The Iceberg Effect of Community Management

Starting The Community Roundtable has been a great way to understand better the day to day issues of community managers in a wide array of organizations. There are a few things that come up somewhat regularly:

• Community managers are under pressure to justify what they do to peers and bosses that don't really see or understand what tasks make up their day.
• Some community managers are dealing with the challenge of inspiring participants to author only to see them become unmotivated when they don't receive any comments or activity on their content.
• Almost all the community managers we talk to struggle with ways to maintain or increase engagement.

One thing that more experienced community managers know - and will typically be learned over time by anyone in the role - is that the visible activity of a community is only a very small part of the overall activity of a community. There are a huge number of things that happen in the background, between two individuals, or behind a wall. While over time, this background activity is done by many in the community it typically falls heavily on the community manager during the development and growth phases and include all of the following tasks:

• Back-channeling: Encouraging participants privately to post, comment, and participate.
• Event planning and orchestration: Ensuring that events are successful by getting commitment from the influencers within the community that will bring along everyone else and make for a successful event.
• Posting event documentation and recaps to extend the value of the event and include more members.
• Sending community activity and content to members that have a specific interest in the topic to ensure the members with something of value to add see it.
• Drafting content, discussions, and ideas so that it is easy for members to contribute or share.
• Creating or re-publishing content into different modalities - text, pictures, audio, & video.
• Building relationships with key members of the community to maintain an 'ear to the ground' of what is really going on.
• Intercepting or interceding with members who are acting inappropriately.
• Evangelizing within the sponsoring organization to generate more involvement and/or gain support.
• Gathering and reporting on activity and results.
• Helping to translate and negotiate between organizational and community needs.
• Monitoring discussions and content.
• Brainstorming on activity, content, and ideas that keep community members interested.
• Working with colleagues to build programming that is valuable to them and the community members.

I'm sure there are quite a few more activities that I'm forgetting (please feel free to add any I missed) but the point is this: If you are just looking at public community activity, you are likely seeing a very small percentage of what is actually going on.

This dynamic is critical to keep in mind when thinking about resources and investment needed to manage a community. What may look like a 'part-time' responsibility likely requires much more than that if you want to successfully drive member engagement and growth.  Once a community is more mature and community leaders emerge and take over some of these tasks, the percentage of a community manager's job likely shifts to less back-channeling and evangelism to more time spent working with community leaders and programming. What you see in a successful online community is really only the tip of the iceberg. 

How do you think about, prioritize, and articulate your 'hidden' work?

[this is cross-posted to www.community-roundtable.com]

Comments

[Lani Rosales]

>How do you think about, prioritize, and articulate your 'hidden' work?

Very thought provoking question, Rachel! I have two projects that require me to be the lead community builder/manager, AgentGenius.com and NMLab.com, and both are very different animals but I would argue that *most* of what I do is behind the scenes. Because community building is an intricate art, I could write out my entire playbook and it would still be almost impossible to replicate because each niche is different.

But back to your question... priorities used to be on a "whatever's on fire" basis but as the communities have grown exponentially, it is much more predictable and I can actually schedule my time accordingly, allotting specific time to specific tasks.

To articulate what I do, I simply explain to people that I'm the den mother of the space- I clean up messes, I give out gold stars, I cheerlead, I recruit writers and readers and most of all, I'm a listening ear.

I would add to your list that a successful community builder is always looking for and open to ways to collaborate with others in order to strengthen the community.

THANK YOU for illuminating the hidden side of the job- most people think it's flying from here to there to party because the pictures abound, but the truth is, it's an eight day week ;)

[David Phipps]

Great post on community managers that is recapitulated in the human off line world of community and social innovation workers. We see it can take a lot of underwater or behind the scenes work to become an overnight success....suspect the same is true for on line community managers.

David Phipps

[Sue John]

You've hit the nail on the head with this article. I would say 80% of my time is back-end, behind the door, one-on-one community and relationship building. It takes time and patience, and you need to build trust and respect. That's not all done "in the public eye". Thanks for highlighting this aspect of our roles as community managers