Tag Archives: ROI

Why it’s worth helping your community manager avoid burnout

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After reading a blog about burnout the other week I’d been thinking about how to help community managers avoid the same problem, faced by pressures from managing difficult issues online to getting buying from across their organisation. The issue came back to me today after reading FreshNetwork’s Holly Seddon ask how to best deal with burnout in the Community Manager group:

Being immersed in the details of people’s lives, and often their traumas and upsetting experiences can take it’s toll on moderators and CMs. I know on previous communities I’ve been affected by some things I’ve read and have had to take five minutes, have a cup of tea away from the screen or talk it through with a colleague… What do you do to avoid emotional burnout?

I confess I have both a professional and a personal interest in this subject having been a community manager (CM) helping to set up an award-winning professional community at the ICAEW, and as a consultant working in a mentoring capacity with other CMs. Speaking on a professional level was I found useful recently was a discussion I had with Rachel Happe, one of the founders of the Boston-based Community Roundtable (CR), a new community for CMs to learn from each other, including accessing mentoring. Or to use its tagline: “A peer network for community managers and social media practitioners”.

Rachel started off by saying that in the US companies were despite the downturn starting to increasingly invest and hire people for community roles, but (in what was no doubt one of the driving forces behind setting up the CR) often they failed to hire senior enough people. The problem is that CMs in this position are being asked a lot, not just ‘running a community’ but dealing with crisis management issues for instance, which means a lot of pressure when such hires may not be trained strategically or have much experience in how to manage a business. This of course itself raises the question of whether companies considering hiring CMs for such pivotal customer facing roles should look to get help in defining early on what such a  role should include. That’s a consultancy service we offer at Sift Groups, just to get the plug out the way!

Rachel’s informed view was that this not surprisingly put a lot of strain on people hired, faced with high expectations, and lack of experience at a senior level in knowing how and when to push back organisational demands. She said a lot of such CM roles did not come from a management background, did not have the skills and experience to operationalize such the role (see Rachel’s recent post ‘Eight Competencies to Socializing your Organization’ for example), which meant effectively what the know-how to help change the business were back to ‘square one’.

In particular the role of the CM in a profit-driven organisation where the culture maybe particularly corporate in style was highlighted by Rachel; this is set against the pressure from customers who (as Clay Shirky recently pointed out in his example of the UK bank HSBC’s climbdown in the face of a student revolt over bank fees hike — see Suw Charman-Anderson’s paraphrased account of his RSA talk) who can increasingly organise to put pressure on companies without the need for the efficencies of command and control at the disposal of the average corporate. In conclusion Rachel advised was that CMs in such a position need to have a core team around them to help operationalize the community within the business. Otherwise the problem of burnout, coupled with lack of senior level leverage and inexperience in strategy and operationalizing the role, could mean CMs walking away and leaving an online space which fails to deliver the ROI everyone wants to see it deliver.

PS: Maybe using the acroynm ‘CM’ for community managers is a bit jargonesque, what do you think? If you are looking at the demands of this role it ‘s certainly worth reading the 35+ comments to Jeremiah Oywang’s post ‘Job Hazard’s of the community Manager’.

How to trigger E2.0 genetic mutation in a 1.0 organization?

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The question “How to trigger E2.0 genetic mutation in a 1.0 Organization?” posed by Stefano Masciocchi in LinkedIn inspired my reply below. Thought it worth re-publishing as a blog post:

• Hmm, good question, it says on one of my recommendations on LinkedIn that I am expert on E2.0 and cultural change, thanks to my current E2.0 software partner, so I’ll try ang give an expert answer;-)
• I first must say that my previous role I brought in lighweight web 2.0 tools such as Im amd wikis and they helped improve the efficency of communication for offices worldwide, but that was not planned with ROI savings in mind.
• In current role again looking at it from purely ROI point of view I can’t really add anything if you are talking genetic mutation, as that’s an ambitious context. But looking at the question and leaving ROI out for now what I can say is of course it’s extremely difficult, even when money is no object, to achieve such a change.
• So what you really I think are trying to do is two things. Convince the boss using ROI that it’s worth the investment; and use ROI as the key to implement the plan which is effective with staff. In other words at every step the boss will ask ‘what the benefit to the business bottom line’ and the staff will ask ‘what the benefit to me?’. In both cases you are selling the benefits, with ROI at the core.
• I would have thought the best way to accomplish this is to start with where people are already. Thus to go back to my previous example you could argue for corporate wide use of internal messaging to improve effciency and reduce email overload. The cost is small so the boss likes it; you have to come up with a way of proving the ROI. Beware that with implementation you need a policy in place on proper use of IM, restricting personal use for example.
• If you are using new kit like wikis to improve collaboration for heaven sake don’t get hung up on calling it a ‘wiki’ in other words leave out the jargon. It may sound cool, but it puts a lot of people off.
• With something like a wiki along the same lines, start off with all the bells and whistles stripped out, it costs more and the ROI can drive extra functionality as and when it proves its value. Scalability in other words.

Stefano’s response is also worth quoting, “Thanks Stuart, some of your comments sound familiar. In fact, lots of us internal resources are already familiary with major social platforms, use IM even from desk-to-desk (sometimes I wonder what “social tools” really mean, huh?) and, even if most of them are unaware, they are probably willing to be part of a true holistic agency.

“But, as you wisely pointed out, there’s an ogre in almost every tale. Since some of our working processes are already travelling in a 2.0 fashion, best politics is to underline the advantages, trying also to evolve this DIY way into something more company-integrated, proceeding step by step and, eventually, discover that ROI can turn from ogre to friend. Or, at least, a known face.”