June 14, 2010
A Different Look at Community Management
By: Amber Naslund
Community management isn’t what it used to be.
Once upon a time, managing a community meant hanging out in an online location – be it a forum or a chat room – and moderating chat. Approving comments. Handling some support issues. Dealing with trolls, helping people with questions. That kind of thing.
But community management, at least the way we approach it, isn’t just online issues management and discussion moderation anymore. It’s a far more fundamental business role, one that ties together responsibilities from a number of different places, both online and off.
Folks are sometimes surprised to learn about how large our team is, or how it’s structured, mostly because they’re thinking of community management as it’s always been. But we’ve got it threaded into our organization a little differently, based on what we think community management should be about in today’s business. Let’s take a look at some of the touchpoints.
Online Engagement
This is the area you probably think of first when you think about community management in today’s world. Doing the listening and monitoring, and getting involved in discussions online in the form of responding to mentions or questions, routing support requests, managing a Facebook page, anything directly related to helping manage your brand online. But that’s not where online engagement ends.
Community involvement also entails contribution of content, initiation of discussion around interesting issues, and more general presence and participation online (not always about your business, or even business at all). We’re all listening for broader topics within the industry and adding our voices and expertise to the discussion when we can. Here, it’s about being invested in and part of the community that you’re seeking to connect to in more ways than just being the online host or hostess for your brand.
Business Development
Make no mistake, community management is part of the lead cultivation process. In addition to our presence online, we attend plenty of events in our industry as well as those that are focused on communications, marketing, and PR in the agency and corporate worlds. We’re there sometimes as sponsors, sometimes as speakers, and sometimes just as attendees.
We’re there to meet our customers and prospects in person, learn about the issues that they’re discussing and dealing with, and build relationships face to face. And while the goal isn’t always and singly lead generation, it’s an important indicator of the impact and value of our presence at these events.
Occasionally, we’re also asked to assist in the sales process with some subject matter expertise, like sharing some social media best practices or knowledge we have to help frame a listening strategy for prospects. Sometimes our customers need a little insight or input on what’s cooking in the social media industry, and we can add a bit of our perspective to their work and tag team with our account managers to help them frame out the big picture.
Internal Communication & Collaboration
In our business, community is what we call a bridge role. We bridge communication from the community into our organization: sharing product feedback with our product team, trends and industry insights with our executive team, helping get sales and support inquiries to the right place for response from those teams, offering input about needs and overall social media challenges that our customer markets are wrestling with.
We’re also in a unique role internally, working closely with all of our departments as if they were our internal customers. We help take the executive vision and translate that into content and communication materials that can help our sales and support folks. We work with our training team to offer social media subject matter expertise for both internal and customer training. We stay connected with product, marketing, support, sales, and management to be sure that our outreach strategy lines up with each department’s objectives, and we’re even shepherding a project to set up an internal social network to share information and communicate more openly inside our own walls.
Content Creation
Case studies. Blog posts. Whitepapers and ebooks. Webinars. We’re the central hub for our content strategy, and other than specific product marketing stuff, it’s created from within our department. We’re listening internally to what our sales folks need to help illustrate the importance of social media as a whole, listening specifically, and how Radian6 fits into the picture. We’re tackling the questions and topics that our customers are interested in related to social media, even if its not just about listening.
We also work with our PR firm to develop ideas for thought leadership contributions to media properties, interview and speaking opportunities, and other initiatives along with our product marketing team. Our whole purpose is to make community a central resource for information and intelligence that can help people do their jobs better, whether it’s our own company’s content, or contributing to external sources. We’re the B2B content marketing epicenter of our company.
Measurement and Reporting
Our group keeps track of our own engagement dashboard, monitoring our own online communication activity. But we also look at trends among our competition. We look at our Share of Conversation, we look at lead generation through community efforts, we look at the engagement around our content and event participation. We look at sentiment trends around our brand, what percentage of our activity is around support issues (and what they are). For more detail on what we measure and why, have a look at this post.
We share that information internally with our teams and management so they can get a snapshot of how the community team is contributing to the bigger picture, and where we can change, adjust, or do things better to have even more impact.
