Tag Archives: community

How to Get a Community Manager Job

July 4, 2008 Dawn 7 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a similar post, but from the opposite side: Hiring a Community Manager. This week, I’ve received emails from several people asking about how they can become an online community manager. I thought it would be a good idea to write this post for people who want to be hired into their first community manager job.

Start by reading the Hiring a Community Manager post. It has many links to blogs about online community management, the role of the community manager, community research, job boards focused on community manager positions, and much more. It will also give you insight into the thinking that employers might be doing when selecting a community manager.

There are a few things that you can do to build your expertise in community management to improve your chances of getting hired. They fall into 3 main areas.

Participate. You can build a lot of expertise by participating in existing online communities as a user. Find something that you are passionate about (restaurant reviews, happy hours, guitars, underwater basket weaving, whatever), and find a community of people with similar passions. Participate in a couple of these communities, and post regularly. Use the experience as a member to see what works well and what doesn’t, and think about how you would make the community better if you were responsible for it.
Share Knowledge. Take what you have learned and share it with other people. Start a blog that is focused on community management, and share what you are learning. Do research on other communities and blog about what you find. If you want to expand out past writing, you could do video / audio podcasts or other various methods to communicate about what you have learned. When you begin interviewing for community manager jobs, you will have a nice base of information to share with prospective employers, and the blog should have a prominent place on your resume.
Volunteer. Help a local non profit organization build an online community and be the community manager for that new community. This could be an online community of volunteers or an online community related to the purpose of the organization. Nothing demonstrates your abilities as a community manager better than a working example that prospective employees can see in action.

I’ve focused on what I think are the 3 most important things you can do to build your community management skills. Jake McKee has a couple of good posts on this topic as well with a few more ideas, including sample courses for college students to take:

I know that quite a few community managers read this blog. What do you think? Is there something more important than these three things for someone wanting to break into the field? What would you suggest?

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

community

Hiring a Community Manager

June 14, 2008 Dawn

Hiring a community manager can be tricky for companies, especially ones filling this position for the first time. Last week, someone told me they wanted to hire a community manager and asked me if I could put together a few resources to help get them started. I thought it would be more useful if I turned my email to him into a blog post so others could benefit from it.

The community manager job itself can be a bit vague, like most leadership positions. The role changes from hour to hour depending on what happens in the community, and the person you hire will play a big part in shaping how your company engages with the outside world. It is important to start by carefully defining your goals for the community along with what you want the new community manager to accomplish.

I’ve written a few blog posts on the topic of community managers including information on what community managers do, the skills required to manage communities, and the various roles that fall under the broad umbrella of community manager:

Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester) and Jake McKee (Community Consultant) also have quite a bit of info about community manager roles & hiring:

The community research being done by ForumOne can also be a very valuable resource for anyone involved in communities. There are also a number of Facebook groups focused on community management, but this one seems to be the most active.

There are also a couple of job boards that focus on hiring community managers and related jobs, the Community Guy job board and the Web Strategy board. These should give you a feel for job descriptions, and they might also be good places to post your job description.

The big question is “how much should I expect to pay this person?” In my experience, salary ranges for community managers vary widely. I’ve seen numbers ranging from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. Community managers for technical communities (developers, etc.) make more than end user, social communities. Salary also changes significantly depending on whether the role is really more low-end, tactical moderation or something more strategic, like building a new community or revitalizing a troubled community site. Job experience, location and how well known the person is can also make a big difference in the salary range.

For more information, you can read blog posts from some great community bloggers. Mukund Mohan has a good list on his Best Engaging Communities site.

I would be curious if any of you have other tips? If so, please drop them here in the comments!

community

Jeska Dzwigalski on Second Life at Community 2.0

May 14, 2008 Dawn

Here are my notes from Jeska’s presentation at community 2.0. In other words, these are my interpretations of her words (not my words), and she talks pretty fast, so I might have some typos or other errors.

