Comments on: Community Managers: How much money should they make?

By: Sue John

Sue John — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:51:33 +0000

CM Salaries can also be affected by geographic location and whether on-site or remote. I’ve seen a couple of remote positions that whilst having similar responsibilities to an on-site employee the salary range was lower.

I agree with Dawn in that the role still seems to be shifting and evolving and that too would account for the differences in the two survey’s.

By: Dawn

Dawn — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:33:28 +0000

jrep,

I absolutely agree. While a few people have had community manager titles for a long time, the job role has been changing quite a bit in the past couple of years to the point of being something of a fad. It seems like everyone calls themselves a community manager without a lot of definition about what it really means and what kind of community management they do. I suspect that it will take a couple of years before we start to get more clarity for the role and what it really means to be a community manager vs. moderator vs. relationship managers, etc. Unfortunately, it takes some time before people start to agree on a common set of well defined job titles for any new or changing industry.

By: jrep

jrep — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:31:25 +0000

Actually, upon closer inspection, I think the two surveys are pretty similar–if you ignore the two hockey sticks in the first one. Both are kinda-sorta bell-ish, with a mode somewhere in the 40k-60k range. You already guessed at why the hockey sticks are present in the one survey (and my guesses are much the same); if we assume Kommein only surveyed “people whose job title is community manager,” that would implicitly eliminate the volunteers (left-end stick), and possibly even the celebrities (right-end).

By: jrep

jrep — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:24:28 +0000

Maybe we need a clearer grasp of what a “Community Manager” is, maybe that would make the surveys make more sense? You reach for something like that, when you talk about “tactical work or something more strategic,” but that doesn’t feel like it’s reached a “survey demographicable” state Not sure I have the answer, either, but some thoughts expressed as distinctions:

Some community managers are “community site managers,” focused on managing the mechanics of the site (website management, membership, announcements, moderation). Others are “community dynamics managers,” focused on managing the relationships among the community members.

Some community managers represent a sponsoring company to the community, manage a site structured as an arm of the support team. Others represent the community itself, both within the community and back to a sponsoring company.

Many (probably most), of course, do some mix of the above, but might these distinctions, or something like them, reveal better result clustering?