I am attending “WWCMD? What Would the Community Manager Do?”
from
Micki Krimmel (Sugar Packet Inc.)
The session audience is packed with community managers, most of them were in that position in the last 18 months at marketing dept. Quite impressive. Here in the US it seems community manager is a well defined job within marketing organizations. In Europe on the contrary it looks to me the Community Manager is not such a sharply defined role and is often mixed with other responsibilities in communication and digital marketing. Community Manager is clearly an Emergent Job.
The whole session is centered on Community Manager job, role qualities and the key concepts are based on a blog post Blog Four Tenets of community manager.
In summary the 4 tenets for community managers are:
1) Community Advocate - Listening community issues and solve them
2) Brand Evangelist – the best fan of the company’s brands. Represents the brand values
3) Pr – (empathizer, pattern recognizer, meaning maker) capable of managing Events & Panels, stimulate participation on new media tools and authoritative to shape editorial contents. Must have with a strong shared vision on products, services and markets. Responsive on a 2 way street
4) Gathers input. Community managers are responsible for gathering the requirements of the community in a responsible way and presenting it to product teams
How to hire a community manager.
THE FIRST QUALITY: COMMUNITY MANAGER HAS TO BE THE BIGGEST FAN OF COMPANY’S PRODUCTS
Mostly hired in marketing dept. No college grad, he has to know company’s functions, to be accountable and the seniority to qualify and interpret feedback in company’s terms. Has to be influential within the company and to monitor alignment of service and quality offered to the community of customers with expectations and company’s communication messages. The community manager inherits the “customer service” culture of the company.
A Wells Fargo community manager, in a comment, underlined the critical role of the community management in post merger management, when inevitably the quality of customer services suffers. Collecting the sentiment from the web and transmitting the messages with the correct priority to upper management.
For the list of real time questions answered during the session check the session’s twitter page
Tags: 4+tenets, community+manager
