Sue On The Web

The Online Community Manager and the Job Search

I often get asked the best places to look for Community Manager jobs. As this role grows I am seeing more and more jobs posted all over the internet. As yet I am not aware of one main central place where Community Manager jobs are listed. However I will try and give you some ideas of where to start looking.

So in no particular order here are some great places for you to peruse:

1. LinkedIn is a great place for tracking down OCM jobs. I've seen some companies that only list available positions on LinkedIn and no where else. You can also use LinkedIn to search for jobs that are listed elsewhere.

2. Jake Mckee, Chief Strategy Officer at Ant's Eye View, whose background is with online communities and community management, has a great jobs board on his site.

3. Jeremiah Owyang, Web strategist and partner at the Altimeter Group also has a large array of OCM jobs listed on his job board.

4. Forum One Communications, a company that is deeply involved in Social Media and online communities. You can find a list of OCM jobs on their Online Community Report site.

5. The Community Roundtable, a peer network for community managers and social media practitioners, is often contacted by companies looking for community managers. In response to that they have implemented a great idea. If you let them know your skills and experience they can pass along your details to companies who contact them.

6. Search Twitter. Many, many, many people will share jobs they've seen posted elsewhere on Twitter. Run a search using the search function, and you will be surprised by the amount of jobs that you will find. Search phrases such as:

• online community manager,
• web community manager,
• online community management,
• online community moderator,
• online moderator,
• etc, etc.

7. Set-up Google Alerts using the search phrases I've listed above.

8. Last, but by no means list, I am constantly keeping an eye out for OCM jobs and try to list as many as I can on OCMForum. However it is by no means an extensive list. My community manager duties means I do not have as much time as I would like to list all that I see.

These are just a a few things to jump start your job search, but hopefully it will get you on the right path, and will reap the reward of that special Online Community Manager that you have been looking for.

If you know of other OCM job resources that I can add to this list please let me know.

Sorry - A Little Word With Big Meaning

Let's face it things go wrong - online communities have tech issues, a moderator or a Community Manager makes a mistake. It's the nature of the beast. It's how we handle those situations that count. Do we fix them and forget about them? Do we ignore the community's concerns? Do we brush the issue under the carpet? No, we apologize.

As online community managers it's our job to ensure that we create an environment in which members can communicate, and interact with each other. We keep things ticking along - responding to concerns, engaging, enabling and helping. But from time to time things go wrong, and it's important when things go pear-shaped that we step-up, and sort it out.

What sort of things can go wrong? Well for starters site tech issues can be the vein of a community managers life. You know the sort of thing I am referring to I'm sure. The site won't load, or people can't use the chat room or upload pictures ... etc, etc ... the list can be endless, and more often than not it's beyond our control, and yet we are in the direct line of fire. Community members moan, and complain to us because we are on the front lines. We pass along the comments and report issues to the tech team, and then cross our fingers and hope that things will be fixed as soon as possible. In the meantime we try and calm the waters. How do we do this? We pass along as much info to the community as possible. We acknowledge the issue; explain the problem is being dealt with and provide regular updates. We must never keep people in the dark. If they do not know what is going on, or feel that as CM's we are not listening to their concerns, they will feel they their membership is not valued. Whether it be a site technical problem, a complaint a person has about another member's behaviour, or maybe a bone of contention someone has with one of the site rules; whatever the concern we need to respond quickly, and let people know that we are taking it seriously.

Bottom line - we mustn't be afraid to say sorry. We need to acknowledge the problem, get it fixed and then make sure we apologize, otherwise our community is going to get the impression that they are the bottom of our priority list when they should be at the top!

Sorry goes a long way, and our membership will be appreciative that we think enough of them to express it as often as we need to.

A Community Manager Should Never Stop Learning

I truly am fascinated with the interaction of people online, it's one of the reasons I've been a community manager for almost 10 years. The last 6 months or so I have slowly come to the realization that I am good at what I do, and that the community management knowledge that I have accumulated over the years does have worth. I may not be as corporate savvy as some, but is that necessarily a disadvantage? Instead of having my head up in the clouds I have been down in the trenches getting myself dirty, and learning how people tick, but I felt I needed to be better at communicating that knowledge to others. So with that in mind I decided I would take some college classes and dust of some of my brain cells. I figured I've got all this junk going around in my head and I need to learn the tools of the trade to dig it all out.

So why am I waffling on about taking classes and learning new things? Well as we all know communities grow and evolve all the time. New members join, old members leave, the dynamics of the membership change and the site matures and adapts. So all this change means that as a community manager I need to grow with the needs of the community. To be ready for change, to anticipate the needs of the members and to act accordingly

When you've been with your community a long time, and watched it grow in size, its very easy to get stuck in your ways. The "if it's not broken, don't fix it" mentality is hard to break free from, especially if you are afraid that rocking the boat will result in something falling out. But if we don't learn new ways of doing things then the communities that are entrusted into our care will not flourish.

If you don't want to stretch your brain muscles in a classroom then instead learn from other community managers. Find out what works for them, what doesn't. Ask questions of others. Participate in communities for Online Community Managers, read some blogs, read some books. The most important thing is not where, or from whom we learn, but rather that we are open to new ideas and suggestions so that we can grow along with the communities we manage.

Some Great Blogs I Read About Online Community Management

There are some fantastic Online Community Managers out there who are wonderful at sharing information, and experiences, about Online Community Management. Here are some of my favourites:

Connie Bensen.
Is a huge advocate of Community Managers and shares her insight on job descriptions, roles, responsibilities and salaries of CM's. A great blog for anyone in a CM role, looking to enter the role, or for companies looking to hire an Online Community Manager.

