February 15th, 2008
Scale 6x: Stormy Peters: What is a Community Manager?
The first day of SCALE 6x, I camped out in the Women in Open Source track. One of the sessions that I caught during this day was Stormy Peters' excellent, "What is a Community Manager?" presentation. My notes - in point form rather than prose - follow.
- Stormy interviewed four community managers and did some simple research for the presentation
- Between Google and Monster.com, she found 50+ job listings that had "community manager" in the title
- Cited Seth Godin's recent "Jobs of the future, #1: Online Community Organizer" blog post
- Acknowledged that there are many titles for the role and that there are likely many other jobs out there
- Many community managers have alternate titles (ed. I don't like the "community manager" or "technical evangelist" - at MySQL AB, I had the title "Community Advocate")
- Often community manager's don't like the title, as it implies that you are in control of the community, like a bad manager. This of course, isn't the case - community managers get to lead by example and influence rather than by force or fiat.
- When Stormy proposed the session, she was thinking about just FLOSS community managers
- However, when she looked for them, she found them in many different industries, including insurance companies, media companies (like the New York Times), and more.
- The people that Stormy interviewed were:
- Jeremiah, who does community management research for Forrester
- Connie (ed. I didn't catch where Connie was working)
- John Mark Walker, who does community work at Hyperic (and who is spinning up the Bytesfree.org project)
- Dawn Foster, Director of Developer Relations at Jive Software
- Alolita Sharma, CEO of Technetra
- Community managers is an old job - as long as we've had human groups, we've had people coordinating and leading them
- Online is different - we have people working on common goals without meeting each other. (ed. This isn't new - writing allowed widespread direct remote collaboration over distance and time.)
- What does an online community manager do?
- A common answer is that they "herd cats"
- This isn't correct - it implies discord, when most community managers have a common goal
- Instead the role focuses on things such as:
- advocating for the community
- explaining the views of one party to another
- defending the community
- advocating for the company (if working on behalf of a company) - representing a company is sometimes seen as a bad thing, but it isn't, as long as the company is genuinely interested in working with the community.
- advocates for users of company or community products - while the community management roles often has a product management focus, in most cases the same person should not do both roles
- Do we really need community management?
- Community management just happens - in almost every community, you find people doing it, whether volunteers or professionals
- What do community managers do on a day-to-day basis?
- A lot of the work focuses on keeping the community healthy
- Make sure that questions on forums (like mailing lists, newsgroups, etc.) are answered. Some times they directly answer, other times they just ensure that there is an answer.
- Keeping forum discussions civil (or at least within the mores of the community) and diffusing tensions with in the community.
- Working to grow the community - not just in size, but also in activity, effectiveness, etc.
- Help to focus the direction of the community
- Help information flow in the community
- Help ensure that the community's voice is heard within the company (if a paid community manager)
- Help ensure that the company's voice is heard by the community
- What do they actually do? When asked, they tended to say:
- 20% watching forums
- 20% reading email
- 20% on new features
- 20% on presentations
- etc.
- until they were at about 200%
- Community advocates are about as busy as the rest of us - however, they do tend to focus on many different things at once, including:
- Facilitating communication between different groups
- Advocating for a group
- Developing content - blog posts, presentations, white papers, etc.
- Marketing
- None of the community managers wanted to be in the marketing team
- All agree that it is a marketing role
- Most wanted to be tied to engineering instead, as that keeps them close to the team that they interact with most frequently
- Monitoring forums - including IRC, email, web forums, newsgroups, … - and answering questions on them (or ensuring that questions are answered.) This tends to take a great deal of time.
- Participating in conferences, where they are focused on presenting and interacting with the community (rather than just going to sessions.) Conferences are valuable because they allow community managers to work face-to-face with online contacts.
- Worrying. In particular about communities and products. They have a lot of passion for and pride in the projects that they are a part of.
- Dealing with trolls.
- Working on strategy. While they don't own the strategy, they collect people's opinion on the strategy and influence it.
- Where do you find community managers?
- Connie said that some of the best come from technical support. They are already wired to help people out.
- They come from the community that they will eventually serve.
- They spend massive amounts of time online - if they don't already do this coming into the role, they are in for some culture shock.
- Can you grow a community manager?
- Yes, but it takes time and mentoring
- What are some of the characteristics of community managers?
- They are passionate - for their role, project and community
- Habitual communicators
- Technically inclined, but often have moved out of a technical role
- Generalists, as they need to understand many things in order to be able to be effective in their role
- Like representing other people's interests
- Fascinated with communities
- Self-motivated (which is key, as they have many small tasks on the go at all times and are very hard to directly manage because of this.)
- Creative problem solvers
- Fun and friendly
- Leaders (Stormy notes that bad examples can poison communities, citing past outbursts on the Open Source Initiative mailing lists)
- Multi-taskers who can deal with frequent interruptions
- Often they are women - in this role, there are a much higher percentage of women than in other areas in FLOSS
- Often social worker types who like to nurture others
- How to become a community manager
- Find a community
- Participate actively
- Practice your communication skills -blog, give conference presentations
- Visit conferences
- Try advocating or doing ombuds for others
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Posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 23:15
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March 13th, 2008 at 13:46
[...] Peters - Director of Community and Partner Programs at OpenLogic - her excellent, "What is a Community Manager?" presentation was useful for and interesting to many attendees. Link [...]
March 13th, 2008 at 16:08
[...] in my "What is a community manager?" talk, Zak Greant did an awesome job of taking notes during my SCALE talk. Thanks, Zak! Bookmark:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can [...]