Social Media Community Management

I've written about the "Geek Marketer" concept put forth by Steve Rubel - that corporations need a person who not only knows about marketing, but is also a geek.   Another set of skills that go into that job description -- well at least for nonprofits who don't have the resources to have fully funded positions in on area  - are community management skills.   There was a post on Seth Godin's blog talking about this.

More recently, I found a terrific article about (ignore the fact that the audience is the banking industry - anyone else think that's ironic?). Anyway, here's his key points about the skills:

Whether or not hard dollars are spent launching a social media project, someone needs to manage the initiative and ensure that it achieves its goals. This is a very specific skill-set with the following requirements:

• Someone who can inspire visitors to come back, readers to register, and registered users to add good content.
• Someone who knows when to get involved in discussions and threads that are degenerating, going off topic, or just going nowhere.
• Someone who can elevate good material to the homepage so it will hook like-minded people, as well as delete remarks you don't want on the site.
• Someone with good taste.
• Someone who understands the business goals of the site and can act appropriately and decisively.

Hat tip to Rob Cottingham or rather his Facebook profile.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free. 

Comments

[Doug Haslam]

Beth,

Thanks for the post. I have been looking at the need for community management skills for all types of companies lately, largely thru PR work for new client Prospero.

From that admittedly biased point of view, my question: do you find a lot of people struggling with the needs of the technology vs. the content/community/program goals? Are technology companies throwing the latest tools out w/o regard to the community-building and management?