What does a Community Manager do? I see a lot of job postings and mentions of this position, but I’m not entirely sure what the role is. How does it different from customer support/service? Is it a component of that role? A dedicated role? Would love to hear from anyone who does it or who has hired for it in the past. Thanks!
Anonymous Coward
on 03 Jun 09Become the President?
Spencer Fry
on 03 Jun 09I gather that it mainly involves customer service, social networking (twitter, facebook, etc.), and blogging. I’ve also seen some Community Managers show up at events to promote their product and interact with their community.
Hugh Cayless
on 03 Jun 09What Spencer said. Where I used to work, the community manager was also responsible for handling engagement with people who posted to the site forums, organizing meetups, and that sort of thing. He was also responsible for communicating the needs and wants of the community to other groups in the company. So not PR and not customer service, but somewhere in between.
Happy
on 03 Jun 09Proactive customer service by recruitment and support of your company’s biggest fans.
Emily
on 04 Jun 09What one does varies a great deal depending on the company that they work for. In my experience, the smaller the company, the bigger the role.
For me, it means I do everything from engaging users onsite, to managing social media stuff for the company, to developing policy for content, to writing the blog, product managing feedback flows, customer service and policy, pitching media coverage, acting as the company liaison with law enforcement and public entities and acting as a voice of the company wherever it is needed.
It is actually a really fun job, but only if this is the kind of stuff you would do anyway. If online engagement isn’t really second nature, I think people end up hating their job.
YMMV
Brad
on 04 Jun 09Most people abuse the term and saddle glorified customer service rep positions with it.
People who truly fulfill the roles of community manager do the type of stuff that Heather Champ does at Flickr
The problem is you need an actual community to have a community manager and most of them get hired prematurely
Brad
on 04 Jun 09regarding what Heather and Flickr do here’s a good link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/09/29/onthejob.DTL
mikelee
on 04 Jun 09i typically see them for entertainment companies and especially for Massively Multiplayer Online games. they make blog posts, manage the forums, organize events, trawl social networking sites, and do a lot of hands on PR. they try to foster goodwill and build positive communities around their products.
since they’re out there interacting with customers every day they’re the interface between your customers and the rest of your company. they can do a little marketing. keep people buzzing by releasing information or running promotions. they can answer questions by tapping developers, product management, or customer service as necessary. they help identify problems and bring them to the attention of the appropriate people within the company.
basically they handle all the same community driven stuff that you guys do but for other companies that don’t trust or don’t want their people to take the time to deal with customers directly.
Alberto V05
on 04 Jun 09Emily’s answer is good. I’d only add that a community manager at times must also flex muscle…be a bouncer of sorts.
Morgan
on 04 Jun 09Greetings, The ‘Community Manager’ is the person who gets to be the human voice of the company. The guy (in my experience, usually) who has to keep calm when people are shouting (virtually) epithets at the company, and basically freaking out.
The person who wades into the most unpleasant forums to address actual issues, and invite users who are having trouble (as opposed to those who are merely grandstanding) into the flow that will help resolve it.
They are the person who makes the company personal. I know that seems silly to you as 37signals, but at many companies not every employee wants (or has the temperament!) to deal with flamewars and user anger over changes the company has decided to make. Perhaps you never make changes that fundamentally anger large parts of your user base, or (more likely) being small many of your employees are very willing to be pilloried personally for the ‘sins’ of the company. Not every company is that small, or willing to shoulder that burden on every employee who has a public presence. Also everybody knows 37s is small, so they cut you a lot of slack. The larger a company gets, the less slack they get.
I’ve never been a community manager (I don’t have the temperament), but I worked at PayPal and we had an exceptional one, Damon Billian. He kept calm, and focused on getting help to users, in the face of vitriol that you probably can’t imagine. PayPal had to make really hard choices regularly, and Damon was the guy who communicated that in plain English, and with a real understanding of what users were dealing with, how things might have gone wrong for them, and the straightest course to getting them back on track.
You can call it customer support, but most customer support is 1:1. It’s ‘email me, I’ll try to get your problem resolved’, as opposed to a 1:* public ‘yes, I know you’re really angry right now, but here’s what’s going on, here’s how that affected you, and here’s how we can get things working for you again’. Over, and over, and over, without losing your mind.
It’s going to forums where people HATE you, and trying to help them, instead of requiring people use yours, where most users love you.
