Excellent point. It is important to have community management report into a group or a person with a passion for community who also knows how to really engage with the audience in the community. Being able to build on existing conversations is important, and I want to make sure that people are taking the time to think about where the community management function should live. Every situation is different, and each company needs to find the reporting structure that works for their individual situation.

I think you are better off searching in your organization for where the best customer engagements and conversations are already occurring and let those folks take the lead, rather than trying to pick the “correct” group to run with it. I’ve found that looking at where current (and successful) customer advocacy initiatives reside is usually a good starting place.

Scott Dodds
http://www.lithium.com

You bring up a great point about having dotted lines to the other functional groups and the CEO to serve as the conduit of information. The community manager has to be very closely aligned with all of the other related groups in order to be effective within the community.

Great post, and it addresses an issue that I think we all ponder as the idea of CM has emerged. To me, as a person who came up through the public relations career track, I see a lot of parallels. When I refer to public relations, I mean it in the broad definition as the function that relates with external publics (customers, media, investors, social responsibility, etc.) and not the PR hacks that try to get attention.

From that perspective and in my experience, the CM (and PR manager in the past) tends to fall into the Marketing silo but the most successful companies treat it fluidly and have dotted lines to most functional groups as well as directly to the CEO. In this way, the CM serves as a conduit of information between the company and the online community and adds value internally and externally. While the tools and techniques have changed, I think the enlightened company emphasizes listening and that extends way beyond any single department.

You are absolutely right when you say that “There is no single solution to the idea of community.” The key to building communities is to spend enough time upfront to really think about what you want to accomplish. The reporting structure and other decisions should come out of honest thought about the right solution for your particular situation.

Dave,

I think in most cases you are right. In past positions, I’ve reported to the CEO, CTO, and CMO as community manager, and it really does help to report to senior management. This gets harder in a company the size of Intel (80,000+ employees), for example, where it’s hard to make the case for any position to report to senior management.

It seems that too often it is merely thrown in the “marketing bucket.” I think that this is fundamentally because the concept of community is still somewhat misunderstood. If we see it merely as “a way to get customers,” then marketing makes the most sense with the boxes we’ve previously built to throw things into. However, if we see it more appropriately as “a way to interact with people,” then we have to figure out who those people are and how they best approach interaction. This means that serious thought goes into understanding the mission.

Nice post, Dawn.