Our Stance
To us, this role is a hybrid discipline – a mix of sales and customer service and communication – and is really silo agnostic, functioning as a hub for many different disciplines inside the company. Online engagement is part of the role, but so too is the integration of that online world with offline efforts, business strategy, and even the culture of our organization.
Our vision of community professionals is that of spokespeople, communicators, networkers, brand ambassadors, and representatives of their community all wrapped into one. We believe it’s a role businesses should take seriously, and hire and incorporate community professionals that have a broad set of business and interpersonal skills. It’s not just the online forum moderators of yesterday.
The folks over at the Community Roundtable (we’re a member) put together an interesting report earlier this year on the State of Community Management. It’s worth a read, as it reflects a lot of the realities today (to the good and to the challenging) as well as a glimpse at what tomorrow might look like. And at Radian6, we put together an e-book on Building and Sustaining Brand Communities that gives our take on what these roles and functions look like inside an organization.
What Do You Think?
Is this what you expected? Is this how you’ve seen community management, or does it get you thinking about it a little differently? What questions do you have for us? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Amber – you nailed it with this post. If community management is ONLY seen as an online activity in a community platform, those organizations will be disappointed. Yes, they will some value but won’t realize all the benefits of a full customer engagement. The organizations that do embrace this view of community and foster the culture change needed to support it I think will stand out above the competition. Also, I think that this approach helps make sense of everything “social” that executives can understand and get behind.
Thanks
Mike
@mjtwit
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Amber Naslund, Lauren Fernandez, Roger Dooley, Dan Blank, Jeff Jacobs and others. Jeff Jacobs said: It's not what it used to be- Community Management « Social Media Monitoring and Engagement – Radian6 Blog @AmberCadabra http://ow.ly/1YeaS [...]
Great post, Amber. While I think that good community architects and managers have always gone way beyond the "community maintenance" mode, you've done a really nice job of identifying their less-than-obvious responsibilities. I'm sure many community managers ignore these critical needs.
Roger
Great post, Amber. While I think that good community architects and managers have always gone way beyond the "community maintenance" mode, you've done a really nice job of identifying their less-than-obvious responsibilities. I'm sure many community managers ignore these critical needs.
Roger
Amber,
Thanks for putting words around the amorphous blob otherwise known as Community Management!
Deb
@digology
It can be rather blobish, can't it?
But I think it'll evolve as business does, as do many other things.
Excellent! That's the holistic approach necessary to be successful today. Oh, and if anyone questions the ROI of these combined activities they need to get their heads examined!
Lots of people question the ROI, but I'd posit that it's because they're not quite measuring it well. I'd be happy to help them there.
Amber
As community manager is still very new to some companies, this article is very useful to them and also those who are considering this type of position. Community manager, as you so well state above, is more than being online and talking. It is about the talking and measuring as engaging current and potential customers is important however measuring your share is just as important.
Maybe we might be headed to where companies when considering to have an online presence will look to this and realize that it is not a let's appoint someone to do this but look at a community manager in a different light and take it much more seriously.
Amber
As community manager is still very new to some companies, this article is very useful to them and also those who are considering this type of position. Community manager, as you so well state above, is more than being online and talking. It is about the talking and measuring as engaging current and potential customers is important however measuring your share is just as important.
Maybe we might be headed to where companies when considering to have an online presence will look to this and realize that it is not a let's appoint someone to do this but look at a community manager in a different light and take it much more seriously.
Thanks for the great thoughts, Amber. I think so many organizations just want someone to point to when there is an issue or assignment. This silo agnosticism is a lifestyle and business management practice theory that needs to be taught to all business owners! We knew silo-ing and fighting social media are both impacted by generational differences. What does this necessity to shirk departmental silos and embrace social media mean in the generational divide?
It's definitely an evolution, no question about it. Really, the bottom line of this is communication. Cheesy, I know, but when you put a role like this in the mix, it forces more and more people to talk to one another than may not have before. That can be pretty powerful in itself, and can start to shift things around even without brute force.
