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Want A Successful Community? Don’t Be A Social Media Manager

by Rachel Happe on February 16, 2011

I’ve held the position that social media management and community management are not the same thing for a while. This morning, a blog post by Maggie McGary (and the subsequent comments) about the value of Klout for community managers made me pause again. There has been a lot of attention on defining and finding influencers lately and to me, everyone is an influencer in the right context. Looking at influence independent of context is a fool’s errand but it struck me that marketers may be after channels instead of influencers per se. They want the most bang for their buck to drive awareness and that makes sense.

Aggregation of content. Ratings. Word of Mouth. Awareness. The more you get individuals with a lot of attention to share your content, the more awareness it receives. That’s great social media marketing.

Once you have people’s attention though, how do you get them to actually change behavior? Pushing more content from well known people is not likely to help except to the extent that it keeps them aware. As a pretty basic example,  I’m not going to trade in my current TV just because well known people that I respect share a lot of information about new 3D TV. What will get me to switch? If half of my friends starting telling me stories about how much clearer, cooler and energy efficient (whatever the case may be) the new product is, over time I am likely to consider switching. That behavior change takes deep peer relationships, context, and time – factors that are not abundantly present in fast-paced social networks.  However, behavior change DOES happen in communities of peers – whether online or offline – through a flow of influence. The more complex the desired outcome, the more defined the community needs to be.

The same things that work brilliantly to grab people’s attention in large social networks can kill communities.  Why? Focusing on just the most viewed content and most active members leaves little room for the contributions of others and little reason for them to stick their neck out to participate or create content. I recently re-read advice given to our CR members from Burr Settles about building a community for FAWM and how instead of aggregating content and highlighting the most popular things (which were not necessarily the best), he works hard to highlight content that has had no feedback. Why? Because highlighting the least reviewed content encourages content creation and participation from every member. Highlighting the most popular only reinforces for the majority of members that their voices don’t matter because they don’t have popular attention. It is why using the 90-9-1 rule of engagement can subconsciously cause community managers to ignore 90% of their members – assuming that they just won’t be converted. Communities are about maximizing engagement and relationships to encourage learning and with it, behavior change.

Good community managers intuitively do some of the following to encourage broad participation:

  • Break up cliques or ask people to take those groups private/semi-private
  • Proactively seek out and promote involvement, particularly from people that have not yet participated
  • Encourage lurkers and quiet community members to get involved by asking their opinion or giving them specific roles and tasks
  • Encourage less active members by asking other members to reach out to them
  • Welcome new members and invite them to participate in a ‘baby pool’ before getting involved in the general community
  • Generally staying behind the scenes and letting members do the majority of the talking

For social media managers it is much more important to be front and center, build a core group of followers that are broadly ‘influential’ in their own right and contribute a lot of content.

Both of these roles are important and serve different purposes in the new flipped funnel of the customer lifecycle. But confusing the roles can make it quite difficult to build a robust community that has long term impact on member loyalty.

What’s your experience been? Have you mixed up the two approaches and had success? The comments are where the action is… let me know.

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  • http://twitter.com/Edubya Emily

    Yes! I think the interest of the general community members of the people that have been earmarked as “social media influencers” is often really overestimated.

    People want to feel like they belong in their community, and when the emphasis placed strongly on whatever member has the highest klout score instead of who really engages with your product, it is a losing proposition.

    I am glad to see your post. I’m been more and more bothered by the “social media reciprocation economy” lately. It is false engagement, and It’s not a substitute for engagement with people who actually belong to your community and use your product.

    • http://twitter.com/rhappe Rachel Happe

      Thanks for you perspective Emily – it’s all about context and outcomes. Complex behaviors do not change easily so it can never be one influencer that gets the credit for that change.

  • Stroutmeister

    Jim – great post on community management. Maybe one of the best you’ve ever done (and I’m not just saying that). And I see what you and Maggie were trying to get at in terms of what’s good for the goose (attention and promotion) is sometimes not always good for the gander (community which to your point, often survives by being the anti “cool kid” hangout).

    However (and yes, you knew there was a “however” coming…) I’m going to stick to my guns from my comment on Maggie’s post this AM and say that I still think that Klout — or other influencer tools — have their place in community. Oh, and this is coming from someone that ran the We Are Smarter community for a year+ (with your help of course) back in the day. So I know a little more than the average bear about community management.

