Community management is hard to pin down. I find myself constantly trying to answer the question “So what is it you actually do?”. I think a better question would be “so what don’t you do?”.
Being a community manager is like having a multiple personality disorder.
Every day I turn up at work I am preparing myself to be 20 or 30 different people. Basically, my job involves running multiple accounts on multiple social platforms for multiple clients each with their own tone of voice and objectives. I have to communicate with each of my clients daily to discuss what offers or deals they are running that need to be promoted, decide which social channels are appropriate for each and deliver requests from the customers to the correct people within the company.
“So you just throw up a few tweets?”
No. If you are just throwing up a few tweets, you are doing it wrong. Sure, announce offers and company accomplishments but this is just the beginning. If you are going to simply push out information about the company you may as well have a print ad, and we all know where print is headed…
I have to engage in the communities that I watch over. Social media in a nutshell is a massive conversation.
It never stops, it constantly evolves and changes direction. My job is to direct and control (to a degree) that conversation. This isn’t as easy as it may seem. You want to encourage and delight your audience whilst at the same time stick to the company’s objectives and not lose the tone of voice appropriate to the company. It is very easy to get too chatty or inappropriate if you, like most humans, have just the one personality.
“So you just chat to people on Facebook?”
No. I can’t just hang around on Facebook talking to people I don’t know under the name of someone else’s company. I have to become the company. Half of my time as a community manager is spent reading. Researching the company’s industry and how they operate as a business is the most important and time consuming part of how I can effectively talk and relate to their customers. It’s not just their industry I have to research either. Tomorrow, the new Facebook could be born and everyone could quit Facebook and move elsewhere. Unlikely yes, but possible, sorry MySpace. I have to keep up to date every day with what is going on in social media, be it a new app, social network, or even an internet meme that I could cleverly twist and use on one of my accounts.
“Ok so talking and reading? Anyone can do that can’t they?”
No. Well ok, most people can talk and read, but not how I do it. To be a successful community manager you must talk for 8+ hours a day, in 20+ different voices, whilst reading 50+ blogs, responding to 100+ tweets, posts and comments, and communicating with each client if needed. However this is just the basics. Carry on like this and you will never see an improvement in your marketing. Community managers must be creative, keep on their toes, come up with new ideas, work out ways to promote things using the tools they have. This is not building a website, or filming a TV ad. This is real time marketing. It doesn’t stop. If I stop talking, my clients social accounts will become stagnant and eventually die.
So what is Community Management? It’s in the title. It’s the management of online communities. How you do that is the complicated part.