Unlike “One Day” in the life sentence of Ivan Denisovich at a Soviet labor camp, the plight of an Online Community Manager is the labor of love many a day!

We hear that Social Media Managers and Online Community Managers work all the time and love what they do for a living.  What makes this young profession ignite so much passion and devotion?

In order to find out, we talked to approximately twenty Community Managers from different companies and also to Social Media Consultants, and we asked them questions ranging from “how did you get into this field” and “what are your predictions for the future of this vocation?”

As we were listening to the life stories of practicing Community Managers, it became obvious that nobody can just decide to be a Community Manager and instantly become a good one.  The reasons stem from what my barber once quipped: “If you have been a successful waiter or a hair dresser, you can excel at any job that requires people skills.”  While we have not encountered any barbers turned Online Community Managers, most of the people we talked to didn’t simply hang out on Facebook during college before entering work force.  Many of them have been doing community work of one type or another, such as political organizing in the physical world, or hanging out on the early electronic bulletin boards.

But whatever the prior community experience, in today’s Web’s world, the job of a Community Manager requires juggling IMs, chats, blogs, feeds, streams, and social networks to organize a community, keep people being interested and active, and make them develop a soft spot for a company or a cause.  Community managers interact with thousands of people, each with his/her individual background, dreams and desires, moods and sensitivities, ego and personality.  And a time zone!  Oh, and by the way, there is no such thing as “done” – the moment you think you are done, that’s when your community is done (and you’re out!).

By the mid 1990ies, it was no longer difficult to convince a company’s management to have a website.  Nowadays, a similar trend is happening with social media.  Every business wants to have a social media strategy and a plan in place.  Though frequently the financial ROI is unknown, it is generally agreed that having a community around a company or a brand is beneficial.  The rationale goes that “if people talk about it, enough buying will follow.”

This is where Community Managers – as employees or consultants – come in.  How do they build a vibrant community without losing sanity (and too much sleep)?

One savvy Community Manager by the name of Mirglip Yllib figured out a fun way to do it all and live to tell us about it.  Mirglip Yllib got unstuck in time.

One day in the late Spring, Mirglip Yllib got up early in the morning.  It was still dark outside, but the dawn of the coming day was beaconing to Mirglip through the roll of tweets.  The tweets were carrying the sun starting in Japan and then across the Pacific, dropping the good-morning greetings along their path.  And the world was waking up to the rhythm of the tweets.

Mirglip closed his eyes trying to recall something from his past.  When he opened his eyes, he was back ten years ago as Ryan Chamberlain.  He had to get out of the house to work on a bunch of political and public affairs campaigns in his town.  There were people to organize and ideas to get across.

Suddenly, no more as Ryan Chamberlain, Mirglip found himself as Louise DiCarlo.  It was 1996.  Louise was at home, still in her pajamas, hopping through AOL chat rooms.  Louise’s job as a community producer required her to get up early in order to not miss anything happening in the lands far away and the times many hours ahead into the future.  Suddenly Mirglip Yllib, still as Louise DiCarlo, time traveled to 2010.  It was still an early morning, and Louise was still wearing her pajamas.  She was busy working, diligently checking through dozens of new articles dredged up by Google alerts to see if she could share something interesting with the fans of her many international clients.  There was no way around this tedious task.  Louise had to find something current and relevant and learn enough about it to add a bit of her personal take.  What changed was that her clients were now working with much larger audiences than in the olden days, and they would disown Louise if they ever caught her simply promoting her clients’ products.  She found an interesting article in a newsletter, another one on Mashable, asked around on Twitter for what other people thought.  Good material.  Satisfied, Louise loaded up her trusty HootSuite and was ready to take the call from one of her clients.

When her call ended, Louise became Mirglip Yllib again.  It was time for Mirglip to check the feeds imported into Google Reader to see if anything worth sharing came in via an RSS feed.  Mirglip Yllib smiled to himself – “I’m a content curator three times a day, with or without meals!”  That thought teleported Mirglip to Denver, Colorado, where he became Christopher Mathew Dancy.  Mr. Dancy focuses a large portion of his work life on providing education services to professionals in the IT Service Management industry.  But at that particular moment, Chris was taking a short break from the world of support.  Instead, he was looking around for the latest and greatest happenings in the sci-fi world.  Being a former support person himself, Chris knew first hand that many of his clients in the Service Management field are into sci-fi.  What could better get the community jazzed up in the morning than a fresh doze of earth-shattering sci-fi news?