Community Spark
Martin Reed has been an Online Community Manager for almost 10 years and has been quoted in many publications and has helped organizations with their community management needs.

Jono Bacon
Online Community Manager for Ubunto and author of "Managing Online Communities"

Community Girl
Angela Connor writes from the front lines about her day-to-day management of a community she manages for a NC news station.

Holly Seddon and Matt Rhodes, from Fresh Networks, blog about many aspects of community management from many different perspectives.

Rachel Happe
Co-founder of The Community Roundtable, a private peer network for community managers and social media practitioners.


This is just a quick list, I've got more I read and will add them soon.

What's in a Name?

I have been monitoring new job postings for Community Managers and noticing that the job descriptions, roles and responsibilities, varies widely, and it made me wonder if many employers are blurring the lines between community management and social media. In many areas these roles do over lap, and I think that's what makes it somewhat confusing. Some roles I've seen advertised are clearly not roles for Online Community Managers, but rather Social Media Managers/Marketers.

So what's in name, should some of these jobs be titled differently? Instead of Community Manager perhaps they should be something like:

Online Media Manager
Social Media Manager
Social Media Community Manager
Brand Evangelist
Brand Community Manager
Brand Advocate
Digital Community Brand Advocate Web Manager

What do you think, do you have any you can add to the list?

Too Much, Too Loud!

I would say approx 70-80% of a community managers time is "behind the scenes" stuff. For example, I always try and connect with as many of our members behind the scenes as much as possible. It's that one-to-one connection that builds relationships and respect, and lets the other person know that you care about their opinions and their experiences.

As we are all discovering, the role of a Community Manger is still changing and evolving. For many it's not just about the managing of our static communities but also reaching out to our "community" elsewhere. I for one, tweet (on behalf of the community I manage) on Twitter in order to pass along useful info, and keep our Twitter follows updated with news from our forum. However, community building is not solely about what you are "seen" doing. Posting and commenting all over the place in public places is all well and good (and of course that's part of community building) but it's not the be all and end all. Connecting with people in private is just as important.

So remember, using social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed, to broadcast your message is fine, but connecting with people is a two-way street. You can't stand on the corner blasting out your message with a megaphone and expect people to stop, stand still, and listen to you.

A recent Tweet on Twitter really summed this up for me when cc_chapman wrote,  "Fact: Social media allows assholes to just be bigger, louder assholes." So take heed, there is no point blowing your trumpet as loud as you can if no one is listening. After a while people will just tune you out!

OCMforum - A forum for Online Community Managers

As the Online Community Manager role grows and evolves, I decided I wanted to create a community where we could reach out and connect with each other. I know there are many LinkedIn and Facebook groups, and some social groups on networks such as Ning, but I have not come across any real discussion forums specifically for Community Managers. The new community is called OCMForm and  I hope that it will become a useful resource tool for all community managers to share experiences, and discuss things, such as our roles and responsibilities.

It's still early days (and as such it will take a little while to build things up), but please visit the site, dig in, start posting your thoughts and help the forum grow.

Community Manager Gigs

I haven't posted any new jobs for a while so are a couple of the most recent ones I've come across.

Online Community Manager - The BluePrint - London, UK The BluePrinst PR client is looking to recruit an experienced community manager to help tell their clients’ stories. Someone who understands the crucial role of relationships in the digital economy the same way they do. Someone who can identify where the communities their clients want to reach gather online, and how to communicate with them. Someone who can listen, as well as talk.

Online Community Manager - Blackstone Technology Group - Redwood City, CA, USA The Online Community Manager will augment and broaden the scope of Client*s communities and blog to better serve customers, prospects, partners, press and more. You will also be expected to help broaden the coverage by bringing new ideas to manage communities, maintain relationships with industry bloggers, developers* network and customers. You will be responsible for much of the day-to-day logistical operations and executions within the scope of the Client communities, user groups, blog, and various social media marketing.

Community Manager - Online Games Industry - Santa Clara Are you an avid online gamer and/or social networker and fairly tech savvy with online tools? Are you looking for a fun, interesting career opportunity to join a successful, award winning start up? The community manager will wear a variety of hats, ranging from managing forums, to developing promotions, rewards programs and partner co-marketing activities to helping grow and engage our gamer and virtual world audience in a new form of social commerce that we are pioneering, www.playspan.com.

CmtyChat

If you are a Twitter user, and an Online Community Manager, you don't want to miss out on Community Chat. Hosted by CmtyChat it takes place every Friday at 1pm ET. It's a fast paced, bite size way of interacting with your peers. Learning and sharing information, and reading about different experiences. We ask questions of each other, and give each other tips. It's a really great way of finding out how other community managers deal with issues in their community, and what works and what doesn't work.

The best way to follow the chat is to go through TweetChat and login in using your Twitter account details, then enter #cmtychat and you are ready to go. See you on Friday!

A Request to the Tech Dept, Please Keep Community Managers In The Loop!

Note to all techies that oversee online communities. Please, please, please do not down-grade, up-grade, back-up, back-down, change colours, fonts, add, takeaway or generally fiddle with any settings before first checking with, and sounding out, the Community Manager. Then once you've done that, and only once you've done that, you (or the community manager) should announce to the membership that at a certain day/time the site will be down for maintenance. That way we are all on the same page and whilst people may miss their community fix at least they were forewarned this would happen and could go and make a cup of tea, or read a book or something.

We always have to remember people are very loyal and territorial where their community is concerned, and they don't like surprises like this. Not to mention the complete and utter plonker it makes the Community Manager look. A CM is supposed to have their finger on the pulse, not be the last in line to discover these things.

Thanks for reading my little rant. I feel much better now I've got that off my chest.