Last week I had a dawning while I was thinking about my editorial calendar for the Network Solutions blog. Small business owners are for all practical purposes Community Managers!

Small Business Owners do it all!

A community manager wears many hats & is a voice for the customers & the company. Small business owners do it all too. Marketing, PR, customer relations, product development, etc are all important. And if you’d like to put your business online then the basics in the yellow middle circle are important.

But take a look at the outside ring. Those are all topics that I cover in terms of networking & building brand. (Hat tip to Web 2.0 for SmallBiz for the graphic. They have started a great new series that you should check out on Marketing 2.0).

More aspects

There are many more aspects to consider (things that a community manager does that I view are necessities for a business online – no matter it’s size!).

  • Listening – Brand monitoring tools
  • Marketing utilizing social media tools
  • Adding a community to your site

The great thing is that so many of the social media tools are free & word of mouth efforts can be done with little or no investment. The key is to choose the ones that will be the most effective for your niche.

What would you add to the diagram?

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