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Key Answers to Questions About Community Managers

27 Jan
The Tweet that started it all.

The Tweet that started it all.

I loved being a Community Manager and with tomorrow (1/28) being Community Manager Appreciation Day (#CMAD), I had to write about my experience in this career-changing, business-critical role. But oftentimes when I shared my title or talked about my role, my friends, family, etc. didn’t understand it. What is a Community Manager? Why is it important? Hence the birth of this blog post.

What is a Community Manager?

A Community Manager spearheads the creation and growth of an online community for a brand. The community can include customers, prospects, employees, influencers, competitors, and more. These community members live on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, blogs, forums, etc. and they’re talking about brands, industries and/or competition…for better or worse.

What is a Community and how can Community Managers help?

By using social media listening tools, brands will discover the conversations mentioned above and with community managers, brands can foster and grow the relationships of these online voices. Benefits include:

  • Turn detractors (those who comment negatively about you) into advocates
  • Deepen relationships with customers to keep them coming back
  • Turn prospects into customers
  • Drive web traffic
  • Put a human voice/face on your brand
  • Ensure someone is monitoring and responding to your social channels (i.e. your Facebook page, Twitter handle, etc.) around the clock
  • Create content such as blog posts, ebooks, and webinars

How did I become a Community Manager?

I was hired as a Community Manager by Radian6 (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud) back in 2011. Prior to that, I worked in agencies as an account executive. I was also a writer and blogger in my spare time. This prior agency experience lent itself perfectly to the Community Manager role. In fact, if you work in a service-provider role in the communications or marketing industry, you are one step closer to becoming a community manager. In addition, my writing skills were ideal for blogging and creating content for the brand. This content kept community members coming back for more and gave a reason to Tweet and share.  Here are some Community Manager traits:

  • Strong communication skills
  • Organization, i.e. ability to manage multiple conversations/people at once
  • Strong writing skills to create content
  • Deep understanding of all social networks
  • Event planning
  • Understand the brand and its products/services to represent it well
  • Be energetic, outgoing and responsive

How do I learn more about Community Management?

To learn more about Community Managers, check out this post by Jeremiah Owyang. It may be an older post, but it still rings true. I also printed this infographic and framed it on my office wall. Here are some ongoing resources I use:

I may not be a Community Manager anymore (now Manager of Content for Salesforce Marketing Cloud), but I still support and love this role. So, cheers to Community Manager Appreciation Day. Make sure to send a note to your fellow Community Managers. They’ll appreciate it! In the spirit of that, here’s a shout out to a few of my favorite Community Managers:

Community Manager Appreciation Day was created by Jeremiah Owyang in 2010. The  goal is to thank community managers via Tweets, blog posts, and in-person meet ups,  for their hard work creating, building and growing their brands’ social media community.

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The Prius Community

4 Aug

I come from a New York family of Audi owners. Ever since my mother fell in love with that logo of gleaming, intertwined silver circles nestled in the front grill of a 1986 Audi, no other car had a chance in our driveway. I believe we leased ten or more Audis over a span of two decades and my father still drives one today.

There is a culture of Audi owners. It is luxury. It is smooth. It is elite. And Audi knows this. When you are handed an Audi key-fob, you can unlock far more than your car door. It is the entryway to a community of like-minded Audi owners. You are part of the Audi club.

The club provides beautifully-printed magazines rich in color and high-quality stock. Then comes the hats, embossed keychains, other magnificently-created collateral and opportunities to join the Audi Club of North America.

Now take a drive about 100 miles northeast to suburban Connecticut and fast-forward to 2008. It is my wedding year and the lease expiration on my 2006 A4 was fastly-approaching like the wedding day itself. While I loved my Audi, it was time for a change.

I am not sure how the Prius and I got connected. I believe it was somewhere between the high gas prices and my desire for a hatchback that this Toyota hybrid suddenly became a viable option. But it did not come with a club of like-minded Prius lovers. At least, not at the sales pitch.

PruisChat was waiting for me. It’s not a place that Toyota touts in fancy collateral. This is an independent website for Toyota Prius enthusiasts. It is not affiliated with the carmaker and you have to seek it out. And yet, this site, rich with forums, pictures, news, shopping and podcasts was offering me much more than I could have imagined. While the site has advanced over the years, it is still a simple forum-based site. Topics range from deep technical discussions to new Prius owners just sharing thoughts. There is a homemade Prius convertible on this site. Believe it.

