The community manager’s role
A colleague of mine who has a startup with current and potential community features was asking me for input on the role of a online community manager. Chris Brogan, acknowledging that the role might be defined differently for different organizations, posts his sense of what the role would be like for his (media and events) company. This is a good reference overview and benchmark. Note that his definition of the role would focus beyond the company’s own web presence… the community you want to manage might be spread across many systems, not just the local blog, online community, or social network.
What would define success for the community manager? Says Chris,
I’d feel our community manager was a success if she accomplished the following through her efforts:
- Empower the listening ability of our organization to our community’s needs and desires.
- Build an awareness of our organization through non-marketing efforts, measured by favorable or at least non-negative mentions on other blogs, forums, and in Twitter.
- Deliver a blog and/or media platform that’s useful to the community at large, and that grows in number of subscribers as well as engaged commenters.
Chris has some great points! I have many resources on my blog on the community manager role.
http://conniebensen.com/blog/resources/
Interesting that he would choose to call networking and influencing word of mouth through blogs, forums, and Twitter “non-marketing”.