Community & Collaboration
About me…
A bit about the company I work for and the community I manage.
We are the world's leading learning company, with 40,000 employees in more than 80 countries working to help people of all ages make measurable progress in their lives through learning.
We provide learning materials, places of learning, technologies, assessments and services to teachers, professionals and students in order to help people everywhere aim higher and fulfil their true potential.
70+ countries
40,000+ employees
60 languages
Pearson faced a number of business challenges and we decided to implement a business collaboration tool, we chose Jive.
hundreds of disparate intranets
siloed information and knowledge
inability to find subject matter experts
inconsistent policies and [best] practices
barriers to collaborative innovation
communication tyranny of email
difficulty onboarding new employees
This is the community I manage, it is called Neo it serves 40,000 users.
Neo celebrates her 4th birthday later this year.
We are on our 3rd upgrade and will be going to the Cloud in 2015.
When I first took on the role of Enterprise Community Manager, I had lots of blank faces and questions, is that like startrek?
Some days I feel my job means I’m more like this…..
In reality the role of a community manager is like this…
You have to be a Jack of All Trades
The role of the community manager evolves as your community reaches different phases of its life cycle. You will also experience communities within your community that will have various needs.
Jive Talks:10 Jobs in 1: The life of an Internal Community Manager Deirdre Walsh April 13, 2012.
1. Ambassador. One of the biggest drivers of social business success is company culture. Community managers help form a successful company culture by being open, responsive, and strategic.
2. Unifier. Community managers helps unite distributed leadership on the best practices for internal collaboration.
3. Builder. Skilled managers focus on best ways to structure and design for interaction and engagement. They also stimulate conversation and have content plans until the community matures.
4. Coach. They are excellent at articulating how employees can use the new technology to accomplish real business objectives, without leaving their comfort zone (which often means their email inboxes).
5. Cheerleader. Community managers often bust out the virtual pompoms. They reward positive behavior.
6. Leader. One of the most important jobs of the community manager is to identify effective volunteer advocates and facilitators for various units (marketing, sales, finance, R&D, manufacturing, etc.). Without these foot soldiers, the community will not take flight.
7. Game Maker. No, I’m not referring to Panem! Community managers come up with awesome techniques to keep employees engaged and reward the most active contributors or the executives who “get it.”
8. Listener. Community managers understand better than anyone the “pulse” of the employee base. They often can be the voice of the masses when it comes to marketing ideas, product features, etc.
9. Governor. Community managers help develop and enforce social media guidelines.
10. Analyzer. Successful community managers can help point to real business value (ie. Employee satisfaction, productivity improvements, increase in sales, etc). They can also do predictive modeling based on sentiment, help find the true expert in a given area, and understand valuable enterprise relationships.
In the beginning…
Learn your platform
I was as new to our community as the rest of the users, I needed to learn fast. But I also learnt to accept what I didn’t know and lean on the experts. You can reward this experts – more on that later.
Engage the business
Your job is to engage users with the platform you need to have a strategy for all layers of the organisation and all levels of understanding.
Not everyone will want the community, some middle managers will think it is a distraction, the people who don’t like social media – may think this is a business version of facebook and not for them.
Build use cases
Early success stories will help build engagement and help your community see evidence of how much value your community can bring to the business.
Set up your general support & help model
Resourcing can be a challenge. It is important you create a good model for supporting your community and delivering training.
Build your advocate group
It is essential that you have an advocate group.
Manage the community
This is my favourite part, you need to be the eyes and ears of you community. You connect the dots and help people along on their way. Building analytics will play an important part in how you manage your community.
Network
Being a community manager can be a lonely job even though you are often online with thousands of people. Make sure you have strong networks with other community managers to share ideas and learn best practice to take back to your own community.
Keep doing what you were doing plus…
Pruning and reviewing – as your community grows you will need to look at how you manage old content and keep content fresh.
Measurement – building a robust model for sharing your successes and giving executives a dashboard of how your community is performing will help you track your progress as well as support you when you need additional resources or additional capabilities within the community.
Upgrades and research – technology moves so fast it is incredibly important that you keep at the forefront of changes and think ahead about the needs of your community in the future. This may mean you upgrade your community, or research the add-ons, plugins or additional features you may consider adding to your community.
Re-mind & refresh – depending on the success of your community you may need to do a remind and refresh campaign company wide or within pockets of the business.
Community best practice – document best practice and build it into your support model.
Additional communities – with the success of one community you may require additional communities. At Pearson we have an externally facing version of Neo called Neo connect. We use it with partners, vendors and some customers.
Neo is now 4 years old so we are considered a mature community, in the future I believe we will continue to Keep doing what we are doing plus…
New features and functionality – we’ve added gamification to our community and we are now looking at how we embed, innovation and reward into our system.
Remind and refresh - our organisation had a company wide restructure with a new leadership model, our community needed to be re-organised to reflect these changes. This was an overhaul on a huge scale. It was also an opportunity to remind people about how to use Neo as well as refreshing content design.
Advanced user training – as you become a mature community manager, the needs of your community will change, your users will also become more advanced and will become more sophisticated in their requirements from the system.
Advocate Programme
At Pearson we launched our first advocate programme at the same time Neo went live. Advocates were invited to join the Neo Evangelist group and helped us build awareness of the tool from the outside in.
Our programme evolved into a champions programme as the community matured. Our needs for support changed over time. We are changing our programme again, our community is filled with experts in particular niche elements of the community, our new advocate programme will nurture our experts and have them share their knowledge and experience with other.
What ever your programme, they will all have the following in common:
Be clear about your objectives
Don’t be afraid to let people go
Pick wisely
Look after your advocates and they will look after you!
Make sure you share your successes!
And have fun!
Gamification:
Link it to your strategic objectives
Have missions to support your community goals
Use it to engage colleagues in the drier less
engaging activities