Internal Collaboration and Socialization
Relationships are everything in a large company like IBM. I enjoyed reading this Interview with Rawn Shah, Practice lead with the Social Software Adoption team in IBM.
My favorite question and answer is the last one:
Q: What advice would you have for a beginning community manager?
Community management is both a learnable skill and a personality trait. The best community managers (CMs) that I know have survived the long term are active listeners, strong relationship builders, and see themselves as a voice for the members. They are resourceful people and always looking to find ways how members can help others rather than trying to be gatekeepers or central clearinghouses of information. CMs generally “work” for the sponsor, whether officially or otherwise. They voice the ideas, feelings and pulse of the community to the sponsoring organization, but they are also not “willows” who bend entirely to the will of the community.
As a new CM it is important to understand not just how you are to serve people, but also what you need to produce or deliver and how to measure them. If these are countable in distinct ways, then you have a way to capture metrics. Otherwise, if these are qualitative ideas and results, then you have relevant stories that may be representative or repeated across the community. My suggestion when it comes to metrics is to look for repeatable ideas or artifacts relative to what your community is doing. They should be meaningful towards delivering the end business goals, even if they are only parts of the whole picture.
Rawn’s book is “Social Networking for Business.” In the post Rawn says “This trend towards partnering depends strongly on influencing opinions and shepherding ideas to get results… the structure of such institutional changes and business models are the core of my book”. Sounds like another book to go on my growing bookshelf of books for community managers.
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