chrisbrogan.com - Latest Comments in On Managing A Community

Re: On Managing A Community

how to get rid of strech marks — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:04:19 -0000

As i am a community manager,that is very helpful for me

Re: On Managing A Community

youtube downloader — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 06:28:00 -0000

Overall, I believe these efforts would be measured by an increase in attendance at our face-to-face and virtual events, an increase in subscriptions to our newsletter, and a larger blog commenting community. This would be a win to our organization, and would thus be worth the expense of another salaried employee.

Re: On Managing A Community

melissaleon — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:26:09 -0000

Great post Chris, I am thinking how this would look for a community manager for a web app.

Re: On Managing A Community

Polasky — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 16:14:11 -0000

In this case, it becomes an opportunity to issue a press release (internal as well as external) to educate about the activities you are performing. If we don't carve out space for the work we are doing, as a collective of change-makers, there is no reason to expect others to know about or support us.

Re: On Managing A Community

crystalaria — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:32:59 -0000

Chris,

Loved the post and everyone's feedback.

I recently accepted a social media position with a retailer and have a question that I have not been able to find an answer for anywhere...

How and when should I (as the brand) engage in user forums? I have a great list of tools for listening in but need more guidance on interactions.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Crystal

Re: On Managing A Community

andrewhemingway — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:47:41 -0000

Kevin,

I was the Community manager for a very large skiing community, and dealt with issues much different from some of the large sites. I think because it is smaller and more targeted you are dealing with knowledgeable members, and they expect you to be the same. Also on a small niche network you have a very small margin of error because any action will be noticed by all of the members. Moderators are the key in a niche community.

Im in Bristol, NH and would love to talk sometime!
Andrew Hemingway
akreins@gmail.com

Re: On Managing A Community

John — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:14:13 -0000

Hi,
Having started about a year ago my job as a "serial poster" as I posted on anything to do with our company, I have found myself in a community marketing manager position in a European startup. I needed a few ideas and your post is going to give me that chek list style thingy to go forward in my job. I am going to keep this post tight for a while.
Thanks!

Re: On Managing A Community

Annette Lang — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:07:59 -0000

As the newly appointed Community Manager in a French start up offering simultaneous interpreting, I'm delighted about every piece of information I can get. I'm still into shaping the budding interpreter community, understanding their needs (joining a community in a job that normally prevents you from enjoying the benefits of working colleagues since you move all the time) and designing our goals.
An issue we are actually discussing is that of starring members... how important is that according to you ?
Thanks to all of you for your great ideas,
Annette

Re: On Managing A Community

Catherine — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:51:09 -0000

Interesting approach, particularly with social media aspect for managing a community. My concern is that the community you are talking about has to be highly motivated and of course connected to the internet. Something a lot of rural Australians aren't. (they have email sure but blogging,etc, not sure they have the know how or the time) So success with the community needs to be balanced towards how your audience wants to receive and give information. So I see this social media info and approach you have provided is mkting push rather than two way communication.
I see your community manager also having the function of educating the community and their own coporation about how to have meaningful two-way dialogue about issues of concern. PLUS a function that demonstrates how decisions are made back to the community. I come from infrastructure community relations background so taking peoples houses etc is pretty emotive stuff.. we've found that the best way for a proponent to engage is face to face... and this social media is ancillary (while innovative )though necessary to complement traditional comms strategies..... ( esp if you have a computer literate demographic...)

Re: On Managing A Community

Mark Neff — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:29:16 -0000

Our (CSC) Community Director is part of our KM function that is part of the Office of Innovation that reports into our CEO. She oversees the community strategy for the company and helps facilitate our key communities and actively engages their sponsors. She also provides help when and where she can to the rest of the communities around the company. She also acts as the leader of our community leader community. Each individual community has a community leader that can be from anywhere in the company.

Her performance measures are not focused on the external components you cite since her work is primarily inward focused. Although, it may be useful to consider them as an extension to her current work or even for community leaders in the Communication and Marketing areas. Thank you for your ideas.

Re: On Managing A Community

Roxanne Darling — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:03:56 -0000

@Maggie McGary - I think you've raised an important issue on both personal branding as well as strategic positioning. @Kevin Skarritt has given us two more data points of support as well.

As people who are at the leading edge of creating whole new industries and job descriptions, it is very important IMO to establish these new roles with the requirements and credibility they deserve (and even demand.) That translates across the entire org chart, and in your case, I would support 100% an upgrade in your title (and salary) to reflect the added responsibilities and skills required to be successful.

Please let us know what you come up with re: your new title and pay grade. And you can certainly turn to this post for extensive documentation.

Re: On Managing A Community

Kevin Skarritt — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:34:51 -0000

Maggie and Roxanne wrote:
"...this not being a role that just an intern or volunteer should—or could—manage."

