The New Diplomats: Community Managers

My degree is in politics and international relations. I found the power dynamics and relationships between countries fascinating and ever-changing. While I pursued a career in international relationship and government, my career path took a turn when I realized that I found working in the bowels of bureaucracy (as well as the bowels of the Pentagon) to be maddeningly inefficient and slow. But that early training in politics and power structures has been hugely helpful in understanding all types of organizations and how individuals interact - perhaps better than any other degree could have. Working with community managers has been no exception and it got me thinking recently that the emerging role of the community manager was really quite similar to that of a diplomat. Like diplomats, community managers must be skilled at:

• Understanding without immediately drawing conclusions or offering solutions (i.e. excellent listening skills)
• Finding resources for others
• Understanding culture
• Communicating often subtle concerns and issues between two or more groups
• Gathering information and developing measured analysis
• Influencing outcomes
• Confronting situations in a constructive, non-defensive way

This thought in turn led to thinking about whether organizations other than governments should have the equivalent of the State Department. I recently caught up with John Reaves and Claudia Putnam who were also interested in this topic and we had an interesting conversation about how companies might incorporate community management more formally and whether there is a business case for something like a state department. After the conversation, I took a moment to look at the mission of the U.S. State Department. To me they are fundamentally responsible for the following:

• Creating a worldwide environment in which the U.S. can prosper, through relationships and alliances
• Reducing threats to the U.S., through alliances, intelligence gathering, and communication
• Collaborating with others to solve externalities that cannot be addressed by one nation alone
• Helping individual citizens navigate other countries

For organizations then, this mission might include:

• Creating an environment whereby the organization can best prosper, through relationships and alliances
• Reducing threats to the organization's growth through partnerships, intelligence gathering, and communication
• Collaborating with others to build standards that reduce negative externalities
• Helping employees interact appropriately with various communities

A few opportunities and issues came up when discussing this analogy:

• Can the benefits of having a major community management functional group be understood and tracked enough to justify it?
• How, particularly in this climate, do you convince management to fund innovative business deliver approaches like this?
• Community management would need to operate at both the transactional level - helping individuals navigate various other communities and at the strategic level - building high level awareness for the organization and feeding back intelligence.
• Without demarcated communities (nation-states), how would you go about defining these communities for an organization?
• Having a network of embassies/ambassadors and consulates with a focus on a specific constituent group could be a good model for community management. What if each also had some responsibility for marketing, support, sales, product, and service delivery to that community? Centralized roles (similar to country desks at the State Dept.) would support other functional groups and channel back issues and directives to the embassies while embassy staff would be 'embedded' in the community to which they were assigned.
• How do you convince companies to care about the history of a relationship with a constituent group and would community management own that history? It mostly gets lost today but is there a way to demonstrate its importance?
• Is it important to have deep analysis and research done on each community - how do you communicate the value of that and how do you share it in a way that is accessible to those who need it?
• How does community management interact with the rest of the organization? Who uses it as a resource? What specific activities and outcomes does it own? Does it have seat at the cabinet/management team level?

While the State Department model may not translate directly to business, it does give one pause. Diplomacy has been seen as an important and valuable tool for hundreds of years. Does government recognize something that business organizations do not? Or is diplomacy dead, in favor of the more transactional and measurable means of power and control - military force? Traditionally force has only been used once international situations escalate beyond the scope of diplomacy because military force has been very costly. Does this suggest perhaps that traditional sales or support models should only be used when community management fails?

Is this a model that works for you? Is it useful to consider or are there too many differences?

Comments

[Annelibby]

Universities would do well to adopt this kind of thinking. When their alumni/ae do well, they have the opportunity to do well, but only if relationships are there and have been nurtured from the early stages. "Brand" affinity is not enough.

[Lioncaller]

Thanks for facilitating this conversation, Rachel. I wonder if companies could start to see business development and community management as part of the same function. Bus dev often includes alliance management, and of course, esp in the B2B world, comm mgment can also. We've been considering, I think, CM to be part of PR and marketing, but maybe it's more a function of bus dev... or bus dev is a function of CM...

Either way, I think the state dept model is interesting.

And perhaps it goes the other way as well... the state dept could start to look at what it does as CM. How would that change gov?

And again, I think the intelligence gathering aspect is perhaps an undersold function of CM, even if it's done in a non-agressive way. C-managers hold a lot of knowledge, even if just in their heads, about the competitive and complementary landscape.

I like the idea above about the applicability to higher ed, where long-term relationship development is especially important.

[Isaac Hazard]

What a fascinating model Rachel. Way to think big. I love the idea of looking at the value produced by a long running governemnt process and seeing how business could benefit. We've certainly seen our fair share of thinking in the opposite direction (see GWB the first MBA president.)

To take this particular idea to the next level, it's probably important to explore which parts of this model are already parts of the mission of existing departments (biz dev, marketing, corporate inteligence)as is alluded to in Lioncaller's comment above. Then look at the emerging responsibilities/skill sets of the Community Manager profession and see how they best fit. My guess is that ultimately you won't see a 1-to-1 correspondence between State Department functions and CM functions, but that a combination of CMs, Marketers, and Biz Dev folks will be needed.

Thanks again for the solid outside the lines thinking.

[Rhappe]

Claudia - thanks for spurring the conversation and for the comments. It's a really interesting model to look to (if not exactly copy) and consider what that model does well that maybe companies don't - and vise versa. And, yes - pausing to consider what current functions this approach might encompass, as Isaac suggests, is also interesting.

Isaac - thanks for stopping by and commenting - glad it made you stop and think :) Don't know either whether it is really a perfect model to replicate but... it does do some things well that current business structures don't tend to.

[Amber Naslund]

Your analogy is deeper and more analyzed than mine, but it's like you're in my head a bit.

I've been referring to community folks - or the social media types in general - as the New Interpreters. We're translators, speakers of multiple languages, wearers of many hats and needing to understand more disciplines and attitudes than just our own.

I feel like so much of what we have in business right now is the proverbial failure to communicate, and we're seeing a renaissance of people who not only embrace the importance of communication from multiple perspectives, but who have the passion and skills to be the catalyst for it.

Thanks for the thinking.

[Rachel Happe]

Hi Amber -

High compliment coming from you - specifically because you are building a team of community managers that will need some type of role definition/demarcation (even if not horribly formal). And, you're right, it is mostly a communications issues. Companies are quite complex and the networks in which they interact are also complex so distilling that complexity and translating it is critical for a company to make productive, efficient headway.