For the second post in our series on community modeling, we’re going to look at how the team at Radian6 is structured, in hopes that it gives you an idea or three about how you might integrate these roles and responsibilities in your organization.

The Front Lines – 1

We currently have a full-time role dedicated to manning our main monitoring post for the Radian6 brand, and ensuring that those posts get to the right members of the team for engagement and response. This person’s job is to filter the posts as they come in using the Radian6 engagement console and workflow, properly tag, classify, and assign them according to our engagement playbook (which they also maintain and keep up to date to ensure consistent practices among our team).

This role also includes analysis of activity in the form of reports on team activities and trends, and some direct engagement for specific types of requests for information that come in. It’s a pivotal role on our team, and ensures that we are always timely and present with our responses.

The Engagement Team – 5 (soon to be 6)

Our community managers, Katie Morse and Lauren Vargas, are our primary online engagement folks, and stewards of the Radian6 brand and community. As our coordinator assigns posts to each of them, part of their job is to ensure that we’re responding in an active, accessible, and timely fashion to commentary around the Radian6 brand. They answer questions, contribute to the larger dialogue through blog comments, and participate in our outpost communities (mainly Twitter, blogs, and LinkedIn).

Both Katie and Lauren also track and participate in industry conversations relative to their area of expertise (and that aren’t directly related to Radian6). Katie is dedicated to supporting and participating in the corporate and brand communities, and Lauren focuses mainly on higher ed and the analytics and CRM spaces. They help us understand the needs and pulse of the community overall, and how the social media and business communities are colliding. They’re both avid content contributors as well, sharing their expertise in social media through our blog, speaking, webinars, you name it. We’ll also be hiring a community manager to support our agency-side clients.

Ali Lee is our User Community Manager, and her main focus is building training and education programs specifically for Radian6 users. While she’s out there attending events and meeting new people all the time, Ali is dedicated to building and refining the user community experience as it relates to the Radian6 platform itself, so her role works directly with our support, product, and training teams.

David Alston (VP Marketing and Community) and I (Director of Community) get involved in many of our larger accounts across all verticals, and help guide our overall engagement and community strategy and best practices for anything community related as well as how community integrates with the rest of our company.

It’s worth noting, too, that several members of our executive, management, and sales teams are active in our communities as well, and sometimes get post assignments or participate in broader discussions. We’re dedicated to making sure that we have as many present, accessible, and engaged people on our team as possible based on their interest and abilities.

The Bridge Team – 3

We have a dedicated slate of community specialists that help act as liaisons from the community side to the sales and business development side. They help funnel leads, conduct follow up on demo requests, and get folks from the community connected to the sales team when the time is right.

You might recognize Steve Robinson, Mike Huggard, or Jana Miller on that front, as they’re out there chatting with and engaging with the community, too, when those inquiries come in. They also help do analysis on the lead pipeline and help the sales, marketing, and community teams understand what’s working to move people from interest to demo to sale.

Content and Product Marketing – 4

Our content and product marketing teams are part of the backbone of our community intiatives, as they’re responsible for spearheading compelling thought leadership content, and making sure that we’re always getting the word out about what we’re up to.

Rob Begg is our Director of Marketing, and he’s focused on generating visibility and brand awareness for Radian6. His team of Gwen McIntyre and Dave Clark help build out those strategies and execute, everything from our event presence to email marketing, SEO and SEM, to keeping our website relevant and ensuring that our digital marketing efforts are up to snuff. And while Rob and his team aren’t sporting “community” titles, the work that they do is inextricably tied to the community work, so I absolutely consider us all part of the same big team.

Teresa Basich is our Content Marketing manager, and it’s her job to steward any content that’s thought-leadership and social media industry related. She oversees the blog, webinars, podcasts, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, client profiles – anything that helps contribute valuable, educational content to our community and customers around the social media space. She does plenty of participation in the community herself to understand what questions and issues folks are talking about around social media, and she both writes herself and manages content contributors on our team to ensure that we’ve always got a library of stuff that’s helpful and useful.

Pivotal Connections

It’s fair to say that while the community team might be on the front lines, we work closely and frequently with all different departments in our organization, because community touches just about everything. From our partnership team to our support, training, professional services, development, product management, executive and sales and account management teams, we have reason and need to interact with and support all of them at one point or another.

Our community team isn’t meant to be on an island somewhere operating independently, but rather touching and supporting many of the other areas of the organization to deliver content, provide insights and feedback, deliver subject matter expertise, and act as a bridge both inside and outside the organization. The way we’re structured, the community team really is the home for everything communications related (rather than having separate marketing, PR, and comms departments).

For more discussion on that, stay tuned for our next post in this series on Monday, where we’ll discuss a bit about our engagement and listening approach, and some of the key projects and initiatives that fall in the community wheelhouse as well as how we work with other teams.

Questions? Comments? Let us hear from you below.