Differentiating Between Social Media and Community Management

by Rachel Happe on March 17, 2010

As someone who works with social media managers and community managers, it seems the line between the two types of positions is not terribly clear – and maybe doesn’t need to be – but I think it would be helpful to distinguish between the two.  Why? Jim will often say that everyone is a community manager and he is right – everyone has a group of constituents which could be cultivated to drive better performance.  However, not all companies want, need to, or can cultivate a community. I may see this differently than many and here is my take:

Community infers the following:

  • Tight interlinking relationships between a significant percentage of members
  • An acknowledgment of shared fate or purpose
  • A potentially wide range of topics/conversations within that shared purpose
  • A distributed leadership network – sometimes with a single leader, sometimes not
  • A core membership that is relatively stable and active

Social media on the other hand infers the following:

  • Socially- or conversationally- enabled content
  • A loose network with the predominant structure being a hub and spoke model of interaction between an audience and the content creator
  • Comment/response transactions

To me this means that communities and social media are good for different types of business outcomes.

In low complexity markets and use cases (think Sharpie pens) the focus is on social media because the relationships desired between Newell Rubbermaid and Sharpie customers does not need to be that deep – and the business model cannot support deep relationship development (i.e. spending hundreds on developing a relationship with a customer who buys $25 worth of products doesn’t make much sense).  The goal is providing infrastructure and management that drives awareness and a sense of connection to the brand with tens of thousands or millions of customers.  Furthermore, proactively connecting customers with other customers doesn’t do much for Newell Rubbermaid because customers don’t need deep references from other customers to make the decision to purchase or to use the product itself. This example is managed by someone who aggregates UGC, publishes content, and responds to people talking about Sharpie – either on the site itself or on a public social network.

In high complexity markets or use cases, communities make more sense. If the decision-making process is complex and long to reach a conversion, customers benefit greatly by interacting and building relationships with other customers – as well as getting introduced to affiliated product and service providers who can help them maximize their value.  Adobe’s design tool communities are a good example of this – customers help each other maximize the use of the tool, creating better adoption and affiliation. Because the price point of the product is higher, the business model can support richer relationship development.  These communities are managed by people who are connecting members to each other and to relevant content but may be doing very little content creation themselves.

The confusion comes because in both cases, the person managing the initiative is responsible for being responsive and conversational, for tracking the success of the interactions in driving desired outcomes, and sometimes they use similar tools.

I took a stab at articulating the primary responsibilities of social media managers and community managers.

Social Media Manager:

  • Content Creation  (Blogging/vlogging/podcasting) designed to spur conversation/viral sharing
  • Responding to conversations about the brand and the content
  • Ensuring input/feedback gets channeled to the appropriate internal functional group
  • Curating and promoting UGC
  • Managing tools – mostly social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) and blogs
  • Reporting/measurement
  • Planning and developing strategies for increasing engagement and conversion

Community Manger:

  • Welcoming members to the community & acclimating them
  • Building relationships with key members of the community and influencers
  • Moderating conversation and encouraging specific topics
  • Promoting members, making introductions to other members, and encouraging relationship formation
  • Running regular programming/content/events
  • Finding internal resources to respond to specific community discussions and coordinating cross-functional needs
  • Enforcing guidelines/boundaries
  • Managing tools – might be a combination of enterprise & social networks (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc)
  • Reporting/measurement
  • Channeling input and response from community into other organizational processes
  • Planning and developing strategies for increasing engagement and conversion

Do you agree that there is a difference in these two roles and if so, do you agree with how I have differentiated them? Admittedly, there is a lot of overlap but I believe the intent and focus of each role is fairly unique. For companies looking to make a hire in this space, it is useful to understand whether they need primarily a content-oriented person or a relationship-oriented person.

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  • krusk
    I agree partially with Jen Evans (that your company stakeholders can make up a community) My job as community manager is to bring those stakeholders together in a representative community. I think customers, partners, employees etc all together openly talking to each other can make for more innovation, genuine feedback and perspective on a company. This is both online on social networks, internally and even occasionally offline (ex. we held an open house event and invite all our stakeholders, including local community members who support what we do)

    Secondly on Lee Stacey's point-I'd never call myself a social media manager. What I *really* do is communications, and social media is just one vehicle that enables it. I state on my blog about page that "I was a community manager before there was a name for it" because I'm doing the same things that I always was before social media was popular, it just enables me to do it easier and more visibly.