To successfully build your community:

know your audience
create an engaging experience
iterate, learn & iterate some more
realize the value of the feature set & its potential
remember, behind every avatar is a real person
commit to the long term

Success Stories in Second Life:

Training / simulation (Harvard, Stanford)
Non-profits – American Cancer Society does a relay for life in second life that raises real money with interesting places for the walk (underwater, etc.)
Branding. Pontiac bought a bunch of islands and they let people build cars along with contests, races, customization of the car. Vodafone did a water cooler where people can solve puzzles over the virtual water cool with the focus on interacting with other people, not a focus on pushing their brand, but people see it.

SL is like RL and not

Behavior – engaged, but not constrained (less inhibited and behaviors are different)
Interaction – All objects can be scripted. Low / No material costs

community

Kellie Parker at Community 2.0

May 13, 2008 Dawn

Here are my notes from Kellie Parker’s presentation at community 2.0. In other words, these are my interpretations of her words (not my words). She said a lot more, too, but I wasn’t able to take notes throughout the entire session. It is also possible that I might have some typos or have other errors in my notes.

Personal relationships are what communities are all about.

Choose your platform wisely – it can enhance or harm your efforts. Find the one that is right for you that helps you accomplish your goals for the community with the tools that you need to support those efforts. Start small, but build for future growth. Continue to re-evaluate the platform as your community grows.

Best practices:

Define goals
Know how to measure them
Be patient. community grows slowly
Require registration
Interact with members
Have written community standards
Address negative comments about your brand. Don’t delete them.

Communities are a group effort. Community managers can lead the effort, but everyone needs to participate.

community

David Weinberger on Community

May 13, 2008 Dawn

Here are my notes from David Weinberger’s presentation at community 2.0. In other words, these are my interpretations of his words (not my words), and he talks pretty fast, so I might have some typos or other errors.

Community is a set of people who care about each other more than they have to. It starts with conversation, and out of that a community can (but may not) emerge. Conversation is not just people talking; conversations are:

voluntary
open ended (you don’t know what you will get out of it)
in your own voice

Marketing violates all of these definitions of conversations. Marketing is broadcasting one to many, but the broadcast era is ending (not going away, but decreasing in importance). We no longer spend as much time as we used to sitting and passively watching TV – we now split this time on the internet where we can also interact with and contribute to the content. We can add our own videos reactiving to other videos on YouTube. We are doing the broadcasters job, but we are doing it for each other and sending them around to share with our friends. Additionally, we contribute our own perspectives through the comments. We invent new ways of talking to each other.

DNA is not information. DNA is represented through diagrams with labels to show DNA as information, which doesn’t really look anything like real DNA. DNA isn’t information – it’s made out of other stuff in our bodies. Information is a representation, not the actual reality. DNA and brain patterns can be modeled in the computer, but the model is not the same as consciousness (Kurzweil) A model is just a symbol, not an actual brain or piece of DNA.

We want to provide people with information. We don’t necessarily read the newspaper for information – entertainment, etc. At conferences, we go through a lot of information, but people are really here for the cocktails and discussions that happen at the cocktail reception.

The view of a person on the computer is more like a database: name, id number, etc. People in the 50’s were afraid that we were reducing people to numbers within a database. Library of congress catalogs a ton of information. Shel Israel tweets thousands of times a day. Flickr a million photos a day; Facebook 8 million photos a day. *Control doesn’t scale* It doesn’t want to scale, and the internet only succeeded because there was no centralized control. We don’t have to worry about managing every piece of content.

We have abundance: of the good & the bad. We don’t give up on email because of the spam. We manage the abundance of bad (filters, etc.) It’s harder to manage the good stuff and find the right things to read. So much good content, but not enough time in the day to read it. Now we digitize everything and need to come up with new principles of organization. It used to be a goal to get everything in one spot organized in one way (card catalogs, etc.) This doesn’t work online. We look fr things in a variety of ways and brows using different information. Amazon does a pretty good job of organizing information for the online world using a lot of logic to determine which books are statistically more likely to be the right result for you based on titles, text, tags, reviews, lists, search within book, etc. They also give us unique ways to browse the information. Any site that lets you tag puts the users in control of the organization of the site. We (the users) decide the order and organization.

