The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

Brian Simpson on Combining Online and Offline Relations in Hospitality

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The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a new podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management.
Our sixth episode features Brian Simpson, Director of Social Hospitality at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City.
 

Highlights include:

  • How online extends and combines with the vital offline relations and events in the hospitality industry
  • A discussion of whether or not being a nimble small business is an advantage over being a big chain when it comes to using social media
  • How hard metrics and the more “touchy-feely” side of social media mesh
  • A critique of Roger Smith Life and the value of showing an off-product side of your business; “It’s got to be interesting.”

MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Hiring A Social Media or Community Manager?

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We recently had a member call on Hiring for Community Management and also discussed the topic at last week’s #TheCRLive. It’s a hot topic for a variety of reasons.  There is growing interest in the field and growing demand for community managers. Our members’ had some additional perspectives:

  • Community an social media management job descriptions vary widely with little consistency
  • There are a number of business functions and processes that community managers can support but often the specifics are also inconsistently articulated in job descriptions
  • Expectations of community manager roles and compensation are not very well aligned
  • Hiring organizations don’t necessarily know what is reasonable to expect from different levels of community managers or are not always able to identify the level of experience they need
  • The attributes of community managers are often more important than the skills or experience but that is not the way most organizations hire

Because Community Roundtable members like Rachel Makool, Dawn Lacallade, and Amber Naslund have more experience than most with regards to hiring community managers we think there is an opportunity to work with our members to develop baseline job descriptions and salary ranges for the following positions:

  • Social Media Expert
  • Moderator
  • Community Manager
  • Director of Community
  • VP of Social/Community

Like any other type of organizational role, as the position becomes more senior, more strategy/planning/management responsibilities are included and compensation should rise accordingly.  We see a lot of job recs being posted that are looking for people with 1-3 years of experience compensated for at that level but also wanting those people to own the social strategy, policies, and internal evangalism.  The effort to find a good match for that rec is likely to be frustrating – while there are plenty of young and ambitious potential employees that understand social software tools very well and are eager to take on an organization’s social initiative, they may not have the management and organizational experience needed to effectively champion and execute the strategy. Those young people who do have the skills to build and execute a new organizational strategy are like their more experienced peers in knowing that it deserves a higher level of compensation.

There are two problems causing even further frustration. The first problem is that many social initiatives right now are pilot or new initiatives that just barely have the funding for one junior position who may not have the business and management experience necessary to be successful.  This is a chicken and egg problem – without an experienced community manager, the initiative may not be successful but the organization can’t afford an experienced person until the initiative is successful. The second problem is that for those organizations that realize they need a mid-level to senior person to develop and execute an appropriate social strategy, there is a fairly small group of individuals with that experience and very often not in the location needed.

There are a few ways organizations can manage this situation:

  • Hire consultants. Many experienced community managers have become consultants (Rachel Makool, Sean O’Driscoll, Jake McKee, Janet Fouts, and Dawn Foster are examples) and are in demand for helping companies navigate the transition from pilot to operational communities.
  • Outsource moderation and/or community management. eModeration, Tempero, LiveWorld, Fresh Networks, and Impact Interactions all offer some combination of moderation and community management. These services can help companies who are starting out, exploring, and experimenting. In particular, moderation is often outsourced completely as needs often fluctuate significantly over time.
  • Spend time seeking out and investing in understanding the most effective use of human resources. Human resources are critical to the success of a social initiatives but if the role and responsibilities are not clear and appropriately aligned, it can lead to a lot of frustration on both the part of the organization and on the part of employee. The more the hiring manager understands, the better off the outcomes will be. Consultants, training, and services like ours can help tremendously with understanding how to effectively hire and use community management.

Are you looking for a social media or community manager?  While we are not a recruiting agency we do hear from a lot of hiring managers and individuals looking for jobs and it’s gotten too much to manage in an ad hoc way. However, if you fill out the form below we can match it relatively easily with a growing database of job seekers and are happy to make a connection.

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Looking for a Community Management Job?

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We’ve seen the community management discipline mature over the past year – both in terms of how well it’s understood and in the recognition by companies that their social initiatives are more successful if they have a dedicated community manager.  Demand for community management skills has also steadily increased to the point where we are getting contacted regularly by both community managers and hiring companies and recruiters.

