International Community Manager Appreciation Day 2011 – it’s time to share a little love! #CMAD

Posted by: Krishna De | Posted on: January 24th, 2011 | 40 Comments | Posted in: Social networking

So you have been building your community on Facebook Page or LinkedIn Group for your business and your Community Manager has been working evenings and weekends resolving questions, queries and nurturing your community.

What ever platform you are using, which ever social media monitoring tool you deploy, often the difference between one online community and another can be put down to the content that you share and how engaged your community feels through the skilful facilitation of your Community Manager.

In the early stages of developing your online community they had the role of attracting members and then encouraging them to participate.

As they go on and have grown your community, they have had to ensure that more people are engaged and feel they are all valuable participants – a tough job to do when the community is not meeting in the real world and the one thing that unifies the group is the mutual interest in being a member of your online community.

You Community Manager has possibly even had times where they have had to share unwelcome news at which time they will have had had to muster up all their energy to remain polite in their interactions.

There is no rule book for managing a community successfully, but can you see the following attributes in your Community Manager:

- Patience to facilitate and encourage members of the community to participate and the ability not to get frustrated when someone asks challenging questions, or worse still is impolite or rude in their interactions

- Warmth, taking the time to welcome new members to the community and making everyone feel welcome

- Skilful networking being able to connect people to solutions perhaps inside your company and outside of the organisation

- Great written skills of course when engaging online but also effective when speaking to colleagues in management meetings to artfully articulate the needs of the community and how the development of the community can support the organisation’s strategic goals

- Confidence with technology so that they can manage the intricacies of the platform you are using for your online community

- Diplomacy so that they are effective in engaging with the external affairs director, sales director, marketing director and legal director who all have different agendas, but all want a say in what gets shared when with the online community at the times of significant announcements about the business

- Tenacity and resilience that means they go beyond the call of duty checking into the community outside of regular hours to ensure there are no questions that need to be addressed, not only serving the community but also helping manage your company’s reputation online.

I am sure there are many other attributes you can think of.

But I wonder do they know that you truly do value them? Do they understand that you know they make a difference to the reputation of the brand, lead generation and bottom line sales?

Well as today is International Community Manager Appreciation Day it’s a great reason to stop for a few moments to say thank you to your Community Manager and recognise their contribution. In fact in some parts of the world there are even in person events taking place.

And if you are a member of a community why not share a little love with the Community Manager – go on make their day!