1.The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management Edited By Marshall Kirkpatrick May 2009ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 1

2. Table of ContentsIntroduction4Framing the issues and describing the parts of the report.The Basics7Our answers to the first questions companies ask about online community.Do Startups Need Community Managers? 12A long blog post that kick started our interest in the topic, based oninterviews and feedback from more than 50 people in the field.ROI25A discussion of the different ways to look at the Return on Investment fromcommunity management; understand the nature of the job by knowingwhat your company will get out of it.Job Description34An exploration of different ways that people describe the work.The Marketing/Engagement Balance 47Is community management marketing, customer service, or somethingelse? Yes.Dealing With Challenging Community MembeRS 57Its a part of every community managers job.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 2 3. Interviews63Mathew Ingram on the Toronto Globe and Mails Big Media CommunityLucia Willow on Managing Community at PandoraDawn Foster on Managing Developer CommunitiesConnie Bensen on B2B Community ManagementAdditional Resources74The Best Podcasts, Online Groups and Public Events for CommunityManagers Big thanks to the research team that helped with this report: Nisha Chittal,Doug Coleman, Tim Hattenberger, Rennie Wiswall, Nate DiNiro and Decisive FlowReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 3 4. IntroductionWe live in a very disruptive period in history. TheWorld Wide Web is a mere 20 years old and evenyounger technology now makes it easy for mil-lions of people to publish their thoughts online.With that huge influx of voices, ears, and eyes onto the Web have comemajor changes in the way people do business. Entertainment, education,shopping, and customer service are still based on many of the timelessprinciples they always have been, but the new social context online has ledto fundamental changes were just beginning to understand.Whats now being called Social Media -- a cluster of technology types thatmake it easier than ever for everyday people to have their say online -- hascreated different expectations, consequences, and possibilities in the worldof business.As occurs during any major economic change, new types of jobs are beingcreated. One of the most common were seeing emerge right now is aposition called Online Community Manager. Scores of people are beinghired to specialize in interfacing with online communities for businessesand other organizations large and small.Practitioners: Kevin Micalizzi, Mathew Ingram, Kellie Parker, John Cass, Kelly Rusk, Justin ThorpThe job is part customer service, part marketing, part public relations, andpart Web savvy. Some of the required skills are timeless, and some arevery new and unique to the Web. In the following guide, youll read howcommunity managers are touching every part of the businesses they workat.Many questions remain unanswered. There is no clear consensus onjob descriptions, return on investment, the appropriate balance betweenmarketing and customer service, or the best way to deal with troublesomecommunity members. The people formerly known as customers nowplay a different role in almost every business, and so new business rolesare emerging in response.You may be a community manager. Just as likely, you may work at or runa company that has a community manager or is considering adding one toReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 4 5. the team. Either way, we trust that the resources in this guide will provevaluable to you, no matter what your level of experience.Whats IncludedIn this guide, youll find some of the best advice, perspectives, data points,talking points, and other kernels of emerging wisdom available about onlinecommunity management. In compiling this report, we looked at hundredsof articles on the topic, chose the very best ones, selected the most salienthighlights from those articles, and then wove them into a coherent narrativethat explores the big questions in the field. Not all of the sources we citeagree with each other on the topics they discuss, weve tried to includediverse and conflicting points of view. Along with curated selectionsfrom around the web, we also share our own professional advice, havingpracticed in and studied the field.We begin with the basics: our most information-rich answers to the mostcommon questions that companies ask. Questions like, Should we have apage on Facebook? And, Should we have a company blog?Next, youll find a reprint of a ReadWriteWeb article titled Do StartupsNeed Community Managers? We wrote that article based on interviewswith more than 40 different people in a wide variety of positions atcompanies large and small. Weve selected the 10 most valuableresponses from readers of the article to reprint here.The bulk of the guide comes in the next section, a four-part explorationof return on investment, job description, the marketing/customer servicebalance, and dealing with challenging community members. Thesesections are made up of selected highlights from varying and sometimesconflicting perspectives, mixed in with our own explanations and advice.Next, youll find four extended interviews with successful communitymanagers from four different kinds of companies: one from a very largetraditional media organization (Torontos Globe and Mail), another froma large consumer tech company (Pandora Radio), a manager of varioussoftware developer communities (including Intel), and a B2B serviceprovider.The final part of the written section of this guide is a collection of additionalresources we think youll find valuable: the podcasts that every communitymanager should listen to, the best Facebook group for communitymanagers to connect through, and a list of some of the most importantcommunity management industry events to attend.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 5 6. The Online Part of This GuideIn addition to the written part of this guide that you hold in your hand orPDF reader, weve also assembled a collection of dynamic online resourcesthat will keep delivering value well into the future.Now that youve purchased theguide, you should have received apassword to log in to the CommunityManagement Aggregator. Its at http://www.readwriteweb.com/community_aggregator.php and the password istrollbopper.There, youll find an automaticallyAggregated: The Hottest BlogPosts in Community Managementupdated selection of the most talked-about articles being published by thesources that we cite in the first half ofthe report. (If youre familiar with Techmeme.com, we think of this sectionas a little Techmeme about Community Management.)If you dont want to visit this page daily, you can subscribe to the articlesby email or RSS.Weve also included a search box where you can search the full archive ofall of these top sources weve listed. Think of this as a dynamic referencebook made up of the written wisdom of top sources in the field.Finally, youll find links to profiles on Twitter and the most recent messagesthere from our selected top sources in the field and some importantcommunity managers worth following. This is a great way to jump into theconversation that is taking place on a daily basis.Informed support is one of the most important resources a communitymanager can use to meet the challenges of this work. We hope the writtenpart of this guide will help companies and community managers becomebetter informed, and that the online part will provide peer support andongoing professional development.Thanks for purchasing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online CommunityManagement. We think the resources here will help pay for themselvesmany times over.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 6 7. Step 1: The BasicsCompanies can ask a handful of questions thesedays as they start thinking about engaging inonline community management. Questions like,Should our company be on Facebook? andShould our company have a blog? Beforewe dive into some of the deeper strategicconsiderations, we offer our advice below onsome of these initial tactical questions. Wevetried to pack as much advice into as little spaceas possible with these recommendations.Definitions: What is an Online CommunityManager?My definition of a community manager is simply: A community manageris the voice of the company externally and the voice of the customersinternally.-Community Management Consultant Connie BensenA community manager is someone who communicates with a companysusers/customers, development team and executives, and otherstakeholders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. Theyprobably provide customer service, highlight best use cases of a product,make first contact in some potential business partnerships, and increasethe public visibility of the company they work for.-from our article Do Startups Need Community Managers? reprinted infull later in this report.Question: Do we need a forum section onour website?Our recommendation: Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on how muchyour customers have to say. If you are in a business in which you canrealistically expect a lot of communication directly with your company orbetween your customers on your site, then an on-site forum would be goodto install.If you expect less conversation directly with your customers on your site, orif the primary reason they would communicate with you would be to solveReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 7 8. relatively infrequent problems or offer occasional suggestions, then youmight be better served with a service like GetSatisfaction or UserVoice.Question: Does our company need a blog?Our recommendation: Probably, yes. Its a rare company that wouldntsee a net benefit from including a section on its website that is easy forapproved team members to update, to offer company news to the public,to engage in public discussion about that news, and to offer variousmethods of subscription to that news. Thats what a blog is, fundamentally.A blog can be a great marketing outlet, but it can also be a simple matterof customer and media relations.We recommend installing WordPress.org on your companys server if it canhandle PHP. Some companies dont like dealing with PHP, and so youllhave to find another solution. Installing a blog on your companys own site,instead of hosting it elsewhere, is the preferred solution because its valueto the company is thus maximized and maintained.You may choose to moderate comments on your blog or require yourexplicit permission before comments appear on the site. But it is preferableto allow comments to appear automatically, and to use Akismet for spamcontrol, and to keep a close eye on email notifications of new comments.This leeway may not be possible for some companies, but it is consistentwith the spirit of free communication that social media is based on.Your company blog could include both company news and your thoughtsabout other industry matters. Linking to other blogs in your field is anessential practice if you aim to use your blog to bring in new customers.You can find the best blogs in your field by using the methods describedin our article Comparing Six Ways to Find the Best Blogs in Any Niche.More sophisticated advice can be found in our article How to Create aSocial Media Cheat Sheet on Any Topic.One reason you may not want to have a company blog is because of thetime commitment. If you cant post to your blog at least once every weekor two -- preferably far more often than that, and definitely during publiccrises -- then not having a blog at all is probably better. Showing up fora conversation and then being completely absent only makes you lookworse.If you can live up to that minimal commitment, then you should have acompany blog.