You Don’t Need a Community Manager
There are campers and there are climbers. Anyone at your company should be working themselves out of their position through automation or consistently reinventing their position. The better you are at your job the less you are needed. Utilizing automation and algorithms is better than being replaced by automation and algorithms. The Enterprise Community Manager position is no different and may be coming to an impasse.
This is coming from someone who has made a career of being a community manager, has been writing about community management since 2010 and was once (just once!) dubbed “The Community Manager’s Community Manager.”
Now to be fair, the title IS a bit click-baity. An Enterprise Community Manager is critical to kickstart a community initially organizing content, leading the culture and promoting best practices. But the above holds true; a good community manager should work themselves out of a position if they build a true community.
What is the tipping point? A thriving community needs:
- a database of easily findable content (find)
- successful samples of every type of group (collaborate)
- consistent creators of content (teach)
- consistent consumers of content (learn)
- consistent contributors (crowdsource)
Once every persona in your community can easily find, collaborate, teach, learn and crowdsource around your content AND all of their respective metrics are increasing (searches, group members, creates, views, contributes) your community cannot be stopped.
At this point, your Enterprise Community Manager is being recruited by other firms and departments within the enterprise. By this point, your ECM should be considered for other global roles considering their variety of skills and massive internal network.
—
This post is the latest in a series of explorations by Alan Berkson and me into what we are calling The Control Scale, a guide to digital communication and collaboration. We are writing our book out loud. If you’d like to stay up-to-date with our happenings, please subscribe to our mailing list. Yeah, it’s old school, but email is not dead. Mistreated, maybe. But not dead.
