Community Manager

You wouldn't provide new software to users without proper support. The case must be made that you can't do the same with social environments. It's not a skill that's been widely understood until quite recently, however *community management* has begun to move to the forefront of discussions about enterprise social computing as the use of social tools begins to climb the maturity curve. Now community management is increasingly proving not just useful but a critical component of Enterprise 2.0 efforts despite an often vague understanding of what it is and where it should be situated in the org chart.

Community management itself can be sensitive subject in the social media arena. Some believe that to be authentic and to grow properly online communities should be as completely self-organized and "unmanaged" as possible. In this vision they should be free of corporate heavy-andedness or even immediate business requirements, thereby allowed to grow organically and naturally to fruition without the chill of censorship or excessive expectation. In this view, as the utility of things like PCs, e-mail, and computer networks became self-evident, workers naturally found all sorts of good uses for them, and the same goes for social tools.

Others believe that there must be some central oversight as well as guidance and support to accomplish anything useful with social software, especially in a business context. This view prescribes the need to actively deal with any potential risks such as inappropriate use, low return on investment, and lack of alignment with business goals. In other words, the business must also have a seat at the community table while helping it ensure the effort has what it needs to succeed.

While the whole idea of Enterprise 2.0 has at its source crowdsourcing and peer support/interaction - some times users just need guidance and support. Users will have questions. You need someone worrying about the right help content, seeding discussions, guiding users as they ask questions. And in fact, you don't just need one community manager, but a solid network of community managers. So yes, we have one ?community manager' so to speak (actually several of us share the role) but then many ?chief champions'... No matter how easy a tool is to use, there are still those that have questions and need ?community coaching'.

Though the act of community management has been taking place since the advent of online conversations going back to newsgroups, open source development projects, and discussion forums, it's only now starting to get serious attention as a technique for managing social collaboration within organizations.

what exactly does a community manager do? A lot as it turns out. While in my experience there's been a challenge in even determining where the community management function should reside (IT help desk, customer service, corporate communications, HR, learning, etc.) it is a skill that sits right at the cross roads of many different essential functions. Those who engage in it must be competent in everything from the social tools themselves to budgeting, marketing, project management, recruiting, evangelism, and more. A community manager must be a true jack of all trades.

Here is what we are seeing this year around the nurturing and development of social collaboration in the enterprise. These will likely be the successful factors with Enterprise 2.0:

• Make a strong and early case for community management resources.
• Management will actually be a larger component of total cost of ownership in an Enterprise 2.0 effort over time. Ultimately, you wouldn't put new tools out to users without proper support.
• Select versatile, effective, positive communicators that have social media competency as community managers.
• Technical skills, organizational skills, willingness to learn, good verbal and written skills, and emotional intelligence are all traits of a good community manager.
• Measure your community.
• Most people generally manage to what they measure. If you aren't looking at overall levels of participation, growth rate of new members, making lists of the recently disengaged and following up on them, etc. then you aren't managing your social environment.
• Now community management staffs tend to be small and overworked, with too many types of tasks to do that no small group could all be strong at.

Community management is likely to mature fairly quickly as a discipline and begin, like any professional, to branch out into specific areas of knowledge. Plan for this and identify which skills your staff is best at and beginning nurturing dedicated excellence, even if it's just by routing it to those who know better for now.

Source: blogs.zdnet.com, Dion Hinchcliffe, 10/19/09