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 8 9. Question: Should our company spend timeon Twitter?Our recommendation: Without a doubt, you should. To the untrainedeye, Twitter may seem like a waste of time. It certainly did to us beforewe started using it. In fact, every community manager we talked to inresearching this report said that Twitter was delivering important value totheir work, and some very successful community managers told us it wasthe single most effective venue in which to engage with the public.Twitter is a very easy way for people to communicate publicly and for youto communicate with them.We recommend that you register one account on Twitter with yourcompanys name and that at least one of your employees engage with thepublic using an account under their own name but identify themselves asworking at the company in his or her account description.You could publish your companys blog feed through the companys officialTwitter account, but engaging with people directly as well is a good idea.We recommend finding people relevant to your industry by searching onTwitter directory sites like Twellow and Tweeplz with relevant keywords.Youll be surprised who in your industry is available to follow and conversewith. We also recommend running the usernames of key industry peoplethrough a service called Mailana, where youll discover the people theyconverse with publicly the most. Start by following 20 to 40 people whoyou discover this way, and youll quickly find value in the service. Werecommend using the desktop application Tweetdeck to monitor yourconversations on Twitter.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 9 10. Two good resources to assist in maximizing the ROI of company use ofTwitter are Laura Fitton, a consultant in the field, and CommonCraftsTwitter in Plain English.Question: Should our company have apresence on Facebook?Our recommendation: Be careful how much time you put into Facebook.Some companies have created company pages or customer supportgroups on the site and have seen a lot of results. Many other companieshave not. Lines of communication are not as clear on Facebook as theyare by email, on Twitter, and on blogs. Customers are less accessible onFacebook.AllFacebook.com and Forester analyst Jeremiah Owyangs Web-Strategistblog are two good places to learn about best practices in making effectiveuse of Facebook. Given the size of the site, though, its surprisinglydifficult to derive value from it. It is much slower than Twitter. The absenceof site-wide keyword search and other limitations imposed by privacyrequirements make it a challenging environment for companies to operatein.That said, there is a worthwhile Facebook group for community managers.People in the field can share support with each other there, andconversation is relatively active. That resource is included in the FurtherResources section of this report.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 10 11. Question: What else should I be doing?Our recommendation: One of the other key methods of engagement withthe online community but outside of your own website is monitoring RSSfeeds for search terms like your company and product names. If yourenot familiar with RSS, its a lot like Google Alerts but more powerful anddelivered to a dedicated application (or inside Outlook). See the videoRSS in Plain English to get a good short introduction to the concept, andsee subsequent recommendations in this report for details on what RSSfeeds to subscribe to.Question: Should I hire someone to be ourCommunity Manager?Our recommendation: Community manager is one of the hottest job titlesthat people are being hired for online right now. Its not a bad idea to hiresomeone to specialize in these responsibilities. You may have someone inmarketing or customer service who can do community work half-time, andwe discuss issues with that strategy in this report as well.If you decide to hire a full-time community manager, you can get a goodone for $5000 to $7000 per month. You may be able to find a good one forless, and you can certainly find some who expect to be paid more. We offerdetailed numbers on compensation elsewhere in this report.If your company can afford to, it would also serve you well to hire anestablished consultant in online community management for a short time tohelp your community staff get started.Those are some of our recommendations in response to some of the mostcommon questions about community management online. Now lets look alittle deeper.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 11 12. Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?You know what little startup companies need thesedays? They need to hire more people! It may be afrightening thought, but in an increasingly social world,being social is becoming an important full-time job.Community Manager is a position being hired for ata good number of large corporations (see JeremiahOwyangs growing list of people with that kind ofjob) but what about smaller companies? We asked anumber of people what they think, and the followingdiscussion offers some great things to think about,both pros and cons. Section highlights Many people believe this is one of the first positions a company should fill,full time Leaving community work to your PR agency can mean it gets neglected Dedicated specialists are more effective than company founders or manytraditional marketing people Companies based on user generated content need to recognize that usersare their most valuable assetReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 12 13. What Is a Community Manager?A community manager (CM) can do many things (see below), but themost succinct definition of the role that we can offer is this. A communitymanager is someone who communicates with a companys users/customers, development team and executives, and other stakeholdersin order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They often providecustomer service, highlight best-usage cases of a product, make firstcontact in some potential business partnerships, and increase the publicvisibility of the company they work for.True believers cant emphasize the importance of the role enough. JohnMark Walker, the Community Manager at CollabNet articulates thisperspective well: I firmly believe that the community manager should be one ofthe first hires, right after a solid engineering group and before you invest in corporate marketing people.Not everyone sees it that way, something that causes substantial distressfor people in the supply chain who are advocates of the CM role. Startups and all companies that exist online need to be looking at a communitymanager as a salaried position, says Dylan Boyd of eROI. We have been working with big brands, and it kills me when they just give social media to someone who already has 10 other roles... At Omma Social last month in NYC, that topic came up, asking all the people in the room from big brands if they had a community manager. 90% of them did not andare still trying to find out how to spec out a job description in order to hire for it.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 13 14. Dissenters: Community Management DoesNot Need to Be a Full Time JobOthers think community management doesnt need to be a full-time job.Community management is essentially a public relationship issue, sowhoever picks up that gauntlet is on point for representing their companyto the rest of us, consultant Peat Bakke told us. It doesnt have to bea specific person or a full-time job, but it is part of starting and runninga business, almost by definition: if youre in business, youre doingcommunity management whether you like it or not.Some would go so far as to call an explicit community manager position abad idea in the early days of a startup. Darius A Monsef IV, Executive Editor& Creator, COLOURlovers.com told us he thinks that in the early days,founders need to be in the thick of managing their own communities.Jonas Anderson voiced concern about community managers being caughtbetween loyalties to the company and its users, while being tripped up byemployer non-disclosure agreements. (Others though, such as former BBCblog producer Robin Hamman, point out that having a community managercan greatly reduce legal risk when a company engages extensively with itsusers.)Startup founder Sachin Agarwal splits his time between community andother work. Though he wishes he had more time for this kind of work, a fulltimer isnt necessary, he says. Our Contact Us page encourages people to ask each other and post on other sites before coming to us. Were happy to help,but Id wager that other users know how to get the most out ofour site better than even we do.Similarly, Twines Candice Nobles says that after some considerationwas given to the position, her company found that its users have beenincredibly self-organized and self-regulating so far.While these thoughts may be valid, consultant Dawn Foster emphasizedthat for some companies - making one person ultimately responsible for community work can be essential.For startups where community is a critical element of theproduct or service, she told us, I think that a community manager should be an early hire. Without a communitymanager, the frantic pace of the startup environment can mean that the community gets neglected simply because nosingle person is tasked with being responsible for it. Thisneglect could result in failure for the startup if the communityis critical.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 14 15. Can Founders Manage Their Communities?We talk to a lot of CEOs on the phone here at ReadWriteWeb and welltry to be polite in answering this question. Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemantaanswers this question diplomatically.The [community manager] role can be played by one of the founders early on, but as the proj- ect grows, you need a person who knows how to listen, he told us. Founders have a vision and might be a bit stubborn about what their product represents and offers (thats why they are founders). Someone a bit more distanced might be much better community managerAndraz Torisince he has a lot more empathy for users and their problems and can relay that to developers and managers. And vice versa.Pete Burgeson, director of marketing for online marketplace crowdSPRINGsays that a good community manager can help raise the voice of the usersthemselves.We want to be able to build a platform for our communityto have a voice, showcase their talent, and become as activein speaking for crowdSPRING as we are in speaking forourselves.Still others believe that users may not want to talk to the founder or acommunity manager, but rather someone with tech chops and focus. Ithink a startup should put a developer in the community as opposed to acommunity manager, Rob Diana told us. Even though the developer may not be as good acommunicator as a marketing guy, he or she has a differenttype of understanding of what people want.