Crazy, is when buisness leaders manage people like hired products marketing their buisness, rather than the heart managing and representing the body of their buisness.
Whistling @ your body of work Amber! :0)
Thanks for the link back to The State of Community Management report – we very much agree with you that community management is a cross-functional discipline of business, not just a role dedicated to online moderation.
Glad to do it, Rachel. You guys did great work with that report so I was happy to share it!
I hate to think that others did not view Community management as "contribution of content, initiation of discussion around interesting issues, and more general presence and participation online." It seems to me that any community manager who takes their job seriously would be about all of that. I do agree with you that the job is evolving and that is largely in part to more buy-in and increased understanding of the role but I think there are a lot of people who, now that it is gaining so much traction, have no idea about how hard many CM's worked before it wasn't so mainstream. Some community managers are simply struggling to get the support and resources they need. It is up to us to teach them how to get it. Posts like this should help in that regard. But we also have to help those who still feel completely alone in their ambassadorship. And we all know that this varies from industry to industry.
Angela Connor
Author, "18 Rules of Community Engagement"
Angela, it's not always the CMs themselves that aren't looking at it that way, it's the people that develop the role based on what they think it was 10 years ago in GeoCities.
I agree with you, too, that this position has probably been largely underestimated and misunderstood in the past, but I think the emergence of the social web gives us a great opportunity to look forward and change that. It can indeed be a bit of a lone soldier thing for some pros that are trying to be the sole advocate in their organizations. But the more we talk about it, collaborate, post, discuss, and put it out there, the more businesses will take note. It's up to us to be constructive about how we illustrate the benefits rather than just complaining that we aren't understood.
This is an excellent post, you nailed it.
Thanks, David. Hope many others think it was helpful, and gives some great CMs a footing.
Provocative post Amber – CM is the Medusa of collaboration! Have uploaded your post to for our community members to consider
Cheers .. see you on Twitter!
Interesting stuff Amber, as always.
I'm convinced that the awkward transition that businesses are having in the face of the most inevitable piece of a digital culture (the transformation of relationships) has faked them into thinking that someone could be tasked to 'deal with the internet' or 'manage the community'. There is certainly a role to play in the space of community, without question…but saying that a 'community manager' is the one to pay attention to, translate, funnel, address, or 'manage' the way a company interfaces with the digital world is already an old idea.
Companies are now in the ocean without swimming lessons. This isn't a scenario with a dedicated fix; it's a glimpse of a world in which every single person who participates in commerce should have a grip on the ways that people communicate. Everyone should be listening, to some degree, or at the very least aware of the overall impact of the role their company plays socially.
Everyone is a community manager. It's a matter of crystalizing what that means and what a team needs in order to execute in that environment effectively. How is the CEO participating in the world outside his door, and how can the rest of his team or company improve that? Where are your stories; who are the people behind your brand? Is everyone listening to the world in the ways they can and should be?
I think this idea that a Community Manager filled a role in the culture of business that wasn't previously needed is partly true and partly false, but I think it definitely represents the fact that every single role in any organization is going to look entirely different in tomorrow's economy.
You make some really fantastic points, Derek, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that what you posit as what people should be doing in terms of communication and paying attention is still too idealistic for today's business climate.
You're right, we're still transitioning into this world of digitally immersed, hyper-connected business, where everyone is tapped into the pulse of the players in their organization's atmosphere on a number of levels, and I think it's completely reasonable at this stage in the game to task someone (or a group of someones, preferably) to manage that community, old idea or not. Part of that person's or team's role should absolutely be crystalizing what it means to have everyone participating.
Maybe the overarching concept of having people pay attention to and manage the way a company interfaces with its constituency is old, but the scope and definition of those actions are changing, and those changes have big implications for the way businesses will be structured in the future. It'll great to be see these changes expand past the confines of community management.
Teresa,
I think it remains reasonable on some level to task a group towards the relationship a company has with its 'constituency', as you put it. That's been true forever, in one way or another. I suppose there's some idealism in my perspective on the reality of today's business climate, so far as I'm running a small company and have been outside of the traditional business environment for a while now.
