The power of bouncing back

It is probably the word of the hour or rather a synonym for 2020: Resilience. The whole last year was about the ability to bounce back and adapt to new circumstances – over and over again. 2020 showed us, how important it is to be agile and resilient to challenges. We experienced a year of total change. We learned what social distancing means. And we were forced to find new ways of interacting with each other. 

Saying that, it could not be more appropriate that CMX, one of the leading platforms for bringing together community professionals, predestined resilience as the theme for their Annual Community Manager Advancement Day (January 25, 2021). “Community managers are driven by connecting people, building bridges, and bringing groups together. As 2020 brought lockdowns and social distancing around the world, community professionals demonstrated extraordinary resilience in finding new ways to bring people together” they say. I became aware of the topic in the course of my master's programme, where we had a lecture dedicated to Community Management.

But wait. If you are new to the topic you will probably ask yourself in this very minute: “How do you even define a community manager?” According to Richard Millington’s book Buzzing Communities: How To Biuld Bigger, Better, and More Active Online Communities there are eight different areas a community manager has to take care of. He calls it the Community Management Framework: 

According to Jeremiah Owyang, the initiator of the annual community manager advancement day at CMX, there are three areas of resilience when it comes to communities. Basically, he differentiates resilience in the context of the micro, meso and macro level.

1. Resilience of the Self
2. Resilience of Communities
3. Resilience of Organizations and Society 

The first level means the ability of the individuum itself, the community professional, to bounce back. In many cases the resilience of a community is shaped by its leader. Community managers need to act as role models when it comes to building the strength and the will to overcome difficulties.  

Managing a community during a global pandemic is certainly one of the most difficult things professionals have to deal with. But no matter what hits us, resilience means not just getting back up again; it’s also about being prepared. Communities need to be built to be resilient right from the beginning. 

Nearly every business model got upended by COVID-19. For some companies though, community turned out as a key driver of resiliency that could keep employees or customers engaged in an all-virtual normal.

In this context the words of the famous American economist Paul Romer come to my mind, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Being an optimist by heart I am sure that after enduring the worst the world will be a better place for all of us. Of course we would have all wished for a less drastic changemaker, but do we know if it would have changed anything? 

Want to hear some thrilling stories of resilience? Let's dive into it. Here you can read some experiences of the CMX Community.

Resilience of the Self: Triggered by all the different stories read, I started to reflect on my own resilience during the last year. Finding new ways for coming together with my family, friends, colleagues, fellow students, and other communities was just one form of adapting to the new situation. Apps I had never tried before like “Houseparty” (just to name one of them) became my faithful companion. They connected me with my friends in the virtual sphere and helped to overcome my sorrow for not seeing them in person. Another form of acclimatizing was trying out new things like live online yoga sessions held by my talented study buddy Kerstin, where I joined completely new online communities. At the micro level, resilience meant for me finding new paths for doing the things I like. “In every challenge, there is an opportunity” – these words became my mantra, which I still obey.

Resilience of Communities: Bringing in our agency’s community on social media – which is most often meant when speaking about communities in the business context, after all – we recognized that there was obviously a shift in the famous 90-9-1 rule. The principle implies that 90 percent of all members in the community are silent viewers, 9 percent react reactive and only 1 percent of all users interact and create content actively. During lockdown 1.0 we tried to choose a rather cautious and more personal approach on social media. We posted typical home-office pictures of all employees, gave insights in our daily routines, and published our own lockdown Spotify playlist. The result? All posts reached above-average interaction rate.

Resilience of Organizations: Thinking of my professional life, the community within our team (being a small communication agency with not more than 12 employees) and corresponding mindsets á la “we are in the same boat” or “together we will make it” for sure helped our company navigate through these uncertain times. Weekly meetings via MS Teams have become standard and even though it felt strange in the beginning not sitting around the big conference table once a week, 11 months later I couldn’t barely imagine anything else anymore. I know it's just a babystep towards an all-online-working-environment, but it's still progress.

To sum up, not matter what happens - communities will always find a way for being connected and if you believe it or not, in hard times they might become your backbone for being resilient.  

And now I would like to hand over the discussion to you: How do you personally overcome hardship, or adapt to new challenges? Have your community members come together in new ways? Is community helping your company navigate unprecedented change?

Relevant Soures:

https://cmxhub.com/announcing-this-years-community-manager-advancement-day-theme-resilience/

https://cmxhub.com/stories-of-resilience-from-the-cmx-community/

Millington, R. (2012). Buzzing Communities: How to Build Bigger, Better, and More Active Online Communities. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16136186-buzzing-communities