This society of Prius fans is different from Audi’s culture. The conversations are hardly around luxury and more often about fuel-effiency (hypermilers galore). But at the end of the day, it’s not about the type of people or the topics covered. It’s that feeling of finding others and joining together to share our harmonious interests. PriusChat was made by people just like me. Cheers to my new community.

Are you part of a car community? Why does it matter to you? Share your thoughts!

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What’s Your Role?

24 Jun

In my very recent past life, I was in advertising and social media was a tiny appendage hanging off massive strategic marketing plans. This past week was week one as a Radian6 community manager, and that appendage has turned massive.

If I thought I was involved in social media before, I had (more than slightly) miscalculated. This beautiful social beast is all around me. It is my day. Now, I’m working to understand this new relationship with the social web and make it as meaningful as possible. My new title as community manager is the very essence of social creation. It’s blogging, listening, responding and engaging with the community. And that may just be my morning. I need to become my title. And that’s my new goal.

As part of Radian6 training, I looked at other roles and how they’re involved in social media. In reality, nearly every job description touches it to some extent, some being larger than others. My father is a lawyer and uses LinkedIn to connect with Clients. My doctor and I talk about the WebMD app. The local consignment shop is offering 20% off to Facebook friends. No longer a small appendage.

So how does a typical organization use social media in their business practices?

  • Customer service. As more and more customers utilize social media as an outlet for their good, bad and ugly commentary, customer service needs to be there. No longer can CSRs wait by the phone to solve problems. They need to respond in this new environment.
  • Marketing. While customer service is listening and responding, marketing is engaging. Marketing can utilize social media to establish relationships with customers, create brand awareness, build brand equity and be the means to execute mass media messages. And that’s just a start. Back in 2008, Chris Brogan wrote about 50 ways marketers can use social media. Check it out.
  • HR. Social media is a massive job bank. Resumes are diminishing in power as networking takes charge in the social space. And when networking used to be more of a localized approach, it is now international as we connect online. There are Facebook pages dedicated to careers for companies such as Wells Fargo and Hyatt Hotels.
  • IT. When it was once all about ROI on company websites, ROI now speaks the language of Facebook likes and Twitter followers. IT needs to keep companies afloat on the latest technologies (anyone remember FBML?!) as well as plug social media sites into theirs for the utmost integration.
  • Finance. Blogs and forums are walloping with great information for CFOs and accounting departments to learn and bond with others in their world. The American Express Open Forum is a great example of a community of business people coming together to gain insights and share ideas.
  • Upper Management. Much like the finance department, utilizing relevant blogs and forums to engage is a great outlet for learning and building relationships. At the same time, social media opens doors for direct contact with customers. Contributing to a blog or utilizing Twitter can break down barriers between customers and the C-Suite to create a dialogue and increase brand retention. Just look at Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh.

If you were wondering why I jumped head first into this new job, it’s because of that lone appendage. I know there’s something special about it in the way it affects everyone in their personal and professional lives. I had to be part of it now. Are you?

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Why Social Media?

20 Jun

Full immersion. Webinars. Videos. eBooks. Conference calls. Research. Reading. Reading. More reading. This, in a succession of fragmented sentences, was my first day at Radian6 as a Community Manager. And I am in love. Radian6 was giving me the diving gear to go deep in the social media waters where I previously only skimmed across the top.

As part of my first day, I was asked: Why social media? Why is it important to the business world? On my third eBook, I started to really think about that question. My advertising background shouts answers like these:

  • Brand favorability
  • Brand awareness
  • Reach
  • Customer service

But the advertising side isn’t the only side. Social media is not all about making brands look good.

Social media establishes community. That word is not new but it’s something all can benefit from because it creates social capital. In this environment, the collective can do things for one another. People can help businesses and businesses can help people. It’s a place to share, learn, grow and thrive.

So let’s go back to that question. Why is social media important to the business world? The answer is the same reason why social media is important to me. So important, in fact, that I got a job here. It’s because it creates community. And where there’s community, there’s social capital. And those are waters worth testing. Or in my case, diving into head first.

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