Critical Success Factor 1: Strong Community Manager

I am trying to distill all that we have been learning about successfully implementing a social media solution in our organization (or as Jive has aptly named it, social business software). I'm going to write a series of blog posts about the critical success factors I have identified -- not necessarily in order of importance.

The first critical success factor, and the earliest one I identified, is to have a strong community manager. Sure, as the community manager I am biased, so take that into account as you read this. But I'm not looking in the mirror, I'm looking at the dozen local community managers we have throughout our enterprise (at least one in each division).

As I reported on our rollout and engagement progress each month, it became clear that some divisions were moving more quickly than others to gain adoption and derive value from the tool. Why was this? The strongest correlation I could find was with the local community manager.

This sounds so obvious: a strong community manager is critical to the success of your social business software implementation. But it's worth stating boldly. If you're serious about building a community, you'd better select and invest in someone well-suited to the role who has the skills, abilities, passion and bandwidth needed.

It's that simple. The single best predictor of your community's success is your choice of community manager.