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 15 16. What Does A Community Manager Do?There are many ways that a community manager can benefit a startupcompany, and they often vary from company to company. Eva Schweber,co-founder of CubeSpace says:It depends on the community and what needs tobe managed... the style and distractability of thefolks in the startup, how they like to collaboratewith peers, and how they define their peers. Eva SchweberIts a complicated job, but one that can help bring cohesiveness to the lifeof a company. Any opportunity to interact with the community forces oneto think about the product/feature considerations and ramifications of onechoice over another, says Nagaraju Bandaru of SmartWebBlog. In many ways, the community manager is the evangelistfor the companys products and the voice of the customer in internal discussions. Its critical to react to online discussionswith skill, consistency, and aptitude; The role is hard to understand from the outside but impossible to miss once a startup is in execution mode.This coherent communication can have business development benefitsas well. This seems to us to be one of the most important benefits of theposition. Graeme Thickins, VP of Marketing at doapp explains: Their world includes the online community that representsboth prospective customers/users, as well as strategic partner companies, possible future investors, future employees, and more. Perhaps thinking in terms of a listening managerwould help a lot of startup founders better come to grips withwhat this job is all about.Carol Leaman from AideRSS says investing in a community manager position has helped her company gain maximum benefit from our earlyadopters and growing base of users, as its a key link between them andour development team. Not having someone on this full-time would impedeour growth and success. We consider ourselves fortunate to have bothrealized this need early and to have found an amazing Community ManagerReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 16 17. to fill the role.Does it have to be one person in particular? AideRSSs Melanie Bakerexplains that specialization is as appropriate for this role as it is for others.While especially at startups theres a shortage of bodies and its all handson deck, not all hands are best suited to all activities, she said. No one would want me writing code, and I wouldnt necessarily want just anyone talking to frustrated users,for example. Its also a totally hybrid role. My background involves marketing, Web, QA, and writing, and I use all of itas a community manager. Someone with a more specialized background can certainly learn what it takes but might havea hard time wrapping his or her head around the customer service, marketing, business analysis, tech support, softwaretesting, documentation, and journalist needs of the role.You need someone who understands the fundamental distinction thatwhile you want to grow your user base, a user base does not equal acommunity, Baker said. The best success involves growing the formerwhile making every effort to evolve it into the latter. Because communitiesgrow themselves organically a lot more easily than user bases do.Isnt it ultimately about marketing? Kim Bardakian, Sr. CommunicationsManager, at the wonderful music site Pandora put it this way:Pandora just created this position about four months ago andits been INVALUABLE to our company in such a short time!Its opened a whole new world of communications for us! Lucia Willow fills that role for us, and shes great. With theiPhone/Pandora launch on Friday, the Twitter network andfollowers were making tons of buzz! It was very exciting.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 17 18. Is Community Management the New PR?Hutch Carpenter points to an example of community management leadingto extensive new media press coverage and saving money on PR.Others see PR evolving towards a community management type of role inthis increasingly social world.I particularly liked the reference to PR as publicrelationships, interjected Kathleen Mazzocco ClearPR. [That]conveys the directness and transparency of todays new PR. How can it not be, given the open conversations going on? Thats why community managers are the critical new PR position.PR has long had a bad rap, though, and if PR pros are going to get intosocial media (they are already here in large quantities), then there may besome challenges to their ability to play a community management role. The idea of a community manager is a good one as long asthat person has the freedom to discuss the negatives as wellas the positives of the companys efforts, says Dave Allen ofNemo Design. If we consider all the aspects of social media asPR 2.0, then I would argue that it is a very important position, given that companies would hardly have gone without PR 1.0.I posted a top 10 list of what the activities might be like here of what you might call a community manager.(Disclosure: the author has a consulting relationship with Nemo)ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 18 19. Is This Worth Paying For?Why would a busy little startup spend precious money on this kind of role? While a community manager isnt the same as a traditional PR role, ideally they should work together, says Meredith from A Little Clarity. Startups are in a blur; often theyre being run by engineers with VCs looking over their shoulders-- they dont know from community managers; so there should be some accountability, and thats the tricky part. Do youmeasure connections? Responsiveness? Transparent publicrelationships? Whatever it is that your company will value, get it out there and agree on it, because one thing startups dont always have is time to do it right after getting burned.You want tangible? Semantic web researcher Yihong Ding will give youtangible! He says that community managers are tasked with tending to themost precious asset that many startups have staked their future on: usercontent. As we know, most Web 2.0 companies are built on user- generated content, he told us. Philosophically, user-generated content is embodied human mind. This embodiedmind is generally the fundamental asset of the company. Maintaining a proper community so that users may embody their mind with high quality is thus a central issue for the growth of the company. The duty of community managers is to supervise and maintain the high-quality production of thefundamental mind asset used by the company. Therefore, I would say that community manager is a critical job title for most of the Web 2.0 companies.We agree with Yihong. User data and community content are thefoundation that Web 2.0-style innovation and company valuations rest on.Failing to tend meaningfully to those assets is foolish.Thanks to everyone who participated in this conversation. We hope readerswill contribute their thoughts in comments below.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 19 20. Selected Comments in Response to Our Post Originally on ReadWriteWeb in July, 20081.My definition of a community manager is simply: A community manageris the voice of the company externally and the voice of the customersinternally. The value lies in the community manager serving as a hub andhaving the ability to personally connect with the customers (humanize thecompany), and serving with all departments internally (development, PR,marketiing, customer service, tech support, etc).Posted by: Connie Bensen2.I didnt really understand what a community manager did, then I hired areally good one. I think its a bit like other forms of PR and marketing: soft,often intangible, full of bullsh!t artists, but when you see it done well, it allmakes sense.Posted by: Paul Deane3.My two cents: At the very beginning, when the startup consists only offounders, you can select CM out of them. If you dont have a person thatcan pull it (meaning someone with marketing, PR, and BDM skills) yourstartup is going to be in trouble anyway; it means you have only engineerson the team.Another issue: CM is not a PR 2.0: its CRM 2.0; back in the day, CRMwas about getting input from one customer, processing it, and givingoutput. Now, as customers sort of manage themselves in a group (thusforming communities), you have to manage the community, not individualcustomers. And as business and products are becoming more interactive(towards customers), its a read/write relationship: customers are changingbusinesses (by proposing features, blocking the cancellation of otherfeatures, criticizing, and praising).Posted by: Marcin Grodzicki4.Whether or not a startup needs a community manager is an excellentquestion, especially as companies struggle with how much social mediathey should be using. Having done community management/developmenta time or two, whether a startup has one definitely depends on the startup.Can the startup get by with just a blog, where the content creator isengaged in the comments? Do they really need a Twitter account if theircustomers might not be there (and, believe me, a whole lot of people arentReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 20 21. even on Twitter)? When the types of social media needed by a businessare figured out, then they can figure out if they need a community manager,and if that community manager should be part-time or full-time.But if the startup is clueless about whats needed in social media, aconsultant who can manage community for them for awhile could alsowork. The consultant can help them get an idea about what the startupneeds first with social media, so that theyre not overloaded and stressedabout keeping up with everything, then fill in on the management, if thatspart of a services package. As things grow, the consultant can, andprobably should, train someone internally or help find a dedicated CM forthe amount of time necessary to do the job.As for PR people handling community... yikes! Ive seen that one backfire abit. Community management is a task better suited to folks who know howto listen and respond, not just dole out the company message.Posted by: Tish Grier5.I said a long time ago, I would only leave freelancing if my dream job camealong. That is, a job incorporating blogging with social networking andtalking with people all day. This happened a month ago when I was hiredby BlogTalkRadio to be their Community Manager.I think whether or not a business needs a full-time CM all depends on thecompany. At BTR, we have thousands of radio shows, thousands of hosts,and thousands of listeners. Thats a lot of people to bring together. It onlymakes sense to bring a full-time CM on board.In addition to handling the blog, my job is to promote the segments,promote BTR, promote the hosts, and bring the community together. Ilisten to hosts and offer tips for bringing traffic to their segments. I talk withlisteners to learn how to make their BTR experience more user-friendly, andI help the BTR team find solutions that benefit everyone involved. I alsoencourage bloggers to start their own radio shows, which is as simple asowning a phone.Do all businesses need a CM? Im not sure. I think any company with aheavy Web presence would do well to have someone to spread the wordand find out what makes its audience or client base happy. CMs establishpersonal relationships and are more invested in the product or service thanyour usual publicist for hire. Plus, we know the social networks, we knowthe Web, and we know the bloggers. BlogTalkRadio wouldnt have hired meif I was just Joe off the street. Being a pro blogger and being able to speakwith other bloggers put me ahead of the other candidates.I dont know that all businesses need CMs. For businesses with a heavyWeb presence, however, its in their best interest to at least look into it.ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 21 22. Posted by: Deborah Ng6.Something important that is very important yet often overlooked in myexperience:Expect your CM not just to socialize/evangelize, but to show up withfeature requests and bug reports. Give them the ability to be heardand considered. CM is a social role, yes, but the point of those socialinteractions is to collect valuable feedback and translate it into actions.On the flipside, a good CM takes the time to understand the dev teamspriorities and timelines and works WITH them to find the best ways toimplement new features.Thanks again for a great article (and the great comments!)Posted by: Thaumata from A.viary7.I look at community managers as the faces of the corporation. People dontinteract with companies, they interact with people who work at companies.And these people have personalities (hopefully).I manage Intels Open Port, a site that congregates several technicalcommunities. Each community, organized by different product segmentslike PCs or Servers, is managed by a technical expert who can interact onthe same level with their community. Community members in this sensedo not want marketing talking heads managing their communities, but realengineers they can connect with and ask questions.Since it is the person that counts, one of the greatest challenges I believe isfinding a dynamic enough personality to engage your community; someonewho is also technical enough to speak on the same level as the community.In essence, he or she needs some level of street cred.Posted by: Kelly Feller8.Were admittedly not a commercial startup (were an NPO) but its becomeapparent that for our kind of organization this kind of position is crucial. Wehave a lot of things we do that could be seen as more traditional products- Im not worried about them as much. We see the role of the communitymanager is to actually foster community, to bring these people together.This might be users for these more conventional products (which is likelyto be the focus for a new startup with one product).But there is also community as product. A lot of the ideas we have aresimple ones like, wouldnt it be valuable if we had a certain group ofpeople talking about a certain thing in a certain way. In this case, theReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 22 23. role of the community manager is about actually forming this community,keeping it healthy and valuable for all of the constituents. Its some of thekey elements of Lizas comments, but replace users with people.For us, these people might be academics, industry leaders, or evenstudents. For a commercial entity this is just as important, but it might beeasier to overlook. Someone who buys a product or signs on for a serviceis already invested in some way, and they could be an active part of acommunity around that product. A really great community manager couldbring other people in to that community and expand it, focus the direction,and make it a community around the things that are behind that product.Posted by: Matthew Hockenberry9.Very interesting concept. Since VCs and startups seem today to be moreinterested in audience than a real business model; it seems like a smartmove to have a community manager.In the long run, I think what really matters though is how you can harnessthe potential of the community. IMHO, that is what differentiate asuccessful project from a fashionable project. Can you find the lead users(cf. definition at the end) in your community ? Can you use crowd-sourcingas a competitive advantage ? Is your community strongly connected?Tightly-coupled to your project? etc...But in the end, as said before, its based on the objectives of each startupand its current position in its development phases.Cheers,Utopiah.From Wikipedia :Lead user is a term developed by Eric von Hippel in 1986. His definition forlead user is:1. Lead users face needs that will be general in a marketplace but facethem months or years before the bulk of that marketplace encountersthem, and2. Lead users are positioned to benefit significantly by obtaining a solutionto those needs.More at http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/Posted by: UtopiahReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 23 24. 10. Community Managers play different roles for different companies. Itsan evolutionary process, and its being defined as more communitymanagers appear. On a daily basis, I work closely with an external advisoryboard, community members, my sales, marketing, and PR teams... I alsoexecute on a lot of partnerships, cross-promotion opportunities, programdevelopment and oversight...The jobs are endless... but the role is fluid.Community managers do not replace any more traditional roles - we addvalue to existing ones.My two cents,~ Janetti ChonCommunity Manager, Web 2.0 Expowww.web2expo.comPosted by: Janetti ChonReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 24 25. ROIWhats the return on investment (ROI) foronline community management? Thats a veryimportant question for a number of reasons. First,its a question that advocates for communitymanagement are almost always asked by thoseholding the purse strings at their workplace.Secondly, engaging with the question helpsilluminate the nature of the job.section highlights Many of the benefits of community are intangible There are hard number studies available, from Ciscos 2004 findingthat 43% of visits to online support forums are in lieu of opening upa support case through standard methods through Dells tale of $1million in sales through Twitter last year Community managers should establish methods to measure theirown impact on other departments bottom lines For every person you interact with publicly, far more watch that inter-action and are impacted Community management can be another form of networking, deliv-ering the same kinds of value that conference attendance, presenta-tions and related activities deliverIf you read one link from this section: Jeremiah Owyangs Com-munity Managers Must Deliver ROI: Commandments For Surviving aRecession http://www web-strategist com/blog/2009/01/28/commu-nity-managers-must-deliver-roi-tips-for-surviving-a-recession/ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 25 26. The Fleshiness of CommunitySome people believe that ROI is impossible to measure in communitymanagement because the benefits of community are intangible. Wedisagree with this argument, but its a worthwhile position to consider.Consultant Jason Falls, for example, saysthat ROI is the wrong question to ask aboutsocial media in general. In an article titled 1What is the ROI for Social Media , Fallsargues that evaluating ROI in social mediain general is like trying to assign multiplechoice scoring to an essay question... tryingto put numeric quantities around human Jason Falls, photo frominteractions and conversations, which areShashi Bellamkondanot quantifiable.Falls quotes the well-known PR pro Katie Paine:Ultimately, the key question to ask when measuring engagement is, Are we getting what we want out of the conversation? And, as stubborn as it sounds, Mr. CEO, you dont get money out of a conversation.Youll Know It When You See It Of course, such perspectives have an important element of truth to them.Once good community management is in effect, the intangible benefitsit delivers make the effective returns easily evident, even if they arentquantifiable. In other words, once its working, youll have no doubt itsworth is. For example, Pandora community manager Lucia Willow told usthat Pandora users regularly email her moving stories and photos depictingthe impact that the music recommendation service has had on their lives.She shares those in full staff meetings and posts the photos on the officerefrigerator. Thats a powerful staff motivator.1http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/2008/10/28/what-is-the-roi-for-social-mediaReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 26 27. 2Dave Hersch of Jive Software puts it this way :Trying to determine if the savings and revenue increase areworth the expense is like trying to measure whether the viewfrom atop Everest is worth the climb: its exceedingly hard tomeasure, and it should be painfully obvious.Here Are The Numbers Trying to quantify a well-run community may be a fools exercise, as DaveHersch argues, but there are some pretty compelling numbers available ifyoud like to be one of those fools.In 2007, Joe Cothrel, Chief Community Officer at enterprise online 3community vendor Lithium, gathered together the most compellingpublicly available statistics on the ROI of community that youll findanywhere. Some of the highlights include: A Cisco study in 2004 found that 43% of visits to online supportforum are in lieu of opening up a support case through standard4methods . Cost per interaction in customer support averages $12 via the contact5center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006 )6 Jupiter Research(now Forrester) reported in 2006 that customersreport good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they dovia calls or mail.7 Ebay found in 2006 that participants in online communities spend54% more than non-community users.Those numbers are a few years old, but we find that they paint a picturethats still true to the experience of community managers now. The blogs8on the Lithium company site , where Cothrel (who aggregated thosestudies) works, are an excellent resource to learn more about corporatecommunity management.23http://www.jivesoftware.com/blog/2007/03/02/roi-shmoroi4http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/images/presentations/Business_Forum_ROI_final.pdf5Managing Support Forums, The Association of Support Professionals (ASP), 20046Support transactions according to complexity and cost (table), Forrester Research, 2006Online Support Forums: Evaluating Opportunity for Community-Based Support, Jupiter Research, June 21,20067Do Customer Communities Pay Off? Ren Algesheimer and Paul M. Dholakia, Harvard Business Review, Nov.20068http://lithosphere.lithium.com/lithium/?category.id=blogsReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 27 28. Real World Case StudiesWhat