The enterprise community manager position is sometimes termed a “jack of all trades” role. I know — I’ve said it myself. But I think we’re starting to take it a bit too far.
Over the past few weeks I have participated in a suite of webinars and talks about online communities and their growing role in functional areas such as customer care. I have listened to, and debated with, countless community management specialists about community management best practices. I’ve heard a lot about keeping business strategy and community management aligned. There’s no question this is a critical success factor for social business — but the issue is whether or not this responsibility is part of the charter for the online community manager role.
Pity the poor community manager who has been handed a whole range of new and complex tasks, responsibilities, and accountability measures related to managing and monitoring business strategy — in addition to the normal work of running a community! It won’t work. Placing responsibility for business strategy on the community manager will ruin many a promising online community, with lasting negative consequences for the business, the brand and, most of all, community members and customers. Online strategy and online community management are emerging as two distinct roles in the rapidly evolving world of online communities.
Let’s look at the role of online community strategy. It starts at the highest level, based on the organization’s mission and vision, and then proceeds to the business goals and business processes for the community itself. It is a line-of-business function led by an executive stakeholder responsible for strategic alignment based on the goals, metrics, measures and ROI.
This means the leadership from customer care, the office of strategy management or even product development — depending on the mission of the online community — have the charter to ensure that the online community is tracking in support of their organization’s strategy.
The second role is that of online community management. The crucial task for this role is delivering value to the community participants – the members. Full stop. If the community serves member needs and builds high-value customer/supplier/prospect relationships, it can achieve the strategic goals established by the business organization.
Adding business strategy leadership to the community manager’s role renders them ineffective, unable to succeed at either task. Keep in mind the community manager is the voice of the members back into the organization, and is charged with serving member needs. Asking the community manager to view her community through the lenses of both the business and the members is a prescription for blurred insights, mixed messages and reduced trust on both sides. Community managers can and should take into account the firm’s business goals in the programs and engagement models they develop and produce. But determination of which best fit with the overall strategy is best left to those in charge of business leadership.
The reasons for this separation of roles is primarily around skill sets. A seasoned community manager typically grew up through the ranks of communication specialties, and has the unique and invaluable ability to facilitate ideas, grow thought leadership content and listen well. What they do, and the ways they have honed their methodologies and insights, constitute hard-to-find skills based on extensive hands-on experience. In contrast, the skilled strategist has a keen appreciation for the nuances of goal-setting, planning, and measuring results, involving technical, financial and organizational design skills.
Just as HR executives typically aren’t tapped to run adjacent lines of business like finance, the community manager may not be best at driving the business of community. While there should be a dotted line between the business and the community operations, asking online community managers to manage functions that are out of their realm of expertise jeopardizes both the community and the business. The corollary is that for your online community to succeed and deliver business returns, the roles of online community strategy and community management should be treated with the business respect they deserve.
Really compelling argument here Vanessa.
Every single community manager that I’ve spoken to (100′s) has been through some sort of “burnout” phase before. I’d venture that a large cause of this is most of the time, they’re responsible for both community strategy and community management.
It’s not necessarily a matter of having the right skills. I think there are many people who are capable of doing both of these jobs really well, just not at the same time. They need to be focused on one or the other.
So then the question is for startups/early stage companies who are still debating whether or not they even need to focus on community and so hiring 2 people for community may not be an option. How can one person manage both realms until they’re able to hire another person?
David
Director of Community, Zaarly
I’m glad you took the time to write this, Vanessa.
But I feel like your article misses something entirely integral to community management.
Being part of community management should absolutely be a strategy role, and a CM, if they are worth their weight, should be weighing in and possibly even creating strategy for a company. When you work in media, as a CM does, strategy is entirely wrapped up in execution. Media IS strategy. Entire new business models can be drafted just out of the unique interaction that CMs have with the community. Think about consumers know and won’t tell marketing because they feel that the marketing pushed to them dilutes their identity as customers. Customers are entirely more individual and personally related to a brand than any typical marketing gives them credit for being. Who knows this well? Community managers. If your community manager is given a role in strategy for the business, you are handing them the keys the kingdom, and the keys to developing a healthier bottom line. In fact, we should be praising whoever wants to make CM part of strategy because they finally GET IT. We’ve been fighting for this the whole time. Community management is not about taking care of the community. It’s about so much more, and the unique skill set of the community manager is the absolutely most perfect thing that a CEO would be looking for — access to what is really going on in the hearts and minds of consumers. This stuff is pretty much invisible behind numbers and data.
As a CM for The Re-Wired Group, I”ve helped them shape and change their business as innovation consultants for Fortune 500 brands, by giving them the information I glean from social, the community, and the creation of content that flows in a cycle from brand to consumer and back to brand.
