Many people connect with me. And I enjoy meeting all of you. Others mentored me & I am glad to give back. In every interaction I always learn things. I wanted to share a particular connection from a couple of weeks ago.
Arvind Juneja of Poland connected with me on Facebook. He works with a community of 300,000! When I showed him the Facebook group for Community Managers his response was one of joy. He said, "I can’t believe there are over 1400 of us. I had felt so lonely!" There are many of us & we’re spread all over the world.
In talking with Arvind he asked whether he should write in his native language or in English? What do you think? He came up with a creative solution. His post on whether a community should be open or closed is quite interesting too. I encourage you to leave a comment on his efforts.
Here are some community managers from around the world.
Tom Noeding is from Germany. He is on Facebook but prefers Xing, the European equivalent. His blog is linked in my blogroll & is written mostly in German. (I assume he writes nice things about me when he links to my blog :) )
Maria Sipka is in Barcelona, Spain. She is the CEO of Linquia, an aggregator of communities (check it out & claim your community).
In the UK there is a great bloke, Steve Bridger. I met him in person while I was on vacation & he’s a great resource.
Norway is adding a term for Community Manager to their language. My Minnesota friend Ruth Sylte has more info on it. She also has a great post on Social Networking outside the US (it’s not all about Facebook folks!).
Recently I asked for help in defining ‘community building’ for Wikipedia. There are some good ideas coming in. Please add your thoughts.
And feel free to share where you’re building community at so that others can connect with you. I’ve been watching for comm mgrs on Twitter & online for awhile so I’ve been connecting with as many as possible. Leave your username on Twitter here if you’d like. Connect with me @cbensen and also at Facebook
I’m from the US, living in Chile, and working for Needish (www.needish.com), which is a US company, founded by a Chilean and two Swedes, based in Chile and about to launch in the US. If that isn’t international I don’t know what is! I don’t have any real sense of how many community managers there are in Chile, but considering that many companies still don’t have much of an internet presence, I doubt there are many others in this line of work. That will likely change within the next 5 or so years though, as more and more people in their 20s enter the workforce.
Right now I’m mostly Twittering in English (@emilyinchile) due to the impending US launch, but it’s also proving a useful way to stay in touch with our Chilean users via the occasional Spanish Tweet. For me it’s been a good way to ease-in to using Twitter as a listening tool. Anyone else out there working outside the US?