Chris went through his usual blogs, then turned back into Mirglip Yllib and checked his Google alerts.  The news from sci-fi conventions was dominating the feeds.  A few articles on paranormal phenomena crept in, too.  Mirglip was scanning quickly, trying to find promising headlines from the authors with good reputation.  Not to miss a diamond in the rough, Mirglip also read the entire posts by a few writers he hadn’t seen before.  The amount of stuff piled up enough reading material to enjoy over lunch, then coffee, and then some.  “It would have been nice to be able to find good stuff quicker,” – thought Mirglip, but he was prepared to go through it one article at a time, even if there wasn’t a better way.  He genuinely wanted to be interesting to his tribe, and not just sell them products or push them e-books and webinars.  He didn’t want to be called that dreadful word, “narcissistic” (nor did he wish to be branded as a spammer).

At that moment, Mirglip Yllib teleported to Louisville, Kentucky, and turned into Kat French, a social media manager at Doe Anderson.  As Kat, Mirglip found himself doing a bunch of things at the same time.  Mirglip opened a browser tab.  There were praises for one of Kat’s clients showing up on the wall of their Facebook page.  Mirglip took note of them.  Then Mirglip opened another browser tab.  A storm was brewing on Twitter in response to something another client did the day before.  While calmly responding to flames on behalf of that brand, Mirglip was peering into another window, skimming over the latest headlines about whiskey.  By the time the damage control was done, Mirglip unearthed a gem of an article about bourbon and posted it on Kat’s major client’s Facebook page.

Mirglip Yllib was proud of his multi-tasking prowess and decided that he wanted to tackle even more tasks.  At that very moment, he found himself as Linsey Knerl, fighting a two-front battle against spam.  With clients on both costs, Linsey recognized many of their fans by name and was pleased to chat with them on Facebook and Twitter.  But she was weary of the army of cretins peddling e-books.  Dealing with them was stealing time from a more useful and fun activity.  The regulars were used to getting the top-10 links on all things financial (and other amusing topics) three times a week.  Mirglip – as Linsey – scanned through RSS feeds, and then went on Guy Kawasaki’s alltop.com for a quick detour before checking her Twitter feed.

Suddenly, Mirglip Yllib was back in Colorado, this time as Kimbirly Orr, with her Tweetdeck running and doing searches for hash-tags and keywords.  Kimbirly was trying to find influencers in the entertainment community, while avoiding spammers.  Mirglip has seen this movie before, many times.  For every online community manager whose skin Mirglip got to wear, spammers stood in the way of getting to relevant content.  Wading through spam made Mirglip wish he could go for a swim in the ocean.

That thought zoomed Mirglip Yllib over to San Diego and turned him into Dana Swanson.  Dana had Facebook and Twitter open as she was preparing a post about a new product for swimmers.  As part of a PR effort for athletes, Dana was googling the athletes’ names and also competitor companies.  Mirglip decided to assist Dana by checking YouTube and Vimeo for the videos with the featured athletes in them.  They also collaborated on pulling content from athletes’ own blogs and Twitter streams.  Together, they composed a post about the new product along with some company news.  With all the work that went into getting the right info, Mirglip thought there was a good chance that consumers will find the post interesting.

Then Mirglip heard a voice.  The voice was speaking words of caution into Mirglip’s ear:  “Mirglip, don’t just reach out to people.”  Mirglip listened further.  The wise voice continued: “Mirglip, if you want customer loyalty, you have to hear what consumers are saying and respond.”  Mirglip was definitely prepared to personally respond to every post, no matter how positive or negative.  The voice was coming from Miami, Florida.  Mirglip transported there in order to better hear the advice.  The voice was now coming loud and clear… from Mirglip’s own mouth!  Mirglip Yllib turned into Katie Norwood: “Thou shall offer engaging, relevant, interesting articles, and not be too ‘salesy’.  People are turned off by the hard sell.”  Mirglip gathered that his post didn’t make any crucial snafus in this regard, so he felt like he deserved to move on.

