What are Community Managers and How Exactly Do They Spend Their Days?

What does the Community Manager do in my company? I don’t have a Community Manager; do I really need one? Would I make a good Community Manager?

It helps to know some of the common misconceptions about Community Management [courtesy of Blaise Grimes-Viort, a hat tip to you] to effectively answer these questions. In a nutshell, here are eight misconceptions about Community Management:

1. It can be done by any Tom, Dick or Harry.
2. They use their mouth piece to laze the day away.
3. They need to be well known to be effective.
4. Their work’s ROI can’t be measured.
5. Their job is to sell a product / service.
6. All of their work is done online.
7. They’re forces to be reckoned with, not unlike Stalin. [really?]
8. They’re 9 to 5′ers.

Now that we’re working with a clean slate, allow me to take you through a portal, Being John Malkovich style, into the heads of three different Community Managers. Lets assume that Community Managers do a broad range of things and often differ from company to company (fair assumption?). In that spirit, we’ll go and take a peak at three different Community Managers that each work for different companies. Lets go.

Scott Drummond, Community Manager @ Optus

• Manages his inbox. He spends a fair chunk of his time here. He uses Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero approach to manage his inbox by compartmentalizing his emails into actionable tasks: Delete, Delegate, Respond, Defer and Do.
• Monitors key metrics related to brand health and shares any significant information with various stakeholders.
• Reviews and tweaks scheduled content that has been sourced throughout the company that is destined for various social media platforms.
• Attends meetings with stakeholders, customer services team members, etc. about things such as strategies to enhance existing relationships.
• Addresses strategic issues such as how to better engage communities.
• Uses reporting tools to share insight from communities to employees.

Get a full breakdown of Scott’s day.

Lee Odden, Social Media Community Manager, Top Rank

• Respond to company blog comments. He also uses a blog comment management tool to effectively reply to comments.
• Visit Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn related to brand health and shares any significant information with various stakeholders.
• Monitors news feeds and shares relevant news articles and blogs, i.e., via Twitter and creating blog posts.
• Search for opportunities to engage with people relevant to the industry.
• Monitors social dashboard and responds to information when necessary.

Get a full breakdown of Lee’s day.

Leighann F., Community Manager @ Yelp

• Makes lots of phone calls to business owners, marketing partners, etc.
• Emails possible venues for events.
• Participates in meetings such as with people in the PR department.
• Writes reviews on places of interest such as restaurant reviews.
• Monitors and participates in communities by engaging people on on various topics of interest and sets out the welcome mat for new ‘yelpers’.
• Hangs out with / stay connected with the community in the offline world. They go to bar crawls, new restaurants, etc.Get answers to more questions related to Leighann’s job.

What Relationship do You Have with Your Blog?

You’ve put your melon to work and have just finished writing a blog post. How do you feel? Maybe you feel a sense of accomplishment / pride or warm and fuzzing inside.

My relationship with some of my nearest and dearest blog articles are as follows:

Top 15 Best Blogging Practices: I feel appreciated as a blogger with this post. It was featured on WordPress’s Freshly Pressed and generated more than 10,000 reads. I was surprised when I discovered it have been translated into Spanish, French and Arabic and was being taught in high schools.

Get Sexy with Social Media: This video post that I created got me all worked up and left me feeling like a major geek. After two friends boast about how social media savvy they are, the conversation blooms into some sexy dialogue that only social media could make possible.

How You Can Get Featured on Freshly Pressed: I felt a sort of warmth and care for my readers, since I wanted them to get their moment in the spotlight on Freshly Pressed. I also felt connected to my readers and valued them more and more with every post since.

Top 10 Social Media Swag: I felt like whipping out the plastic and shopping a storm. I ended up buying a social mug, mouse pad, Netflix and Last.fm subscriptions, customized Jones Soda bottle and some Twitter shoes. I’m lovin’ them all!

Lets Get You Laughing: I felt uber happy when I wrote this post. I got to watch and read some really funny videos, comics, spoof news and more relating to social media and then share that slice of joy with my readers.

Here, grab the talking stick! What is your relationship with your blog posts?

Gmail Labs: Top 5 Settings

You may not be familiar with Gmail Labs if you have not carefully tabbed through your Gmail Settings. So who cares? Well, Gmail Labs can help improve the way you use Gmail. If you have a Gmail account, this is worth a read.

