6 Reasons Your B2B Company Needs a Community Manager
By Guest Author
Tue, Sep 8, 2009
This guest post is by Amanda O’Brien, Inbound Marketing Manager at Hall Web Services, one of Maine’s largest web development firms.
Your Twitter status and Facebook fan page are stale. Your latest B2B blog post is a week overdue. People are filling out your contact forms on your website and you haven’t gotten back to them. And you just burned your microwave burrito. It can all be so overwhelming.
On top of that, social media management may not be your thing. That doesn’t make you a bad person. How can you keep up? How can you make sure your online inquiries make it into your sales pipeline? How can you be on the cusp of what is coming up next and not playing catch up all the time?
Perhaps it’s time to consider an online community manager.
What is an online community manager?
It depends.
It depends on what you need. Your community manger should oversee, maintain and take responsibility for your business’ online presence. If the community manager is not going to follow up with all online inquiries, they should be the one to funnel your inquiries to the correct department for handling.
Many companies are hiring community managers and they are proving to be beneficial. Lots of businesses started social media programs without a clear understanding of the resources required. This led to interns or other unqualified part-time help who felt swamped trying to keep up with everything. These responsibilities could be worked into an existing position or perhaps a new position entirely.
1. Keep Organized
A community manager can keep your social media marketing efforts organized, which is a constant reflection of your business. They can establish goals, objectives and set timelines.
2. Time Saver
Some have spent hours and hours trying to catch up with this new social internet. Your online community manager should already be well versed in the social web. Also, many organizations express frustrations about employees wasting so much time on social networks. With one corporate voice you can concentrate those efforts.
3. Lowering Online Risk
For many companies the risks just seems too high to let all their employees participate online on behalf of their organization. Having an online community manager ensures your efforts are consistent, strategic and are an appropriate representation of your company.
4. Recognize Leadership
Recognize the employee, and it is usually one, who is willing to lead a company’s social media efforts. For your social media campaigns to be successful there has to be some amount of passion behind the content you are producing. The qualified community manager will not only be passionate about your business but also about the tools, process and outcome of their efforts. The best blog posts don’t come from business owners forcing themselves to write.
5. Stop Playing Defense
Reactive marketing usually isn’t the best plan of attack. Having one person tracking your online reputation and keeping you up to speed on what is happening in your industry is a much more solid approach. Instead of always playing catch up with your competitors, be trendsetter in your industry.
6. Track Results and Time
By expending a single resource you should be able to better track your results, time spent and return on each campaign.
As with everything in your social media strategy, you need to keep in mind this is only a single part of your overall marketing strategy. This is not a checklist. You need to figure out how it works best for your company. A community manager works for businesses who need to keep a handle on their online marketing strategy.
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Agreed on all. Great post.
But I don’t prefer the term “community manager” nearly as much as, say, “Director, User Participation” (this is what BusinessWeek does because one doesn’t really “manage a community!” so much as help facilitate user/customer participation and build the company’s presence so as to grow the community). Perhaps that’s just a personal preference.
Thanks CK,
No you are not alone. Chris Brogan actually mentions in his new book Trust Agents that perhaps ‘Community Manager’ isn’t the BEST term since a community doesn’t want to be MANAGED. I just went with the term I am hearing most often for this type of position.
Thanks again for the feedback!
A
So what are some other options instead of the title: Community Manager? I don’t necessarily love it, but am having trouble coming up with good alternatives. Community Liaison sounds a little too corny…or pompous.
Ryan,
Krist Eclectic actually put out a post not so long ago of all the different titles: http://kristeclectic.com/2009/05/26/the-many-job-titles-of-the-community-manager/
I think my favorite (that didn’t make the list) is ‘Head of Magic’ held by Saul Colt from Zoocasa.
One word of caution is try to stray from fad terms. You don’t want to have to change your title and your business cards every year.
Hope you find something that is appropriate for you!