But the voice kept on lecturing.  Mirglip Yllib was now somewhere in Palo Alto, California, embodied as Maya Grinberg, and talking to himself in Maya’s voice: “Remember to be interesting.  Constantly read up on the topics you want to post about.  Constantly interact with users.  Reach out to as many users as you can.  No selling.  Give stuff away.  Don’t spam.”

An invisible force whisked Mirglip Yllib down South to El Segundo, CA, where he continued talking to himself as Maria Sass: “Follow industry leaders.  A lot of good info comes to them first.  It is very important to share industry news, to be the source of knowledge about your industry.”

“Yes, yes,” replied Mirglip Yllib to himself loudly (in his own voice), “I want my Facebook pages to be interesting for people who care about the community, not just for my employers.  I got it!”

By this time, Mirglip Yllib has been through enough of the in-someone-else’s-body training.  So he felt that he could handle a standup status meeting.

Mirglip was teleported to an undisclosed location.  The amaranthine team of online community managers already stood waiting in an open-area office.  (Nobody was wearing pajamas.)  The meeting’s agenda was to talk about metrics or offer ideas of potential interest to the others.  Procedurally, Mirglip would continue borrowing bodies and providing all the answers as them.

To start off, Mirglip Yllib snatched the body of Katie Norwood and reasoned (in her voice) that companies that don’t use social media today do not have a competitive edge.  Then Mirglip quickly morphed from Katie into Deepak Gupta and nodded in agreement that businesses can’t afford not to be involved.  Social media creates a personality of a company.  But then he took a step back and asked a rhetorical question, “What are the goals and how do you measure success?”  Which he proceeded to answer himself: “The goal is to increase awareness and traffic.  You measure it by watching what type of content better attracts visitors.”

Next, Mirglip Yllib transformed into Lawrence Whiteley and offered a different perspective on the measures of success.  “It’s all about traffic, but to a point.  In the long run, the best kind of traffic is the one that will come from your community, from people actually listening and propagating your information further.  The growing arsenal of tools notwithstanding, the human touch – real human connections – will still be extremely important.”

Mirglip Yllib then appeared across the room as Srinivas Rao, further elaborating that people in your community like to talk about interesting stuff themselves, not just gobble up posts by the community manager.  “So ask questions.  Involve them in what you do.  Create a conversation, but don’t dominate it.”

Mirglip Yllib paused to think this over.  His next words of wisdom were uttered as he transmogrified into Amber Gott: “If you want to become a good community manager, it might help to be active on social media personally before getting involved professionally.  Read a lot about your industry and about marketing in general.”

Mirglip then borrowed Chris Dancy’s identity (and appearance) – but only for a brief moment – to recommend that a key part of curating content for a community is to share breaking news with them early.  Posting yesterday’s news make the community manager look silly.  “And “as a rule of thumb,” he added, “there should be as much as 80% of non-promotional content on a company’s Facebook page.”

The next metamorphosis turned Mirglip Yllib into Linsey Knerl, who talked about weekly Twitter chats with giveaways and counting how many people come back and bring along their friends.

“Counting, counting, and again, counting,” picked up Mirglip Yllib, transfigured into Ryan Chamberlain: “I say, if you can’t count it, it does not count!”

“Ah, don’t be too obsessed with metrics, strategy, and measuring results,” retorted Mirglip Yllib, looking and sounding like Jim Gilbert.  “Know this: an engaged customer will become a buyer.  It just works.  (And giving away free food on your Facebook page now and then page can’t hurt!)”

When Mirglip Yllib transmuted into Mark Phillips, he became clairvoyant.  In Mirglip’s visions, the future online community managers became more and more metrics driven, taking on some business analytics responsibilities.  The ROI never got computed exactly, but all businesses were convinced that getting involved in social media was a good thing.  Users routinely helping other users eliminated the need for the company having to address every customer issue.  But the signal-to-noise problem – in Mirglip’s rendition of the future – got worse.  The legions of “experts” multiplied astronomically, and every one of them was publishing something.  Absent a good way to check reputation reliably made the enormous amount of extra reading unavoidable.

And, by the way, “online” dropped out from the job title.

The meeting ended.

