As you may (or may not) know, I've been a regular over at Twitter lately - having conversations and building relationships with my fellow bloggers and blog readers. It's been fun, but it takes a bit of time every day. Not that I mind - because if it weren't for the relationships, I would be just another voice making noise without an audience.
If you're a company wanting to get into the social marketing arena, be aware that it does take time to build relationships online. You may need a dedicated person to monitor all the forums, communities, and online profiles that you create for the company. Before you hire that person or assign the position to someone internally, there are a few things you should ask yourself:
- Does this person have experience with online communities and the etiquette involved with each community?
- Is this person ready to face attacks from people? Can they handle tough topics?
- Is this person fully knowledgeable about company services, products, and ongoing issues?
- If there is a major issue that needs to be addressed (this JetBlue Twitter story comes to mind), who can this person contact for help?
- Does this person's online personality fit in with the personality of the company?
What other things would you look for if you were to hire an online community manager?
Maria -
This is a fabulous post.
As someone who has worked in this field for the past couple of years, I would love to contribute a couple of additional observations:
A company, business, or nonprofit taking the leap into online community management should know how they plan on measuring the levels of success that come with hiring an online community manager. The tricky thing about doing so is that the fruits of having an OCM are different for some companies and somewhat unmeasurable for others. This is a dialog that the company should have internally before hiring and then they should carry that conversation on to any potential new hires.
Further, with regard to this question: "Does this person's online personality fit in with the personality of the company?" If the answer is an honest "yes," are you ready to put a lot of trust into the hands of the community manager with that personality? Often, the job of a community manager is to be the smiling, witty, receptive Internet voice of your company. Chances are that they know a lot more about the style of communication than you do. In order for them to make progress, a business might need to lend them a sometimes uncomfortable amount of trust with the job that they're doing (with meetings, of course, that explain how this is ultimately benefiting the company).
Many companies naively expect that they're going to jump onto a social media bandwagon and they'll have people knocking down their door for product the next day. Weaving through a world of social media communication is like opening a whole other business in a whole new place - There's new hand-shaking that needs to happen, new relationship cultivation, new trials and failures, etc.
And a note to OCMs - I was recently talking with my friend Wendy Cohen. She was the Huffington Post's first OCM and she now works at Participant Media. At HuffPo, she was responsible for getting people to chat with each other, and the bloggers, online. At Participant, she is responsible for getting people to go from the online world to meet with each other and take action in the offline world. I asked her, "Same title and two entirely different jobs... How do you figure out how to do your job as I go along?" She said that she still reads best-practice blogs about her field every single day. I think that's great advice.
Thanks again!
.a.
Posted by: Alex Steed | July 30, 2008 7:15 AM | Permalink to Comment