    I have worked as a community manager for both companies with a physical online community of customers/partners as well as in a more generalized sense. Perhaps there should be distinction between the two, but I still consider what I do cultivating a community to strengthen stakeholder relations (with the company and each other) as well as to build a better company. I also feel that the two are interchangeably skills wise (i.e. how I've managed to hold positions as both) so maybe distinction is not necessary.

    My inconclusive two cents. :)
  • Excellent article. This is really helpful as I am setting up a social media and assessing best practices and hand-offs working with our individual brands.

    Best,
    Social Steve
    Director, Social Media
    Hachette Filipacchi Media
  • Surely differentiating between social media and community management is like differentiating between a tool kit and carpentry...

    Social media is just that, a tool kit. Some of those tools are used by marketers, some by PR, some by by customer service teams and some by community managers. In many cases some tools are used by all of them, in just the same way as a plumber, carpenter and electrician will all use a screwdriver, a hammer and a saw.

    Social media isn't a method, it isn't a platform, it isn't black magic or witchcraft, it's a toolkit.
  • Thanks for all the great feedback and I'll try to get to some of the themes brought up.

    On the SMB side of things - many roles get muddled but I would say that it is important to have a clear understanding and articulation of all of the different roles/responsibilities at play so that as the person in that role, you know what your priorities are and what success looks like. From this perspective understanding whether you are doing awareness building (more social media) and/or building relationships between people in a more defined community (more community management) is useful as it indicates how you should spend your time and what is most important.

    Jen - I agree that companies have existing constituents although if you bundle customers, employees, partners, and shareholders in the same bucket I would call that a network - not a community - since they are all loosely connected via the company but they really have different shared fates and motivations. To me that is, in many ways, the difference between using social media and using community operations. Is the communications needed to a wide, loosely connected group or to a narrower, more deeply connected group that has a lot in common. I think that makes a huge different on how you manage it, the tools you use, the content/programming, the policies, etc. and that's what I'm trying to get at.
  • Hi Rachel,

    Great post. We recently spent a long time trying to tease this out, mostly because we felt the community manager role was unfortunately being rolled up into an overall social media one, since social media is currently 'hot'.

    In an ideal world, the community manager has appropriate access to all stakeholders (internal and external), and adequate information to meet their demands except in very specific cases.

    A vague distinction based on where community management should sit in an established organisation was that the MarComms people are not that interested in feedback because they're busy on their next project, the PR folks are busy trying to *control* the negative feedback and amplify the positive, and the community management people welcome negative feedback. They then try and tell the product teams about this, with varying degrees of success.
  • Hi Rachel,

    An interesting post. Much depends on your opening definition of 'community', a word that has multiple definitions and interpretations.

    Our theory of community is that a. each organization has one, whether they formally identify or engage with it or not and b. each one is composed of people with varying strengths of ties, and that distributed communities can be just as powerful and effective as localized communities. In that sense, all of social media engagement is part of community interaction. Where that discussion happens may be on a localized, 'owned' community (online discussion board, company website etc) or distributed (on social networks, on industry discussion boards, via email, SMS etc)

    We go further to say that the larger community doesn't just include customers, but employees, partners, former employees, families of employees and partners, shareholders - everyone who has a connection to the organization and a vested interest in it.

    Social channels are an unprecedentedly powerful way to reach out to and engage with this distributed community. The dynamic of these channels and tools is different from traditional methods of communication, and it's bidirectional and real-time. This changes how organizations need to be structured to communicate, but it doesn't change the fundamental nature of that communication. They are just changing the requirements of the skillsets of the people who manage these functions to be able to respond real time and in many cases publicly to feedback and discussion. The role of community manager or social media manager of today will be much like the role of 'webmaster' during the dotcom era: how that role has evolved is different from organization to organization, but it's changed significantly, become much more diversified and integrated across businesses (with varying degrees of maturity depending on vertical and business structure).