It was already getting dark outside.  But the transubstantiations of Mirglip Yllib continued well into the night as he kept on impersonating community managers in other parts of the globe.

Because contrary to a popular euphemism of a decade ago, there is no “end of the day” for the indefatigable community manager!

Author’s Note

In this story, the fictional character Mirglip Yllib jumps in and out of actual human beings, who are, in fact, real living breathing online community managers.  Their names are used with utmost respect and gratitude for the insights they have provided into their exciting line of work.

Credits

Huge thanks go to the online community managers, PR people, marketers, and social media consultants we interviewed to gather material for this post.

• Christopher Matthew Dancy: http://www.servicesphere.com
• Srinivas Rao: http://Flightster.com, http://TheSkooloflife.com, http://BlogcastFM.com
• Maya Grinberg: http://www.WildfireApp.com
• Tina Arnoldi: www.tinaarnoldi.com
• Kat French: http://www.doeanderson.com
• Linsey Knerl: http://www.wisebread.com
• Deepak Gupta: http://www.marketingbydeepak.com
• Amber Gott: www.lastpass.com
• Jim Gilbert: http://www.thefreshdiet.com/
• Dana Swanson: www.h2oaudio.com
• Maria Sass: http://www.wpromote.com/
• Mark Phillips: http://www.basho.com
• Ryan Chamberlain: http://www.greenlightapparel.com/, http://www.palmconnections.com/
• Katie Norwood: http://www.thinkinkpr.com/
• Louise DiCarlo: http://twitter.com/lovelylu, http://www.linkedin.com/in/ldicarlo
• Kimbirly Orr: http://www.viralmediawest.com/
• Laura Zanzal: http://www.postabon.com
• Lawrence Whiteley: http://blurgroup.com

We sincerely appreciate the generous gift of your time on the phone with us and for sharing what goes on in your daily lives.  Thank you all very much!

—-

Alex is a co-founder of MustExist – a social content curation startup based in Silicon Valley. He tweets at @AlexSherstinsky.

We are big fans of Mixergy – an interview series for “ambitious upstarts”. Andrew Warner conducts several interviews with founders a week. He asks his questions in a very unassuming manner, yet he makes the interviewees open up about the details and mechanics of their businesses. This makes Mixergy unique. Beyond simply enjoying it, from listening to the interviews you can pick up practical advice about early marketing, product positioning, partnerships, and other startup issues. The list of past interviewees is who-is-who of the startup world.

Here is the latest Mixergy interview: How Webs.com Slowly Grew From Side-Business Into A Giant With 100,000 Paying Customers – with Haroon Mokhtarzada

Our application – Buzzworthy – is running in the App Store of Webs.com, so the part where Andrew and Haroon are discussing the App Store was of particular interest to us. Besides, it was very generous of Haroon to mention Buzzworthy as an example of a successful app from a small startup (begins at 37:50 in the video).

Here is an excerpt from the transcript:

Andrew: Do you have an example of one of the small app makers who’s doing well, a guy who had a small business who was able to grow?

Haroon: Yeah. There’s a company called Buzzworthy. It’s done a great job of using us in that manner, and they’ve done . . .

Andrew: What’s Buzzworthy?

Haroon: What it does is it lets you put in topics, and it pulls in sort of what the buzz is on those topics, from the Twitter sphere and the real-time Web. So, if you have a site about something, let’s say you have a site about plumbing or something like that, and you want fresh content on your site. You don’t want to just have static content. You can install this app. It adds a page that is all about the topics that you care about, and it just automatically populates itself.

And so, the point is to get more people interested, to get Google seeing that your site is getting updated and things like that. They’ve gone through multiple revs as they’ve gotten feedback on what especially the business users are finding useful for them and running surveys against those users and seeing how much they’d pay for it. And now, they’re going to be rolling it out their premium plans on the platform and all that stuff.

Thanks to Pawan Deshpande of HiveFire, Inc for inviting us to write a guest post on Content Curation Marketing blog.

We used the opportunity to share our findings about how news spread on Twitter and why Twitter is a great tool for content curators.