does ROI look like for community managers in the wild? Onegreat place to start getting an idea is analyst Peter Kims list of over 3009corporate social media campaigns .Dell Computers is one of the best examples of a company that has made amajor investment in online community and claims to have found immediatefinancial benefits. The juiciest story is that Dell says it has generated morethan $1 million in sales by publishing discount alerts through its Twitteraccount. Were not sure how community engaged that is, but its certainlygoing where people already are and delivering value to them. According to 10a recent Financial Times profile of the companys efforts, the companysVP of Communities and Conversation Bob Pearson has 45 peopleworking for him. The core of the crew searches for dissatisfied customerscomplaining around the Web and tries to reach out to them to resolvethings. The company has 80 Twitter accounts, 20 Facebook pages and ahigh profile user-voted suggestion and feedback site called IdeaStorm.Zappos, Whole Foods, and WineLibrary.tv are other examples ofcompanies that have generated revenue directly from the communities 11theyve built up on Twitter. ReadWriteWeb recently wrote about a Gartnerreport on four distinct ways that companies are using Twitter in particular.910 http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2008/09/ive-been-thinki.html11 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/84b63f98-e7df-11dd-b2a5-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/4_ways_companies_use_twitter_for_business.phpReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 28 29. Build Your Own ROI Case StudyDells tracking of Twitter-driven sales is the type of thing that just about 12anyone could do. Jeremiah Owyang offers this advice .Community Managers should start to measure how clicks fromthe community directly impact e-commerce, go to product pages (perhaps if youre B2B) or to affiliate marketing to demonstrate how community interaction increases revenue.If you can demonstrate this (like Dells million dollar sales in Twitter) tout it loudly to management. 13Lithiums Cothrel offers some great tips along the same lines that couldwork well for some companies.Ask the people who run your companys customer surveys toadd a question about community use. That will allow you to seehow community users compare to those who havent used thecommunity. And/or, run a survey yourself in your community andask about your users purchase and support history. Use this datato tell a story about how every registration, every visit, every view,and every post to your community adds something to the bottomline.Begin to figure out how you can do a real ROI analysis in thefuture. That means tying community data to customer data and/orother web data meaning youll need to forge some partnershipswith the people in your organization who own that data. In someorganizations, theres someone who can take the email addressesfrom your registration database and give you back all sorts ofuseful info about the value of your community members. That wouldbe a good thing to do. Better would be to have that informationcontinuously by integrating your community with those othersystems. But you gotta start somewhere!12 http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/01/28/community-managers-must-deliver-roi-tips-for-surviving-a-recession/13 Left in comments at http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/01/28/community-managers-must-deliver-roi-tips-for-surviving-a-recession/ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 29 30. Ongoing Costs Does the work of a community manager have to remain active in order for a community to make a tangible difference to the bottom line? Tom14 Humbarger studied the numbers before and after one community he managed cut the budget for a community manager position. He concluded that active management contributes significantly to the health of a professional community. Comparing the period of active vs. inactive management: membership growth slowed significantly, a fall-off of more than 63% on a week-to-week basis. Number of visits dropped 60%, number of pages viewed per visit drops 22%, and time on site decreased by 33%. Community WithIt might not be intuitively clear to non-participants that a companyand Without representatives consistent high- Tom Humbarger quality engagement in community(also known as with and without is necessary to reap the benefitsactive community management) of community, but for community managers, the relationships they areMembership growth: Down 63% building make it very clear. Thoseweek to week relationships would go cold without consistent engagement.Website visits: Down 60%The above should provide you withPage views per visit: Down 22%some of the type of data you canuse, some methods to captureTime on site: Down 33%it, and some evidence that youractive engagement is required tocapture those benefits. The fact of the matter is, though, that the non-financial benefits of community management are potentially much more important. Your World is a Stage The number of participants, much less visibly active participants, in most online communities is almost always tiny compared to a successful companys total number of customers. It would be easy to feel frustrated by this, to feel like the resources spent engaging with these communities arent worth it. We discuss engagement and marketing more in a later section of this report, but in terms of ROI, some clear tangible benefits come out of management of the subset of customers youll find in an online community. 14http://tomhumbarger.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/the-importance-of-active-community-management-proved- with-real-data/ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 30 31. Squeaky wheels get the grease, so it may feel like theres an even smallernumber of people yet that a community manager is interacting with15regularly. Michael Mace of Rubicon Consulting points out that a muchlarger group of silent community members are watching those interactions,and thats where a lot of the payoff will come from. Because most Web users are voyeurs more than contributors, you should think of an online discussion as theater; its a performance in which the community leader(s) interact with a small group of contributors for the education and amusement of the rest of us. All the Webs a stage, but were not all players in it... This means companies that turn away from Web communities because theyre populated by only enthusiasts are missing the point. Youve mistaken your fellow actors for the audience. Take care of the active participants in a community, Michael Maceand the audience will watch and learn.That said, even the relatively small number of people you will likely engagewith in an online community can offer a lot of value to a company.Customer Complaints Yield ProductDevelopment OpportunitiesSometimes in a small business, the long list of customer complaints canfeel like a distraction from getting work done and moving forward withdevelopment plans. In a post on the Dell community board, Dell staff16member Robert P. argues that close communication with customersabout the constraints they face can lead to product developmentopportunities to solve those problems. Dells social media efforts arentjust a way to push a message on community members, Robert writes,but a way to find problems that can only be solved by innovation, productdevelopment, and sales. It almost sounds obvious when he says that aninnovative business model helps you do the job [of solving customersproblems] in a new, novel way that will make the business more agile andprofitable.1516http://rubiconconsulting.com/insight/winmarkets/michael_mace/2008/10/online-communities-and-their-i.htmlhttp://en.community.dell.com/blogs/smallbusiness/archive/2009/02/05/why-do-small-businesses-have-to-be-innovative.aspxReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 31 32. Community Managers Can Deliver ValueFrom Communities to Other DepartmentsProduct development insights are just one of many tangible things that acommunity manager can take to other departments. Community managersshould prioritize building connections with other departments becausefailing to do so would leave clear value untapped. Community managementexpert Bill Johnston puts it well in a conversation on Jeremiah Owyangs17blog . Reach out to other departments. Online communities offer valueto almost every department in the organization, from HR (recruiting), tosupport (call avoidance), to marketing (awareness/reach), to the productteam (feedback, customer-led innovation). Now is the time to reach out toother teams and create cross-organizational ties, and involve other teamsin community-building and engagement activities. Almost all of the community From a Communitymanagers we talked to for thisManager to report brought up one or more Other Departments of these same benefits. By helping to hire the most active Customer support: Call avoidancecommunity members, community managers can deliver tangible Product development: Feedback,value to HR; a well-managed customer led innovation community captures and reuses troubleshooting knowledge and Marketing: Awareness, researchsees active members coming to each others aid, thus decreasing HR: Recruitingsupport costs for the company, etc.The Same ROI as Many of the MostTraditional Business ActivitiesParticipating in communities like social networks can deliver value to awhole network of different departments inside any company. That makesthe community manager an important person. It also puts them in a keyposition to foster a social network-type consciousness within the company.More on that later.But theres one more traditional business deliverable that can come fromcommunity management. Were talking about networking -- like youddo in any business setting, but amplified by the space-busting powers ofonline social media.17http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/01/28/community-managers-must-deliver-roi-tips-for-surviving-a-recession/ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 32 33. Business communication trainer Heidi Miller tells an illustrative story abouthow this works, in an article titled Social Media Isnt Marketing - Its18Networking[PR consultant Michael Sommermeyer] was making the case that, whileupdating your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or what-have-you status isnta marketing strategy, it is an excellent way to expand your network andmake connections you wouldnt otherwise have had access to. He relatesthe story of Jeremy Epstein, who through a relatively random social mediaconnection, discovered that the person hed been corresponding with wasthe Chief Privacy Officer at AOL, a great business connection for him. So in this sense, no, social media isnt marketing. Its networking. Its the equivalent of going to those Chamber of Commerce events and getting to know your fellow business people. Its the equivalent of joining your national trade organization so you can get to know, mentor, and connect with people in your industry. Its the equivalent of throwing a cocktail party at the industrys big yearly trade