Levels of Maturity for Communities

Communities are essential for Social Businesses. All communities go through a community maturity model.

1.  Potential:  Planning phase of maturity.  It typically involves setting up the community elements required for long term success such as roles and responsibilities, strategy, mission, membership planning and activities.

community maturity model

2.  Formation of the community.  Having a great community manager is a key factor of success.   During the formation, the initial members and influencers

3.  Building and Evolving.   The community builds and evolves as it forms.   The best communities stick to their goals but evolve in the way they reach them.    Typically building and evolving involves driving traffic to community and increasing member participation.   The topic of content curation is also one that grows and questions of contribution of content and consumption is reviewed.   The community may review how to improve quality of content and how to train the leaders.

4.  Operationalization.  A community that has made it to this stage, has begun to do analysis adn use the insight to drive to its strategic objectives.   Typically, the metrics are around Collaboration, Consumption, and Contribution. Opportunities, Risks and learning are then applied.  This is the time to develop detailed action plan to achieve goals, maintain and monitor activity plan and content strategy, identify potential content gaps to feed to harvesting plans

and to train community members on social.

5.  Adaptive.   This final phase is where the community now takes on the personality of the members. It enables the community manager to drive the goals to the next level.

At IBM, we do Health Checks for our communities.  

These health checks do the following:
  • Ensure the communities have the design for success
    • Clearly defined strategy and active plans
  • Produce Healthy communities
–High volume of collaboration, contribution and consumption
–Connecting people to experts and people to quality strategy content
–Ensure Community roles and responsibilities are clearly defined
–Facilitate business benefits that lead to important organizational value
  • Utilize the Brokerage Service to ensure long term vitality and maturity of the community
–Consistently high participation, collaboration and contribution and consumption from the community members

by sandraanncarter

Happy Halloween! Social Business is creating a Scary number of new jobs

Happy Halloween!  Since we had Hurricane Sandy last year, and snow the year before, this will be our first true trick or trick in a while!  Be safe!

I was just in a panel with Target Marketing and after the panel got a lot of questions around what are the new job types I should be looking at due to social media dominence. 

Don't be scared!   There are a few.  Your fear can rest if you start looking at the new frontier today!

What are some of the new job types that the Social Era is producing?

  • Community manager - A person responsible for building, maintaining, and activating members in an online location around certain topics.  Key skills required:   Ability to be transparent, drive sharing among members, and listening and shaping conversations.   This role has become so popular that a day honoring its professional was created!

 

  • Social Business Risk Manager – A person who is focused on managing the risk associated with clients controlling brand online.   The role entails building a risk management plan, selecting a listening tool for ensuring risk is assessed, and ensuring groups of people can rally around a recovery.   Key skills required include:  Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, public relations, and grace under fire of a crisis.  

 

  • Reputation manager – a person responsible for building, maintaining and protecting a company’s reputation.   Reputation is what clients and potential clients believe to be true about your company.  Key skills required:   Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, marketing, and the ability to position a brand, company or product in a positive light.   This role has now outpaced the Risk Manager role, showing that the industry has moved to being much more proactive.

 

  • Social Analytics manager – a person who monitors, listens and analyzes the sentiment (or feelings of people online), and turns the massive amounts of data into insight.   This role will become increasingly important as more automated tools are coming into the market.  Key skills required:  Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques,  business intelligence, and ability to make recommendations on incomplete data.

 

  • Social customer support manager – a person responsible for scouring the blogsphere for customer concerns, insights, and statements.  This person’s role will have to extend through multi channels of input – including social tools like Twitter, Facebook, as well as traditional channels of phone which has now become one of many places where listening and turning data into insight will occur. Key skills for this role include:  Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques,  customer service, and CRM.

 

  • Social Product Innovation manager – a person who can generate ideas, refine ideas, and solicit valid “votes” on the best ideas that customers will actually buy.  With the increase in crowdsourcing or the ability of using crowds in the blogsphere to create and vote on new product concepts, this person becomes crucial to your company’s innovation engine.  Key skills for this role include:  Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, product management, and product development.

by sandraanncarter