Nevertheless, in my dealings with major conglomerates in hugely traditional, slow moving industries (Wall Street, for instance), the interaction is increasingly transparent and digital. I'm on conference calls with executives who hear my name and hit me up on LinkedIn minutes later. I'm not suggesting that companies have the internet figured out, but they all know that it is there and can't be ignored. As individuals, they have a grip on the concept of the unavoidable relationship they have with the world outside. Interestingly, determining an 'official' strategy seems to preoccupy them these days.
I honestly think in most cases they'd be best served by just getting out there and being themselves.
A company IS it's people.
The brand, today, is the humanity you offer your audience.
Here I am being idealistic again:)
Interesting stuff Amber, as always.
I'm convinced that the awkward transition that businesses are having in the face of the most inevitable piece of a digital culture (the transformation of relationships) has faked them into thinking that someone could be tasked to 'deal with the internet' or 'manage the community'. There is certainly a role to play in the space of community, without question…but saying that a 'community manager' is the one to pay attention to, translate, funnel, address, or 'manage' the way a company interfaces with the digital world is already an old idea.
Companies are now in the ocean without swimming lessons. This isn't a scenario with a dedicated fix; it's a glimpse of a world in which every single person who participates in commerce should have a grip on the ways that people communicate. Everyone should be listening, to some degree, or at the very least aware of the overall impact of the role their company plays socially.
Everyone is a community manager. It's a matter of crystalizing what that means and what a team needs in order to execute in that environment effectively. How is the CEO participating in the world outside his door, and how can the rest of his team or company improve that? Where are your stories; who are the people behind your brand? Is everyone listening to the world in the ways they can and should be?
I think this idea that a Community Manager filled a role in the culture of business that wasn't previously needed is partly true and partly false, but I think it definitely represents the fact that every single role in any organization is going to look entirely different in tomorrow's economy.
You make some really fantastic points, Derek, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that what you posit as what people should be doing in terms of communication and paying attention is still too idealistic for today's business climate.
You're right, we're still transitioning into this world of digitally immersed, hyper-connected business, where everyone is tapped into the pulse of the players in their organization's atmosphere on a number of levels, and I think it's completely reasonable at this stage in the game to task someone (or a group of someones, preferably) to manage that community, old idea or not. Part of that person's or team's role should absolutely be crystalizing what it means to have everyone participating.
Maybe the overarching concept of having people pay attention to and manage the way a company interfaces with its constituency is old, but the scope and definition of those actions are changing, and those changes have big implications for the way businesses will be structured in the future. It'll great to be see these changes expand past the confines of community management.
Teresa,
I think it remains reasonable on some level to task a group towards the relationship a company has with its 'constituency', as you put it. That's been true forever, in one way or another. I suppose there's some idealism in my perspective on the reality of today's business climate, so far as I'm running a small company and have been outside of the traditional business environment for a while now.
Nevertheless, in my dealings with major conglomerates in hugely traditional, slow moving industries (Wall Street, for instance), the interaction is increasingly transparent and digital. I'm on conference calls with executives who hear my name and hit me up on LinkedIn minutes later. I'm not suggesting that companies have the internet figured out, but they all know that it is there and can't be ignored. As individuals, they have a grip on the concept of the unavoidable relationship they have with the world outside. Interestingly, determining an 'official' strategy seems to preoccupy them these days.
I honestly think in most cases they'd be best served by just getting out there and being themselves.
A company IS it's people.
The brand, today, is the humanity you offer your audience.
Here I am being idealistic again:)
Interesting stuff Amber, as always.
I'm convinced that the awkward transition that businesses are having in the face of the most inevitable piece of a digital culture (the transformation of relationships) has faked them into thinking that someone could be tasked to 'deal with the internet' or 'manage the community'. There is certainly a role to play in the space of community, without question…but saying that a 'community manager' is the one to pay attention to, translate, funnel, address, or 'manage' the way a company interfaces with the digital world is already an old idea.