Library of congress put a bunch of photos that they were having issues categorizing along with the information that they had. They allowed users to add to tags to help categorize. Every tag becomes a bookshelf. Additionally, we can put boxes around portions to add notes and comments, and we will fill up all of the available space with information given the freedom to do so. People will also get creative when they run into limitations. For example, when they maxed out the 75 tag limit, people started added tags into the comments.

Knowledge is becoming conversation. Newspapers have a limitation of the physical which provides authority (only one front page with editors who find the “best” stuff for the front page). On Digg, the front page is outsourced to the users. Our inbox is also a front page where we share information and recommendations with our friends and contacts.

Twitter is also becoming a front page. It’s not about people posting what they had for breakfast – you can unsubscribe from them. Others are doing really interesting things. There is intimacy in details, and we get all kinds of interesting information from other people on Twitter.

Communities are smarter than any of the individual participants.

Communities, like Facebook, provide all of the context that a static database of the 50s lacks. We overflow the boundaries. We make connections which lead to conversations which lead to community. Without control we overflow boundaries and create abundance of information. We do it together at our best when we are in communities.

community

Community Building: Good, Bad and Ugly – The Video

May 9, 2008 Dawn

I finally found a video of at least part of our Web 2.0 Expo session about Community Building: Good, Bad and Ugly. A big thank you to Jim Goings for uploading it. It looks like they caught the first 30 minutes of the session on video.

Panel members included: Dawn Foster (Jive Software), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Bob Duffy (Intel), Kellie Parker (PC World & Macworld).

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

barcampportland

BarCampPortland 2008 Recap aka Geeks, Bubble tea, and Werewolf

May 6, 2008 Dawn

The days and weeks leading up to BarCamp can be busy and stressful for the organizers as we work through all of the last minute arrangements, but it is so worth it! I had an amazing time at BarCampPortland, and the majority of the feedback has been positive. I won’t go into the gory details about everything that worked / didn’t work, since you can view the full postmortem document online; however, I will cover a few of my impressions of the event.

I love the BarCamp format

I’ve attended a number of BarCamps, and I am finding that I enjoy attending BarCamps more than traditional conferences, and I think I learn more at BarCamps, too. The people who attend BarCamps are smart and engaged. These are the people giving up a weekend to geek out with others over various technologies, not the corporate types who only attend conferences during working hours. We had people attending from as far away as Chicago, Washington D.C., and Alaska. I had amazing conversations, talked to a bunch of very interesting people, and learned about new ideas and new ways of doing things.

Online Communities

I held a community management roundtable session again this year at BarCamp to a packed room. I’ve done a few of these roundtable discussions where I kick off the conversation and let the group take it in different directions while I act as moderator for the group and contribute actively along with the other participants. I’ve done this at Corvallis and Austin BarCamps, but it never works as well as it does here in Portland. In other places, I’ve had to drag the discussion along or manage people who dominate the conversation while contributing little. In Portland, these just work, and I learn as much from the process as the other participants. I have no idea why it works so well here, maybe we are just more community-oriented than some other locations, but I’m glad that the session went so well. If you want to learn more about the topics discussed, you can view the notes from the session on the Drupal site.

WordCamp

We held a mini WordCamp along with BarCamp on Sunday, and there were more great sessions that I wished I could have attended. I learned a lot about WordPress theming, including how to write your own theme from scratch. I doubt that I’ll try it anytime soon, but it did give me a much better understanding about exactly how themes are constructed in WordPress. Aaron Hockley also led a really good discussion about the underlying infrastructure under WordPress.

Painter’s tape is your friend

Painter’s tape makes a great schedule board and can be used to hang really heavy banners without hurting the walls.

Unique Portland Flair

Here are a few things that make our BarCamp very “Portland”:

We have Bubble Tea! For the second year in a row, we’ve had bubble tea made to order at BarCampPortland. A big thank you to Six Apart & David Recordon for making it possible.
Werewolf games provided us with hours of amusement in the evenings led by the Portland Werewolf group (yes, we meet up to play monthly here in Portland!) We even had a Chicago attendee introduce us to a new variant that proved to be really interesting and challenging!
Twitter was a main attraction during the event. Portland has a very active Twitter population, and most people had a Twitter username on their badge. We used Twitter to make announcements, follow up on sessions, and drive most of the communications during the event.
We had lots of other entertainment including a wii station, War Games, and more.

