I also think a good community manager needs to be a good moderator. I have seen so many communities where the CM rarely, if ever, gets involved in the day-to-day discussions. You would think this should go without saying, and to most seasoned CMs it does, but to companies with little experience in the online world, it often doesn’t. You can learn a lot just from reading user feedback, but unless they have a visible person to contact with issues, a lot will go unmentioned and unresolved. That’s why I always favor promoting community moderators up to the community manager role. That type of real experience immersed in the community is what really helps make an awesome community manager. You can learn the business stuff, but there is no replacement for actually being in touch with your users and their needs.

The basic idea is that you have to look outward to join a conversation and bring people into your community. Too much attention is paid to monitoring mentions of your own brand, when you should be joining people in the larger community outside your brand. A community isn’t something you manage, it is a wide range of people you reach out to.

My biggest question is… can a companies entire market be considered
a community and therefore, the VP of Marketing or the VP of Support
*is* the community manager… in bigger organizations I think not…
in smaller ones yes. Also thinking about when companies move from a
company with a community to a community-based company… then where
do the roles fall. Not too many companies in that camp yet but a few
are emerging – IBM & SAP on the large end and many smaller one in the SMB area.

Roger, Stuart, Lawrence – thanks for stopping by and adding your perspective. Stewardship is a great word for it but also one of those things that you know when you see it but difficult to put universal description of what that means.

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