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

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?

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