What are Gmail Labs? They are experimental features that are still in the oven, so they’re not quite ready to be integrated into default Gmail settings. It’s worthwhile to peruse through the various Labs to find out which ones work for you. The Labs tab can be found under Settings. A wee caveat here: these features could disappear, be altered or break at whim, but do not fear. If there is a glitch with the Lab feature and you have trouble accessing your Inbox, there is an ‘escape hatch’ or link that will allow you to return to your original settings.

These are the five Labs that I’ve found most useful and are currently offered at time of posting.

1. Google Calendar gadget lets you see your Googe Calendar in the left column, regardless of where you are in Gmail.
2. Message Sneak Peek lets you peek into a conversation by right-clicking on your message from the comfort of your inbox.
3. Auto-advance takes you to your next conversation after you delete, archive, or mute a conversation, instead of taking you back to your inbox.
4. Superstars lets you choose from an array of stars and icons to categorize your emails. You are no longer limited to a yellow star.
5. Undo Send lets you undo your big oops for a few seconds after pressing the send button.

What other Gmail Labs do you find helpful?

Top 10 Things You Can Buy For $5

Image via CrunchBase

Have you heard of a website called Fiverr? It provides a meeting place for people to buy and sell their products and services (mostly services) for – your guessed it – five bucks. You can select categories from social marketing and business to fun and bizarre. A little caveat, not all services are entirely ethical, there are however some real jems.

Allow me to entertain you with an overview of some of the more colourful, perhaps less than savoury gigs. Need to breakup with your girlfriend / boyfriend? You can have someone else do it for you for $5. Want to meet someone in prison? $5. Want to find out if your new mate is a major sleeze, porno addict or felon? Fiverr.com at your service.

Time to sift through the rift raft and get you spending the best five dollars of your life. In that spirit, the top 10 things you can get for $5 from Fiverr.com follows, but don’t just take my words for it, each of the gigs are rate based on their past performance. Drum roll please… for five dollars you get:

1. A romantic gift for your loved one. Have someone hold up a sign in Times Square in New York with a message of your choice, such as ‘I love ____’ or ‘____, will you marry me?’.

2. A professional voice over for your commercial, podcast introduction, etc. for a radio vet that has 10 years under his belt.

3. Your CSS browser issue fixed, including writing new CSS.

4. Your own customized cartoon version of you. This seller does a remarkable job of making your cartoon look realistic.

5. A customized computer font created from your handwriting.

6. Four customized logos for your business.

7. A fashion editorial about your personal style.

8. A customized 30-second song about anything you want and get it posted on YouTube.

9. A video of a funny looking puppet that sings a special song for you / greeting such as a song for your loved one for Valentine’s Day.

10. A customized design of the landing page for your Facebook page.

Have you tried any other services on Fiverr.com that you recommend? If you have, I would love to hear from you!

Lets Get You Laughing

Do you want some good, hardy, deep-from-the-gutt kind of laughter? These 10 posts about the funny side of social media and marketing was created for that exact purpose. Enjoy!

1. Another Twitter Parody, Meet Flutter. This is a YouTube video (under four minutes) and is a social media parody directed, point blank, at Twitter.

2. Meanwhile, at Santa’s Social Media Command Center: this is a comic about the role social media plays when deciding who’s naughty or nice and responding to gift requests.

3. Apple’s Genius Bar Expands to Include Food and Drink: this is a spoof news article.

4. South Park Mac vs PC: This is a YouTube video (under two minutes) that’s a parody of Mac vs. PC commercials.

5. Twitter Movie Trailer: This is a YouTube parody trailer (under three minutes) – perhaps you can squeeze it in before lunch.

6. 5 Very Badly Placed Adverts, such as ads for McDonalds next to a child obesity advert…

7.  15 Funny Photoshop Mistakes: See a range of ads that have some serious PhotoShop mistakes.

8. Get Sexy with Social Media: this one I created and published to YouTube. Basically, these two characters show off their knowledge of Twitter lingo, then suddenly some very heavy flirting – social media style – takes place. :0)

9. Social Media Marketing for (Real) Dummies – Elaine Fogel lists three real life examples of social media marketing done badly, very badly.

8. Social Media Dating: a comic strip about how men can use social media to pick up woman.

9. Fakebook.com – Chapter One – The Idea. This is a spoof news article.

10. Awards for Social Media Addicts. Actual awards that you can download and give to favourite social media junkie.

Do you have any funny links about social media? I’d love to hear from you!

Photo by: jimbowen0306