Monday, April 28, 2008

What Does A Community Manager Do?

Happy Monday Morning! There is a great post by Chris Brogan about the characteristics, requirements and expectations of a community manger. Please read it immediately to get a sense of what a successful social community manager both does and how it define and measure success.

Here is a flavor:

Measurements

I’d measure my community manager on the following:

  • Responsiveness to communications (blog comments, emails, twitter messages and forum threads) less than 24 hours max.
  • Number of QUALITY blog posts read and shared via Google Reader.
  • Number of meaningful comments (more than a few words, on topic, pertinent to the space) 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.

Success of the Project

I’d feel our community manager was a success if she accomplished the following through her efforts:

  • Empower the listening ability of our organization to our community’s needs and desires.
  • Build an awareness of our organization through non-marketing efforts, measured by favorable or at least non-negative mentions on other blogs, forums, and in Twitter.
  • Deliver a blog and/or media platform that’s useful to the community at large, and that grows in number of subscribers as well as engaged commenters.

Overall, I believe these efforts would be measured by an increase in attendance at our face-to-face and virtual events, an increase in subscriptions to our newsletter, and a larger blog commenting community. This would be a win to our organization, and would thus be worth the expense of another salaried employee.

Chris has outlined a strong, ROI focused definition of what a company should look for in an internal employee. Read the comments section to learn about how people are objecting- mostly about the issue of measurement.

3 comments:

Chris Brogan said...

My plug for folks to click through and read that post is that the BEST thinking is being done by the community at large in the comments.

Happy WOrld Comment Day! : )

Straight to the Point said...

Thanks for the comment, Chris! You couldn't be any more correct- following the the continuing conversation in the comments section of your post has been extremely valuable for me.

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I'm a newbie here, hope that I enjoy my stay here....

Thanks,

Tom


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