    The reason I keep beating this drum is that, “while all animals are created equal, some are created more equal than others.” And for that reason, knowing that someone has a Klout score of 45 vs. 15 can be important. That DOES NOT mean that as a community manager, you want to woo Robert Scoble or Gary Vaynerchuk because they won’t necessarily add long term value to your community. But, you might want a Heather Strout (45), a Mark Wallace (44) or Matt Solar (45) in your community. Hell, you may even want a Jim Storer (56) adding content, helping to draw others out or even culling/curating the best content from places like… wait for it… Twitter.

    So I get the fact that what’s popular doesn’t necessarily = good. You’ve also done a nice job pointing out why community management and social media marketing are different which is essential to the argument. But regardless of which group you are talking to — be it at a conference, a webinar, a community or Twitter, it NEVER hurts to have more rather than less information about your audience. I guess that’s why at the end of the day, I can’t wait for the promise of augmented reality to come to life so that I can actually use tools like Klout in real life. ;)

    • Stroutmeister

      And when I said, Jim, I actually meant Rachel. Damn iPhone autocorrect. Seriously though, great post Rachel. Great points.

    • http://twitter.com/rhappe Rachel Happe

      That’s OK – apparently Klout thinks we are exactly the same so… there you have it :)

    • http://twitter.com/rhappe Rachel Happe

      Hi Aaron – thanks for the comment and counter argument. One of the things I would say is that the people who are naturally socially talented and prone to popularity because of it will always find their way to a degree of status and attention because they actively network and proactively get involved. They are people that the community manager should actively engage with but the community manager needs to understand how to balance the awareness they have with promoting others. It’s a fine line but you don’t want them taking over because it will subvert engagement from a lot of other community members. And then there are also plenty of communities (even online) where the majority of members are not actually active on Twitter. As a community manager you could spend a lot of time obsessing and monitoring Klout scores but your time is likely better spent elsewhere… not that you couldn’t glean some value from it.

    • http://ariherzog.com Ari Herzog

      The thing with Klout and their ilk is the thing between quantity and quality. Klout only cares about quantity. People are ranked by scores, in accordance to who they retweet a lot and who follows them. And the scores of those people. Hubspot’s Twitter Grader works similarly. And so on.

      Klout gives me a score of 55. But so what? I don’t flaunt it and if I hadn’t read this article here, I wouldn’t know what my number is. It is outdated for sure, because it says I tweet about public relations which is hardly true. But because Klout says it, its lovers believe it to be the truth?

      I’ve built up Twitter accounts for organizations wearing my social media manager hat, and I’ve managed online communities as well. I like your thoughts, Rachel, but it’s not clear cut. You admit that the dual roles may intersect in some organizations. Unless the organization has more than $X dollars devoted to marketing and more than Y people devoted to marketing roles, there will always be that intersect, no? Who’s to say the social media manager, when launching the online campaigns, won’t find those lurkers in other media and source them to better build the online community, for instance?

    • http://twitter.com/rhappe Rachel Happe

      Indeed, not always clear cut at all but if both social media and community tasks are done by the same person, it’s worth them recognizing and being clear about which they are doing at any given time. It’s also worth identifying the people they interact with by the occasional touch points vs. people with whom they want deeper relationships and have the time/interest to offer sustained attention.

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  • http://twitter.com/SueOnTheWeb Sue

    Great post!! A Social Media Manager and a Community Manager are not the same beast and yet time and time again I see people confusing the role. Yes sometimes a person takes on the duties of both roles, but they are different. I’m a community manager, I am not a Social Media Manager. I manage a static website-based community, and a large amount of my time is spent behind the scenes encouraging and enabling our community members to engage and build relationships with each other. Whilst, as I see it, a Social Media manager reaches out to a wider audience in order to connect with people, and I feel a SM’s role is more about building a relationship between a customer and a brand, rather than helping to facilitate relationships between community members.

    A company can have a person performing both roles and/or they may have two people each performing both roles, but as you so eloquently pointed out both “roles are important and serve different purposes.”

