What does a community manager do?
10th December 2009, 09:57 am by Holly SeddonSounds like a stupid question, no? But actually it’s a valid one, especially in this time of flux. If you ask some people what an online community manager does, they’ll describe a moderator.
If you ask others, they’ll detail a curator. Others liken it to being a gardener, keeping the weeds at bay and encouraging conversation to flourish.
In our recent community predictions for 2010 post, many of our contributors thought that 2010 would see a tightly-defined, standardised ‘community manager’ role, with various spin-off roles taking on the work that’s currently supplementary to many of us running communities.
So what are the skills that should make up this core community management role? Well, looking at the communities I am currently responsible for and have run in the past, I would suggest the following ‘job spec’.
Managing moderation and moderators
That’s right, as communities mature – and some of the first communities are veritable grandparents now – it’s simply not sustainable or sensible to have community managers spending all their time moderating.
With a sensitive or particularly ‘lairy’ community, post-moderation (or even pre-moderation) of every piece of content can be a full-time role, possibly several full-time roles.
If this is the case, community managers should be managing the work of moderators, possibly even moderation software, not doing all the grunt work themselves.
Welcoming new members
Whether you personally greet every new member, make it your business to encourage particularly shy members when their first post goes unanswered, or put together an amazing ‘new members’ pack’ to be emailed out when anyone joins, welcoming members is very important.
Engaging stakeholders
Building a flourishing community is fantastic, but if you’ve built it as part of an organisation, and that organisation isn’t committed to it, isn’t prepared to listen to it, the people that make up the community could well fall out of love with it.
Promoting good behaviour
This starts with the community management team, continues through fair and transparent guidelines and is enforced by consistent moderation and through taking tough decisions for the good of the community.
Monitoring and reporting
A good community manager understands how healthy his or her community is, they know it instinctively, they can sense it, but they also have the figures to back it up.
Reporting and statistics aren’t unpleasant monthly (or weekly) pains in the bum, even if they’re often treated as such. If you really want to know your community, and if you really want to prove that there is a point to all the work you’re doing – and the organisation is funding – then you need to know how your community is behaving, feeling, and moving around.
Be an advocate
For your community, for the members that make it up, for your organisation, for community management in general. If you don’t feel you can, this is not the job for you.
This list is not exhaustive, what shall we add?
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Nigel Legg:
In terms of “wild” communities – communities of interest that do not have one particular home – the role of the Community Manager also includes ensuring that the focal points of the community – the blog, the website, etc – are actively maintained and up to date. Also, monitoring goes beyond merely haveing the stats to justify your work – it can be use as a means of finding interesting content for you community and drawing new members in.
10 December 2009, 11:27 amRachel Happe:
Hi Holly -
We are seeing a lot of stratification happening in the field of community management as it becomes more of a career vs. a job. Like many functions the more senior the person is, the more their role involves strategy, planning, budgeting, and cross-functional coordination – they are responsible for the care of the community but they delegate moderation, content development, programming, application management, etc. to either people on their team or liaisons from other groups within a company.
Apart from the seniority levels, we also see pretty big differences on how a community manager spends their time depending on what type of community they manage. For example, in big consumer communities moderation is a big task… moderation looks a lot different in B2B or employee communities – you still get some trouble makers but they are not the trolly spammers one tends to see in bigger consumer communities. Content and programming also looks pretty different.
So, the upshot? The industry is starting to have common perceptions of what a software support community looks like vs. a big consumer media community vs. a retail community vs. a market research community and on and on. There are a lot of similar dynamics – after all groups of people still act like groups of people but the way to think about investment, how the community manager spends their time, content, community design, etc. all look a bit different.
At the core, the attributes you laid out are necessary to have for all community managers – no matter what the context.
Rachel
10 December 2009, 1:20 pmViv:
Their job title should really be “Digital Concierge”.
10 December 2009, 1:43 pmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concierge#Hotels
Sue John:
Thanks for including moderators in that list. Guiding and assisting the moderators is a large part of a Community Manager’s job, and one that I feel often gets glossed over. As my community has grown over the years I find more and more of my time spent on assisting our expanding group of moderators.
10 December 2009, 1:44 pmJason Peck:
Nice list here. I agree with Rachel that community managers need to be involved in various aspects of business to be successful. I would add that community managers need to be aware of existing business processes across different departments and establish new ones. For example, if someone is having an issue with customer service and mentions it in the community, what process is in place to make sure this gets routed to the appropriate person.
10 December 2009, 1:57 pmGuillaume:
I think what makes a good community manager is the capacity to do anything quickly: how long does he take him to spot a problem and find a solution? It is the capacity to find the quickly the right solution and bring it to the community that makes a difference.
10 December 2009, 4:32 pmS’il ne fallait en lire que 5 – semaine du 7 décembre 2009:
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11 December 2009, 4:01 pmPraz:
Great set of thoughts here…
I think a key factor is maintenance of the community, by that I don’t just mean interaction and keeping stakeholders/members engaged, but also maintaining the visual aspects of a community to ensure it’s always timely and clean.
Also on monitoring, I would add providing regular feedback on the health of the community/blog as well.
Lastly, Community Managers also need to be versed in the policies and be aware of existing processes, departments, products and services(to a lesser extent)
Cheers,
Praz
14 December 2009, 1:47 amLawrence:
Hi, from a B2B community perspective, almost as important (if not more so) as the community managers online engagement is the work she does offline or in the ‘private’ community space.
I also think it is difficult to try and formulate a specific set of tasks that a community manager does. Simply because each community is different, will probably have a different purpose and members will want to interact in different ways. That said, I’d agree that there are perhaps some fundamental traits and skills required for any community facilitator.
A second question, which I find interesting, is whether these skills and traits can be taught – are you born a good community manager or can you become one?
18 December 2009, 6:09 pmWeek-end link roundup | The LugIron Software Blog:
[...] What does a community manager do? | FreshNetworks Blog …”community managers should be managing the work of moderators, possibly even moderation software, not doing all the grunt work themselves.” [...]
19 December 2009, 11:52 amHolly Seddon:
Hi Lawrence,
That’s a great question (and a whole new blog post in waiting?!).
Personally, I don’t think some of the softer skills can be taught, you can’t learn to be empathetic, patient or diplomatic.
If you have the right ‘people skills’ as a foundation, I think you can be taught the ‘rules’ or the ‘theories’ but you have to be the right kind of person to start with.
I would be happy to be proven wrong, though!
Holly
21 December 2009, 8:43 amThe unnatural lingo of the online world | FreshNetworks Blog:
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