While CR members are happily employed, we do reach a lot of community managers through our larger social network that could use some matchmaking.  We’ve seen a wide range of positions and backgrounds and feel like we have the experience to help connect people and companies that are likely to be a good fit for each other.

With that in mind, if you’re looking for a community management role and would like to be in our queue of individuals that we recommend to recruiters, please tell us a bit about your experience and what you’re looking for.  We will share your contact information with recruiters and/or hiring companies as appropriate (let us know if if you’re ok with that below), but your answers to these questions will be kept private and will only be used to assess fit and/or shared in aggregate. We will not share your name for any other purpose.

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What Defines a Community Manager?

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By Rachel Happe, Principal and Co-Founder of TheCR

Flat HillaryWhat is a community manager?

We all know that the community manager role comes in a wide variety of flavors with different expectations and different levels of responsibilities and often the person in the role isn’t called a community manager – they may be a VP of Marketing, a director of customer support, a business analyst. For us at The Community Roundtable this is a complex issue because it gets at the heart of who we target and invite in to our community. So what makes one VP of support a community manger and another just a VP of support? What does the person who manages a smaller B2B community have in common with the major brand manager who is managing tens of thousands of people?

Tough questions for us but critical to define. If The Community Roundtable can tackle that one issue with some success, I will feel like we have helped move the conversation forward for the whole market. Today I opened up the conversation to my Twitter crowd and got a flurry of activity. Below are some of the definitions and replies:

@Aronado – @rhappe who reps the Co. and has the most consistent & deep relationships with the customers

@megfowler – @rhappe I think you define it according to volume, tone, results, and uptake in terms of community response (also volume + tone)

@AuctionDirect @rhappe – Engagement levels, type of content, metric objectives (ie: proven traffic, conversions, leads, revenue, etc) Stuff like that?

@4byoung – @rhappe Tough call. No consensus in biz as to what a comm manager is / should be. Ability to organize & manage groups is key.

All good suggestions. One issue I raised is that some of the best community managers I know are like the silent hand of God – they don’t necessarily post and get huge reactions… they get others who get huge reactions to post. So direct measurement of short term responsiveness is dicey. A couple of people had really good analogies that I thought were useful to think about:

@gyehuda – @rhappe the analogy I use is Minister of Culture – not the artist, not the mayor, not the police, but still has budget and responsibility

@ayeletb – @rhappe That’s the same issue as communicators – everybody’s job is communication esp leaders so there is a need to isolate com mgr role too

I liked Gil’s the best – in that it is the job of the community manager to create the environment, set the stage, and make sure participants are encouraged and rewarded but not to be the primary actor. That means the measure of the community managers success is the activities of the community members. But what is the timeframe to measure? I would bet that the timeframe is different for different types of communities.

There were some other insights that I thought worth pulling out. 1 – Community managers job is to interface between one group or community and another. @AmberCadabra @DavidAlston and I were just discussing this today – that community managers spend just as much time converting internal advocates as they do with the community they were hired to manage. So the interface or foil role is important to the job description.

@Aronado – @rhappe haha! well, to me it means allowing a situation where two or more communities begin to communicate effectively with one another

There were also some things that people felt a community manager must do:

@DavidWLocke – @rhappe Someone who never posts can’t be the CM. No credibility. Ah, a metric.

So there are patterns we can identify – if not always explicit metrics.

A community manager:

The Community Skills Framework help community managers identify their strengths and find areas to improve their skills.

The Community Skills Framework help community managers identify their strengths and find areas to improve their skills.

 

– Manages the interface between two communities/groups/networks (in effect be a translator)
– Participates in the conversation personally
– Creates the environment the encourages the intended outcome
– Influences activity of the participants

My question is not completely answered – still working out in my mind how I might identify the customer support manager who is a community manager vs. one who is not. Like many things in life, I know it when I see it but I can’t quite put words to everything. Characteristics I would add but have a hard time finding fact-based items to use as identifiers are:

– Must be a connector – (which is different than a hub)
– Have a desire to attract people vs. hunt people down
– Have no need to be right but also have an assertive perspective

Ultimately, you can have an isolated, discrete community manager or you can have a person in a functional role, performing that role in a community or social fashion. Is one a community manager but the other not? How would you decide?

I welcome your thoughts on this. As the community manager role evolves – and gets more strategic – it is will change. Who *should* we at The Community Roundtable consider a community manager?

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Need community management resources? Check out our online training courses, our community benchmarks and TheCR Network – a private community for community pros.