The job description that I posted in July 08 is another most frequently visited post. Here’s an update:
The Community Manager/Social Media Specialist position is a broad encompassing role.
My definition of the position: A community manager is the voice of the company externally and the voice of the customers internally. The value lies in the community manager serving as a hub & having the ability to personally connect with the customers (humanize the company), & providing feedback to many departments internally (development, PR, marketing, customer service, tech support, etc).
Responsibilities:
- Creatively and proactively assist customers.
- Serve as the initial point of contact for inbound requests from online company properties & the web at large
- Identify and analyze issues, patterns and trends in customer requests & product performance
- Transfer the information to the appropriate departments so that they can respond accordingly.
- bugs to quality assurance
- new ideas to product development
- messaging effectiveness to marketing
- frequently asked questions noted
- identifying user generated content
- Monitor online conversations and participate in them to build brand visibility and thought leadership
- Author blog posts, articles, podcasts, videos and screencasts – whatever media you want to use – to creatively communicate product uses.
- Establish metrics & report on them on a monthly basis including recommendations
- Identify & engage advocates
- Proactively escalate issues, observations, opportunities, and insights to the executive team.
- Communicate issues, opportunities and insights to the company at large.
- Stay up to date on new social media tools, best practices and how other organizations and companies are using them, so that the company can continue to be an early adopter of these technologies.
- Participate in professional networking by interacting with peers and influencers & attending events.
Qualifications:
- People oriented
- You love helping people and find it rewarding to solve people’s problems. Then you love to proactively use that experience to make the whole service better.
- Ability to work cross functionally
- You like working hard and thrive on the excitement of a goal oriented team.
- Possess 360 degree leadership skills
- You enjoy learning & are curious!
- Excellent communication skills
- You love to write & enjoy sharing your ideas with others.
- Project oriented & creative skills – You are an independent, creative self-starter who loves running with things while keeping everyone inside and outside the company in the loop.
- Net savvy (addicted to social networking sites & all things Web 2.0)
- You spend a lot of time online and stay up-do-date on new, fun things out there for web savvy users as well as regular people.
- Potential for working remotely
- This position lends itself to working remotely. The projects and ongoing work can easily be done independently.
Now you can personalize that for what your company needs. My recommendation is to make sure that it’s open ended enough to allow the position to grow. The type of person that you’ll hire will want to be continually challenged & motivated to keep the community growing.
What a timely find. I’ve being hired to provide online support and coordination for a new online community of Housing Outreach Transitional Support workers and this job descriptions helped me immensely to articulate what I believe the job is all about.
I really like your site and all your supportive and informative posts. I’m going to be a regular reader from here on in.
Brent MacKinnon
Connie,
I ran across your updated job description while doing some research for a new blog post I’m writing. Your job description for community manager has many of the same elements from the ideal social media job description I posted on my blog last October (http://tomhumbarger.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/my-social-media-job-description/).
In my description, I was trying to expand the community manager role into a larger role that covered all aspects of social media.
I especially liked the part of the description that community manager position lends itself to working remotely. I just wish more companies thought the same way.
Thanks for sharing.
Tom Humbarger
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A very insightful post and invaluable to me as I’m about to start working as a copywriter/media manager for a mobile spa company. Thanks!
Thanks Connie. This information was very helpful and shed more light on what it means to be a social media/community manager.
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