In support of Community Manager Appreciation Day (2011) we decided to ask 15 of the best community managers we know what did/didn't work in 2010 and what they expect for 2011.
2. We Love Community Managers!
Community Managers are the backbone of To be successful in the coming periods, Community As the Community Manager role continues to
customer service in today’s modern online market- Managers must prepare for scale. As more grow into a key piece of the customer experience
place. In fact, these new media professionals must customers adopt social technologies, Community lifecycle, remember to approach this space with
apply traditional client sensibilities to new mediums, Managers must invest in scalable programs such humility and patience to teach internal stakeholders
but in real time, 24/7, often connecting to a global as systems, processes, and understand how to let the value of the role.
audience. Unlike customer support interactions of the crowd help resolve issues on their behalf. To
A salute to this important member of
the past, these new professionals must reach to be successful, they should measure true business
the workforce...
customers where they are— rather than wait for an metrics reduce support costs and increase in
incoming support telephone call—and constantly be positive word of mouth about the company and
connecting with customers. its products.
Jeremiah Owyang
Altimeter Group
3. So...What is a Community Manager?
Com•mu•ni•ty Man•ag•er The role of Community Manager has quickly evolved from a new age social ambassador,
The online Community Manager role is a growing and a supporting player, to being conductor of the orchestra. Today more than ever before
companies are relying on individual customer engagement to cement brand loyalty
developing profession. People in this position are
and leverage word of mouth marketing, The Community Manager has the daunting but
working to build, grow and manage communities around
essential responsibility of keeping the various resources of the organization in sync and
a brand or cause.
playing to the same sheet music, ensuring that customer needs are met, concerns are
addressed, and their product and service ideas and suggestions are brought into the
Wikipedia Definition process in order to shorten product lifecycles and better map to needs. If customer
service is the new marketing then the Community Manager is the new CMO.
Jeremiah Owyang and our friends at Altimeter Group have declared the fourth Monday
of every January “Community Manager Appreciation Day.” In support of this year’s event,
we surveyed some of the world’s best community managers to better understand their
successes, challenges, and what they see on the horizon for 2011. We picked the best
answers and included them in this report. Our hope is that you’ll laugh a little, learn a lot,
and give a pat on the back to the community manager(s) at your company.
4. You Can Call it George.
In which internal department does
the community management function The Community Manager is a jack of all trades and master of many. While the
reside? desire to place them in a box on your org chart may satisfy the needs of Human
Resources, it will almost never be accurate. To simply say that community
management is part of Support, Marketing, or R&D does not capture the
value they bring to the organization. The only way to accurately reflect their
contribution would be to understand that they work at the very edge of your
organization, the place where the line between company and customer is
blurriest and their job is to understand, manage and stimulate the collective
passions of your customers in a way that creates value for both company and
customer. You can call it customer support, social marketing or you can
even call it George, but if you want to accurately reflect it, then you’d
call it what it is, a revolution.
*28% of participants listed multiple functions
5. The Online Community Manager
“A Jack of All Trades”
Brand Management
Platform Management
Brand Support
Upgrades and Improvements Situation Management
Software Know-How Capture Brand Feedback
Feature Selection
Advertising & Marketing
Project Management Listen/Join Conversation
Priority & Schedule Marketing Analysis
Management Documentation Impact Reporting
Ad Rotation
Product Management
Incorporation of Experience Staff Development
Product Selection Recruiting
Team Building
Staff Training
Customer Management
Outreach
Business Planning
Events
Incentives Budgeting
Issue Management Goal Definition
Business Alignment
Professional Development
Networking
Community Management
Identification of Best Practices Content Management Control/Management
Attend Trade Events Moderation & Rule Enforcement
Content Plan
Elicit Participation
Research & Insight
Rewards & Incentives
“Community management: The ‘essential’ capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts” - Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet - http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe
6. The Five Objectives of a
Community Manager
1. Brand awareness
2. Customer retention
3. Customer acquisition
4. Internal culture building
5. Customer service
Philipp Postrehovsky
Mogo Money Community Manager +
7. The Answer is “No”... Sometimes
Erin Lariviere of Tungle.me learned that one of the hardest things about hearing customer
feedback is not being able to say “yes” to every request.
“We sincerely appreciate
your suggestion; however...”
When you open the door to feedback, you get it in droves. The challenge is
that you can’t make everyone happy. You may have 20 customers request-
ing a feature and 20 more customers requesting a completely contradic-
tory feature. It’s difficult to say no - you want to give everyone what they
ask for. For Tungle, it’s important that we respond respectfully, try to be as
transparent in our decision making as possible and let our customers know
that we are listening, even at times when the answer we give isn’t what they
want to hear.
Erin Lariviere
Tungle.me Community Manager +
8. Juggling Brands
Brands have feelings too! Or rather, brands can evoke feelings. Sometimes getting a brand’s
unique personality across to consumers is a Community Manager’s biggest challenge.
My responsibility spans across three
separate P&G brands with three
distinct online “voices.” I have
to make sure that I’m engaging con-
sumers in a way that accurately rep-
resents the individual brand.
