Autumn update: #cmLDN changes and Community Clinics

After a rather long summer break, and with the lovey Elana Zak off to dazzle the world of social media in the States, the cmLDN steering group met this Autumn to discuss going forward with our regular meetup group.

One of the things which we found difficult in our first year was organisation – as busy communities people it wasn’t always easy to find time to arrange venues, speakers and plan meetups around a theme. So with our new steering group recruit Rich Moynihan, we took time to think about what we wanted from a meetup group for community managers in London.

This took me back to days organising the Cardiff bloggers meetups with Ed Walker – which usually attracted about 40 bloggers each month from Cardiff and beyond to chat, drink, share notes and experiences and enrich the blogging community online with face to face gatherings. Part of the reason this worked, I think, was because most of the ‘talks’ were from the bloggers themselves – sharing experiences on a topic in an informal and friendly way. There were many other reasons this group was popular but I think this was one of them.

CmLDN meetup. Photo: Marika Kochiashvili via Twitter

Much like the bloggers in Cardiff, community managers and editors in London tend to work pretty remotely and detached from others parts of the company – often dealing alone with various problems and issues which arise in their communities. So coming together to share ideas, problems and tactics is really important and will develop and increase the quality community management in London and beyond.

So the meetups are being reconfigured to be for community managers about community management – with informal meetings in homes and pubs and the focus on sharing experiences and ideas in an informal, off the record format. Some of the most interesting discussions we had at the meetups in the last year where when a number from the group started to pitch in and a debate began.

We’re moving our organising platform to Facebook (the group is here) and off meetup.com – so hopefully we can have more conversation, link sharing and interaction between meetups – we’ll announce dates and venues on the events page of this group. If you’re a community manager in London, or work with online communities in some way please do request to join the group and get involved!

#cmLDN March meetup: ‘What makes a community manager?’ – notes

What makes a community manager? This was the title of last Wednesday’s meetup event for the new and growing Community Manager London group.  

And a key point of discussion it is too – with many recruitment agencies and companies thinking of employing a community managers and wondering what the role will require.

Steve Ward, founder of Cloud Nine Recruitment who recently ran an award for the ‘community manager of the year 2011’ took us on a whistlestop tour of how the community manager role has evolved form 1998 to present from his perspective in media recruitment.

You can see the slides form Steve’s talk here – which give you a good idea of many of the points covered – the main one I took away from the talk was in some ways how community managers are doing the job the startup CEO used to do – in terms of meeting and knowing intimately the company’s users and target audience – holding the keys to future development and possibly business potential too.

[View this story “What Makes a Community Manager? (#cmLDN March meetup)” on Storify – helpfully curated by Elana Zak]

#cmLDN: Community managers London January meetup and #CMAD

Thanks to all those who came to the first Community Managed LDN meetup for a Christmas social. We’re kicking off the new year with our first event proper.

It’s on Wednesday 25 January 2012 – from 7pm at Crayon, in Oxford Circus. See my last post on what the meetups are all about here – a friendly informal space to chat about building and developing online communities.

For the first event we’ve got Markham Nolan from Storyful coming to share some thoughts with us about community management in the year to come. Markham is a social media newsgatherer, sourcing and verifying news via social media using old journalism techniques alongside new tools. A core part of this is sizing up and building relationships with online sources and crowdsourced factchecking.

We’ll then have a couple of pitch sessions à la Hacks/Hackers London and some space for anyone to share a story from their community and questions/debate. If you want to take part in any of these slots please email communityLDN@gmail.com.

The very lovely people at Crayon have kindly offered up their cool space in the heart of Oxford Circus for us to meet up in so we’re looking forward to trying out this new space with this new group. Please do say hello to @nathanmiller and the @crayonlondon team to thank them for the room and the Ribena! There are more details on how to get to Crayon and a map here.

So all you need to do is head over to the meetup page here to tell us you’re coming. Once again we’ve organised this via The Community Manager – but you can also find our chat about it on Meegloo here, or follow some of the tweets here. If you add yourself to the London group we’ll keep you updated on future meet ups – where we’re likely to hear from speakers and do some more exciting things.

Also – in case you didn’t know, next Monday it’s #CMAD – community manager action day! Give you nearest communities worker a cupcake, hug, beer or any other sign of your appreciation. It’s an international event (there was an event last year in London too) so get involved via Twitter using the #CMAD hashtag.