In my experience, it takes more than a thick skin, it takes a teflon skin. Not every customer support person is cut out for that, and not every company who THINKS they need one, do.
There’s another side to it, which is to bundle the experiences up, and tell the company bluntly, internally, where they are going off track. Where users are getting dumped into the weeds, and where the green path is failing them.
This gives the feedback without the vitriol.
You can probably make a great argument that if a company never does anything to anger its users, then it doesn’t need a community manager. However, a company like that probably isn’t making any hard choices.
That all said, most folks advertising for a community manager probably just want a customer support person who’ll hang out in their own forums.
Community Manager is related to customer support (and it’s related to Marketing, interestingly), but it’s a very different beast.
— Morgan
Morgan
on 04 Jun 09Greetings,
I should note that another company I worked at, McAfee Associates, also had a Community Manager who happened to also be the head of (and for a while, only member of) Technical Support, Aryeh Goretsky. Of course back then ‘forums’ were actually BBSes, and he did it because he had the temperament and will rather than because it was his title, but the idea holds true.
He took the hit of interacting with the broad world of users who were upset, and potential users who were listening, so that everybody else could focus on things other than how our latest patch made some subset of vocal users angry.
I imagine Flickr had a lot of need of that when they added video, for instance. When times are good, a community manager’s job is easy, and any support person will think they can do it. When things go south, it pays huge dividends to have the right person in place, able and willing to deal with it publicly.
— Morgan
Jesus A. Domingo
on 04 Jun 09Other than being the voice of the company when facing their audience, they also come up with ideas for events and often spearhead them during execution. They also look into how user experience can be improved by taking feedback from the users directly or indirectly (thru customer support metrics).
Jane Quigley
on 04 Jun 09We’ve hired a dedicated community manager who works with one of our clients on different initiatives. For a large electronics company, she seeds conversations in the forums, blogs, answers questions, surfaces great content, interacts with the community on the internal and external soc nets, does light technical support, and escalates issues that might have gone unnoticed. She also is the voice of the community within the company, which has become very important as the community has grown from 450 to over 25K in 3 months.
For other clients, we’ve also hired people in lesser roles who monitor forums and the social networks for mentions, answer community questions, etc. I love it when someone from the company actually steps into the role because you get the best of both worlds – passionate employee and community leader (Tony Hsieh from Zappos and Frank Eliason from Comcast are the usual examples).
I think it’s a role that is still growing and companies are definitely asking about it.
Don Schenck
on 04 Jun 09Sounds like a job I would be perfect for.
Nirav Sheth
on 04 Jun 09Seth Godin wrote a really good post on this: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/07/jobs-of-the-fut.html
Tobias
on 04 Jun 09The community manager in our organization oversees a specific site. They engage the community in the forums and on the site. They write and answer routine questions that our writers. They report any problems or any potential problems. They are general care takers of the site.
Josh Williams
on 04 Jun 09We have two “community managers” at our company, one for each of our games PackRat and Gowalla.
As a small team, the community managers certainly handle customer support (though all of our team does in one respect or another). More importantly, they act as cheerleaders for those who play our games — they organize events, contests, and are generally just available to converse with our players in a non-support setting.
In some ways they almost serve as advocates for our players. It’s almost like preemptive customer support.
Aaron Turner-Jones
on 04 Jun 09Not sure of the context (over here in OZ so the lingo may be different), but I’m a manager for an adobe user group. You know, the free sort. done for love and beer money (occasionally Adobe will chip in for beer) where we talk about what’s new, get on beta tests etc. The user group community are more often than not simply referred to as just communities. There are staff on the Adobe payroll who are engaged to foster these communites, which often span the globe. Would that fit with what you’ve seen? I imagine they could have counterparts in various fields and industries.
Tim Martin
on 04 Jun 09For us, “community management” would be closer to marketing than support. It’s a bit more proactive (while the support piece is reactive). Obviously, the two roles are related and interact, but community management requires some searching, looking for places to be and be heard.
Steve Jones
on 04 Jun 09I ran a community site, and a software company purchased my site, which I now run.
I think that I’m not managing the community, even though my title is publisher. It’s been listed above, but you really are the voice of the community as much as the public face of the site.
