July 19th, 2007
Seth Godin’s Job #1: Community Management
by Joshua Porter | 
11 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/651
It’s not everyday that Seth Godin writes something that has anything to do with social web apps, so his post today got me really excited. In Jobs of the future, #1: Online Community Organizer he writes:
“What if you want to hire someone to build an online community? Somebody to create and maintain a virtual world in which all the players in an industry feel like they need to be part of it? Like being the head of a big trade association, but without the bureaucracy and tedium…
It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications. They have to be able to balance huge amounts of inbound correspondence without making people feel left out, and they have to be able to walk the fine line between rejecting trolls and alienating the good guys.
Since there’s no rule book, it would help to be willing to try new things, to be self-starting and obsessed with measurement as well.
If you were great at this, I’d imagine you’d never ever have trouble finding good work.
I included “Not hiring a Community Manager” in my Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them. It is one of the first conversations I have with anybody thinking about building an online community…who is going to manage it…and are they a kickass people person?
So, needless to say, I think Seth is completely right on this one. 
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Comments
1. Bryan Eisenberg 1:19pm, Thu 19th, 2007
Josh,
I did an interview with Betsy Weber of Techsmith who is their customer evangelist. You can find part 1 of the interview here.
2. Brad Garland 2:42pm, Thu 19th, 2007
Couldn’t agree more. My thinking about this though got me thinking on how a community manager works. Seth stated about getting people invited to this new service or that which kind of came off to me as a spammer of sorts. Not to downgrade the position at all b/c I feel it is very important.
3. Adam Audette 2:58pm, Thu 19th, 2007
It’s a position just starting to take up momentum, and no doubt will explode in the coming months / years. My company (not linked here) started in the community development space a long time back, but it didn’t gain traction until Web apps took off. Old days it was all about remarketing, email lists, forums, and blogs. Now those are givens and it’s about online social networks, and many big companies are starting to put resources there.
As the web evolves people want more dynamic and sophisticated ways to interact, to find information. Companies able to solve consumer problems with social media will be at the forefront of the new wave, imho.
4. Dale Cruse 8:59pm, Thu 19th, 2007
Funny, I was having this EXACT conversation with two guys from a startup just this evening!
5. Uno de Waal 6:50am, Fri 20th, 2007
I’m starting a new position on the 1st of August in a similar if not exact position.
6. Jeremy Fuksa: Creative Generalist 11:12am, Fri 20th, 2007
It’s certainly a career shift that I had been dreaming of myself over the past few weeks, and it’s nice to see Seth validate its possibility.
7. Henrik 4:09pm, Fri 20th, 2007
The last 6 months or so, my job has been to develop a social network. This niche-network will go out of a private beta phase next week, and we’ve already got about 1700 members. And I can tell you, there’s a lot of different people out there. I’m currently in the “network manager” position, if you’d want to call it that.
It’s not a dream job, that’s for sure. But it’s the best job I’ve ever had! I have never learned more about human beings than I have the last four weeks. The humidity you might encounter from a troll when confronting him is a rather shocking experience.
8. Oddpodz 1:39pm, Tue 24th, 2007
We read this post over at sethgodin.com, too, but I’m glad I found the commentary and discussion over here.
This is one of the most challenging, but interesting jobs I have ever had (community manager). In order to get the word out at a grassroots level, it draws upon my creativity, my personality, my strategy skills and even lessons from anthropology 101. It also requires lots of on and offline networking and relationship building – you can’t just sit behind your computer. Even in Web 2.0, the face to face interaction is important. And, finding ways that we can be helpful to others is key.
It has been extremely rewarding to watch Oddpodz grow by reaching out to individuals and organizations that are aligned with our community and telling our story. I should correct myself here. We’re actually more than a community, we’re building a nation – a global nation for creatives. And, our members are citizens.
We’re pretty young, but it has been such fun to see it evolve and to meet so many interesting people. Much of my time is spent interacting with our citizens and listening to their suggestions. I’ve even had the occasional encounter with a rude, cranky person which makes me call upon another skill…dipolmacy.
Thanks for the post, glad I found your blog.
9. pepelicious 2:59pm, Tue 24th, 2007
You might also want to add that a great community manager is able to weigh the needs of the community against the needs of the business. They usually end up playing a very important role in determining what features get attention and what don’t. They not only are an evangelist to the community for the company, but they also evangelize back to the company on behalf of the community. It’s actually kind of a crap position to be in.