Connie Bensen

It’s been exciting to see the evolution of the Community Manager role and how it is becoming mainstream across organizations ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 50 and with no matter as to profit or non-profit.

People have been avidly interested in pursuing this type of role and want to know how they can gain the necessary skills. Back in June of 2008 I offered 2 training programs to meet that need. It went great until I got sucked into the tech startup world and social media monitoring. Since then I have continued to mentor and scale the reach here through my blog.

Periodically people would request my courses when they came across the old posts referencing training. I always felt bad when I had to explain that my day job was busier than busy. So, I’m really pleased to see that WOMMA and the The Community Roundtable are offering training courses that are specific to Community Management (in contrast to Social Media in general) and they are created by credible people in the industry. Earlier this week Jeremiah Owyang covered the pro’s and con’s of the certification aspect of the Community Manager Training courses.

These courses will:

• fast track your knowledge base on the expectations of community management
• open your eyes to aspects that you didn’t realize existed and cause you to have even more questions
• be excellent for those of you that have been assigned or are spending a portion of your time in this new role

They probably won’t:

• make it easier to get a job (employers are getting 100’s of app’s per position) or more pay
• ramp a company’s adoption of social media (ie: embrace the value of community & related culture shift)
• replace the value of volunteering and showing leadership in an online community and the related experience.

If you’re interested in exploring community management and strategy these courses are a good place to gain the skills and an overview.

I would highly recommend connecting with like-minded people in one of the following communities:

• Facebook group Community Manager, Advocate, and Evangelist

An active group that has new people joining everyday. There is a doc with social media jobs there.

• Community BackChannel

Membership is free, but there is a process for requesting it.

• CommunityAdmins.com

These active forums are a part of Patrick O’Keefe’s iFroggy network. Patrick is the author of Managing Online Forums.

• Community RoundTable

Jim Storer & Rachel Happe are the founders of this peer network. They have built a very active community that is based on resources, research and regular activities.

Seeking a job? Check out this Facebook group of Social Media Jobs

If you’re a practicing Community Manager, what resources have you found the most helpful?

The social web has greatly changed the search for the job seeker as well as the organization that is doing the recruiting. The interview starts long before the hiring manager meets the candidates on the day of the ‘interview’.

Over the past few weeks we have been in the process of hiring community managers. Here are some tips for those seeking this type of role.

Resume

• Your experience needs to be relevant to the position (it needs to be obvious)
• Include metrics for the impact that you had in previous positions

For example:

• Increased sales by X %
• Increased the community by X %
• Increased participation in the community by X %

Tip: Do not represent consulting as if you were an employee

Your Social Presence

• Google your name: What online presence do you have?
• LinkedIn – Some key aspects:

Do you have a complete profile that is public?

Do you have a number of references from previous employers?

Have you written references for others?

• Twitter presence – quality of tweets and a balance of followers to following

Preparation for the Interview

Research the company that you’re interviewing with. What talking points can you take with to your interview?

Research the person that you will be interviewing with. Do they have a personal blog or are on Twitter? That insight provides great conversation starters.

If your LinkedIn profile set to show  your activity, then the interviewer will see that you’ve viewed their profile.

All of the above interactions happen before the interview ever happens. They are all items that can be used to qualify candidates. If you’re applying for a social media role, take some time to ensure that your application stands out from the crowd.

If you’ve recently hired for a social media position, what additional tips would you give?

The online community manager position has become mainstream. Many have referenced my outline for the Responsibilities and Goals for a Community Manager. I have been evolving that definition since 2007 and it remains my most read post. But the concept of having one person doing all things social is limiting.

Companies are taking community to a new level by empowering staff. Many brands are realizing that their social media strategy requires an internal position to guide and champion it. The Community Strategy position provides organizations with a role that works holistically and cross-functionally in ensuring that all departments are leveraging social media in a way that meets their team objectives.

Definition of Community

Many consider community in a very limited way. My definition is very broad and encompasses everyone that is interacting from both the company standpoint and the public.