    • http://twitter.com/rhappe Rachel Happe

      Hi Sue – As your experience shows and based on other great community managers I know, some of them have very low visibility outside of their own communities and in fact, may not be on Twitter at all.

      You also bring up a great point that some individuals do both and I think that is probably very challenging because they either do one poorly or are constantly switching techniques. It can be done but it is tricky.

  • http://community-roundtable.com/ jimstorer

    @Aaron – While I’d love to get credit for the post, I can’t take it. Rachel had the “aha” moment… I just proofread and edited it. With that said, I’ll add my 2 cents.

    You don’t NEED Klout to know who’s important to you and your community. You already know. If you’re in tune with your members (and I know you are) then you know. You know who fits all the different personas… who your mavens are, your salespeople, your connectors. Sure, it might be another data point for you, confirming what you already know and making you furrow your brow every once in a while. But it’s likely more of a distraction than a valuable tool in your community manager toolbox.

    Again, my two cents. I’m sure Rachel has some thoughts too.

  • http://community-roundtable.com/ jimstorer

    duplicate

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  • http://www.jeromepineau.com/ JeromePineau

    Point(s) well taken – which is why I get bent outta shape when I read or hear people talk about how to monetize a community! – A social media manager must monetize, among other things – a community manager must not IMHO.

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  • http://lamiki.com/ Laura Kimball

    “Good community managers intuitively do some of the following to encourage broad participation”

    That line sums it up. In a lot of cases, social media managers double as community managers but there are some intuitive skills that CMs need to have that is hard to teach. Things like knowing the brand/organization inside and out, when to highlight certain community members and how, and exactly how to craft the message to communicate the goals they’re trying to accomplish.

    I’ve been thinking about the role of a CM a lot, especially as I’m trying to revise the engagement and community strategy for the nonprofit I work for (Jolkona/@jolkona). Either way, thank you for bringing this topic up and giving me even more to think about (e.g. what makes a stellar CM).

  • http://mizzinformation.blogspot.com Maggie McGary

    This week has been such a nightmare time-wise that I haven’t even had a chance to thank you for posting about this and drawing so much attention to my post! I’m so glad that my post has sparked so much discussion. AMEN to the concept that Klout is a social media marketing thing and not a community thing. There is so much confusion between the terms “social media manager” and “community manager”…sadly my title includes both ; ) It’s definitely hard to do both, because some degree of social media manager is marketing and, to me, marketing flies in the face of community management. Maybe my perspective is skewed coming from the association world where community exists as a by-product of membership: if you’re a member of an association you’re part of that community. So attracting people to the community or getting the word out about it beyond the “walls” of the community are kind of moot points. Sure, it’s great to drum up traffic to your website or whatever as a by-product, but my main goal is helping members connect with each other and helping them find what they need from the association. Klout has nothing to do with it.

  • http://twitter.com/jpunishill Jaime Punishill

    Jim, I have been thinking alot about your reply and Arron’s reply and I would add this. Somewhere in this discussion has been lost the idea and fact that not all communities are the same. There are Twitter communities and private communities and on site communities and off-us communities. The idea that there is one approach all in isnt reflective of reality.

    To that end then, I come right back to there are regular and identifiable and important members of communities that no one needs a Klout or any other score to recognize. But there is also participation from non regular or infrequent folks, or Twitter communities where volume or regularity is necessarily different from site based communities, where some other measure of that person’ influence, connectedness, is useful information.

    As Aaron said, it would be a mistake for folks to throw all other measures beyond the “I am Community Manager I know my community” out, on some principle that you arent a good community manager if you need to look beyond who/what you know. As in all things in life, every picture has multiple ways of veiwing and intepreting it, communities are prisms with multiple ways of evaluating trheir health, their influencers, and scores like Klout are just one more tool in the toolbox.

    That’s my two cents as a social media manager, who employed community managers of various flavors of community. For whatever that is worth.

    • http://twitter.com/rhappe Rachel Happe

      Hi Jamie – great perspective as usual, and I think that is actually what we are trying to communicate here (regardless of the Klout debate. My general issue with Klout is that it takes too long for the value it provides i.e. the overhead is not worth the insight at scale… at the moment). My general point is that a loose online community on a social network is effective and operates quite differently than a relatively closed, distinct community and from a business perspective, they should be used for different things and managed differently.

