At my company we have shared the responsibility of an internal community manager between 1 IT person and 1 senior level group leader. The problems we are experiencing is that neither of the two "managers" of the community have the time to do clean-up work. The content that is posted is very valuable but poorly organized. We have committee chairpersons who are tasked with managing/editing/re-tagging/etc. the content that falls in their respective committees, but as with any task that isn't your primary responsibility, that oversight is not really happening. The result is a lot of content that is already getting hard to sort through and therefore it's not being utilized efficiently.

Not to use an already tired cliche - but I liken it to having a party without a host.

Without a community manager, I have no doubt that you'll be able to build and launch something... But won't realize the potential success that is oh so close.

You need a person to focus on the tone... Focus on the overall well being of the community.. They need to ensure the environment is a warm, welcoming and intuitive place where your audience feels comfortable participating. This is especially key if you're trying to evolve E2.0 behaviors in an organization not already comfortable with social computing.

I don't have any war stories to share, I'm afraid. We've had an internal community manager since day one. IMO, it's among the key ingredients to a successful deployment - perhaps the most important.

Peter, I feel your pain. You need someone to focus on the overall experience. Someone must serve as advocate for the community at large and help drive the overarching strategy... And time must be allocated as such (I understand first hand that making this business case can be difficult). However, without it, you may find yourself with a disjointed community experience and a bad taste for the evolution of 2.0 in general - which can be far more devastating that a single failed community.

One mans POV. Happy to provide further context if helpful.

Len Devanna

I have a comment on this topic, but since it will steer the discussion toward a different direction I started a related topic about Internal Community Managers here: http://www.jivesoftware.com/clearstep/thread/1088. Requesting your feedback there.  Thanks.