If you’re in a role that encompasses elements of community management or program strategy, there is no doubt that one of the year’s highlights is the Community Roundtable’s publication of their ‘State of Community Management’ annual report.
The Community Roundtable group’s expertise and experience is unrivalled – anyone that’s heard Rachel Happe speak will vouch for that. However, the SOCM report is not just their take on the ‘state of the union’ of the community management discipline, it is instead based the results of a detailed survey taken by hundreds of community managers worldwide:
The data published in this report were collected from 331 community programs over 8 weeks in January, February and March 2017. Participating communities represented internal and external use cases and a wide range of industries, and they ranged in age from pre-launch to a handful that were more than 20 years old.
That huge volume and range of data allied with decades of experience and insight allows Rachel and her team to produce an exceptionally detailed report that provides practical and valuable recommendations that can be applied to any community.
If you’re directly involved in managing a community, responsible for a wider employee communication or customer support program, or just interested in community and collaboration technology at a more abstract level, I would recommend you download and consume the report. It’s really that good!
The three key findings from the SOCM 2017 are:
- Strategy: Quality of engagement matters more than quantity as communities mature.
- Operations: Lasting behavior change requires more than transactional investments.
- Tactics: Connecting content and programs to strategy accelerates community success.
The full report goes into more detail about these findings, as well as exploring the data in all eight competencies of the Community Maturity Model and much more.
Get your copy of the 2017 State of Community Management Report now.
One final comment given my historically strong IBM audience… Here is the breakdown of the 300+ survey respondents:
Just 2% of those that submitted their community data to the Community Roundtable are running IBM Connections. This leaves me somewhat frustrated!
I’m not absolutely sure of the reason for this. Perhaps there simply aren’t many Connections platforms that are in production? Maybe they don’t have dedicated community managers that would know about the survey or consider it important to respond? Or it might be down to IBM and its partners not promoting the survey to their customers?
Whatever the reason, I would love to see this change for 2018! If you’re active with the IBM Connections product, please download this edition of the report, learn from it and plan to submit your results next year!