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  • http://www.mhandy1.tumblr.com Mike Handy

    I disagree with the Social Media Manager vs Community Manager post as you take away core job functions from one and give it to the other.The roles are similar in every respect except for introductions and some of the dexterity that non branded community managers have that branded ones do not. I digress on that one.

    To the point of this post, its not about me or my brand. Social anything would never work that way, brands that are focused on themselves fail at Social Initiatives. I am not trying to force a hard sell, that stopped working in the 1980′s. I am trying to add value and customer support to as many people as possible on an open network. Corporate value statements and mission statements aren’t just pretty words anymore. They are the foundation of telling stories. At the end of the day community managers/Social media managers are telling a story! Considering the width and scope of this industry and position I am shocked that we need to draw lines. If every community is different than the role of the steward within that community will be different.

    That said I would never admonish someone to ignore low scoring members because they maybe an important influencer. My wife with a klout score of 34 has influence over users with scores of 60 and up!

    The comparison is not fair and even though this post is dead (5 days no comments) I had to say something.

    • http://twitter.com/rhappe Rachel Happe

      Hi Mike – thanks for the comment and your perspective. The thing that I see people not differentiating is the different networked structures required for different business outcomes. Driving awareness requires a very different type of social network than does supporting existing customers. Don’t get me wrong, there is lots of cross over and the line between the two is not hard and fast but regardless of what you call the two different roles, I’m trying to help articulate that the outcomes require different approaches even if some of the tecniques and tools are the same.

      In regards to changing how ‘branding’ is done, I couldn’t agree with you more.

  • http://twitter.com/kkbrough Kelly Brough

    So I’m late to the discussion (thanks to @zendesk for tweeting this recently), but want to thank you, Rachel, for articulating so well the difference between the role of a social media marketer and community manager. I’m not sure the two need to be distinct individuals within an organisation, but certainly understanding the differences in objectives is important to getting your desired outcome.

    In my last role, I had an instinctive bristling at some social media marketing suggestions based on the importance I placed on our community in the long term health of the business. I was never able to articulate it like this, however, and an executive’s gut instinct can only be sustained for a short time under challenge without some empirical evidence.

    • http://twitter.com/rhappe Rachel Happe

      Hi Kelly – thank you and you are right, I know many people that do both as they are the only social/engagement person at their organization but like you say, it’s helpful to pair the outcome with the appropriate technique. Thanks for stopping by.

  • http://twitter.com/mor_trisha Trisha Liu

    Coming back to this great post… I got a little surprised in the weekly #cmgrchat today. The topic was ‘Educating your coworkers.’ My expectation was that we would talk about ‘as a community manager, what do you do to educate your coworkers on community participation?’ I guess the disconnect for me was ‘educate about what?’

    So, I asked a clarifying question about the topic, and the direction (response) was ‘For the sake of today’s chat, we’re talking about internal communities, teaching those you work with about tools/process/industry.’ That was still confusing to me. Maybe it is because my company’s internal community is still in the toddler stage? For our internal community, my focus is very much on the bullets listed in this post. Teaching about the industry, Twitter, social media, is a very different focus, one that is not entering into our internal community at the moment.

    Just wanted to send y’all a thank you for this valuable content.

  • Anonymous

    I agree in large part with this post, however I think a lot of it depends on if you view Social Media as a marketing tool (“…the more awareness it receives. That’s great social media marketing.”) or if you view Social Media as being part of the product by which your community engages. Each community will have different needs in this regard.

    • Anonymous

      That being said, I do agree with the distinction between the two executions. Social is NOT the same as Community. And while a good CM will likely need to be involved in both, there definitely is a difference.

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  • http://twitter.com/ElenaBRZ ElenaBRuiz

    Hi Rachel, I just simply love this post. I wonder if I could quote and link you and translate most of it into Spanish on our blog. Do I have your permission?

    • http://www.community-roundtable.com/ TheCR

      Hi Elena – thank you and yes, of course, thank you for asking!

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  • http://www.adigaskell.org/blog Adi

    For what it’s worth, research has found that we don’t tend to change our behaviours or what we buy/like based upon recommendations from others.  Instead we seek out others that already have the same interests as us.

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