show so you can meet, connect, and converse with associates, prospects, and partners from all over the world.Its also a lot less expensive than many of those activities, though somepeople do it all day long. While social networking can never fully replaceface-to-face networking, it can capture a lot of the same value at a fractionof the cost of travel and conference attendance, and its much easier toschedule. Theres literally no way you could network in person the wayyou can online. People knew that was going to happen at the beginningof the Web, but then for several years there werent people doing businessin online social networks. Now there are... many people. Thus, from abusiness development perspective as well, the return on investment of agood online community managers job seems clear.18 http://talkitup.typepad.com/weblog/2008/12/social-media-isnt-marketing-its-networking.htmlReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 33 34. What Kinds of Animals Are These?Whats the difference between communitymanagement and more traditional positions likecustomer service and marketing? That dependson who you ask. There isnt much consensus.Most people agree, though, that online communitymanagement incorporates some of both of thesetypes of work. It also presents unique challengesand opportunities because of the newly publicnature of conversations, the variety of people nowable to discuss things publicly, the scale of theWeb, and the speed of communication.SECTION HIGHLIGHTS Social media is different than anything thats happened before be-cause of several unique qualities of the internet Community management takes a particular kind of personality: amixture of passion and compassion This is a demanding job with long, hard hours and high public ex-pectations Skill in working with social media tools is important Management assumptions need to be questioned Good community management will change the business its per-formed for There are established norms for pay (we list them below)If you read one link in this section: Interview with consultant NancyWhite http://www.netsquared.org/nwhiteReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 34 35. Things That Make SocialCommunity manager and expertMedia Different: on the field Connie Benson bristled when we used the Communication is public, im-marketing word campaigns pacting passive site visitors,in our interview with her. She search traffic and others believes community management should tilt away from marketing, Blogs will challenge youtowards customer service and thus achieve what could Customers can help each other be called passive business development. As the innovators Conversation happens much behind the popular forum site fasterGetSatisfaction.com said in their slogan for a recent conference: Use cases are public, customers Customer service is the new create contentmarketing. That means that making your existing customers Your claims are verifiable by happy, in a public way, is the best Googlekind of marketing you can have.The ideal community manager personality: Passionate, but without letting it get out of control.Thick-skinned, but not cruel or insensitive. Driven, but still interested in helping others. Personable, but always1professional. - Dan GrayMarketing consultant Rick Turoczy says its a matter of skill sets andauthenticity. I think community management is better handled bycustomer service for the majority of companies, he told us. Mostmarketing people dont get it. Theyre broadcast only. The bestcommunity managers Ive ever worked with (including before the days ofsocial media) were always in customer service or professional services.While such high-minded ideals are, well, ideal, marketing and communitymanagement will probably always have a close, if at times uncomfortable,relationship. Some of the more marketing type of work that communitymanagers do includes the creation of original content, highlightingselected customer-created content, and engaging in conversations off-site on blogs, Twitter, etc. about the company and issues relevant to itsindustry.1http://bifftheunderstudy.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/the-mind-of-a-cm/2http://conniebensen.com/blog/2008/07/17/community-manager-job-descriptionReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 35 36. If youre looking for an explicit example of a job description, Connie2Benson has posted a good long one that was adapted from MarkAndreesons company Ning.Bringing Data Back to the MothershipEven the customer service/marketing dichotomy cant capture everythinga community manager does, however. Jeremiah Owyang discusses3another important part of the work - bringing customer feedback to thedevelopment and management teams. Community managers are responsible for gathering the requirements of the community in a responsible way and presenting it to product teams. This may involve formal product requirements methods from surveys to focus groups, to facilitating the relationships between product teams and customers. The opportunities to build better products and services through this real- time live focus group are ripe; in many cases, customer communities have been waiting for a chance to give feedback.Owyang draws back and spells out the big picture in a couple of differentways. Weve found there are five major objectives found in any social computing effort: Listening, Talking, Energizing, Supporting, and Embracing.Elsewhere, Owyang puts it in another way thats helpful. In nearly allthe many community manager job descriptions hes seen, there are fourcommon responsibilities rolled up into the job: 1) a community advocate2) brand evangelist 3) savvy communication skills, shapes editorial 4)4gathers community input for future product and services. Flickrs Ten Points to Live By 1. Engage your community. 6. Be patient. 2. Enforce decorum. 7. Hire fans. 3. Take responsibility for failures.8. Stay calm. 4. Step back and let the community9. Be flexible but focus on support itself where appropriate.what matters. 5. Give freely. 10. Be visible. 5 From Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ3http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/11/25/the-four-tenets-of-the-community-manager4http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/11/25/the-four-tenets-of-the-community-manager5http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/09/0914_flickr/index_01.htmReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 36 37. The Fun Doesnt StopThose are some nice job descriptions, but even a list of responsibilities 6can fall short of describing the less tangible parts of the position. Deb Ngreminds us that while community management may not be a 24/7 job, itsnot best done as a 9-to-5 job either.What happens to your community on the weekend? Do you just leave itand come back on Monday spending a frenzied day trying to catch up, ordo you drop by here and there on the weekend just checking to make surethe joint hasnt been taken over by trolls?.... Rather than have a frustratedcommunity, its probably in your best interest to make sure theres somesort of presence during the non-business hours.Community management may be your day job, but most of the peoplein your communities will have different jobs and will be active in yourcommunity outside of regular work hours. Given that, its surprising howmuch interaction in online communities does go on during regular businesshours.What does the work look like day to day and night to night? Check outlong-time gaming community manager Sanya M. Weathers epic post titled, 7Why Does it Take So Long to Answer Simple Questions? Weathersweaves together anecdotes from industry colleagues to tell the story of asingle all-too-typical day in the life of a gaming community manager. Its alot of work.We would summarize the most important parts of the story Weatherswrites, but its the non-stop insanity she describes that makes it soremarkable. There really arent any parts of it that are more important thanothers; you should read the whole thing. May your business have as manydemands on your time as successful online game companies have on theirpeoples!The Online Community Research Network asked hundreds ofcommunity managers what the most important factors are in8establishing and maintaining a communitys culture .The top three responses (in order) were: Quality, up-to-date content. Have a clear objective/value statement. Strong moderation/facilitation.6http://kommein.com/what-happens-to-your-community-on-the-weekend/7http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org/2007/05/23/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-answer-simple-questions/8http://redplasticmonkey.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/online-communities-establishing-an-online-communitys-culture/ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 37 38. Keeping it In Perspective 9Jeremiah Owyang sounds a rallying cry : you are not alone, work smart,and remember your priorities. There are thousands of other community managers who are pushing the membrane of the corporation to reach to customers; the list grows longer every day... Start by focusing on objectives, chart a road map, assemble the right team, and plan to be flexible... Above all, remember that control is in the hands of the members, so put their needs first, build trust, and become an active part of the community.The importance of remembering that no community manager is alonecannot be overstated. As long-time open-source community manager10Stormy Peters told Dawn Foster in a recent podcast interview that goingout of your way to connect with others in the same field can be veryhelpful. See our list of resources in the final section of this report for waysto connect with other community managers.Okay, but how long is this going to take? How long will it take to build a 11sustainable community? Mary Lou Roberts writes that even with the helpof professional consultants and outsourcing, community managementrequires a meaningful investment of time and resources. Her estimates, infact, seem low to us. It takes three to six months of serious effort to build a sustainable community. Its not a silver bullet, and good consultants help managers understand that and have patience. Monitoring does seem to be a real issue. [LiveWorld.coms Brian Person] says they usually monitor communities for their customers. They require the customer to invest at least 10 hours each week in community management. This is not an activity to just be outsourced and then wash your (corporate) hands of the operations. Its your brand; continuous involvement is necessary even if you hire management services.We think that 10 hours a week for three to six months sounds like the kindof strategy that would only work with the help of outside consultants doingmuch of the work. If you can afford such consultants, its probably a goodidea to hire a more affordable full-time community manager to do the workafter theyve left.9http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/02/14/forrester-report-online-community-best-practices/10 http://fastwonderblog.com/2008/01/20/podcast-episode-6-online-community-management-with-stormy-peters/11 http://diy-marketing.blogspot.com/2009/01/managing-your-branded-community.htmlReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 38 39. Lets Get Hip to the SceneMuch like a good consultant, a community manager is going to help thecompany understand the real benefits of participating in the community. 