Social Business Series

2011 Community Manager Insights

We Love Community Managers!

Jeremiah Owyang Altimeter Group

Community Managers are the backbone of

customer service in today’s modern online market-

place. In fact, these new media professionals must

apply traditional client sensibilities to new mediums,

but in real time, 24/7, often connecting to a global

audience. Unlike customer support interactions of

the past, these new professionals must reach to

customers where they are— rather than wait for an

incoming support telephone call—and constantly be

connecting with customers.

To be successful in the coming periods, Community

Managers must prepare for scale. As more

customers adopt social technologies, Community

Managers must invest in scalable programs such

as systems, processes, and understand how to let

the crowd help resolve issues on their behalf. To

be successful, they should measure true business

metrics reduce support costs and increase in

positive word of mouth about the company and

its products.

As the Community Manager role continues to

grow into a key piece of the customer experience

lifecycle, remember to approach this space with

humility and patience to teach internal stakeholders

the value of the role.

A salute to this important member of the workforce...

So... What is a Community Manager?

Wikipedia Definition

Com•mu•ni•ty Man•ag•er The online Community Manager role is a growing and

developing profession. People in this position are

working to build, grow and manage communities around

a brand or cause.

The role of Community Manager has quickly evolved from a new age social ambassador,

a supporting player, to being conductor of the orchestra. Today more than ever before

companies are relying on individual customer engagement to cement brand loyalty

and leverage word of mouth marketing, The Community Manager has the daunting but

essential responsibility of keeping the various resources of the organization in sync and

playing to the same sheet music, ensuring that customer needs are met, concerns are

addressed, and their product and service ideas and suggestions are brought into the

process in order to shorten product lifecycles and better map to needs. If customer

service is the new marketing then the Community Manager is the new CMO.

Jeremiah Owyang and our friends at Altimeter Group have declared the fourth Monday

of every January “Community Manager Appreciation Day.” In support of this year’s event,

we surveyed some of the world’s best community managers to better understand their

successes, challenges, and what they see on the horizon for 2011. We picked the best

answers and included them in this report. Our hope is that you’ll laugh a little, learn a lot,

and give a pat on the back to the community manager(s) at your company.

You Can Call it George. The Community Manager is a jack of all trades and master of many. While the

desire to place them in a box on your org chart may satisfy the needs of Human

Resources, it will almost never be accurate. To simply say that community

management is part of Support, Marketing, or R&D does not capture the

value they bring to the organization. The only way to accurately reflect their

contribution would be to understand that they work at the very edge of your

organization, the place where the line between company and customer is

blurriest and their job is to understand, manage and stimulate the collective

passions of your customers in a way that creates value for both company and

customer. You can call it customer support, social marketing or you can

even call it George, but if you want to accurately reflect it, then you’d

call it what it is, a revolution.

In which internal department does the community management function reside?

*28% of participants listed multiple functions

Platform ManagementUpgrades and Improvements

Software Know-How

Feature Selection

Project ManagementPriority & ScheduleManagement Documentation

Product ManagementIncorporation of ExperienceProduct Selection

Customer ManagementOutreachEventsIncentivesIssue Management

Professional DevelopmentNetworkingIdentification of Best PracticesAttend Trade Events

Brand ManagementBrand SupportSituation ManagementCapture Brand Feedback

Advertising & MarketingListen/Join ConversationMarketing AnalysisImpact ReportingAd Rotation

Staff DevelopmentRecruitingTeam BuildingStaff Training

Business PlanningBudgetingGoal DefinitionBusiness Alignment

Content ManagementContent PlanResearch & Insight

Community ManagementControl/ManagementModeration & Rule EnforcementElicit ParticipationRewards & Incentives

The Online Community Manager“A Jack of All Trades”

“Community management: The ‘essential’ capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts” - Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet - http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe

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The Five Objectives of a Community Manager

1. Brand awareness

Philipp Postrehovsky Mogo Money Community Manager

2. Customer retention

4. Internal culture building

3. Customer acquisition

5. Customer service

+Erin Lariviere Tungle.me Community Manager

When you open the door to feedback, you get it in droves. The challenge is

that you can’t make everyone happy. You may have 20 customers request-

ing a feature and 20 more customers requesting a completely contradic-

tory feature. It’s difficult to say no - you want to give everyone what they

ask for. For Tungle, it’s important that we respond respectfully, try to be as

transparent in our decision making as possible and let our customers know

that we are listening, even at times when the answer we give isn’t what they

want to hear.

The Answer is “No”... SometimesErin Lariviere of Tungle.me learned that one of the hardest things about hearing customer

feedback is not being able to say “yes” to every request. “We sincerely appreciate

your suggestion; however...”

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Juggling Brands

Angie Mcauliffe P&G Community Manager

Brands have feelings too! Or rather, brands can evoke feelings. Sometimes getting a brand’s

unique personality across to consumers is a Community Manager’s biggest challenge.

My responsibility spans across three separate P&G brands with three distinct online “voices.” I have to make sure that I’m engaging con-sumers in a way that accurately rep-resents the individual brand.