Companies are now in the ocean without swimming lessons. This isn't a scenario with a dedicated fix; it's a glimpse of a world in which every single person who participates in commerce should have a grip on the ways that people communicate. Everyone should be listening, to some degree, or at the very least aware of the overall impact of the role their company plays socially.
Everyone is a community manager. It's a matter of crystalizing what that means and what a team needs in order to execute in that environment effectively. How is the CEO participating in the world outside his door, and how can the rest of his team or company improve that? Where are your stories; who are the people behind your brand? Is everyone listening to the world in the ways they can and should be?
I think this idea that a Community Manager filled a role in the culture of business that wasn't previously needed is partly true and partly false, but I think it definitely represents the fact that every single role in any organization is going to look entirely different in tomorrow's economy.
You make some really fantastic points, Derek, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that what you posit as what people should be doing in terms of communication and paying attention is still too idealistic for today's business climate.
You're right, we're still transitioning into this world of digitally immersed, hyper-connected business, where everyone is tapped into the pulse of the players in their organization's atmosphere on a number of levels, and I think it's completely reasonable at this stage in the game to task someone (or a group of someones, preferably) to manage that community, old idea or not. Part of that person's or team's role should absolutely be crystalizing what it means to have everyone participating.
Maybe the overarching concept of having people pay attention to and manage the way a company interfaces with its constituency is old, but the scope and definition of those actions are changing, and those changes have big implications for the way businesses will be structured in the future. It'll great to be see these changes expand past the confines of community management.
Teresa,
I think it remains reasonable on some level to task a group towards the relationship a company has with its 'constituency', as you put it. That's been true forever, in one way or another. I suppose there's some idealism in my perspective on the reality of today's business climate, so far as I'm running a small company and have been outside of the traditional business environment for a while now.
Nevertheless, in my dealings with major conglomerates in hugely traditional, slow moving industries (Wall Street, for instance), the interaction is increasingly transparent and digital. I'm on conference calls with executives who hear my name and hit me up on LinkedIn minutes later. I'm not suggesting that companies have the internet figured out, but they all know that it is there and can't be ignored. As individuals, they have a grip on the concept of the unavoidable relationship they have with the world outside. Interestingly, determining an 'official' strategy seems to preoccupy them these days.
I honestly think in most cases they'd be best served by just getting out there and being themselves.
A company IS it's people.
The brand, today, is the humanity you offer your audience.
Here I am being idealistic again:)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by . said: [...]
Good Community Management post – how things quickly move from moderation to engagement when you do it right: http://bit.ly/b0N42m
A Different Look at Community Management http://www.radian6.com/blog/2010/06/a-different-l…
[...] But community management, at least the way we approach it, isn’t just online issues management and discussion moderation anymore. It’s a far more fundamental business role, one that ties together responsibilities from a number of different places, both online and off.[From A Different Look at Community Management « Social Media Monitoring and Engagement – Radian6] [...]
[...] [From A Different Look at Community Management « Social Media Monitoring and Engagement – Radian6] [...]
[...] to be built into what community managers are doing. To this end Radian6 published an interesting post suggesting key areas of influence for a community manager: Once upon a time, managing a community [...]
I think that you definitely hit the nail on the head in regards to the nwe look at community management. Online Engagement,Business Development,Internal Communication & Collaboration,Content Creation
and Measurement and Reporting, are definitely SMART ways to break down the tasks that this job centres around.
I think that you definitely hit the nail on the head in regards to the nwe look at community management. Online Engagement,Business Development,Internal Communication & Collaboration,Content Creation
and Measurement and Reporting, are definitely SMART ways to break down the tasks that this job centres around.
Angela, it's not always the CMs themselves that aren't looking at it that way, it's the people that develop the role based on what they think it was 10 years ago in GeoCities.
I agree with you, too, that this position has probably been largely underestimated and misunderstood in the past, but I think the emergence of the social web gives us a great opportunity to look forward and change that. It can indeed be a bit of a lone soldier thing for some pros that are trying to be the sole advocate in their organizations. But the more we talk about it, collaborate, post, discuss, and put it out there, the more businesses will take note. It's up to us to be constructive about how we illustrate the benefits rather than just complaining that we aren't understood.