If you could only bring 6 Social Media Pros to an island to start a Web 2.0 Marketing Department, who would they be?

Making it on Jeremiah’s list of ‘Social Computing Stategists’ got me thinking about my team, what we do, what we want to do and what’s next. My team is fairly new and we’ve been at it for about 9-months now and the various disciplines and skill sets of our team was built trial and error over the past few months. As we plan for the next fiscal year I can’t help but think big so I started creating a list of all of the things a ‘Social Media and Web 2.0′ team should focus on (leaving out the boundaries of resources). Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Social Media Strategist - In ‘Alice in Wonderland’, Lewis Carroll wrote “if you don’t know where you want to be, it hardly matters which direction you take”. At the core of every good team there’s a good plan. This is the person who pulls everything together. They build the Social Media Marketing plan and determine what the objective of the campaign is and therefore what tools should be utilized and how.

Community Manager – There are currently two communities that we have an active presence on - Facebook and NetPro having someone actively facilitate conversations in these communities would really take things to the next level.

Social Site Management – The great thing about engaging your customers in social media is that you can tweak your message depending on the audience. The tough thing about engaging your customers in social media is that your message could end up looking different for every audience. At the core of any marketing strategy lies a common message. We now have a presence on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Depending on the campaign we may leverage one or more of these channels and having someone to manage the communications and having it centrally executed is critical.

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OK, *Exotic* may be a bit of a stretch, but while our numbers are growing rapidly, we are still small in numbers.

If you haven’t seen Jeremiah Owyang’s current list (many of you probably had because you read his blog and if you don’t you should), but just in case I’d encourage any Social Media Managers, or as Jeremiah calls them; Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations, to head over and add your name to the list.

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Recently I was chatting with Josh Hilliker who is the Community Manager of the vPro Expert Center, and I believe Josh is an example of someone who has figured out how to be successful by not over thinking his community.  Josh manages a site that revolves around an IT product. And to be frank it is a product that few understand and who’s value has yet to reach mass appeal.  Now here’s the odd thing, Josh’s community kick but over our other communities based on broader appealing products.  All logic says his community should reside in the shadow of these communities.

So what’s the deal?  What’s Josh got going on the other communities don’t?  Simply put Josh just does it.  He doesn’t slow down to think whether or not his next idea to engage the community is the right idea.  He doesn’t pause on whether he should or should not step out to another site and engage.  Josh runs on instinct and expertise that is not encumbered by a need to analyze or perfect what he is doing before he does it.

However it’s not all full speed in every direction.  Josh does his research and is grounded in his deep knowledge of his audience and community.  He knows where they are online.  He knows the conversations that are happening. He also knows that he must often quickly fail before he can succeed.  And ultimately he focuses on opportunities not on barriers.

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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.

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Let me admit up front that this is a blog post about a blog post. Apoligies in advance if that is too post-modern for you. But I think I have good reason to blog about a blog: I need your help.

Yesterday I wrote a post on Intel’s corporate community site asking if community members thought the site was too commercial. The site itself–called Open Port–and some of our community managers had received recent feedback that their focus was too marketing in nature. This is weird given all the community managers for the site are serious tech dudes who just happen to have a passion for the space they manage.

The Nacho Analogy

To help the community frame the discussion, I used my colleague Bob Duffy’s nacho analogy. He theorizes that nearly every restaurant carries nachos on their menu. Yet not all nachos are created equal. Some are better than others and Bob contends that it’s the cheese-to-chip ratio that counts. Too much cheese drowns the chips and too little cheese makes the chips dry and difficult to swallow.

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Community managers like hats. And that’s a good thing – because they wear several.

It’s hard to list everything a community manager does because that list varies from company to company and Web site to Web site. It’s also a moving target.

I recently spoke with a friend of mine at the Patricia Seybold Group, Matthew Lees, who was writing a report titled: “How Should You Manage Customer Communities?”

Matt asked me about my background and how my professional experience helps me do my job. I told him it does more than help me “do” my job – it helps me “shape” my job. This apparently piqued his curiosity and forced me to think back to events that have transpired since my 1988 college graduation.

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We have a current debate going on right now within HP’s Community Counsel and I thought I would pose our question to you for your input.

Normally I’m a bit of a blogging purist. NO GHOST BLOGGING. Always use your real name, always use your full name, no pseudonyms, aliases etc.

But we just had a new blog request that made me step back and re-asses my thinking. I find this a useful practice to do whenever I start getting an emotional knee-jerk reaction to a question (which I did this time).

We have a blog request from a group within HR and the proposed author is very hesitant to use her full name. Being a mother with small children she is very worried about having too much private information out there and doesn’t want what information that is out there too closely associated with what she does for a living.

Since she is in HR she is also concerned about backlash from prospective job candidates that don’t get hired or about the potential deluge of recruiter emails she would get (she already gets a large amount). Because of all of these factors (and a self professed irrational fear) she wants to just use her initials.

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I joined Cadence Design Systems a little over a month ago as the company’s social media/Web community manager. My first mission: recruit, train (and then, on a weekly basis, cajole) a small army of expert bloggers from within the company’s ranks of engineers and product managers.

Cadence makes the software and hardware tools that very smart people use to design the latest and greatest chips for computers and electronic devices. The folks who work here are also very smart. They are on par with rocket scientists. I am a Neanderthal (no offense, all you Geico cavemen) in comparison.

The company’s user community, cdnusers.org, has discussion forums and articles – mainly technology-related papers and interviews featuring folks in the electronic design automation (EDA) space.

Adding blogs to this successful mix will give the community additional information and insight from Cadence experts.

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