Altitude Branding - Being a Director of Community One Year LaterLast year, I wrote a post about being a director of community. It was a bit of a drilldown on what a job like mine entails, some of my functional areas of responsibility, and a bit about the time commitments that come alongside working in the social media realm full time.

It’s been a little over a year since I’ve been in this role, and boy has that year seen a lot of changes. So I thought I’d share with you a bit about what’s evolved, what’s stayed the same, and what I think the future looks like for community-related roles inside of companies.

What’s Evolved:

Team size:
A year ago, our community team was just emerging. David Alston was manning the ship, and in addition to me we had Mike Huggard, who helped us manage some of the lead pipeline from the community to the account teams. So there were three of us.

Today, we’re a team of twelve, and still growing. In April, keep an eye out on the Radian6 blog where we’ll dive into more detail about how we’ve built our department, and the structure and processes we use to operate in this unique way.

My Responsibilities:
When I started my role a year ago, my responsibilities were chiefly doing the active listening as well as front-line engagement through our external communities – Twitter, blogs, and the like – and creating content. I still do engagement and content creation, in addition to now overseeing a more complex and strategic system of team community management and content generation.

The biggest part that’s changed is the growth of our company, and therefore our team. I’ve now got a pretty awesome team of community and content folks that make me look good every single day. That means I’m less in the trenches, and more in an oversight role to help keep the big ship on course.

Here’s a bit of what’s in my wheelhouse:

Events and Business Development
I do a great deal of speaking and attending industry events, because the offline component of community building is still critical. During busy event season, I spend anywhere from 40-60% of my time on the road to spend face time with the people that drive our business (and our community team is doing more and more of this, too). My goal at those events is to meet and talk to existing customers, get to know the social media community at a deeper level, and yes, bring home potential leads for our sales guys.

Internal Communication
Our community management team is focused on supporting our users and external communities on a day to day basis. And while that’s my role too, I’ve also taken a lot of ownership over internal communications and community, making sure I’m the bridge between our internal departments, executive team, and the communities we serve. We have lots to communicate, so I work closely with our product, support, and sales teams to keep the lines of communication open, and always find better ways to keep everyone informed and working from the same sheet music.

Community Resource Development
It’s my job to make sure our team is mobilized to provide our users and the social media community with the resources they need. Whether that’s our monthly ebooks, content for the website, our blog, or a community for our users, those are the projects I help shepherd. I also continue to actively contribute to our content creation myself, and am ever thankful for folks like Teresa, Lauren, and Katie for keeping me on task. That goes for our internal folks too; when they need help with strategic social media input for customers, our team helps on that front.

Listening and Engagement
We have an entire team dedicated to fielding the discussions in the community about our brand and industry, and engaging with them actively online. I do plenty of direct engagement myself, and help set some of the benchmarks like engagement guidelines, processes and workflow, and responsibility distribution on our team. And I have awesome people on the front lines that are the ones that make those thoughts reality.

Measurement and Reporting

I have a dashboard of metrics I track daily, looking at 14-30 day timeframes: breakdown of engagement (% of posts responded to and what categories they fell under, like support or compliments or content sharing), our Share of Conversation, competitive landscape, sentiment trends,  and what media are carrying the conversation about us so we can gauge our outreach accordingly. We’re also putting together regular executive reports that detail metrics on community engagement, content performance, lead generation, and competitive analysis to take regular snapshots of the impact of our work.

What’s Stayed The Same

Community work is still not a 9-5 proposition. Our team has grown, but that’s just scaled the number of people we have managing specific pieces of our community and content functions. The intent remains the same: for us to build human and personal relationships with our users and the social media community as a whole, provide rich and useful content on social media strategy specific to listening, engagement and measurement, and help businesses build social media into the very operations and culture of their organizations.

That means I’m on and connected more than might be comfortable for some people, and I balance that with being a mom and having a personal life. I still work long days – anywhere from 12-16 hours usually – and I’m blessed to work with one of the hardest working groups of people I know. My role has definitely evolved from an in-the-trenches and hands-on role to a more strategic and leadership-based role, but it’s critical for me to stay involved directly in my community. But make no mistake: this is all by choice.

You never really scale, because the needs always grow alongside. So you have to consistently evaluate priorities, and tweak your approach accordingly. And I still have to always balance my personal and professional presence, but you do eventually settle into what “feels” right, and go from there. There’s no checklist or precise answer for this one, and it’s something that every community person will have to figure out for themselves.

The Future of Community Management

It’s hard to speculate on this one still, because community management is still a bit of an enigma for many companies. They’re not sure what it’s for, or why these roles exist, and they tend to be pigeonholed as “online” community managers, as in the days of forum moderators. But the role really does have business significance, offline too, and it’s serious work.

If I had my druthers, I’d be educating companies about how this role is a hybrid discipline – a mix of sales and customer service and communication – and how really should be silo agnostic, functioning as a hub for many different disciplines inside the company. Online engagement is part of the role, but so too is the integration of that online world with offline efforts, business strategy, and even the culture of an organization.

These people are spokespeople, Trust Agents, communicators, networkers, brand ambassadors, and representatives of their community all wrapped into one. And in my opinion, it’s a role we need to take seriously and require that the people who hold them can demonstrate a wealth of mature business and interpersonal skills. That’s the ideal, of course.

The folks over at the Community Roundtable (I’m a member) have put together an interesting report on the State of Community Management. It’s worth a read, as it reflects a lot of the realities today (to the good and to the challenging) as well as a glimpse at what tomorrow might look like. And at Radian6, we put together an e-book on Building and Sustaining Brand Communities that gives our take on what these roles and functions look like inside an organization.

What Do You Think?

Does this job look the way you expected? Is a role like mine going to become more prevalent in the future, and where do you think it fits in business (and why)? What other questions do you have about community roles that I can help answer?

I’m looking forward to your comments.

Special thanks to my Radian6 colleagues for making this year the roller coaster of the best kind, and to my team for always making me look smarter and more accomplished than I am. You guys are what keep me doing this every day, without question, and keep the ship afloat.

image credit: David Paul Ohmer