    So to me, the distinction is not all that meaningful long term. Today's community manager may be tomorrow's HR manager, marketing manager, customer support manager, but it will be a function diversified across organizations depending on how those organizations choose to formalize and structure their interaction with those communities.
  • Hi Rachel,

    Thanks so much for taking the time to articulate so elegantly some thoughts that simmer away in the endless conversations I have with myself :-)

    I don't mean to muddy the waters, but another aspect of managing branded or internal communities in the SME / non-profit / membership association sectors that hasn't been mentioned is the third hat of being the web / product manager.

    Perhaps this is unique to my situation (though I'd guess not!) but this takes between 20-40% of my time. Thankfully I have a background in building and managing sites from the content side, so I jump into it with that broad mindset. But sometimes the extent of this isn't factored adequately into role specs or project plans when hiring, nor the ongoing health and strategic development of communities. I worry about communities where inexperienced people are landed in this position, and in terms of how far objectives can then be realised. I'm also interested in how brands will tackle this going forward and what new roles will emerge, a question I asked at the end of this blog post I wrote last autumn http://bit.ly/rtuUd

    Ultimately this "third hat" is another thing that might be factored into both the delineation of roles we're talking about here - and into growing more specialised community teams going forward - as the community space matures and organisations look to achieve more via the use of managed collaboration, social tools and customer / member engagement.

    I'd love to hear if community managers and "pure" social media managers (or those more focused on that side) have similar or differing experiences in terms of web and product management being rolled up into their responsibilities... and if its recognised as such in the organisations they work for.

    Deirdre
  • The differences between community and social media seem sound. Fuzzy lines, yes, but if you have to make distinctions, sure. I've always liked the way Patti Anklam defined communities in terms of ongoing purpose and such. But don't social networks also have a purpose, even if it's only to perpetuate the connection among members? And I'm not sure social networks are really hub-and-spoke. Relationships may be hub-and-spoke in a Blog situation where the loosely defined community relationship is typically asymmetric from writer to reader. (Even when there's comments, they're supposed to be on the pre-defined topic.) But in more social forums or newsfeeds, anyone can initiate. That seems more of a network topology.

    Anyway, a core difference seems to be the degree of engagement. A Community Manager has to be active; or at least deeply vigilant, at all times. They're truly engaged in managing the community towards its goals; whatever those may be. A Social Media Manager, (at least in this business context), is more a matter of 'being present.' They may be active in producing content, blogs, etc. But it seems - in a lot of ways - a more passive or responsive role. Your Sharpie Market example is great. From a Social Media perspective, once you've provided a place for someone to ask, "What do I do when I accidentally use the Sharpie on the White Board?" you've probably exhausted 90% of what people need to engage about! But you never know. People talk. And ask things. And a SMM should be around for that. Whereas a RubberMaid effort to promote recycling of plastics, ways to use their products in re-usable ways, etc. is going to need to be much more hands on.

    You asked: "For companies looking to make a hire in this space, it is useful to understand whether they need primarily a content-oriented person or a relationship-oriented person."

    Relationship-oriented is obviously important for either role. But clearly - to me anyway - it's a top success factor for Community Management, whereas SMM might be better served by a content person with some basic relationship skills as well as great listening skills if they're also serving as brand monitor in social spaces.

    Scott
  • Hi Edward/Aerin/Dennis/Anna/Jay -

    Thanks for stopping by and for the great comments.

    On the topic of business management and becoming a change agent, I feel like that depends on the level at which the social media or community person resides. We work with plenty of Directors of Community, VPs of Social Media, etc. and an EVP of Community. They are all taking a business lead in transforming their organizations to think differently about business processes and structure. We also work with a number of Directors/VPs of marketing, support, knowledge management, etc that are taking a 'social' approach to their functional responsibilities. So while you are right, this is a bit different from a 'manager', I see it as a seniority spectrum like any other functional role.

    Jay, in regards to why it matters... I'll attempt to take a quick stab at this but it is worthy of a longer explanation. I believe that the metrics, processes, tool integration, and role definition (the operational components) in each case is significantly different so from an organizational perspective having some clarity will help focus the investments needed in all of those things.

    Thanks for all the great conversation - really interesting things to think about.
  • Jay Pinkert
    A very thorough and well-reasoned post, particularly in describing how different community/conversation models should be informed/shaped by the type of product/service/issue they address.

