Community Managers of 2014
- By Sean Bryant
- Community Manager
- January 28, 2014
#CMAD is over. Or is it?
If you’re not listening to your user/consumer, you're talking to much.
There are so many takeaways from this year’s Community Manager Appreciation Day, it can be a little overwhelming for anyone. With so many community managers taking part and contributing, it reflects on the direction which businesses are moving within the digital age. But it doesn’t stop there. The last century door to door sales model is dead. Businesses recognize the need to engage with their users, and with that, comes the role of the community manager.
Here are three takeaways/contributors Inversoft thought should be placed in the spotlight.
We appreciate and thank every community manager for what you provide to the online community. Have a great year!
What’s Next for the Community Manager?
Via Nikki Serapio, Marketing Community Manager at Oracle
In learning community management, we’ll increasingly rely on a case-method approach instead of “best practices.” In its 2013 Community Manager Report, SocialFresh asked 1,047 people “Which platforms do community managers find the most success on?” In response, 54% identified Facebook (the most popular answer overall) as their best platform, while only 4% singled out email (one of the least popular answers).
Such studies and analyses are easy to find online; we arguably live in a golden age of peer-sourced and industry-specific knowledge. If you’re looking to strengthen your community management chops, there are so many practical guides, infographics, white papers, e-books, data visualizations, etc. that can help. Just a few of my recent favorites:
In a blog post accompanying last year’s #CMAD festivities, Jeremiah Owyang presents a great analysis on the required skills for community managers (as stipulated by hiring managers): writing talent and customer relations talent top the chart.
Relaying Community Success Back to the Client
Via Sherrie Rohde, eCommerce Program Manager at Rebellion Media
Working for clients means each community you manage is unique – with different goals, measurement methods and reporting structures for community managers. For Community Manager Appreciation Day we connected with those working in marketing and advertising agencies.
Quote
"Just knowing the demographics of your community isn’t going to let you engage with them on a relevant more personal level. There’s always a great two or three striking images that back up a wealth of data. Here are the proof points but on top of that lets take you down to this micro-level, here is Bob in Wisconsin and here’s how his tweets and his posts and his demographics line up with this data that we found."
—Brandon Hill, Co-Founder at BTC RevolutionsContinue reading
Building Communities Around Content
Via Dennis Shiao, Director, Product Marketing at DNN Corporation
Building a community, especially from the ground up, requires a lot of effort (as we all surely know). One of the most important parts of being a community manager is being visible. Once you stop partaking, everyone will. While the goal of building a thriving community is in fact so this does not occur, it remains the unfortunate truth at the start.
A big part of staying active within your community is to create a mini “content strategy” outlining how you plan on communicating to your co-members. Creating and sharing content for the purpose of community building can range from visual content to long form reads, and in any circumstance can not be overlooked.
Other Community Manager Articles
Executive Buy-In: A Community Managers Worth
7 Properties of Online Community Safety
Online Community: Places for Approval Processes