You twitter and respond to tweets for the company. You might manage the Facebook page, ensuring it engages with people. You answer emails, post thoughts, ideas, blogs, you do a lot of what this blog does.
Rey Bango
on 04 Jun 09@Jason: I’m the community manager for Mozilla’s Add-on community. In looking at the replies, I think a lot of people have done a great job of explaining the role. It’s definitely more than customer service and for some, it’s not even customer service related.
It’s about gauging the needs of a community and ensuring that you convey those needs effectively to the company so that they understand the value of the community as well as the impact company messages & direction can have on perceptions. A lot of this is based on evaluating reactions from various sources to determine where the good & bad lie and reporting back to the correct stakeholders so they can properly address any important topics.
In other respects, it involves being an evangelist and ensuring that the right message is being distributed. Information dissemination is an immensely important activity for a community manager as it keeps the community engaged and builds a certain level of trust. The more information you provide, the more likely that your community will understand how your products or services will impact them and subsequently provide you with feedback that can dramatically help drive your company in the right direction.
So in essence, a community manager helps to bridge the communication gap between a company & their community and serves as an advocate for both. It’s not always an easy job and it requires a certain level of finesse (something which I work on daily) to be able to manage the needs of both groups.
sb
on 04 Jun 09I work in kids’ gaming and community management is a little different, as the title takes on a safety aspect. It’s identifying and banning bullies. It’s enforcing the rules of the game, such as no swearing, etc. It’s also part code cracking, as kids morph language and lolzspeak – they invent new bad words all the time. And not just words. You’d be amazed at the hidden messages kids can create by, say, rearranging furniture to spell out inappropriate words in a virtual world. Or that groups of kids can band together to block a player from being able to move at all.
For us it’s a virtual camp counselor position – balancing fun + safety.
Danielle McKay
on 04 Jun 09Community Managers are responsible for assessing the needs of the community and effectively communicating those to the rest of the company, acting as a bridge and advocate for changes and additions to products and services. We are also largely responsible for community retention, building and marketing.
If a company needs a Community Manager, the community is a valuable asset they feel the need to protect, empower, and build a relationship with.
To be effective in this position you need to be empathetic, dynamic, personable and have great leadership skills. You also need to be able to manage several tasks at one time.
You act as the face of your company and you’re always ‘on’.
rondata
on 05 Jun 09It depends on the community.
Some say a community manager is like a pinata, people beat the (blank) out of you and you still have to give them candy.
Others say we’re like Doctors, fixing things. Except the pay is lower, we work longer hours and there is WAY more blood.
I tend to think of us as your one stop shopping center. We are customer service, evangelists, soldiers, doctors, therapists, and sometimes friends.
We do whatever we can to make sure you can.
Scott Tsuchiyama
on 05 Jun 09Amber Naslund is the Community Director at Radian6, and she wrote a great post on her blog a few months ago on this topic. She breaks down some of the day-to-day responsibilities on her plate, including some of the challenges that others here have mentioned: Being a Director of Community
Amber Naslund
on 06 Jun 09Hi there.
Rey offered up a really comprehensive response (and thanks to Scott for the shoutout for the post I wrote about it). And I have to respectfully disagree with Scott way above that you need a community before you need a community manager.
I think the role is definitely different based on the company; online companies are going to have different needs than brick and mortar companies, and they’re going to vary widely by industry.
My job to me is a mashup of customer service, business development, marketing and communications, and internal education. I do lots of content creation, interaction with our community both online and at events, and being the bridge of communication between our company, clients, prospects, and partners.
It’s a job I really love because it’s the best of so many worlds to me, but it’s definitely one that takes a certain kind of person (and to answer your question, no, it’s not just customer service in a different title). It’s an ambassador role, kind of.
I’d be happy to chat with any or all of you anytime about what I do; feel free to reach out at [email protected].
Cheers, Amber
Philip
on 08 Jun 09Jono Bacon works at Canonical as the Ubuntu Community Manager and he is currently writing a book “Art of Community”. The book will be available for purchase in print and will also be released online under a Creative Commons license. It might be of interest?
Ellen Watson
on 08 Jun 09I liked this explanation from Jenna Woodul from LiveWorld (the company we use for our Community software):
http://socialvoice.liveworld.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1100000770
She compares community managers to good hosts of offline gatherings, and says their main role is “to support the social tone and culture of its community”.
This discussion is closed.