Let’s Celebrate! Next Monday is #CMAD Community Manager Appreciation Day

Next Monday is Community Manager Appreciation Day!

We have an amazing community of active, engaged, enthusiastic, and vocal members who love to make their thoughts known on a variety of topics from SAP products like HANA, Mobile, Cloud, Analytics to the new SAP Business Trends.  With such an active and passionate community and nearly 2 million unique visitors to SCN every month, how do we manage it all?  That’s a great question because we definitely don’t do it alone!

SAP Community Network couldn’t exist if it weren’t for a dedicated and passionate group of individuals that help manage the wide variety of topics and conversations happening every single day in the community.   Most of these dedicated folks contribute their time to the community as volunteers – so they have full-time jobs as well.  That’s right, most are completely volunteer and help with the community simply because they are so passionate about their topics and because they want to help the community thrive, grow, learn, and succeed.  They are truly heroes in our community and we love taking the opportunity to thank them and show our appreciation.

Four years ago, our friend and colleague Jeremiah Owyang – and well respected industry analyst covering all things social and community – started a movement to take one day a year to celebrate these unsung heroes with Community Manager Appreciation Day.  So now for the fourth year, we have Community Manager Appreciation Day 2013.  This year it’s coming up on Monday, January 28^th and you can follow the conversation that’s already started on Twitter at hashtag #CMAD.

So of course SAP is participating and helping keep the momentum going!

The community managers in the SAP Community Network ecosystem include a lot of folks that are critical to keeping the community alive.  While each of their roles aren’t strictly called “community manager”, they all are focused on the SCN community in their role and model the behavior of community managers in their support of the community:

• SCN Moderators – We have nearly 800 moderators in the SCN community and they are working hard every day watching conversations, tracking blog comments, engaging with the community, mentoring new participants, correcting when issues arise, and generally doing everything possible to keep the community alive and thriving.   We have a regular Moderator Spotlight featuring some of the great work done by our moderators – most recently Mariana Mihaylova was featured earlier this month in a blog by Gali Kling Schneider – Mariana is both a Moderator and Space Editor covering 7 different spaces, which definitely keeps her busy.

• SCN Space Editors – We have over 400 Space Editors that manage the overall look and feel of the community.  They edit all of our topic home pages, watch for interesting content and feature great stories on the home pages, find great content from our product teams (product info, whitepapers, articles, etc) and publish them in the topic spaces for the community to enjoy. 

• SCN Content Strategists – Our Content Strategists work with all of our Space Editors helping new communities get set up, maintaining best practices within the community, doing regular QA reviews on content and layout, helping with SEO best practices, running analytics on community activity to see what’s working, and helping strategize on how best to leverage community participation around different topics.

• SCN Collaboration Team – Our Collaboration Team are evangelists in the community connecting directly with community members, but also working with our Moderators setting up best practices, conducting Moderator council meetings, building and delivering new Moderator training, managing the Moderator workload across different topics, helping with escalations when there are problems in the community, and so on.

• SAP Social Media Team – Our Social Media team work closely with our community teams in a number of areas, helping manage our global social media accounts, interacting with the community through our social channels, answering questions, and staying on top of conversations taking place on social media every day.

These are all critical stakeholders enabling the success of SAP Community Network – and we HONOR the work you do every day to help guide our community of customers, partners, developers, analysts, bloggers, and others who use the community to be more successful in their jobs and organizations.

The Content and Collaboration teams engage constantly with our Space Editors and Moderators.  Our primary way to engaging is through our private Moderators and Space Editors space right in SCN itself.  The area is always active with the latest topics on managing and publishing in the community.  We also publish a regular newsletters for our Space Editors and Moderators called the SCN Momentum.  Here’s a link to the full archive of SCN Momentum issues – check them out!  And at physical events like TechEd, we love to connect directly with Space Editors and Moderators – like recently at this meetup at TechEd Las Vegas, Madrid, and Bangalore. 

Here’s one of my favorite and fun photos of our SCN Content, Collaboration, and Social Media teams from last year’s kickoff planning meeting – what an amazing team!

So, this week we will be building the momentum to Monday’s #CMAD event with blogs, tweets, and other programs to be announced leading up to next Monday’s Community Manager Appreciation Day.  And you can follow the conversation on Twitter hashtag #CMAD. 

Watch for more this week as we celebrate these amazing and passionate contributors to the health and wellbeing of the SCN Community.

Thank you – we appreciate all you do!

Best,

Chip