More Information

As always, Rick Turoczy has done a great job on Silicon Florist of rounding up the coverage for the event. You can get links to pictures, session notes, and other blog posts from the Silicon Florist BarCamp Portland: The Weekend that was post.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

A huge thank you to the entire organizing team, all of the volunteers, the always helpful Cubespace staff, the attendees and the sponsors who made this event possible and successful. These events do not happen unless people are willing to pitch in and help where it is needed. People were helpful and patient as we recruited from random passers by to help with various tasks.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

web 2.0 expo

Community: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly at Web 2.0 Expo

April 23, 2008 Dawn

I really enjoyed my panel this morning at Web 2.0 Expo with Jeremiah Owyang, Bob Duffy, and Kellie Parker. Here are a few of the things we talked about (including a correction to one of the answers that I gave during the panel) 🙂

How do you know that a company is ready to embrace a community?

A few things I would look for:

Are the key people at the company willing to invest the resources, like time and money, into building, maintaining, and growing the community over time?
Are key executives at the company encouraging or fighting the creation of a community?
Do the key people already actively participate in community activities? Do they already blog?

If you have any doubts, a good way to test whether the company is ready is to start with some baby steps: get the key people blogging and participating in existing conversations in other communities. If they are willing to devote the time and energy to some small community activities, you can start to build from there into more complex, full blown community efforts

What are some good ways to kick-start your community?

Getting that initial base of community members can be challenging and how you approach it depends on the type of community.

For communities around a product or service offered by a company, you can tap your existing customer base. Start with some of those customers or users who are most passionate about your products. They will be the biggest cheerleaders for you and can help you get other people involved in the community. These evangelists can be a huge help while building and growing your community.

For social communities or other communities where you don’t have an existing customer base to tap, you’ll want to reach out to a few potential members early in the process. The best people to approach are those that tend to quickly embrace new technologies and are influential among the group of people you are trying to reach.

Regardless of the type of community, you’ll still need to do additional outreach using various marketing campaigns. For communities, I would put a heavy focus on social media outreach through blogs, twitter, facebook, or whatever other social media is appropriate for your community to talk about the benefits of joining your community. You can also offer any other incentives appropriate to your community: T-shirts, drawings, discounts, etc. as you build your initial base of members.

Just One Key Takeaway for communities:

Be flexible in everything from community design and evolution of the community to the day to day activities.
Communities are ultimately about the people, and people aren’t always predicable. You may find that the structure and design of the community isn’t working for most people, and you’ll need to be flexible to embrace evolution of the community. You will need to be flexible with how you spend your time. I never know when I’m going to spend the morning cleaning up after spammers or answering burning questions instead of completing the items currently on my task list.

Managing Internal Communities: A correction

Near the end of my panel, Dan McCall asked a really good question about how you approach community management in an internal community. My answer was something along the lines of this: “You might need a community manager to get it kicked off, but the role would probably go away fairly quickly once you got it set up.” After the panel, Jake Kuramoto pointed out (nicely) that I was completely wrong for most companies, and I agree with him.

My answer was colored by the fact that almost all of my friends are geeks and that I have been working in startups for the past couple of years. In startups filled with people who are passionate about software where participation in communities comes completely naturally. Well, the idea of an internal community with no community manager would work great in my little insular, tech-centric world. I forget that in other companies, participating in a community might not be so natural.

For tech startups, I stand by my answer; however, for the rest of the world, I’m now revising my answer to Dan’s question. In most companies you will need a community manager for internal communities. The community manager will need to continue to encourage people to participate and help people navigate the technology as it evolves. New employees will likely need help getting involved and understanding how to engage in the community. In some companies, the community manager will also need to carefully monitor metrics and impact in order to continue to justify the time and expense of managing and maintaining the community.

I would love to hear your input on any of these ideas in the comments.

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