• Internal Community – All corporate stakeholders including staff, management, executives, board members and shareholders.
• External Community – Brand owned properties; Corporate presences on social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn); Social channels (blogs, Wikipedia entries, forums, Nings, Google & Yahoo groups, YouTube, Flickr); Mainstream media that allow comments; Ratings and review sites (Amazon, TripAdvisor, etc)
• Anyone searching for information

The last one is key. You want to be found by everyone needing your products and resources. Community building creates invaluable organic SEO.

Meeting Business Objectives

The role can’t be justified without having goals and metrics associated with it. Every organization has some form of ‘sales’. Even non-profits have some type of conversion needed. Those could range from increasing the number of donations, the number of volunteers, and brand visibility.

The community strategy role will work towards:

• defining a plan to empower staff
• review all customer touchpoints and ensure frictionless engagement
• review all departments and provide recommendations and training on ways that teams can utilize social to meet their objectives

The diagram below has the sales funnel on it’s side and shows how community building assists in moving customers through the sales funnel over time. Social channels can be used to build brand awareness and enable the conversion. Once the sales is made customer service is of utmost importance. There is a new opportunity to cross sell & up sell. Crowdsourcing the social web will provide feedback for product development.

The ROI of social media!

Over time the following benefits will be realized.

• Increased word of mouth means that consumers are sharing the marketing messages. This results in a reduced need for PR, marketing & advertising spend. Acquisition costs are lower.
• Higher quality leads that have a higher percentage of converting. Warm leads mean a savings on cold calling
• Providing excellent customer service in the channels where consumers are at means a lower abandonment rate of products and the brand and a much higher loyalty.
• Overall a shorter sales cycle can be realized and a longer customer life cycle.
• Product development costs can be reduced by utilizing feedback from the social web.
• Creating products that consumers WANT will mean increased sales and demand.

Challenges for integrating community building into a company’s culture

Startups have the advantage of not having an established culture. The people are passionate and very agile. It is easy to create a team approach with a focus on content marketing and connecting directly with the customer

Existing organizations have a much bigger challenge. Community management is almost an intervention. In order to achieve the objective of applying social media across the enterprise and create a social business, one needs to identify the barriers, encourage cross-functional collaboration, and assess incentivization in order to reverse engineer the problems to find solutions,

It’s important to have executive buy in along with support from management. This role needs to be empowered to provide training, identify problems and work with front line staff.

The larger the organization the more challenging it is to shift content from the intranet to be public facing. The business of the future will have the majority of it’s content not only public facing but also generated by consumers. Present day intranets are largely siloed which creates challenges for a community strategist.

The web has removed the barriers of geography but this creates a challenge for global companies. Many are geography based and teams need to revise how they operate. Listeningn to the social web is also challenging because of geography and languages.

What have I forgotten? What else do you need to sell this position to your executives?

I have come to realize that as community managers may be doing ourselves a disservice by choosing that title. We are all in agreement that we’re not managing anyone. But do organizations understand the term ‘Community’?

It seems that the larger the organization, the bigger the challenge. Small businesses and start-ups understand the value of having a community manager. In the last few years it is in vogue to add the position. And if the brand has a product support site, then the role is defined as a forum moderator. Oh how narrow that view is!

Let’s start with a definition for Community Manager:

The person in an organization that is the social media specialist and works cross-functionally and holistically to ensure that the business objectives in regard to social media are met. The primary objective is to serve as a translator between customers and prospects and the company and vice versa.

And what is the definition of their community? It depends on what the objectives are. But in general:

A community manager needs to support customers, prospects and colleagues. The three constituents have very different needs. Customers require excellent service and appreciation shown for their support of the brand. Prospects require information about the products and services that the company offers. Both will appreciate from information about additional services that will benefit them. And colleagues need training and support in best practices for utilizing social media to meet the objectives of their roles.

Both of those definitions are open to discussion. But do executives understand the term ‘community’ and ‘community manager’? Should they? or should we be speaking in their language?  

Should the role of community manager include the words Social Media Specialist? Would that better state what a community manager does?

Are we hurting ourselves by using words that traditional organizations aren’t familiar with? Is it arrogant to expect them to learn our vocabulary? Is it seen as vogue and trendy? or should we be speaking in terms of their business objectives? Will we get more respect if we do so?