12FutureLabs Matt Rhodes writes that a community manager shouldadvocate [for] the community within the organization [as well as for] theorganization within the community. You translate what goes on in thecommunity and make it relevant for the organization and different peoplewithin it. You can explain to a CEO why the community is important andshow the value they can personally get.In order to do that, Rhodes says that you need to be a trusted andtransparent source within the community. I see too many communitieswhere the community manager is face-less, has a generic name, andnever really interacts with members. Honesty and transparency are reallyimportant online, and your community manager should be a member of thecommunity like any other.How to Not Lose Your MindHow do you keep one foot in the basics of your business, and the otherfoot in the world of early adopters, with all it has to offer? Social mediatrue believers run the risk of going off the deep end and losing the abilityto communicate with their co-workers who are trying to run a business. Onthe other hand, focusing on the business interests too much in the shortterm can mean losing out on the emergent value of online community. 13Connie Bensen offers the following advice . Identify and offer solutions for breaking down barriers between customers and corporate. This includes identifying needs that arent being met from the customers perspective and being involved in the discussion as to whether the needs are valid, if they can be met, and if they will benefit the organization as a whole.Paying attention to unmet needs that surface through the channel of onlinecommunity, then taking part in corporate conversations about which ofthose needs or concerns are valid and require a response, will help keepone foot in the traditional business world and its concerns. Bensen goeson to explain the second half of the process:12 http://blog.futurelab.net/2009/01/defining_community_management.html13 http://conniebensen.com/blog/2008/07/17/community-manager-responsibilities-goals/ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 39 40. Be available to staff across the company to assist them inidentifying and using online tools if it can help them achieve theirgoals related to their position. Teach, guide, encourage them, andprovide support if they are new to Web 2.0 tools and culture... Stayup to date on new tools, best practices, and how other organizationsand companies are using them, so that the company can continue tobe an early adopter of these technologies.How to Listen to the Internet Much of social media is all aboutWe recommend that you subscribelistening to what people have toto search feeds for your companys say, and community managementname and your competitors on the is no different. Youll want tofollowing sites, as a minimum: make sure you are comfortable with an RSS reader and use it to1. Multi-media search with EveryZ- subscribe to persistent searchesing (see http://bit.ly/everyzing for for your company name, yourexample).competitors, and related2. Blog search with Icerocket, keywords. Once you set upGoogle Blogsearch. those searches, Connie Benson143.Microblogging search via search. says theres some simpletwitter.com and twingly.com. logic to think through when you4.News search with Yahoo! News compare the conversation goingand Topix.net. on online about your competitors5.Social media search with Friend- to the conversation about yourFeed (see http://bit.ly/searchfriend-own company.feed for example).6.Google web search RSS (see If the brand has morehttp://bit.ly/googlealertsrss forconversation around it, then:instructions). Doesnt the brand want to maintain its lead online?If a competitor has more conversations around it, then:Shouldnt the brand get busy and consider its strategy?If neither the brand nor competitors have any conversations aroundthem, then:Shouldnt the brand get a head start on its competition?14 http://conniebensen.com/blog/2009/01/06/using-social-media-monitoring-to-show-roi/ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 40 41. What are you going to do with the information you find through thosemonitoring feeds and other sources? We discuss engagement withyour community in the next section of this report, but a key part of thejob description is reporting the information that you glean to companymanagement. Jeremiah Owyang has a great framework for reporting back15that he suggests .During incidents, the community manager should report in real-time to keystakeholders. Secondly, they should provide weekly updates that can bequickly scanned in 30 seconds. Each month, they should provide a detailedreport, and initiate a 30- to 60-minute meeting with key stakeholders todiscuss changes. Chris Brogans Recommended Criteria For Evaluation of Community Managers16 Responsiveness to communications with the community: less than 24 hours max. Number of QUALITY blog posts read and shared via Google Reader. Number of meaningful comments left on appropriate blogs, videos, and other media per month. Overall quality of her Twitter stream (maybe a 60/30/10 mix of industry-related / personal @ comments / and off-topic). Engagement on our blog/community/network. (Number of subscribers, number of comments, number of links out to other blogs from our community site). Number of quality blog posts and linking posts (probably a 40/60 split between original and linked, though some would argue for 30/70). Eventually, number of links from other sites to our blogs and media.15http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/01/28/community-managers-must-deliver-roi-tips-for-surviving-a-recession/16 http://www.chrisbrogan.com/on-managing-a-community/ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 41 42. The Existential Dilemmas of Community Managers So this job is a grind and a juggling act. Whats the best attitude to aim for in dealing with it all, as a company representative participating in an17 online community? Dion Hinchcliffe offers some good perspective : its about humility and mutual respect.Making sure the community has truly free rein to serve itself even if it ends up recommending competitors products in somecases or becoming a venting zone for customers complaints isessential for the community to thrive through open conversation,honesty, trust, and candor. This back-seat position can be avery difficult thing for some organizations to accept, much lessencourage, but the best organizations manage to do this withhumility and a sense of mutual respect.If youre ready to get touchy feely,(and this is community were talkingabout, so that makes sense) then its agood idea to check in about our mostbasic assumptions about the position.Consultant Nancy White, who is oneof the smartest and most experienced 18people in this field, asserts that theterm community management mightnot be as appropriate as networkfacilitation. She beautifully articulates Nancy Whitesome things to consider when framingthe job of community management.Are we talking about communities, or are we embarking on the eraof network facilitation? When we move to the network, a coupleof things happen. The notion of managing becomes even more ofan illusion than managing that herd of cats called community. ...Instead we are talking about scanning for things important for ourorganizations: conversations about us, niches or needs we can fill,feedback and suggestions for improving what we do. It is filteringand redirecting those messages to where they can do good. It is alittle bit like listening to the universe. 17http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=190 18http://www.fullcirc.com/wp/2008/04/28/musings-on-community-management-part-2/ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 42 43. Instead of managing conflict or spammers in a walled community, we are seeking to make connections between people that advance our organizations learning and goals. That includes between dis- gruntled people and the people who might address that problem, between ideas, links and content to people who might use them, and between communities that exist within the humus of the network garden. Instead of spawning or archiving threads, we are tagging and re- mixing. Instead of inviting in or kicking out members, we are map- ping the network of relationships, looking for where to respond, and where to catalyze action.19From an earlier interview with White again: As I get older, sometimes I wonder if the world help is actually a very big trap. So I think by helping make things discussable, by convening, holding space for exploration, we can avoid assuming we know what is best, speaking for others where they did not ask to be spoken for, and assuming that anyone WANTS our help. So maybe here we are more mirrors than candles, eh? Reflecting what we see and seeing if others see the same thing. Then figuring out whats next.We really like the way Nancy White puts it, but we recognize it wontresonate with everyone. A more straightforward way to look at therelationship between a community manager and a companys users/customers is well articulated by ClearSpring Developer Community 20Manager Justin Thorp . Your users are the lifeblood of your community.You want to treat them like youd treat guests in your house. Otherwise, likeme, theyre going to make their way to the exits and not come back. Oneof the benefits of the Web 2.0 era we live in is that there are lots of placesI could spend my time. Thats the kind of plain-spoken, utility-basedapproach that all parties could probably agree with. Thats language thatother people in a company could likely hear from a community managerand agree with.19 http://www.netsquared.org/nwhite20 http://drinkingoatmealstout.com/2008/12/15/taking-feedback/21 http://www.sonnygill.com/what-makes-a-great-community-managerReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 43 44. Community Management is Important WorkIf youve already done some work as a community manager or doneany advocating for social media inside an organization, you know thatconvincing unfamiliar co-workers that these tools and strategies areimportant can be a big challenge. Sonny Gill wrote a good post titled What21Makes A Great Community Manager, and new community managerScott Drummond left a very insightful comment about this challenge there.Drummond argues that community managers are an important internalforce for openness. Id add that I think CMs are also internal organizational advocates for the art of powerful conversation. I see a large part of my (soon-to-be) role as championing not just THE community, but also championing community as a concept in our own business. I drive excitement about embracing transparency and authentic communications among the development team, the C-level, and all areas of the business. I think its potentially an issue if the only person embracing conversations in your business is the community manager. Chris Brogans