Community Managers - A Way of The Future?

[Tami]

It's funny how a remark about the future said in passing at a conference can turn out to become true very quickly. After one of the seminars at the Vancouver Game Summit, it was mentioned how Community Managers will become one of the fastest growing career areas in the future. Lo and behold, the title topic in one of the many newsletters I get discussed just that. So - for all of you who feel you don't really have the skills to become a programmer or an artist, and you don't want to go into business management, there is hope for you yet - become a community manager. I say this in all seriousness, too - even though it may not seem like it. As you will see in this article, being a community manager does require some amount of skill and knowledge. Remember though, that a good part of this article deals with communities for consumers, many aspects are applicable in other community scenarios.

[b]
Community Manager's Evolving Role [/b]

By Tom Diederich
[url=\"http://www.conversationsmatter.org/\"]source[/url]

Community managers like hats. And that's a good thing - because they wear several.

It's hard to list everything a community manager does because that list varies from company to company and Web site to Web site. It's also a moving target.

I recently spoke with a friend of mine at the Patricia Seybold Group, [url=\"http://www.psgroup.com/research_lees.aspx\"]Matthew Lees[/url], who was writing a report titled: "[url=\"http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?id=880\"]How Should You Manage Customer Communities?[/url]"

Matt asked me about my background and how my professional experience helps me do my job. I told him it does more than help me "do" my job - it helps me "shape" my job. This apparently piqued his curiosity and forced me to think back to events that have transpired since my 1988 college graduation.

This trip down memory lane both horrified and delighted me (not in that order). I told him that since graduation I've been a:


• Newspaper reporter/editor

• Peace Corps volunteer

• English teacher

• Marketing writer

• Technical writer

• Project manager

• Internal communications manager

• Forums moderator

• Community manager

"I should have warned you that I've worn a lot hats," I told him.

He paused for a few moments.


"Well, that's probably a good thing," he said.

When the report was published a few weeks later, I understood what he meant.

Matt wrote that: "Community Managers could be the most well- rounded employees on the payroll. The role demands a strong mix of business, management, technical, analytical, communication, and interpersonal skills, and a wide range of experience."

This of course made me feel better about all of the job-jumping I've done over the years. Yeah, that's it it's all been part of my master plan!

In Part II of this topic, I'll talk about my specific experience as a community manager at Symantec and how that role rapidly evolved to include all of the bullets listed above. I'll also talk about some of the cool things in the works at Cadence.

[b]The Evolving Role of a Community Manager (Part 2)[/b]

I mentioned in Part 1 that community managers require a broad range of experience and wear a lot of hats in the course of their jobs. To me this is what makes the job so interesting. We must draw upon everything we’ve ever leaned both personally and professionally — and we’re always learning things that we put into practice. There is no “status quo.”

No two community managers have exactly the same job description (as many of you shared in the comments from my last post). And most of us add to our responsibilities as new opportunities are identified (most from conversations with our specific community).

Let’s look at my previous gig as an example.

When I joined Symantec in 2006, the company’s public Web site housed a forgotten area of discussion forums inherited from the 2005 purchase of Veritas Software. Launched in 2003, the Veritas Architect Network (VAN) was a peer-to-peer community for business customers, mainly functional IT managers. Most of the discussions were support related and “How do I” questions.

In addition to peer-to-peer discussion forums, VAN featured the (very) occasional white paper and links to various resources within veritas.com.

Veritas didn’t have a full-time community manager and content was stale. Discussions were seldom moderated. Links to resources became broken over time.

Worst of all, Symantec wasn’t learning anything from the forums and wasn’t sharing anything with the community.

As the new kid in town, many of the employees I spoke with from product and support teams had never even heard of VAN. My job as a full-time community manager was to breathe life back into the forums and map out a 2.0 version of the community under the Symantec brand.

Here’s what I did over the first couple of weeks on the job:

* Introduced myself on the forums: “Hello, we’ve finally joined the conversations!”
* Identified a handful “power users” who were very active on the boards even with no love from Symantec (up until then, anyway).
* Built a private area for these power users to allow them to talk among themselves — and with me.

This private forum was instrumental in re-launching the community. We had daily conversations, starting with: “What should we call it and what features, in addition to discussion forums, should this new community offer?”

We decided to ask the community through a series of polls and discussions within the forums. The power users helped shape the discussions and the polls. The community eventually picked the name, “Symantec Technology Network,” along with the new elements within its walls: Expert blogs, videos and white papers.

I literally sketched out my vision of the site on a piece of paper. Once the napkin-sketch blueprints were in place, over the next four months I had to:

* Choose a new forums/blog platform (working with IT).
* Get my sketch turned into schematics -– then get it built (working with support, product management, the forums/blog vendor, the Web design team, IT …).
* Convince product management and support that listening to — and participating in — customer conversations via the forums would be worth their while.
* Recruit a small army of Symantec bloggers (no easy task … I am doing that now at Cadence).
* Create an editorial calendar for white papers and videos.
* Lay down the following law in stone: “Thou Shall Not (and I will not allow you to) Delete Negative Posts!”

OK, this post is getting long so I’ll wrap it up in Part 3. :-) [i](note from me - he hasn't posted part 3 yet, but when he does, I will add it here.)[/i]

[b]About the Author: [/b]
Tom Diederich is a contributing writer for [url=\"http://www.conversationsmatter.org/\"]ConversationsMatter.org[/url].