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Your community wants to hear from you... Rather than answer each question and concern one at

a time, Get Satisfaction allows companies to share answers with a large audience.

Answer Once & Only Once

We’ve learned to leverage our Customer Community

to address large-scale issues that may generate a lot

of discussion. It helps us contain the conversation

in one area, so the whole group can see AMC’s

responses, as opposed to having to communicate in

a 1:1 manner on common questions.

Ryan NoonanAMC Theaters Community Manager

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Why worry yourself with tasks like gathering reports when Get Satisfaction can

automatically do it for you. We love making life easier for our clients.

Automated real-time dashboards and reports that

allow community managers to “set it and forget it”

are the future of community. It’s great to be notified

automatically in real-time about hot topics, awesome

new contributors and trolls (and of course scan

manually as well, which we will always have to do).

Real-Time, Right-Now

Roland Tanglao Mozilla Community Manager

+Noel Paterson Real.com Community Manager

Being a good Community Manager may take hard work, but Get Satisfaction makes it easier to

communicate with customers and hear their praise.

Attention: Mr.Paterson

I had a praise topic with ‘Attention:

Mr. Paterson’ in it after we improved

performance on one of our games.

The user had complained before and

wanted to make sure I got credit for

fixing it. ;)

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Why look to anyone other than your customers for answers? A different perspective on things

always shines a clarifying light.

Communication is Key

Our customer community helps our product team identify

necessary fixes and shape the product roadmap. Having

a place for customers to easily share feedback on features

and report bugs is helpful, and the ability to easily

aggregate and prioritize that data based on popularity

makes it more effective than other methods such as

focus groups or surveys.

David OknerNitroPDF Community Manager

Road Map

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Customers Rule!Daniel Kaplan of Mojang predicts the future of Social and Community Management in 2011.

What does he see? Customers will rule.

In the age of social media, customers have a direct line to

companies. This means companies are held accountable for

their actions. With communities, customers have even more

power because they have power in numbers. As customers

gain more power, customer-company transparency will be-

come more and more important.

Daniel KaplanMojang Community Manager

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Social media tools are great but let’s face it, it can be difficult to keep track of them all.

That’s where we come in.

I believe there will be further integration of social media tools

in community management. Every company balances a

difficult act of meeting community members on their own

terms, while attempting to foster a common location for the

discussion to reside. For SCVNGR, we see requests through Get

Satisfaction, email, Twitter and Facebook. Continuing to sync

these avenues of communication can help quell some of the

redundant requests.

Nick HerboldSCVNGR Community Manager

It’s a Circus Out There

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The internet helps us do all sorts of things. In partnership with online communities, it can solve

even the biggest challenge. In the case of NerdOrleans.org, the internet helped save a city.

Online Communities Save a City!

Working on NerdOrleans.org. I asked the internet for help

to rebuild houses in New Orleans, and the internet came

through – with funds, volunteers, even a stop in from the

Zappos’ Delivering Happiness bus and book donations from

O’Reilly. It was all promoted via online communities and was

a success because of them.

Ginevra KirklandW+K Community Manager

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A CRM’s ability to play nice with others can make all the difference.

See the Bigger Picture

More cross-platform integration. I am beginning to ex-

pect that my CRM will integrate with my support plat-

form which should integrate with my customer commu-

nity, which should integrate with our social networks, etc

etc. The more complete a picture we can get of our

customers, the better able we are to understand

their ongoing needs.

Jamie KiteIzea Community Manager

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Developing good relationships with your customers is essential. Your customers may not tell

you about the crush they have on you, but they will tell their friends.

With our customer community, we aim to improve the

customer experience and become closer to them by

creating more ways to talk with us. This fulfills the PR and

Support functions because it helps customers easily solve

and report problems. We hope these happy customers

go on to become product advocates as a result of their

positive experience.

We Love Satisfied Customers

Kenji Onozawa Telenav Community Manager

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Community Managers help guide online discussions and answer consumer questions. Because of

their dedication to online communities, consumers are getting more information than ever before.

We Aim to Help

In 2011, social communities in general

will take on more traditional sup-

port roles in addition to simple mar-

keting and brand awareness. We hope

a good portion of our support issues

will at least undergo triage through

the community.

Paul TracyJusticeTrax Community Manager

Resources will always be an issue.

We have to encourage our employ-

ees to monitor and participate in

our customer community so our

customers find value in their

participation.

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Community Managers do an excellent job of answering questions and helping their customers,

but now even customers are taking on the job and helping each other out!

Fred SoneyaKiddicare Community Manager

Since Community Management is part of IT&Support, we

use it primarily to support our customer base. The com-

munity format is efficient because it prevents reoccurring

questions and allows customers to help each other. In

the future, we plan to promote more product discussions in

our community to help our product team figure out what our

customers want.

They Aim to Help

Erin Lariviere

Philipp Postrehovsky

Angie Mcauliffe

Ryan Noonan

Roland Tanglao

Noel Paterson

David Okner

Daniel Kaplan

Ginevra Kirkland

Nick Herbold

Jamie Kite

Kenji Onozawa

Fred Soneya

Paul Tracy

Thanks to our Contributors!