Community Management Playbook

Community Playbook
Created with love by the Yammer community team for community managers and businesses they support.
A comprehensive guide to community strategy, design and execution.

Community is a group of people with unique shared values,
behaviors and artifacts.
- The Community Roundtable
What is community?

External community ecosystem has business benefits
Best practices evolution
Customer stories
Customer and partner
advocacy
Top line growth
Market relevance
Bottom line growth
Richer customer
experience
Greater visibility,
richer partnerships
Better decisions

Internal (employee) communities make companies more adaptable
Better customer
experience
High performing
teams
Engaged employees
Business transformation
Market relevance
Better communication
Stronger innovation
Business agility
Employee advocacy

But.. communities arent yet strategic
Value hard to quantify
Lack of resources
Unhealthy communities
Poor ROI

When done right, they have tangible benefits
Source: McKinsey
Source: University of Michigan
collaboration with stores in shopping
centers
employee community makes better burgers
membership in customer community
increases spending by19%
largely untapped opportunity in social$1.3 Trillion!

but without proper planning and resources, your community may not
reach its potential; even worse, it may backfire.
These benefits are achievable

1. Lack of supporting resources: people, technology, finances
2. Low engagement; vocal minority drowns out the community
3. Negativity: can be cultural or ongoing, driven by culture or bad fit, habitual trolling. May be situational or temporary negativity.
4. Content sprawl: Too many resources across too many spaces can feel confusing and daunting to members
5. Lack of direction: People dont know what to do when they get into the community or why its relevant to them
For more pitfalls, check out the Community Roundtable
Potential risks without active and strategic community management

What do we do now?

Community managers: you must elevate community building as a strategic discipline

Strategic CM Cultural foundation Community design Day to day
What a community is Engine that mobilizes and empowers, gives people what they need, speeds up your business and helps you make better decisions
What a community isnt
A marketing, broadcast or one-way communications channel

A community strategist is an individual who has tacit or explicit authority to define
enterprise-wide standards for social media and community engagement. This includes
approaches to strategy, leadership, culture, community management, content and programming, measurement, policies /
governance and tools.
- The Community Roundtable

Community managers strategic goal:
Facilitate an environment where members work together to build shared outcomes, driven by a common vision

A CM facilitates this kind of environment by:
Building an environment of trust to convert tacit knowledge into shared artifacts
Being a cheerleader, anthropologist, connector, leader, detective, conductor
Giving people a voice, inspiring and mobilizing to act Curating stories and celebrating members success Handling negative situations Upholding the communitys mission and vision; builds community
WITH community Educating, paying it forward, nurturing community Ambassadors Collaborating internally, getting support for initiatives and removing
roadblocks
Role of a community manager

Internal Communities Internal hierarchies and politics come into focus Need to help teams and business units think through use cases
External Communities Bridge gap between company and external stakeholders Help stakeholders meet each other & form a working relationship
Internal and external communities possess some differences, but behavioral foundations are very similar

BRAIN
Well-connected Has credibility
Understands existing business process
Industry and market expertise
COURAGE
Tactful and diplomatic Confident and shrewd
politician Creates structure without
stifling Can make difficult decisions
HEART
Empathetic Passionate
Inspired by people Inspires others to act
Patient Approachable
Honest, transparent
The community manager mindset

Examine culture as the foundation to community

Communitys health (internally and externally) is a manifestation of companys culture. Being open magnifies the good and the bad; culture can enable or hurt
community efforts. Community orientation can help shape culture.
Community Culture

Engaged and informed employees
are a source of knowledge
Engaged companies
5x higher shareholder
return
Engaged employees
37% more likely to stay with
their employer
Engaged customers
3x more likely to
recommend product
However,
71% of employees are
unengaged
Engaged employees drive
customer engagement
To be effective externally, get your house in order!
Source: Gallup Source: Constellation Research Source: Constellation Research
Source: Dachis Group Source: Kenexa Source: Gallup

Strive for community-centric culture
Collaborative & open
Transparency
Authenticity
Honesty from leaders
Mutual trust & accountability
Ability to communicate without fear of
retribution
Comfortable with working
out loud
Hierarchy doesnt define
flow of information
Aligns to higher purpose, the
why

Instead: Focus on a few behavior changes Take actions every day as individuals and teams: work out loud Discover pockets of people practicing the desired behaviors Focus on changing behaviors you can change To change your behavior, change your mind
Be realistic about culture change
Culture is highly ingrained in the ways people work; any company culture has assets. Honor your cultures strengths, focusing on changing just a few critical behaviors rather
than attempting a wholesale transformation. Harvard Business Review, Cultural Change that Sticks
Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit
Harold Jarche

Catalyze change through observable actions
DO IT
Post a draft, update or what youre working on and ask the community for feedback and insight. Do this often and encourage others to do the same.
Working out loud requires courage and comfort with making mistakes publicly. Trust is necessary to work out loud, and transparency, in turn builds trust. "
Working out loud = Narrating Your Work + Observable Work Bryce Williams
Narration is making ones tacit knowledge (what one feels) more
explicit (what one is doing with that knowledge). Narrating work is a powerful behaviour changer
Harold Jarche

Community is not a one-way communication or broadcast channel It takes time to build a healthy community; ROI wont be immediate Communities are messy You have to learn to let go Feedback is a gift You cant control what members do, nor should you try. But you can
increase purposefulness by helping people be their best Expectation setting is an ongoing process internally and externally. Have a vision and stick to it
Set expectations for your community
DO IT
Determine your communitys mission and vision before you set up and build the community.

To create the conditions that can support a self-sustaining community, you must be deliberate about community design. Community design guides members to outcomes and helps them iterate and make the community their own.

Be deliberate in community design

Needs, jobs that need to get done (official and unofficial)
Expertise that exists, expertise thats needed Intrinsic motivators; is there a higher purpose
that binds? Where they are in employee / customer life
cycle What other informational sources compete
for their attention / time
Understand your community
DO IT
Get to know your community, their goals and motivators

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