The Community Manager: Defining and Implementing

The Community Manager is a new type of position that ties a company to its community of consumers and fans. Human resources should work with Marketing to develop this new job function and define its responsibilities. The role lies at the intersection of the community and the company, sometimes sitting in between the proverbial rock and a hard place. In other words, the Community Manager has the vital function of listening to the community and bringing messages back to the company—with the objective that the company will note and deal with the issues brought to light in these messages as well as responding to and engaging with the community according to the company’s strategic objectives.

To carry out their responsibilities effectively, community managers must possess or acquire certain competencies, including good interpersonal skills, technological proficiency, and business acumen. First, the person involved in this role must be willing—and preferably enjoy—meeting, discussing, and creating relationships with strangers online. To do so, they must be able to identify who they are communicating with and be able to respond appropriately, taking care not to appear condescending or patronizing. Since people online come from all walks of life and educational backgrounds, the Community Manager must be able to moderate language to engage at all levels, while adhering to company values and principles.

Second, the Community Manager must embrace technology. We have already mentioned Dell’s active engagement with social media. Dell has two key social media job functions: Social Media Listening & Engagement Operations Sr. Manager and VP Social Media & Communities. More than 5,000 employees have been trained in social media and actively participate in building communities. These roles have built processes and training practices that require more than implementing new technologies. While social media tools are becoming increasingly easy and intuitive to use, there are still a number of challenges that tools alone cannot solve. For one, Community Managers must not be allergic to listening to, evaluating, and responding to mentions! Not all Marketing employees want to interact with the general public and so might not be suitable for this role. Furthermore, there are always certain technical elements involved in posting to a blog, creating and maintaining profiles on social networks, and particularly in creating, posting, and embedding photographs and video and audio podcasts. Before hiring your Community Manager, make sure he or she has a following, has built communities, and has references from public social media communities.

Community management really involves the use of online, desktop, and mobile platforms, tools, and applications, provided by the social networks themselves or by third parties, for the ongoing management of social media communications and relationships. Your Community Manager must be as involved with delivering training for employees as in monitoring your Twitter stream in MentionMap from Asterisq.com (http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap/#user-mentionmap), as shown in Figure 7-1, or using other tools. The proper and secure use of these tools requires a modicum of technical proficiency that can be easily learned, but that requires an important natural curiosity on the Community Manager’s part.

Figure 7-1 MentionMap Twitter visualization dashboard

The Community Manager should work with IT to identify and recommend required applications for the job, including tools for monitoring social media mentions and activity, for internal collaboration and reporting, and for external communications across platforms. Depending on the need, such tools may be available for free or on a subscription basis; they may be available as cloud-based services or for self-hosting; and they may be built using open-source or proprietary technologies. Each of these configurations or combinations will pose additional social media security considerations and training.

For example, when using self-hosted systems, like a Drupal community website or a WordPress blog, you need to check regularly for the latest updates to the core and to install plug-ins and modules. These updates may not be immediately apparent when opening the dashboard for daily use, however, and users must be trained to check specific screens regularly on the dashboard. You can subscribe to mailing lists maintained by the community and containing news and updates regarding security vulnerabilities and patches. On cloud-base systems, the service provider maintains software security centrally, such as with Twitter and Facebook. Because of the vast populations of people using these platforms, security is about maintaining the integrity of passwords and observing safe practices, rather than about installing security patches. It is also advisable to devise backup systems in all cases to preserve a history of published materials, interactions, and activity on these networks. These security and backup practices are specific to each tool and platform that the Community Manager is required to use. These tools and platforms are continually evolving with new features, even as the Community Manager’s tech skills and familiarity with the tools increase naturally through regular use and practice.

Finally, the Community Manager must be aware of the organization’s business objectives when developing and communicating with the community. Even though friendly relationships should be built over time and the communication may be genial, business imperatives must be kept in mind to better focus the efforts and resources allocated to social media, according to predetermined objectives and security priorities.

The Community Manager has different responsibilities than the average employee. While many companies let all employees use social media—and most without proper training—the actually job responsibilities differ. In the “Training” section, we will walk through the various roles to see how each requires different functional applications to use social media tools on a day-to-day basis. First, however, we look at the Community Manager role and Human Resource challenges in small, medium, and large businesses.

