What is a Community Manager?
Social media specialist. Online marketing coordinator. I have seen this position called many names by employers over the last few months that I have been researching this job, but I wanted hear from someone actually doing the job. Last week I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to sit down with Derek Shanahan of FoodTree to talk about his experiences managing different communities.
The first question I asked him was: what does it mean to manage a community? At its core, managing a community means doing things to help the community become more awesome. It means protecting the community from vultures and from trolling from insiders. It is about bringing people together that share the same passion and connecting them.
What Makes a Great Community Manager?
All this sounded very altruistic, but I wanted to know what the value was in having someone responsible for managing the community. Derek explained that the community is a great source of information for the company, but it’s difficult to filter out the good ideas from the bad. The community manager is someone that can extract that information from the sea of noise and knows how to use the tools to do so. He or she needs to be able to collect and filter that information, and pass that information up to the management of the company as feedback. A great community manager can create a community of evangelists that help sell the company through word of mouth. Apple is a great example of a frontrunner in recognizing the power of community.
Because of the nature of modern online communities, word spreads very fast and companies need to be quick to respond to problems their customers are having. Community managers need to have appropriate knowledge of a wide range of tools like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and whatever the latest ways their customers are communicating with each other. They also need to be able to learn the newest tools quick enough to not fall behind their community. And of course, the most effective community managers are the ones that have the autonomy granted from management to solve problems for their members. Derek cited Southwest Airlines as a great example of this in action, where there are only something like 5 people managing the entire community, but they have enough power to direct their customers to a named individual wherever they are that can help them.
Derek suggested the following as the basic skillset of a community manager:
- You have a strong command of the web and understanding of how to use communication tools and which ones are most appropriate to use.
- You know how to handle yourself online and how to present yourself.
- You are a quick learner with a curious personality.
