The Evolving Role of a Community Manager (Part 2)

I mentioned in Part 1 that community managers require a broad range of experience and wear a lot of hats in the course of their jobs. To me this is what makes the job so interesting. We must draw upon everything we’ve ever leaned both personally and professionally — and we’re always learning things that we put into practice. There is no “status quo.”

No two community managers have exactly the same job description (as many of you shared in the comments from my last post). And most of us add to our responsibilities as new opportunities are identified (most from conversations with our specific community).

Let’s look at my previous gig as an example.

When I joined Symantec in 2006, the company’s public Web site housed a forgotten area of discussion forums inherited from the 2005 purchase of Veritas Software. Launched in 2003, the Veritas Architect Network (VAN) was a peer-to-peer community for business customers, mainly functional IT managers. Most of the discussions were support related and “How do I” questions.

In addition to peer-to-peer discussion forums, VAN featured the (very) occasional white paper and links to various resources within veritas.com.

Veritas didn’t have a full-time community manager and content was stale. Discussions were seldom moderated. Links to resources became broken over time.

Worst of all, Symantec wasn’t learning anything from the forums and wasn’t sharing anything with the community.

As the new kid in town, many of the employees I spoke with from product and support teams had never even heard of VAN. My job as a full-time community manager was to breathe life back into the forums and map out a 2.0 version of the community under the Symantec brand.

Here’s what I did over the first couple of weeks on the job:

• Introduced myself on the forums: “Hello, we’ve finally joined the conversations!”
• Identified a handful “power users” who were very active on the boards even with no love from Symantec (up until then, anyway).
• Built a private area for these power users to allow them to talk among themselves — and with me.

This private forum was instrumental in re-launching the community. We had daily conversations, starting with: “What should we call it and what features, in addition to discussion forums, should this new community offer?”

We decided to ask the community through a series of polls and discussions within the forums. The power users helped shape the discussions and the polls. The community eventually picked the name, “Symantec Technology Network,” along with the new elements within its walls: Expert blogs, videos and white papers.

I literally sketched out my vision of the site on a piece of paper. Once the napkin-sketch blueprints were in place, over the next four months I had to:

• Choose a new forums/blog platform (working with IT).
• Get my sketch turned into schematics -– then get it built (working with support, product management, the forums/blog vendor, the Web design team, IT …).
• Convince product management and support that listening to — and participating in — customer conversations via the forums would be worth their while.
• Recruit a small army of Symantec bloggers (no easy task … I am doing that now at Cadence).
• Create an editorial calendar for white papers and videos.
• Lay down the following law in stone: “Thou Shall Not (and I will not allow you to) Delete Negative Posts!”

OK, this post is getting long so I’ll wrap it up in Part 3.

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