HEAR, HEAR! A little lesson on this point for anyone who reads this and is thinking otherwise. We (www.BlackWidowNetwork.com) brought in a full time Intern to take over a large quantity of 'Community Management' responsibilities. She was bright, energetic, a college business major, 'got' social media and was extremely excited to start her career path with such an important role. Long story short; It took her three weeks to become so completely overwhelmed with the job she ended up quitting and reconsidering her major. YIKES! Our best decision, next, was to bring in another employee with maturity, industry expertise and gave them a LOT more pre-framing of what the job entails. She too was initially overwhelmed, but she's doing fabulously well because of her business savvy.

My $.02 for what it's worth.

Re: On Managing A Community

Maggie McGary — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:15:22 -0000

Old post but very relevant to me because I have been wondering about this same thing, but in a slightly different context. My question is how important is the actual job title for the position we’re talking about? I work for an association and we already have a community manager--she manages the intranet--so that title's out. My title is assistant content developer, but I have become the de facto community manager--my job is exactly what everyone here has described.

Should job title be just an internal thing, or should it really matter if the person in this role is to be the "face" of the organization? With the association thing in particular--how much should/will it matter what title the people who begin to fit this job description have?

Take me, for example--would it have a negative impact on my credibility within the association community if my title stayed assistant content developer or would it not matter? How about to members, journalists, public—whoever; would they wonder if someone is really the spokesperson for a company/association if, say, the person acting in that role’s title was administrative assistant? Is it a necessary part of the job that the person be easily identifiable as the community manager by title, or does it just not matter? Such a big part of effectively doing this job is being an active participant in social networks, and I wonder if there is--or will be--some dynamic where community managers will be reluctant to share knowledge with someone they feel isn’t on par with them professionally.

And, btw, I totally agree with Roxanne’s point about this not being a role that just an intern or volunteer should—or could—manage. I can see how it’s easy for companies to think that all this position entails is setting up a Facebook profile and sending out the occasional tweet—but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Once you get the social media ball rolling you realize just how integral it is to many different departments and how involved and time-consuming a task it actually is.

And ditto about the skills—it’s not just a matter of finding someone who knows what Facebook is; it is a unique skill set that encompasses far more than it might appear. To have just a web person or just a writer isn’t enough; they need to be a strong writer—preferably a blogger, be technically savvy, know about/have experience in public/media relations, etc, etc. Not to mention not only be intimately familiar with all the current social media applications but constantly stay on top of new trends and technologies as they emerge. It truly is a 24/7 job because that’s how much time it takes to keep all the balls in the air and be able to see what’s coming around the next curve, not to mention be responsive to the needs of the community.

Re: On Managing A Community

Allison — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:22:32 -0000

We just established this type of position and your post will be VERY helpful and gave us some considerations for measuring success. Thanks!

Re: On Managing A Community

TeganDowling — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:06:09 -0000

Soooo much time has passed since this was first posted ;) that twitter should now be replaced (or at least augmented) with identi.ca. That's where the future will be.

Re: On Managing A Community

Lisa — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:11:16 -0000

Great post! I would add FriendFeed to the list of platforms that the community manager should have an account on.

Re: On Managing A Community

KareAnderson — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:46:04 -0000

A gem of a new resource on this is Patrick O'Keefe's book, Managing Online Forums
Kare

Re: On Managing A Community

Dan Thornton — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:28:59 -0000

Great, and very interesting post. I'm intrigued why the message has to be explicitly non-marketing (I'm Community Marketing Manager for 10 brands!), but I can guess why...

I would say that a position exactly as detailed would be easier to set up in a smaller, or newer company. In a more traditional set-up, there still needs to be some balance between quality engagement, and at some point, driving significant numbers to what can be fairly established and substantial websites. Some of this is covered in your description, but the problem that normally occurs is in making an explicit link between community engagement, and an end result in attendance/readership/commerce etc.

It's certainly a problem which is fairly prominent in the Measurementcamp gathering I've been lucky enough to end up involved with (http://blog.willmcinnes.co.....

With regards to structure, I work for a large and very established publishing company, so if the community resource is increased, it's likely to either mean working with community specialists located within brand teams, or creating a horizontal team of specialists working across a maximum of a couple of brands each - but that's a way off yet!

Re: On Managing A Community

Chi-chi Ekweozor — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:07:03 -0000

Fantastic post.

Much fat to chew on...

This post was a bit of an eye opener to me as the term 'Community Manager' implied 'Organiser of After School Club' to me and it may well appear so to many other readers from the UK. We are catching up though...

The Measurables and Duties sections were pretty useful.

I read it all the way to the last comment which says a lot.