Small Companies’ Human Resource Challenges

In small companies, the Community Manager may be just one person juggling multiple responsibilities at work. This person may be the Human Resource director and the Community Manager. Or it could be the Marketing director and Community Manager. Social media policies may be virtually nonexistent, except for what has been applied through common sense and through personal learning. Small businesses often turn to continuing education classes and workshops about social media, online or at local colleges and universities. Often, the local chapters of marketing and PR associations, such as the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), American Marketing Association (AMA), the SMC Social Media Club (SMC), and the Chamber of Commerce, offer monthly meetups and workshops to provide guidance on social media best practices, ethics, and case studies. Also, these trade associations may connect small businesses with social media practitioners for further training and consulting. But the small business still needs a written social media policy.

Social media security might be delegated to the providers of applications and social platforms, such as relying on Facebook security or Google to protect your GoogleDocs and Gmail. But many companies that rely heavily on these social media platforms for business have the ability to do self-hosting, which can be a more secure practice, for instance, for a company blog.

In general, secure social media practices for small business involve:

Hosting applications on the company’s hosting provider whenever possible and affordable; in many cases, using cloud-based applications may make more financial sense.

Creating secure passwords on an individual basis.

Distributing passwords securely among company principals for communications continuity in case of emergencies and unplanned absences.

Identifying people in the community who act as influencers, whether positively or negatively.

Keeping up to date on security flaws as well as on innovations highlighted by leading technical and social media blogs, including TechCrunch.com and Mashable.com. Each individual application you use will have security issues that you need to follow up on and be aware of when things happen.

Researching each cloud platform being used and determining what security restrictions can be put in place in a hosted application. For example, every manager should know how to access and modify the Facebook Privacy settings, as shown in Figure 7-2. By the time this book comes out, we are sure these will have changed—yet again.

Figure 7-2 Facebook Privacy Settings

NOTE

Follow Bob Lord on Twitter for Twitter security-specific information (http://twitter.com/boblord).

Medium-Sized Companies’ Human Resource Challenges

At medium-sized companies, the Community Manger may be a handful of people across company functions, collaborating with each other through the use of internal tools such as wikis, social media monitoring applications, and group publishing applications, including CoTweet for Twitter. In a medium-sized company, Human Resources is usually a stand-alone department that can work with Marketing and IT on social media policy problems.

Sometimes, Community Managers are identified from the larger online community of customers and fans. Some people are naturally inclined and very familiar with their favorite brands and would jump at the opportunity to participate in social media on behalf of these brands whether they are remunerated or not. Otherwise, social media interactions can be delegated to employees who have been identified as having natural community management skills, as described earlier in this chapter, and are excited about the opportunity.

In addition to the tactics taken by a small business, a medium business may want to adhere to some additional security principles:

Hosting applications on company servers to the extent possible. Some applications are only available on the cloud.

Limiting access to applications to authorized Community Managers and assigning secure passwords on an individual basis and changing passwords periodically.

Holding regular weekly or biweekly meetings to discuss the challenges and opportunities found online.

Keeping administrative-level passwords for high-level access when necessary.

Identifying key influencers, customers, and clients in the community, through a social media customer relationship system (Social CRM) that may be added on to a company’s existing CRM system.

Communicating through internal enterprise-wide collaboration tools, including a wiki, such as SocialText.com, or instant messaging and social networking applications, such as Yammer.com.

Keeping up to date on security patches for open-source and proprietary technologies, such as WordPress, Drupal, and other types of self-hosted websites. If you host your own WordPress blog, you will have to keep it updated in much the same way you have to keep your Windows operating system updated with patches. Figure 7-3 shows an example of having to patch your WordPress application manually.

Figure 7-3 WordPress manual security updates

Keeping up to date on security flaws as well as on innovations highlighted by leading technical and social media blogs, including TechCrunch.com and Mashable.com.

Large Companies’ Human Resource Challenges

At larger organizations, the role of Community Manager may actually evolve into a dedicated team of up to a few dozen people to up to several thousand brand ambassadors using different levels of social media administration privileges, depending on the nature of the industry, with dedicated technical resources and, in some instances, dedicated areas and hardware. In a large company, Community Managers are generally recruited specifically for the job and work in their own hierarchy, even as they interface with all parts of the company. The heads of the community management team wield increasing influence in the company and may, in some cases, rise to the C-level, on a par with the CMO, CTO, CLO, and others. Community management is becoming a truly cross-functional occupation within more companies, as they learn to deal with issues ranging from information security policies, monitoring and reporting, marketing campaign management, sales promotions, customer (dis)satisfaction, legal issues, product development ideas and opportunities, competitive tracking, and shareholder and investor relations. As we discussed in Chapter 6, Human Resources can push out a complete social media policy and utilize the Community Manager to manage that policy and get corporate buy-in.

