Community Manager News & Articles

Formation of communities is one of the many ways that distinguish humans as social creatures. Communities generate and preserve a common set of value systems that are important to the group. This creates a sense of belonging, dedication and commitment essential to a successful community. 

The past few years have been good for community managers. Community managers have been able to transform themselves into company listeners, social enablers and company customer service liaisons. But the community manager has a growth problem -- in that there hasn’t been anything for the community manager to aspire to -- no corporate ladder to climb. Until now. Introducing the Community Director. 

This week Sprout Social launched a new initiative aimed at helping brands better measure and improve social media engagement.

Marisa Peacock is the duly designated community manager at CMSWire, and we want to say thank you for her valuable time and the inspired work she does in extending the CMSWire circle ever wider on this special day. It's Community Manager Appreciation Day! What? It's a real thing!

Last year we summarized the trajectory that the position of social media strategist has taken. We said that “the career path of the social strategist will continue to be limited as long as companies undermine the role of social media within the enterprise.” One year later, does this still hold true?

Around a year ago, several reports came out that highlighted the lack of employee desire for social features in workplace intranets. What a difference a year makes. 

Last time in our Building a Social Media Team series, we discussed the community manager. A community manager is necessary, but it is not the only role that’s important in a social media team. This week we take a look at the social strategist.

Social Media has evolved from its beginnings as a recreational pastime into a tool for communication, social activism -- and of course, business. While even the most conservative organizations are incorporating social components into their operations and strategy, many continue to struggle with exactly how to get started. An almost infinite number of consultants, books and articles offer guidance on strategy, but many fail to answer a key question: who will actually do the work? In the first installment in our six-part series, we take a look at building a social media team.

Over the past few months both HootSuite and Yammer have been making headlines. Today it’s actually for the same thing. HootSuite has added Yammer to its ever-expanding App Directory, allowing users to monitor and reply to their Yammer conversations without leaving the HootSuite dashboard.

This year’s State of Community Management report, published by The Community Roundtable, takes an anthropological view of tracking, observing and analyzing how community management is being developed and implemented across organizations. And like cultural anthropologists before them, they have created a maturity model designed to help us all better understand the issues and competencies relevant to community managers. Margaret Mead would be proud. 

Last week I emptied the contents of my community manager’s toolbox to showcase a few of my favorite tools and apps. Since then, a few other social media management tools crossed my feed, both coming with recommendations from other community managers.

As we learned in last Wednesday’s Social Business TweetJam, creating a social business requires a unique combination of people, process and technology. For SharePoint users, the technology is the easy part, but getting the people and process in place can be challenging.

The social media monitoring marketplace has been growing steadily. With so many tools available to help companies manage social media, it’s not always clear what can add value to the process. This week SocialVolt and Bottlenose have unveiled updates that are sure to help set their social media management platforms apart from the competition.

There is definitely not a shortage of tools and apps designed to help us manage social media, the messages we send, the communities that gather and its influence on building brand loyalty. Of course, the right tools are easy to use and add value to how customer experience is managed and measured.

To say there are a lot of tools to help you manage, measure and monitor your social media presence is an understatement. Finding the right tool isn’t easy, but when you find it, it can be life-changing. Such was the case when I discovered SocialBro. Despite its frat boy name, SocialBro delivers a powerful and comprehensive Twitter management dashboard that will make you wish you could manage everything in your life with it.