Thanks.

Re: On Managing A Community

Missy — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:10:28 -0000

IMHO the perfect candidates for a CM position, are bloggers. Because in essense a blogger is just that, a Community Manager.

Bloggers are at the forefront of social media. Experienced bloggers know that no blogger is an island. One needs to make friends, and establish relationships within the blogosphere.

Also any blogger that picks up a blogging book, or reads an ejournal, etc. will soon enough find out that joining and participating in blogger communities is the best way to "make friends" and grow ones blog. The 2 go hand in hand.
It is in the learing curve of a blogger.

Blogging and Social Media are intertwined. So if YOU are looking for a CM, look for an experienced blogger.

Great CM job description, Chris.

Re: On Managing A Community

iwilker — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:41:09 -0000

Great post chris. And lordy, there's a lot of experience and wisdom in this comment string. (On a blog like yours, showing up late for the party -- e.g., after a post has been up a couple days -- might almost be considered a strategy: Maximum gorging on worthy contributions, in minimum time.)

Couple thoughts: I like the succinct way you (a) define measurement as qualitative more than quantitative, but (b) rough out a few areas where numbers can be meaningful: response-time limit, number of posts filtered up via Google Reader, ratios re twitter and original vs link posts on blog. All this helps bring measurement into some focus.

And a corollary to Marnie Webb's observation. At bottom, any community person's role is going to be about facilitating connection between the org they represent and that org's constituents or customers. And sometimes that may call for tasks, skills, and measurement I haven't seen singled out here.

In my view, what a lot of orgs really need in order to make that connection with their community is social-web skill widely distributed among staff -- it's great to have one or two community people who are incredibly prolific bloggers, twitterers etc., but in some contexts that community won't really be satisfied unless it has direct access to staffers with highly specialized knowledge. An intermediary is only going to weaken the signal. In the internet industry, so many people are now connected on social-web services that your community can probably tune in to the specialists doing what they're particularly interested in, but in organizations that are less savvy about web culture, social media, the value of online identity and so on, a senior community manager's role may be as much about getting colleagues online as about directly interacting with the community.

I've worked as a community gardener for some years now for a large advocacy org, and that's how it's been for me -- evangelizing the social web, building mechanisms allowing colleagues to interact directly with people outside the org, teaching and constantly coaching staff how to blog, use del.icio.us, Flickr, twitter et al. In such an organization, measurement might include something like "number of colleagues who've become self-sufficient users of blogs, Facebook, twitter et al, have established robust online identities, and who regularly use social-web tools in their jobs."

Re: On Managing A Community

CortneySellers — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:45:27 -0000

Hey everyone,

This post led to some fantastic conversation here and at Nancy's Full Circle blog.

In a post I made over there, I offered to try and do an online expo to cover this topic (and am flexible to adding others).

So I'd like to know 2 things (you can DM your answer on twitter @cortneysellers so we don't crowd Chris' blog):

1.) Would you be interested in attending such an event online?

2.) What topics would you like to see covered?

Thanks,
Cortney

Re: On Managing A Community

Connie Bensen — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:21:04 -0000

great post Chris - I agree with some of the others that it is more entry level

Duties -
Utilize the platforms listed, but explore emerging ones & evaluate how they can be utilized

Measurements -
(This was interesting but I'd hesitate to have someone tracking their engagement. I would find it tedious to keep track of all that.)

I think that this position requires a highly motivated person & those items would all be inherently accomplished. So listing them is good. My caution would be to make sure to encourage new options be explored all the time.

Success
I'm going to blog about this with a graphical representation, but here's my definition of success: the community manager will be facilitating conversations at the various levels:

Customer Engagement:
Gather feedback
Provide Resources
Customer Services
Marketing & PR support

Internal Engagement:
Quality Assurance
Development
Tech Support & Customer Support

I agree with the person that said that Comm Mgr role is going to become more important as companies realize it's value. And the position if done well will be challenged by customers & internally. Hiring this type of person may also be challenging, but there should be a telecommuting option. There are definite advantages to working remotely & I believe I get far more accomplished.

Re: On Managing A Community

CortneySellers — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:55:58 -0000

Thanks Chris! I may give it another shot someday, but I've really become fond of attensa in outlook.

Re: On Managing A Community

chrisbrogan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:53:16 -0000

@Cortney - Google Reader is a judgment call for me and for my employee. I love Google Reader. I can move through thousands of articles, finding exactly what I need, with a lot less time and effort than any other reader.

The sharing function gives me aggregation powers, and the starring, emailing, and further tagging features allow for rich metadata that permit me the ability to move through things fast.

It's how I use it. In list mode, with the keyboard commands. And so that's how I got it going.

Your mileage may vary. : )