WTF Community Managers
An introduction to Community Management
I just walked home from the first meet-up of Community Managers of Sydney. I’m co-organising and supporting Swankie and Mandi who have kindly started the initiative.
So WTF is a community manager? What are they managing and for who? Well that’s what we were discussing. It seems that the role of a community manager is as dynamic and as varied as the communities they manage.
They need to be able to grow, evolve and adapt just as their communities do.
Overall, a community manager, and community management means different things to different facets of the business. I think the key to strategy – business, digital – it to understand how this should all be aligned. Beyond communications, marketing, customer service, brand – but as a business focus. How do we align all the stakeholders to deliver the best possible outcome for all? What’s the pay off?
There were so many insightful thoughts from the broadest range of backgrounds in the room. Everyone had a unique position. Everyone!
The Take Aways:
- A whole new language
- Rhythm of contact with members
- A community that complains: the community lifecycle
- The conversation
- What do you compare it with in your real life
- A reason for belonging
- That I’m not alone (Carla)
- Identifying who your community with and how to engage them
- That I’m not wrong when I tell my clients that they need to create a local channel
- Rhythm & Community Life Cycle
- Creating internal communities within the business – building hubs within the business to seve the community elsewhere in the business – the community managers role into other areas of the business. You are empowered on behalf of the business to solve problems, giving them the skills to tell a story.
- Analogy of the maitre d’ – the community manager
- When building a community: identifying a shared purpose
Up Next:
- How do you measure change from your community management efforts
- Influencers, Advocates
- Trolls & Moderating: Guidelines
- When do you take the conversation offline
- Where does community management fit in the organisations
- Case studies
3 Comments
Great overview Jye, especially as the lurgy made me miss it!
Should point out that Nic is the brains behind the outfit and got the ball rolling. The rest is a testament to her mad community management skillz – getting people involved and inspired.
Shucks, thanks Mandi, *blush*, and thank you Jye for summarising our first session to share with everyone.
As background, I think it felt like ‘Community Manager’ was the new buzz word in Social Media land, but there still seemed to be a lot of confusion about exactly what the role, and what the wider thought of Community within the organisation involved.
So, inspired by the Semantic Web Meet-up run by @missmcj and the Australian Community Managers Roundtable run by @alisonmichalk I thought it would be a good idea to set up a small monthly Sydney meet-up of like-minded professionals involved in Community. Really to get together informally discuss relevant topics and challenges in this space, especially as we all get our collective head’s around it a bit more and establish best practise.
The first session was passionate to say the least (wow Community Managers can talk!) which was really inspiring to see and it was agreed there is a lot of potential shared value in the group going forward.
For now, we are still in the process of figuring out exactly what our ‘Community’ can produce to benefit others curious about this very old concept, but relatively new discipline. But if you are keen to find out more, keep an eye out for wider events to come in the future!
Good post Jye – the role is certainly diverse and I expect to see morph again with the rise of the ‘Social Media Manager’ role.
Thanks for the mention Nic. I’m hoping quite a few of the CMs from the roundtable can converge at the next meet-up, as we love talking too :P