In some cases, large teams of people are assigned with community management roles in addition to their current job responsibilities. For example, at Microsoft and at Intel, identified engineers are trained and encouraged to create and maintain their own blogs in which they identify themselves as employees and engage their respective followers on more technical issues. Although they do not share company confidential information and are not official spokespeople for companywide issues, they help to humanize the organization and to move the conversation about product ideas and innovations forward.

In leading-edge social media management, dedicated teams are allocated specific areas and hardware within company headquarters to carry out their daily responsibilities, which includes managing or coordinating social media efforts across company divisions in other parts of the world. A leading example is Gatorade’s “Mission Control” room (Figure 7-4)—an area filled with flat-screen monitors where Community Managers observe what people are saying about the brand across all social media sites and where they engage with consumers.

Figure 7-4 Gatorade’s Mission Control for social media

At Gatorade, a team of four full-time staffers works at the center in collaboration with the company’s PR and Marketing agencies. Mentions of Gatorade, competitors, and related topics, such as “sports” and “hydration,” are monitored on Facebook, Twitter, and around the Web on blogs and other sites, as shown in Figure 7-5. The Mission Control operation has engaged in thousands of one-on-one conversations with people online, helping the brand to shape the conversation around sports performance, rather than just hydration.

Figure 7-5 Dashboard featuring mentions of Gatorade on Twitter

Security issues are multiplied with each new area of participation by the community management team, and best practices for large organizations, in addition to those listed in the previous sections, include:

Developing applications and mashups when appropriate, oftentimes applying for and using the Application Programming Interface (APIs) provided by social media platforms and mobile platforms.

Creating and hosting a secure social network for the community based on the company’s products and services. For example, the Nike Plus Running Community or the ad-hoc physician communities organized by pharmaceutical companies. Often, these communities involve mobile and/or geolocation features.

Creating and hosting limited marketing micro-sites to support campaigns for specific promotions or product launches.

Assigning limited administrative roles to Community Managers so they may better moderate and act as “superusers” with extended powers.

Keeping “user 1” administrative-level passwords for high-level access when necessary.

Communicating through internal enterprise-wide collaboration tools, including a wiki, such as SocialText.com, or instant messaging and social networking applications, such as Yammer.com. Sometimes, communication occurs through VoIP applications, in particular, the ever-growing Skype.

Holding daily operational meetings to support company initiatives and marketing and communications objectives.

Creating relationships with open-source communities and contributing new developments, modules, and plug-ins. Open-source communities maintain scores on reputation and are quick to respond with help to other community members known to have a history of helpful participation and contribution.

As you can see, the role of Human Resources, Marketing, and IT has changed when it comes to managing social media. These roles’ key responsibilities are evolving to bridge the gaps between the Marketing, Information Technology, Human Resources, and Legal departments. The main functions we see today across these departments include:

Brand evangelist Promotes company in all social media platforms, utilizing the appropriate technologies and processes to get the message across.

Researcher Determines where the industry is going and finds the next great social media platforms.

Trainer Educates employees and customers when necessary, follows legal regulations and best practices, and ensures employee compliance to requirements

System administrator Manages technology in the social media space, defines requirements, implements, and monitors.

Content developer Manages company and community content about the company.

Strategist Develops new campaigns, decides on technologies to use, manages resources, and guides company restrictions on social media usage.

Solution provider Responds to company problems in social media discussions and provides answers.

Moderator Brings together different roles and smooths out conversations.

Social networkers Brings people into the company community.

Feedback expert Takes into account what the customers are saying and relays the challenges back to the correct departments within the company.

Policy manager Develops, promotes, and monitors social media policies and security policies, determines and manages policy violations, and responds quickly to threats due to social media usage.

Because of their daily work with social media platforms, tools, and applications, Community managers have additional security responsibilities, procedures to follow and maintain, and regular training to keep current. Their security responsibility bridges the human and technology elements. On the human side, they must adhere to commonsense interpersonal rules they would observe offline, while keeping the company’s business and communications objectives and values in mind. On the technology side, they are responsible for keeping up to date with safe and secure practices related to the tools they are using and to distill these safe practices back to the organization in close coordination with the IT and Human Resources departments.