How to find your perfect Community Manager

I'm seeing a shift, the community management industry - it's leaving its puppy pen and has reached adolescence. Over the past few years, only a small number of companies have invested in their own social departments, choosing to outsource their community actives to agencies. Now, as brands and companies identify that full integration between Social and existing Comms teams is essential, they're putting out their feelers to find their Mr (or Ms) Right in Community Management. Just looking at the #cmgr hash tag on twitter you'll see there is an increasing need for in-house CMs.

For the past few months I've been leading the community effort over at The Social Practice, helping to build the team to support our clients requirements. As a result, I've met a lot of Community Managers, some excellent, and some down right awful. I currently work with a selection of CMs that have a wide variety of skill sets, and knowing the clients I work with, I partner these together with the right brands. It's not easy and I've been working in Community Management for years! So I thought it would be useful to outline some things you should be looking for to find the right Community Manager for you and your brand.

Do you like the way they communicate?
Resource is often stretched to manage multiple clients agency side so bringing your social in-house you'll now have someone fully committed to building and creating relationships for your brand. For this reason, it's important that who you choose has strong communication skills both on and offline. This means, they have to communicate on your level as you're essentially asking them to represent your brand both on and offline.

Can they create engaging content?
A huge part of your Community Managers role will be to generate and implement engaging content around your comms strategy. This not only means having an eye for a good picture, but also being able to craft an update in only 140 characters with a clear call to action inline with your social KPIs and objectives.

Do they know your brand?
Yes you want someone who lives, breathes and eats your brand… but you won't always get that. You will however find wonderfully prepared Community Managers who have done their research and really know your brand history, ethos and want to be passionate about your products.

The Top 5 Things Your Community Manager Needs:
- Passion and enthusiasm, not just of your brand but of community management and social activity online.
- Connections, or the ability to be versatile enough to make new ones easily within your sector.
- Ability to create good quality, relevant content under pressure.
- To be brave, confident and likeable.
- Have a solid understanding of behaviour on the social channels you'll be requiring them to work on.

I'd strong recommend that you set your CM a task to do in a set amount of time to test all of the above. Never underestimate the affect a little bit of stress can have on the out put of a CM.

Best of luck with your search!

Do you need a Community Manager?

I am a Community Manager... not a Pony.

A Community Manager is someone who represents your brand to the World. World, as in World Wide Web and World as they are a real person who will attend events and be a spokesperson for you. This person will have excellent communication skills, a fabulous bedside manner and will have (hand)bags of common sense. They'll be your voice on all social platforms, they'll write the content plan for your blog posts and email communications. They'll work closely with your customer service, PR and marketing teams - giving a voice to your audience within the company. They will be on the front-line when you have to communicate with the masses and will negotiate with key influencers. Their KPIs are the size of their audience and the volume of conversation generated around key messages. Their KPIs are also the overall feeling from the public towards the brand (ie. are you likeable). They are never off duty. The work that a CM does for your brand is for you and not them, they will reflect the praise and positive comments towards who they work for and not them directly.

A Social Media Manager is someone who manages your presence on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. They will generate content calendars and moderation guidelines inline with the greater overall social media strategy for the brand. This person will need to be up to date with all the latest platform developments and on hand to advise the brand when conversation in the digital space requires action from either CS or PR.  Their KPIs are provided but the Social Media Strategist who will define a goal for each platform for the brand.

A Social Media Strategist is someone who will look at your social media footprint, work with your sales/marketing team and create roads to common goals with can be implemented by the SMM.
They will have to be familiar with social media monitoring software and be able to analyse vast quantities of qualitative and quantitative data to generate a fully integrated plan of actions. They will also have the skill set to translate this information into an understandable plan for action for board members, account managers and clients.

As you can see, these are three very different roles. For every company, duties can vary depending on the brand, but the basics are all here. I often have to explain my role to people - most of the time it's recruiters trying to put me forward for a job that I'm quite often not interested in and most often not qualified for.

Social Media is important for any company that hopes to survive and grow in the next few years. If people aren't buying your biscuits I can damn well be sure their bitching about them on twitter and they'll tell you why. For service companies, using social media is key to understanding your users wants and needs. As for community, this is when you want to take your brand that step closer to your audience. This is where you want to create a kind of consumer that is a brand ambassador without handing over your hard earned cash. It takes time and you have to see it for the long term - it's not a quick fix. It can have many advantages but it is a brand by brand situation, speak to many people to find out what will suit you best.

PS. I am not a guru. If you call yourself a Social Media Guru you're a twat. If you are on the hunt for someone to help you with social media and you put Social Media Guru as the job title, you'll attract these twats. You'll also attract people who talk more that they do, yes they'll impress you with the latest SM news and the last article they read on Mashable but what have they actually done? The online digital industry is so new and continuously changing and evolving that calling yourself a Guru is pretty small minded. We're all learning... Even the experts!