Forrester Groundswell Awards

Dear community,
 
We entered The Moderator Community for this year's Groundswell Awards. These awards aim to recognize the "excellent and effective use of social technologies to advance an organizational or corporate goal". Whilst we are still at the beginning of our journey with The Moderator Community, we do think this community has a lot of potential to support, engage and inspire community managers, group moderators and social media experts.
 
We'd like to encourage you to have a look at the Groundswell website, where you can view, rate and review all the entrants for this year's awards in various categories.
 
You can find the details of our entry below and on the Groundswell website.
 
 
Short description of The Moderator Community
 
The Moderator Community is one of the key places for community managers, group moderators and social media experts to go to find advice and relevant information for community creation and management.
 
We support community professionals by enabling them to easily find information they need to succeed in their role. The community has a dedicated research team indexing information publically found on the web as well as creating white papers around the topics of community management, community development and social media basics. The Moderator Community also aims to provide a place for self-help, where community managers may receive support from their peers and exchange experiences through various social networking and conversation tools.
 

How does this entry accomplish business or non-profit goals?
 
The Moderator Community’s searchable resource library currently contains around 1,500 blog articles, white papers, podcasts, presentations and books. Content is added by members and the community’s own research team, which also publishes ebooks and writes their own blog on community management and social media marketing.
 
Special interest groups, social networking functionalities and the ability to comment on every resource, event or job make it easy to enter in discussions with peers and social media experts.
 
During the short time The Moderator Community has been running, we have secured a number of strategic relationships that will further help the community’s members to achieve their goals. A partnership with Monster enables us to constantly provide recently published job ads to our members, whilst a partnership with Forum One Network further enhances our research focus. Member discounts to many industrywide community events encourage members to meet peers in an offline setting as well.
 
 
What features does The Moderator Community provide?

- A resource library, full of amazing content gathered from the best blogs, white papers and presentations available on the web
 
- Peer groups on topics like community management, monetization and community development
 
- An industrywide event calendar, with community management related events and special member discounts for selected events
 
- A job board, bringing you the latest jobs from the community world, in collaboration with Monster
 
- Our own research, published in ebooks and available for free to all members
 
 
How has the community developed since it started?
 
The community was first opened to the public on January 20th, 2009 as a beta version. While we are still in the process of building it up and adding new features and content, we have managed to attract a concentrated group of over 300 members within the first few months, with many members accessing the community regularly for information and to communicate with peers via the groups, our commenting system or private messages. We have secured partnerships with Forum One Networks and Monster, and have been able to secure discounts for various recognized events such as the Online Community Unconference in California and the Community Summit in Hamburg, Germany.
 
 
A few Moderator Community highlights
 
- Our social media guide for business (published in August 2009)
 
- The latest newsletter
 
- A few social media planning tools one of our members (Peter Young) shared with the community
 
- Our all-time popular content
 
- Meet our awesome members in the Introduction forum
 
 
 
More information

- Our About Us section
 
- Follow our daily musings on Twitter
 
- Read about our Social Vision
 
- Learn about our parent company Starfish Community Group S.L.
 
- Find out more about the Groundswell Awards and this year's entries.