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Business Class

July 03, 2009

What is a Community Manager and Should I Hire One?

Ben Parr

Editor, Mashable

Summary

With the rise of social media, online communities, and open information, the need to track online conversations, manage brand identity onlin
With the rise of social media, online communities, and open information, the need to track online conversations, manage brand identity online, and foster web communities has soared.  In fact, many companies have hired community managers to be their conduits to their user bases.  

While community managers are a growing profession, what exactly does the job entail?  And more importantly, will your company benefit from having one?  Knowing the answers to both can help put you in a great position to grow your community or help you save money on a salary you never needed to pay.

Defining the Community Manager

While the community manager is still being defined as a profession, there are several key traits that are almost universal to the position.  Some of them include:
  • Communicative: a community manager is adept and comfortable with multiple information streams and multitasking them all.
  • Social media prowess:  without adept knowledge of how to track trends, analyze information, and quickly respond via Twitter, Facebook, Ning, and more, a community manager cannot succeed.
  • Jack-of-all-trades: community management includes responsibilities in multiple fields, including PR, marketing, customer relations, social media, sales, analytics, and sometimes development.
  • Initiative: the best ones tend to take the initiative to create new tools and networks for the brand, stay up late addressing user complaints, and thinking of new and creative ways to promote the brand to more people.
  • Evangelist: simply put, they love the product like it was their own child.
A community manager’s job is as the title says: to manage a community.  This is a person that wears many hats and can multitask without losing focus and without complaining, a rare combination when you think about it.

Several major companies have community managers, including Ford, Rubbermaid, and Dell.

Do you Need to Hire One?
Now, the important question: is a community manager necessary?  While there is no litmus test to answer this question, there are a few things to think about if you’re considering bringing someone on board.

Do hire a community manager… 
  • If you have a large and active user base 
  • If you have a lot of customer support questions and feedback coming in every day
  • If you want an online evangelist for your brand
Don’t hire a community manager…
  • If you’re primarily a business-to-business operation
  • If your community doesn’t require a lot of management or time
  • If you don’t have the money
Just remember: it’s about cost vs. benefit.  Do you get more utility from having a community manager or from hiring someone else?  Finally, remember that you don’t have to hire someone exclusively for community management – having a person on board who can do marketing, PR, analytics, or sales in addition to social media is great as well.