Essential Skills of a Community Manager
Community manager is a role that more companies will adopt in the coming years. Jeremiah Owyang provide a huge list of companies who have such a champion already, and more recently gave businesses a scorecard for whether startups should have a community manager.
Here, I’ve talked about managing a community and what it takes. I’ve discussed what I want in a social media expert. I’ve even written about how we might do community management wrong. Here are some pieces of the puzzle that I think are vital to the role, and to its adoption for most businesses. Tell me what you think.
The Essential Skills of a Community Manager
The best community managers are like a good party host mixed with a fine restaurant host. I make a distinction because a party is more personal and a restaurant requires their host to think with a business mind. Community managers need both skillsets in equal space. A party host will connect people together, praise incoming guests appropriately, maintain conversations throughout the event, and see everyone safely off with a smile and a wave. A restaurant host must be certain the ambiance is just right, know that the kitchen is functioning appropriately, and help the rest of the staff pull off a flawless dining experience. The blend of the two mindsets suit a company’s community manager well.
Community managers must be experienced communicators. One thing a communicator needs to do well is LISTEN. Part of that involves building sites and community spaces such that people have a place to engage you directly, and part of that means using listening tools to understand what’s being said about you elsewhere. Upon hearing and understanding, a community manager should engage with their own authentic voice, not with a marketing message.
Community managers are ambassadors and advocates in one. This is complex, but a community manager’s first responsibility is to her employer, and yet, she must convey the voice of the people (customers and other stakeholders) such that the company fully understands the mood of the marketplace, the needs of the people, and the customer’s intentions. Further, the community manager must clearly understand the community’s position in the marketplace and communicate that in such a way that customers don’t feel they are being fed a line.
Community managers are bodyguards and protectors. Some communities find a bad apple in their midst. A solid community manager will understand the difference between a vocal critic and a curmudgeonly troll. Knowing when to remove someone politely and quickly from the party is an important matter. The rest of your guests will appreciate this. Just be sure that you know the difference.
Community managers must build actionable reports. It’s not good enough to send emails to your leadership saying, “We had 54 comments on that last blog post.” Metrics and reports appropriate to your organization are necessary to weigh the value of these efforts. Understanding the goals of your organization’s use of social media, and especially the relationship marketing expressed within having a community manager position in the first place are the key to understanding what to measure (I have several measurements I’ve communicated to companies over the last few months, each reasonably different).
Community managers cultivate internal teams for further support. As community managers are the face of the organization (or “a” face) to your online customers, being sure to promote internal champions, leaders, and other teammates becomes important. One reason is that you want your customers and stakeholders to realize the humanity within the company. Another reason is more for the company’s benefit: should the community manager leave the organization, some level of continuity might be salvaged.
Your Take
I’ve given you my ideas on what I find essential to a community manager role. I’m curious how you’d apply this to your needs, and/or if you can see what I might have missed. Your thoughts are valued.
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The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, foxtongue
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On Managing A Community
I wonder how most organizations are handling the role of community manager. I’m curious where a community manager reports. Marketing? HR? Customer service? I wonder how organizations are justifying the cost, and what they believe the role entails for level of effort. How are companies using the role in either direction?
Depending on the organization, I imagine the role of a community manager would be different, so I’m going to walk through what the role might entail for a media and events company (like mine), and see what comes to mind. I could do the same for several other professions, but let’s start here. Want to follow along? You can help me refine it in the comments.
Strategy
My strategy for a community manager would be to accomplish the following:
- Develop an awareness center for our industry (so we can listen and know what the community at large feels).
- Build a non-marketing community outreach to deliver a voice for our organization to the industry.
- Engage the community we embrace, and facilitate learning and education from our organization’s perspective, and through relationships with other trusted organizations.
Reporting Structure
My company is a fairly flat organizational structure. At my office, a community manager would report in to me as the VP of Strategy & Technology. Why? Because I’m charged with setting the tone and the look and feel of the content for all of our events. To me, the role at my organization would be to help me build on the customer experience.
Duties
My community manager (and I’ll use the feminine pronoun to save both of us the “he or she”) would have accounts on the following platforms:
- Ning
- YouTube
- Google Reader
She would have responsibility to set up tracking and alerts for keywords specific to our industry, to subscribe to several industry blogs, podcasts, and video channels, and to subscribe to certain topic categories on YouTube.
She would comment on appropriate blogs. Not about our events, but about the topics at hand (the comments would at least have a URL back to her blog, so that’s enough self-promotion on that front). Listening and commenting would be the bulk of her first three months’ duties.
She would blog when she felt comfortable with the space.
If we decided to grow a Facebook or Ning community, she’d help facilitate good conversations there, too.
Measurements
I’d measure my community manager on the following:
- Responsiveness to communications (blog comments, emails, twitter messages and forum threads) less than 24 hours max.
- Number of QUALITY blog posts read and shared via Google Reader.
- Number of meaningful comments (more than a few words, on topic, pertinent to the space) on appropriate blogs, videos, and other media per month.
- Overall quality of her Twitter stream ( maybe a 60/30/10 mix of industry-related / personal @ comments / and off-topic).
- Engagement on our blog/community/network. (Number of subscribers, number of comments, number of links out to other blogs from our community site).
- Number of quality blog posts and linking posts (probably a 40/60 split between original and linked, though some would argue for 30/70).
- Eventually, number of links from other sites to our blogs and media.
Success of the Project
I’d feel our community manager was a success if she accomplished the following through her efforts:
- Empower the listening ability of our organization to our community’s needs and desires.
- Build an awareness of our organization through non-marketing efforts, measured by favorable or at least non-negative mentions on other blogs, forums, and in Twitter.
- Deliver a blog and/or media platform that’s useful to the community at large, and that grows in number of subscribers as well as engaged commenters.
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.
YOUR Turn
How would your organization incorporate a community manager? Where would they report? How would you measure their efforts? Do you see any flaws in my suggestions? Are YOU a community manager? How does this sync up with your world?
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The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