    But I am not clear on what the practical applications are other than job descriptions. Seems like distinctions without difference, as the professional skills are largely the same, just applied differently based on the organization's engagement model, the program's objectives and the platform that supports it.
  • Here's my concern. We are breaking it out in two roles. I feel that as the space evolves, so will the management structure. While I agree that these two positions fit the bill for now, I imagine that this structure will not support future environments.

    For example, I feel neither of these roles would be politically strong enough to be the change agent within the business environment and I imagine in the near future a third role focused solely on adaptation of business practices based on social learning. While this role is too large to be managed ( in a large company) by the community manager or a social media manager, whatever team tasked still needs to be deeply embedded in the community to be effective.

    Perhaps I am the pessimist here, but I am just not comfortable assigning business management design to an area of interaction that has not yet matured.
  • I've worked for years in larger corporate environments on communities and now that I'm back working with smaller businesses, the same thoughts have occurred to me. I just wasn't able to formulate them. Thanks for articulating what has been nagging at me.
  • Hi Rachel -
    What a great post - very thought provoking. I have 2 comments relating to the 2 types of social media/community management I'm involved in.
    In the non-profit space, limited resources often means that the communications person is responsible for both social media and the community, and I think both are critical components (and maybe not separable) of any social change strategy or client centered focus. The ability to wear both outreach and content hats may be rare, but is becoming a growing necessity in organizations where resources are scarce.
    I was really struck by Eric's response, where he questions "marketing being behind the wheel". In many companies, it the marketing group or person is "assigned" the social media portfolio, because social media and community management is still seen as an opportunity (and increasingly, the only opportunity) to push messages, push agendas, and corral customers into a place where they become a captive audience. Potential social media and community managers need to determine what the company's interest really is - and run like hell as soon as someone says "if we build it, they will come."
    Great stuff - thanks for the post!
  • You may or may not have them perfect, but yes different roles. There is also conversation strategy, perhaps the most important role of all, as without it the SM Manager has no idea what to do or make it relevant to brand. But this is a good list of overall responsibilities. May actually use it.
  • Rachel, David, Emanuele, Eric -

    Thanks for all of the great comments!

    Emanuele - that's a great case study/story and I think the way that I would look at that is that there is, like you say, a very active community but I would add that it is within a wider network of customers. If you look at Jones Soda or some other examples there is a segment of their customers actively involved in helping co-produce and innovate with them. And you are right - it is very worthwhile to have a community manager cultivate that segment of the customer base while there may also be a social media manager targeting a wider network of customers that is not as involved.

    Eric - I think you hit on how the community management title is currently practiced and in many ways, there is nothing wrong with calling both types of individuals community managers but for semantic and expectation-setting reasons I'm suggesting we differentiate. This is really the crux of the conversation I started - is it important to differentiate or not... and what is a 'social media manager' if the two roles I described above are both community manager roles. Again, I may be parsing the details too finely but because there is so much confusion in the market about what both roles are, I think some differentiation is useful but in many ways both are managing a community, just different types of communities.

    Thanks for the great comments!
  • Rachel: As always, your thoughtful nature makes for an excellent post. Love reading your stuff.

    I think I agree with you (as usual), although I see it a tad differently based on my personal experiences. I see both of these types as community managers, but maybe with different strengths (all of this is assuming, of course, that marketing isn't ultimately behind the wheel and that community really is the focus). In my mind, I often delineate two types of community managers: communicators and empathizers.

    Communicators are comfortable writing for a large group, are very organized, are guided by intuition, and are happy to delve into philosophical arguments with community members. Or to put it another way: an ombudsman (or woman!) for the community who is great at summarizing and relaying objective thoughts about the community. Thinkers and intuits with publishing chops.

    Empathizers are people who thrive on engaging in one-on-one conversation for days on end, are guided by (and often seek to create) tradition, and who don't focus as much on the high-minded aspects of community and instead focus on being practical and giving help (the customer-service aspect of community). They are awesome at promoting the greater good and organizing real-world events. Sensors and feelers with serious people skills.

    I do think that without both of the roles you posit, communities might suffer. They're both very important. The way I divide them up is a little more oddball than your way (maybe too simplistic, too). I'm extremely fortunate that my work environments as a community manager have included people in both roles -- so I can rely on the other person(s) to pick up where I'm not as strong.

