Community Manager Role and Responsibilities
Created on: Apr 25, 2008 12:55 PM by Barry Tallis - Last Modified: Jul 16, 2008 7:00 AM by Barry Tallis
Develop strategy for the launch and growth of the community
Monitor community and facilitate discussions
Engage with the community through a series of online and offline events
Provide real-time alerts and monthly reports to key internal stakeholders
Coordinate, publish, and follow up on content as it serves the needs of the community members
Identify and develop relationships with influencers and key community members
Evangelize and train internal employees on the value of the online community, including executive management, marketing, sales, and IT
Have an interest in the technology, and a real interest in people
Responsive to the needs of the community and the needs of the business, and facilitate any misalignment of the two
Invite participation by setting the tone, expectations, and rules of engagement for the community
Comfortable writing and engaging online
Gloria Shaw
says:
In a big company (20.000 employees) I believe this role should be held by a team, not only one person. Do you agree? How big should the team be? We are planning our on line community and there are discussions on this point and I would like to hear the opinion of someone who already has experience on this.
Thanks for your help!
Andrew Easton
says:
thanks for the post this helps clarify our thinking on the community manager role. I have one question, how do you
think multiple languages influence the community manager role or social media team structure ?
Jamie Pappas
says:
Hello,
I am the enterprise community manager for our enterprise community offering, EMC|ONE. We have about 35,000 global employees at EMC.
I have one social media specialist on my team, who assists me with all aspects of managing the EMC|ONE community. Beyond us, we use a distributed model for community management whereby any group interested in starting a targeted community on EMC|ONE has a team of 3-5 community managers for their specific area that share responsibility for engaging folks in their community, keeping it active and vibrant and responding to questions, as needed. We try to employ a “train the trainer” type approach by sharing the responsibility across the community with our additional designated community managers. Currently, this extended team is well over 400 individuals.
Gloria Shaw
says:
Hi Andrew,
Hi Andrew, I believe that for multiple languages the community manager should speak all of them or have someone that does. Not only speak the language, but understand the culture of the people involved. I'm not sure how it should be in external communities but when trying to build an on line collaboration network inside a company understanding the people involved, in my opinion, is crucial. This is the only way to understand the participation or the lack of it and make actions to promote it. Do you agree?
Gloria Shaw
says:
Hi Jamie,
Thanks your information was very helpful. What kind of responsibilities do you assume and which do you delegate to the extended team?
Thank you very much!
Jamie Pappas
says:
Hi,
My typical day consists of being actively engaged in EMC|ONE in a variety of ways, including community management, design, and strategy for evolution of our community. I am responsible for actively engaging the EMC|ONE community, communicating news and events regarding the community, receiving and responding to feedback from the community, developing FAQs and tutorials for end users and community managers, and best practices for making the most of the whole experience. I am always actively engaged with a variety of groups at EMC looking to become more active in the community, as well as end users just looking for guidance on where and how to start.
The extended team of targeted community-specific managers essentially handles these things on a micro-level for their individual spaces, answering questions and concerns on their specific focus area, as well as setting the tone and any additional requests/guidelines for their individual spaces. They are the first line of contact for their communities, and I am the first line of contact for the overall site. Each one of them knows (and does) reach out to me when in need of further guidance, best practices, etc.
Cheers,
Jamie
Andrew Easton
says:
Jamie and G thanks for the info,
Im still looking for those implications(cost, effort, complexities etc) that are introduced when you accept that your employee community platform will have 1,2,3,4... languages. Our company(50k employees) has a global footprint but our businesses have products and services tailored for their local country/market. If we decide from the outset to allow the employee community platform to have English, Spanish but we then decide to include (Chinese, Thai, Danish ...) im assuming we need community managers who speak the language, our MI reporting would need to report at a local community level then at a global level(not sure how complex this is to do, what the cost implication, does self regulation of the entire site become more complex - degrees of... ) etc...
Jamie - I assume you only have English at EMC ?
G-Shaw - I agree with Jamie and your comments about distributed structure for community management and this is what we will be doing..
Jamie Pappas
says:
Hi Andrew,
We allow all languages that the platform supports to be used on our internal community (EMC|ONE), but we do have "country champions" that are involved in those discussions, which typically (although not mandated) happen within their country-centric communities. They are not a part of the "official" team funded for the effort, but they do volunteer to keep an eye on things. Currently, we have folks colloaborating on documents, discussing and blogging in Chinese, Japanese, Russian and German that I have seen.
We felt that it would increase adoption and the feeling of a global EMC organization to allow users to communicate in English or their native language, whichever they were more comfortable using. By far, the predominant language used on EMC|ONE is English - I'd say about 98% of the content on there.
Cheers,
Jamie
Gloria Shaw
says:
Jamie,
Thank you verry much for your help!! We have this structure for the administration of the intranet and the sites administrators. And we are still deciding if the team administratng the community and the intranet should be the same or not.
Thanks a lot!! 
Gloria
Sounds just like my job decription! I also report on the stats to management on a weekly basis (using internal stats and Google Analytics) and deal with PPC/AdWords.
Not done so much of the offline events yet either.