What it Takes to be a Great Community Manager

Managing a community requires a fair bit of understanding regarding the product, service, or company in order to properly manage the related community. It also requires a personality that can be charismatic, and lead by example, as well as someone that can constantly network and organize.

The best community managers are those that can balance the needs of the company to market themselves or their product with the needs of the community, all the while trying to find avenues to improve the company or product and increase the size of the community.

It can be very difficult to balance everything effectively, and it requires constant communication.

Community managers have to be able to express themselves in the medium that the community prefers. For PicApp, this was almost all text based, and so I found it in line with what I was used to, having been a professional blogger before hand.

I was also lucky with PicApp because I believe that the product/service that PicApp offers fills a need, and in doing so, it made my job easier. We were also fortunate to have some great relationships with various people using the service.

Community managers really need to be experts at a variety of communication, marketing, business strategy and technology skills to effectively manage a community.

Difficulties of Being a Community Manager

One of the hardest parts about being a Community Manager is taking what you learn from the community, and distilling it into useful information that the company can use, and then waiting for a response from the bureaucracy. The smaller the company, the faster the turnaround, and the more likely they will be to listen to their Community Manager. There are companies that have Community Managers as a public relations arm, rather than creating a two way communication channel, they hope only to build up a following and push out information to various “fans”. This can be hugely detrimental over the long term, and if the Community Manager is trying to push changes in the company that aren’t happening, this can be exasperating.

I didn’t experience this during my Community Manager stint at PicApp, but I know of some people that used to have this issue, and were unable to be happy with their role in the company.

Leaving My Community Manager Position

Why did I move on from being the Community Manager at PicApp? It was a great opportunity, and a great company, but they weren’t really in need a Community Manager. The various people involved in the company were deeply involved with the community, and understood where the shortcomings in their product were. They were all so passionate, and listening intently to feedback that I was nothing more than a reminder of things that they already knew. Also, at the time, I didn’t really understand enough of what makes a good Community Manager and wanted to do too many things outside the scope of my role that stopped me from effectively leading the community that they had created and were already leading in the right direction.

Some companies don’t need Community Managers, despite having the position available, while others don’t have Community Managers, and need to hire someone desperately. Doing due diligence in your research, will help you figure out if the company you are interested in working with actually needs your services as a Community Manager.