    Anyway, enough of my long-winded ramble. Please keep these great posts coming!

    E
  • Hi Rachel,
    thanks for the inspiring and stimulating post!

    While I absolutely agree there is quite a marked difference between community managers and social media managers, I can see examples where this distinction is more related to the company goals regarding social media than to the social object around which the relationship happens.

    I have a specific example in mind in Italy where a well known food brand is currently engaging thousands of customers to reinvent both the product and the communication around it. I believe engagement is where the distinction is: even if every single piece of product only costs a few euros, the passion they are able to raise is amazing and customers are spending hours inside the community to co-create a product that is more responsive of their desires and needs.
    They could be using (and are actually using) social media to reach a broad audience and spread the word, but the difference lays in the company's goal: transforming customers in partners and thus establishing a completely new relationship with deep market implications.

    The product is very simple. The context again is quite basic. The relationship they are creating is amazingly rich and strong.

    A similar conversation recently happened on Twitter between me and Mark Tamis about the distinction between social media marketing and social CRM after the new report released by the Altimeter Group. I believe community managers fall into the second category.

    Just my two cents to this interesting discussion :)
  • Agree with the comments left....great post. In Oracle we are having a similar internal discussion now but more around the business need of what we term "Professional Communities" (led by community managers) and "Social Business Communities" (led by social media managers).

    The result of the discussion was a resounding yes, and the differentiation between the two was very much aligned to your blog post (though I have to say you have managed to articulate it much better than we did!).

    There is undoubtedly going to be an overlap, and in small to medium businesses that overlap will be greater as individuals have multiple responsibilities and therefore have to wear multiple hats. However it is important distinction to make as the needs and objectives for each can be very different.

    Thanks again Rachel - great post!
  • Rachel Makool
    Wow Rachel, this is a great post! I do think that there is a tremendous overlap between the two so-called positions. I think a lot of companies don't know what they want and therefore either hire the wrong person, someone too junior or pile on the responsibility to one person who couldn't possibly accomplish all that's needed. The key to all of these positions is to have someone who understands the mission/goals of the company and can connect customers and their needs to the same mission to ultimately sell products and services. I agree that the methodology and position responsibility should be determined by the type of company. Not all companies are right for having a community. But, I believe, that there are a lot of companies that are right for community but they either don't have the resources or desire to foster one.

    I think over time, we'll see more clarity of Community/Social Media Managers roles. I'm just excited by the growth of the number of roles out there now and the prospect of even more in the future.
  • Adam -

    Thanks for your input here - I too worry that companies get confused by what they are asking for and in that regard, set the person they hire up to fail - or at least not be as successful as they might be. This confusion also manifests itself in the confusion over what to measure.... if the goals are clear, the measurement typically is too. I also think that while there are some people who are good at both the content and the relationship angles (Maggie is a great example!) it is harder to find and typically a more mid- to senior- level person.
  • Hi Maggie -

    Glad that helped clarify a bit and yes, it gets further complicated by the fact that some people (particularly as small or medium sized organizations) do both and are responsible for both building awareness generally and cultivating relationships with and between members. So - not always a clean dividing line but some people are clearly in one camp or the the other.
  • Not only do I agree with the premise of this post, I have clients who are exemplary of this split between roles. In addition to the responsibilities laid out, I've seen social media managers play a role of strategist, developing and shepherding ideas and initiatives through the corporate project prioritization process. They tend to be (ironically) more behind the scenes, working with creative, agencies, marketing, PR and other groups to embed social technologies into ideas and campaigns. At first this starts as what I like to call "sprinkling social media pixie dust" - adapting current ideas in the pipeline to make them more social. Over time, the companies that excel and have a higher level of maturity in leveraging these tools will have social be the origin of the ideas at the core.

    I get concerned when I see companies starting out with hiring one person to do both roles; besides being different skill sets they each can require a full time effort.
  • Great post--and finally I see a difference! This makes a lot of sense to me and works particularly well in the context of associations (as opposed to for-profits). When you put it this way, it's clear that associations--which are supported by member dues--need community managers. My title is long--online community & social media manager--but it does fit with both your descriptions and couldn't really be one or the other.
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