excellent post on the scalability of social media and community communications (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the- matter-of-scale/) and the comments on that post demonstrate that for social media to be successful at scale, partners need to be brought on board from within the organization as well as from within the community.The first part of that comment in particular is one of our favorite quotesin this whole guide. We suspect that the best community managers areinterested in more than just a job: they are hoping to change the world.One of the areas where one has a key opportunity to do that is in theworkplace itself.New Approaches Are Needed for a NewWorkplaceIn some ways, though, Drummonds comments above read like a rookiecop talking about joining the force so that he can rescue kittens from trees.With time, its easy to get cynical in this business of community. Socialmedia veteran Heidi Miller has published one of the best podcasts on the 22subject in years. In one blog post she offers a check-list of tips onhow to mess up social media. Its sarcastic of course, but also insightful.Heres a selection of some of our favorite tips from her list.For your more fearful clients who have an inclination to use social medialike its a spambot, a list:ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 44 45. How to frak up social media and guarantee its a waste of your time Treat people in your new social networks as prospects, not friends. Make sure that you constantly bombard them with one-way messages about how great your product is. Be in a hurry to show results. Forget that Connections over time equal trust (--Tara Hunt); insist on showing immediate sales, hits, and click-throughs from your blog, podcast, Twitter, or Facebook page with no concern for building relationships with your friends and participants. Keep it impersonal; sounds like a corporation. Avoid speaking in a human voice; always regret any inconvenience we may have caused you, instead of saying sorry we messed up. People love to interact with stale, sterile impersonal corporations, right? Be the same. Never change. Keep on doing what youre doing. Dont bother to differentiate yourself from your competition; just stick with what you know. Never reach out. Be afraid. Let your fear of loss of control of the conversation cause you to treat social media like traditional media.Thats a great list of ways in which people more familiar with olderways of doing business regularly engage with new online communities.Changing the workplace is much easier said than done. Especially inlarger organizations, middle management can be a big stumbling block toadvancing the use of community tools with the public, internally, and inplaces where public and company communication intersect. 23Karen Monks summarizes an eWeek article on the topic nicely as follows: In short, it suggests they are not comfortable with the tools and cant see how it benefits their day-to-day operation. They need education on not only how to use the tools but also to see the results that they bring to the business in terms of savings in time, re-use of information, and creation of new unique artifacts. It seems they may be a rather crucial cog in the wheel. If prominent and respected managers in a business are seen to be participating, it sends a signal to users that this is accepted and supported by the business.22 http://talkitup.typepad.com/weblog/2008/12/how-to-frak-up-social-media-and-guarantee-its-a-waste-of-your-time.html23 http://www.geekgirl.co.nz/?p=21ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Management page 45 46. Miki Szikszai offers some great advice for tackling this challenge in discussing Monks post. Its similar to advice that many people offer in talking about promoting adoption of social technologies in general, but Szikszai fashions it well to middle managers in particular. I think part of the issue with middle management and Enterprise 2.0 take-up occurs because of the way the conversation starts. I observe that middle management is quite often recommended We need a blog/wiki/RSS, as opposed to We need to share information better with our colleagues to make everyones life easier. The most sustainable way to make this stick is to take a user-centered design approach: - Observe the middle managers, - Understand what their problems are, - Get them to participate in creating solutions. Involve them so that they are part of the solution as opposed to part of the problem. Any competent middle manager will always recognize that there is value is learning new stuff. And your analogy about middle management being the trunk is a really good one to use with them! The downside of this is that it takes a LOT of time and energy. Upside is that you get a sustainable result. A community managers job is never done. After a full day of dealing with the community at large, youre probably going to need to tackle an even more obstinate crowd: the reticent folks on your own companys staff. It may not be necessary to bring everyone along for the ride, but some minimal amount of meaningful participation is essential. Community Management Jobs: Demographics and Pay The Online Community Research Network did a survey last year of24 225 people holding CM positions . A majority were female (55%, vs. male, 45%), The majority (61%) were 31 to 50 years of age. Most had more than 5 years of experience, completed a Bachelors degree, and worked 41 to 50 hours per week. Average salary was $81,000, with a median of $72,500. There were peaks on both the low ($0-$25,000) and high ends (more than $150,000), and then also at $60,000 to $65,000. Women are earning only 91% of what men are earning; women averaged $77,000, and men averaged $85,000. The average annual salary for all participants was almost $81,000. Most were satisfied with their jobs, with an average satisfaction score of 4.2 and a median score of 4 (on a scale of 1-5).ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 46 47. Community Management: Maybe Marketing, Not AdvertisingIs community management marketing? Are theremarketing benefits that can come from it? Whatsthe role of customer engagement in it all?These are the questions we tackle in this sectionof our guide. SECTION HIGHLIGHTS People prefer to be talked with, not too, numbers and anecdotes sayso. Microsoft has done a particularly good job of engaging their most ef-fective users effectively. You need to be consistently present, both physically and online, withyour users. Dont spread yourself too thin on too many social media platforms. If you read one link in this section: Dawn Fosters Communication Issues and Corporate Blogs http://fastwonderblog.com/2009/01/21/ communication-issues-and-corporate-blogs/ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 47 48. There is reason to be cautious when thinking about marketing and1community. Church of the Customer invokes survey data to argue forengagement over advertising in online social networks. Advertising doesnt work on social networks...A survey of500 Americans found that 62% of them prefer direct andpersonal communication with a companys online brand 2 representative [over] ads or promotional materials.Were surprised that the preference for personal communication was thatlow. The point, though, is that most people dont like being marketed toas much as they like being able to communicate with a company. Thatsespecially true with existing customers, as tempting as it may be to keepcommunicating with them in a marketing voice.Gaming community pro Sanya M. Weathers puts it well in a long post ofventing and advice titled Community Management Is, In Fact, Not That3Hard The secret to making friends out of board warriors [critics in forums], and lasting for more than eight months on the front line, is sincerity. If you can fake sincerity, you belong on the publishing side of the business. You cant fake it as a community manager. You have to like the people youre dealing with or youll burn out. You have to BE one of the people youre supporting or youll burn out. (And you need support from the company that employs you or youll burn out publicly, but thats another rant.) I never went to a player or press gathering where I didnt feel like Id come home. If you dont feel that buzz, if you dont see your friends in the people who traveled miles just to talk to you, get out. You dont have what it takes.Those are strong words. While its ideal, and probably essential in the gam-ing industry, for community marketers to be one of us may not be real-istic for all people in all companies. Good solid community skills can becross-applied from one context to another.1http://www.churchofcustomer.com/2008/12/if-the-world-is-a-target.html2http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/consumers-want-direct-interaction-with-brand-reps-online-7192/?utm_campaign=rssfeed&utm_source=mc&utm_medium=textlink3http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org/2007/05/22/community-management-is-in-fact-not-that-hard/ReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 48 49. Fedora Project community manager Max Spevack, for example, does a4great job explaining how to win the trust and respect of community mem-bers with more experience in the field that youre trying to manage thanyou have yourself. (Spevacks wisdom is included in our attached list ofthe best community management podcasts to listen to.) I dont hate marketing. I hate poorly thought-out, knee- jerk, disco-era marketing perpetuated by people who dont understand massively multi-player games. Or the Internet.Oh, and I hate hype-based marketing done without consulting anyone who is actually implementing the features.- Sanya M. WeathersEngaging Your Most Active UsersGaming, open-source projectslike Fedora and other large onlinecommunities present both their ownchallenges and unique possibilities forproblem resolution. Lessons can belearned from large communities thatare applicable anywhere, however.Lawrence Liu shares a great storyabout managing Microsofts SharePoint5forums in the early days there . Lawrence found out that the cost Telligents Lawrence Liuper incident each time a customer (formerly Microsoft). problem was dealt with in the forum was about 90% lower than it was for commercial phone support. Thatsa great number to know in his case, and similar savings can probably befound anywhere where customer support can be provided online. For onething, its much faster to read someones complaints or questions than it isto listen to them on the phone.In order to extend these savings to a greater number of customerinteractions, though, Lawrence Liu knew he needed to scale up the numberof people available to respond to issues and questions. His approach wastwo-part and quite interesting.4http://blogs.sun.com/barton808/entry/fedora_s_max_spevack_chat5 http://communityzenmaster.com/blogs/lliu/archive/2008/11/14/how-to-attain-self-sustainability-in-community-forums.aspxReadWriteWeb Premium Guide to Online Community Managementpage 49 50. To draw from his own community to expand the ranks of those who couldreply to incidents, Liu leveraged the MVP (or Most Valuable Professional)program, which is funded by our Custo