Has the relevance of the community manager already come and gone? Just four years ago, it would be difficult to name a company that employed someone to grow and nurture their communities. Today, it would be equally as difficult to name a company that doesn’t.
As you read this, hundreds of community managers are taking to their TweetDecks and HootSuites to manage social media outreach and engagement. So, is community management really dead? Perhaps not altogether, but the narrow definition of it, which has been used in the past four years, most definitely is.
What is community management? (Some people are still asking )
Community management is the act of taking a group of people and turning them into an asset that can be used to meet brand goals. It is a combination of content creation, social media management, public relations, marketing, event management, customer service and more. The exact combination, to further confuse the definition, is unique to each brand.
Brands with Killer Communities
To clarify the sometimes complex definition of community management, here are three brands that are absolutely killing it.
1. HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the surprisingly few brands that know community management goes beyond setting up Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. They have spent countless hours preparing webinars, producing blog content, sending tweets, posting to Facebook, creating videos, crafting slideshows and more. They’ve went beyond the standard influencer identification and engagement, and built an empire.
Of course, where do all of these communities lead back to? The HubSpot website, where they push traffic to purchase their all-in-one inbound marketing software. They produce quality content, build communities based on their expertise in the area and then close the circle by achieving the goal of increased sales.
2. Texts From Last Night
Texts From Last Night (TFLN) has two separate goals: increase ad clicks and increase merchandise purchases. Not only do they sell t-shirts with user-generated content on them (bonus points for selling someone else’s hilarity), but they sell a book as well. On both their Twitter and Facebook pages, you will find an advertisement for the book and a link back to the website, where you can purchase t-shirts.
Like HubSpot, they escape social media tunnel vision, which is commonly associated with community management. Social media refers traffic to the website and helps increase sales in both departments, but the real community is on the website itself. Managing the replies, comments and blog posts round out community management for the TFLN team.
3. Damn You Autocorrect
Just like TFLN, Damn You Autocorrect (DYAC) relies on user-generated content to thrive. Both brands depend on the community on their actual website more than the communities on their social media channels. Without their website communities, where would the content come from? Both serve as an example of brands that focus on internal community management, which exists separately of the social media world.
DYAC sells t-shirts, earns ad revenue, promotes an app and sells a book. The app presents a whole other community that requires management. Hundreds of comments per month provide an additional community management element as well. Once again, social media is a vehicle of community management instead of the destination.
A New Direction
While those three examples prove that community management is not dead, they indicate a clear shift. Community management can no longer be defined as merely monitoring keywords on Twitter or commenting on popular blogs, as community-oriented as that sounds. Between social efficiency, transforming business models and internal communities, community management is headed in a whole new direction.
From spending 24/7 monitoring Twitter feeds and Facebook conversations to leveraging a community as a business asset, 2011 saw a major community management transition. Whether the brands still chained to their TweetDecks and HootSuites would like to admit it or not, community management is more about achieving real-world business objectives than fostering superficial conversations on social media.
Social Efficiency
The concept of social media being “always on” is not new. However, the idea of spending hours upon hours surfing social media channels is outdated, if not dead. With time-saving social media tools, the efficiency of managing social media is improving daily. What was once an 8 hour job has been reduced to a 45 minute job (save a few unexpected hiccups).
So, what does a community manager do after those 45 minutes are up?
Internal Communities
With the advent of social efficiency, we are seeing a clear shift towards internal communities. TFLN and DYAC are obvious examples of how owned communities (communities on web properties you own) are becoming a focal point. Community management is no longer synonymous with social media management.
In fact, some highly successful community managers don’t even know their way around social media – gasp!
Transforming Business Models
All of these changes come back to the idea that business models are transforming. There is no clear-cut definition of community management because each brand has its own unique goals. Not surprisingly, talking to people about the weather on Twitter is not a big concern for CEOs. Community management has become more about putting a community to work, about having it labor towards the same goals as the brand.
In 2012, we will see brands finally reach the other side of the Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn tunnel.
Renee Warren
Originally posted at ReneeWarren.com