Angie Mcauliffe
P&G Community Manager +
9. Answer Once & Only Once
Your community wants to hear from you... Rather than answer each question and concern one at
a time, Get Satisfaction allows companies to share answers with a large audience.
We’ve learned to leverage our Customer Community
to address large-scale issues that may generate a lot
of discussion. It helps us contain the conversation
in one area, so the whole group can see AMC’s
responses, as opposed to having to communicate in
a 1:1 manner on common questions.
Ryan Noonan
AMC Theaters Community Manager +
10. Real-Time, Right-Now
Why worry yourself with tasks like gathering reports when Get Satisfaction can
automatically do it for you. We love making life easier for our clients.
Automated real-time dashboards and reports that
allow community managers to “set it and forget it”
are the future of community. It’s great to be notified
automatically in real-time about hot topics, awesome
new contributors and trolls (and of course scan
manually as well, which we will always have to do).
Roland Tanglao
Mozilla Community Manager +
11. Attention: Mr.Paterson
Being a good Community Manager may take hard work, but Get Satisfaction makes it easier to
communicate with customers and hear their praise.
I had a praise topic with ‘Attention:
Mr. Paterson’ in it after we improved
performance on one of our games.
The user had complained before and
wanted to make sure I got credit for
fixing it. ;)
Noel Paterson
Real.com Community Manager +
12. Communication is Key
Why look to anyone other than your customers for answers? A different perspective on things
always shines a clarifying light.
Map
Road
Our customer community helps our product team identify
necessary fixes and shape the product roadmap. Having
a place for customers to easily share feedback on features
and report bugs is helpful, and the ability to easily
aggregate and prioritize that data based on popularity
makes it more effective than other methods such as
focus groups or surveys.
David Okner
NitroPDF Community Manager +
13. Customers Rule!
Daniel Kaplan of Mojang predicts the future of Social and Community Management in 2011.
What does he see? Customers will rule.
In the age of social media, customers have a direct line to
companies. This means companies are held accountable for
their actions. With communities, customers have even more
power because they have power in numbers. As customers
gain more power, customer-company transparency will be-
come more and more important.
Daniel Kaplan
Mojang Community Manager +
14. It’s a Circus Out There
Social media tools are great but let’s face it, it can be difficult to keep track of them all.
That’s where we come in.
I believe there will be further integration of social media tools
in community management. Every company balances a
difficult act of meeting community members on their own
terms, while attempting to foster a common location for the
discussion to reside. For SCVNGR, we see requests through Get
Satisfaction, email, Twitter and Facebook. Continuing to sync
these avenues of communication can help quell some of the
redundant requests.
Nick Herbold
SCVNGR Community Manager +
15. Online Communities Save a City!
The internet helps us do all sorts of things. In partnership with online communities, it can solve
even the biggest challenge. In the case of NerdOrleans.org, the internet helped save a city.
Working on NerdOrleans.org. I asked the internet for help
to rebuild houses in New Orleans, and the internet came
through – with funds, volunteers, even a stop in from the
Zappos’ Delivering Happiness bus and book donations from
O’Reilly. It was all promoted via online communities and was
a success because of them.
Ginevra Kirkland
W+K Community Manager +
16. See the Bigger Picture
A CRM’s ability to play nice with others can make all the difference.
More cross-platform integration. I am beginning to ex-
pect that my CRM will integrate with my support plat-
form which should integrate with my customer commu-
nity, which should integrate with our social networks, etc
etc. The more complete a picture we can get of our
customers, the better able we are to understand
their ongoing needs.
Jamie Kite
Izea Community Manager +
17. We Love Satisfied Customers
Developing good relationships with your customers is essential. Your customers may not tell
you about the crush they have on you, but they will tell their friends.
With our customer community, we aim to improve the
customer experience and become closer to them by
creating more ways to talk with us. This fulfills the PR and
Support functions because it helps customers easily solve
and report problems. We hope these happy customers
go on to become product advocates as a result of their
positive experience.
Kenji Onozawa
Telenav Community Manager +
18. We Aim to Help
Community Managers help guide online discussions and answer consumer questions. Because of
their dedication to online communities, consumers are getting more information than ever before.
In 2011, social communities in general Resources will always be an issue.
will take on more traditional sup- We have to encourage our employ-
port roles in addition to simple mar- ees to monitor and participate in
keting and brand awareness. We hope our customer community so our
a good portion of our support issues customers find value in their
will at least undergo triage through participation.
the community.
Paul Tracy
JusticeTrax Community Manager +
19. They Aim to Help
Community Managers do an excellent job of answering questions and helping their customers,
but now even customers are taking on the job and helping each other out!
Since Community Management is part of IT&Support, we
use it primarily to support our customer base. The com-
munity format is efficient because it prevents reoccurring
questions and allows customers to help each other. In
the future, we plan to promote more product discussions in
our community to help our product team figure out what our
customers want.
Fred Soneya
Kiddicare Community Manager +
20. Thanks to our Contributors!
Erin Lariviere Noel Paterson Jamie Kite
Philipp Postrehovsky David Okner Kenji Onozawa
Angie Mcauliffe Daniel Kaplan Fred Soneya
Ryan Noonan Nick Herbold Paul Tracy
Roland Tanglao Ginevra Kirkland