I think of community management as an advertisement that listens, offers feedback and then creates a new business within a business. That’s profit. That’s brand integrity. That’s honesty and real participation with a community.
I really appreciate this article Vanessa.
David – to your question, I think when a company starts out, very few people should be working on ‘strategy’, they should be working towards the problem being solved by the product or working with users.
In other words, what community strategizing can you do if you don’t have a community?
Granted, one should start documenting numbers and process to get general sense of what works.
I think there’s a natural inflection point when the initial community-type hire determines what tasks s/he’d like to spend time on and which tasks the company should have the next related hire cover.
David,
Thanks for your comments! I agree that it is not always a skills issue and that Moderator burnout is definitely a factor. I think in larger organizations, the roles should definitely be distributed, but to your point, in smaller companies this is not possible. One could assert that if an organization doesn’t have the capacity to manage the outcomes of a vibrant online community both strategically and tactically, that should serve as a warning that perhaps they are not ready to have one. Just as an organization wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) launch a new product or service line without the capabilities, an under-staffed community may do more harm than good.
But in the event of a fledgeling community that needs to ramp up revenues or returns before they can justify another hire, the role of a strong executive sponsor who can help guide the operational demands can often bridge the gap. According to a now infamous report from the Standish Group http://www.velocitystorm.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/chaos.pdf, strong executive sponsorship is a key predictor to new project success rate.
I’m not sure I agree here. Certainly don’t expect a community manager to also do strategy in zero time, it does take time and that can’t be forgotten. If your community is too big then they will need help.
And yes, you need someone who can think high-level about business value. But why can’t that person also be a community manager? As you grow and have more work the top person will start to do less day-to-day community management and more strategy but I think staying connected to and a part of the community is an essential part of the strategy role. How can you build the strategy without having a feel for the living, breathing thing that is the community?
Yes, it hard to find someone who’s excellent at day-to-day community management and good at strategy. Just like it’s hard to find a good engineer or a good product manager. It doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing or that community managers simply can’t do strategy.
-Megan Berry
@meganberry
Founder, LiftFive
Megan and Laura,
I think you both hit the nail on the head with your observations and insights. Too often these days, CMs are not offered the opportunity to grow with the community and hire additional staff to scale community operations. Instead, they are being heaped with additional work, in my opinion an entirely different job, on top of their existing role. Our industry is new and there is a lot of confusion about what work belongs where. So, community managers get heaped with additional responsibility, sometimes outside of their desire or comfort level and expected to perform two and sometimes three jobs simultaneously~ This is the problem.
IMHO:
Either the entire organization sees their members/users/customers *as* a community OR each individual department sees a different strategy to mine the most value out of the member/customer/user resource pool.
The ultimate opportunity of the community professional, is to help the organization gain the former perspective.
Depending on the size of the organization, we have to use different strategies AND tactics to model this behavior and attitude, and tell an alternate story about the role of the community in business.
But, at the end of the day, the only way community “management” scales is when all parts of the organization are able to participate in the tactics.
This is a great and essential conversation and the issue is not black and white; dependent on size of organization and staffing models. The situation I described above pertains mainly to *enterprise* communities. Here is an example:
Take a large software company whose board sets the FY 2012 goals to include improving quality of products. This goal cascades to a line of business who then focuses on reducing defects for a certain costly module.
One way to do so is surface issues early in the release cycle so that fixes can be applied before it impacts customer satisfaction at large.
The LOB and the community manager work together to think about how to use the online community to learn about defects sooner. The Community Manager suggests developing a new feature on the community to gather early data and enable defect reporting. The CM then does formative research with the community members to determine whether this feature would be welcomed by customers and learns that it is desirable.
Now the work needs to be done to design the new (costly) feature, someone needs to look at the community financials to see if sponsor revenue could be reallocated to cover the cost of the new feature without impacting the run rate of the community, and the outcomes of the new feature need to be reported to the LOB to help them better track defects. Someone also needs to determine whether or not the development of the new feature should be built in house or using an outsourced vendor.
Who’s job is this? Can the community manager continue to run their sizable community operations while also fulfilling the needs of this requirement? And should they take on this role?
Vanessa,
Fully agree that approaching a community manager as a jack-of-all trades able to plug any hole in the organisation is not an approach which will benefit the community or the business. As long as we’re still having discussions like this it’s clear that unhelpful ambiguity still remains in some organizations about the general functionality and scope of the CM role.
Luke Winter
Community Manager
OneDesk
I found this article and all the comments to be extremely interesting and insightful. I’m still pretty new to community management and working on social media for business, and I don’t believe I’ve run into many articles discussing this topic of the separation of the two jobs. Thanks for writing it!