Here is a story of how one article became popular. The article Researchers: HFCS is much worse than table sugar was published in the environmental news magazine Grist earlier this year. It went to be tweeted almost 400 times and reached a significant audience. It achieved what Twitter calls resonance. Let’s trace how it happened. Read more…

I’ve been reading live tweets from the Third Annual Workshop on Search in Social Media in NY today. Would be really great to be there in person.

Workshop Chairs

• Eugene Agichtein, Emory University
• Marti Hearst, University of California
• Ian Soboroff, NIST
• Daniel Tunkelang, Google

Keynote Speaker: Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist, Microsoft Core Search

Thanks to Gene Golovchinsky and Nitya N for live-tweeting their notes. Here is a selection of bits that I found particularly interesting and relevant to our project:

• #ssm2010 challenge to academia: amer-yahia: scalable community discovery in social network, collaborative recommendation accuracy about 2 hours ago
• #ssm2010 hurst: might mistrust algorithm more than known (trusted) expert about 2 hours ago #ssm2010 hurst: local vs. global optimum in satisfying user information need about 2 hours ago
• #ssm2010 hurst: answer from a specific person carries different weight than aggregated data. about 2 hours ago
• #ssm2010 hurst: users train themselves based on results of queries. Understanding/trust of algorithms need to be improved. about 2 hours ago
• #ssm2010 hurst: niche expertise not represented in CNN about 2 hours ago
• #ssm2010 Amer-Yahia: need to explain reviewer bias given reviews of content about 3 hours ago
• #ssm2010 what do ‘big’ players provide for social search = editorial selection (curating), default community identification about 3 hours ago
• #ssm2010 Amer-Yahia: relevance is applicable to certain communities. about 3 hours ago
• Best use case for real-time search: “tail events” and “tail interests.” We’re not talking about cats or chameleons! Oh wait… #ssm2010 about 4 hours ago
• #ssm2010 Pedersen: systems issues: realtime search: tweets as sentiment about URLs about 4 hours ago
• #ssm2010 (audience q) what happens when content is low-volume (e.g., conference tweets) but potentially high quality — how to expose this? about 4 hours ago
• #ssm2010 Petersen: is not enough participants, cannot generate enough content to reach some critical mass. Scale is important. about 4 hours ago
• “It’s not so much the tweet itself, but the referring content,” says Jan Pederson. Show the page to which the tweet points! #ssm2010 about 4 hours ago
  

“Twitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update service—an easy way to keep in touch with people in your life…”.

A lot of people use the main feed or lists named “my peeps”, “friends” or “IRL” (in real life”) to do just that. Nice and easy. However, if it was all, I doubt Twitter would grow to where it is now.If you want a network that models your real life relationships with a small group of people, Facebook does it well enough.

So, it can’t be just that. Twitter is built in a way that goes beyond this. Everything is in the open, reading someone’s updates does not require approval, and bi-directional relationship is not need. It’s a publishing platform for byte-size chunks of information.

In addition to keeping in touch with a small group of people I want to keep finger on the pulse of a larger community who shares a particular interest. It can be journalists, investors, startup founders, or photographers. People who I have no direct relationship with, don’t know personally, yet am interested in them as a group. How to achieve this? Organizing people into these groups is not problem – create your own lists or subscribe to ones created by someone else. To get a real feel of a community, a list should be pretty big. Keeping track of the raw feed of such a group is too much work. I want a “newspaper with my morning coffee” experience. Would be nice to filter out all irrelevant staff and summarize the important one.

As a result of developing our List Tags app, we ended up having a lot of lists and users categorized by tags. If you need a list of 100-200 leading Ruby programmers, we have it. That’s a good start. Now we want to go further and help users with reading this list. As a first step, we can summarize the links posted by members of a list and present the summary of articles discussed by this group. If we want to dream a little, we can take it much further. Imagine people live-tweeting an event, and software creating a story out of these tweets, a robo-journalist of sort.

We can’t wait to show you an initial version of this new list reader. Very very soon.

I like Twitter. But lately I noticed that going through my Twitter feed left me dazed, confused and tired.

It’s not just the volume (although volume is a problem). It’s the context switching. Here is a sample of what I saw just on one page of my feed several days ago: a tweet about scaling relational databases, a deep thought about meaning of life, a Foursquare update, a link to the latest Techcrunch article, “had coffee with so and so” (name dropper!),  something about semantic web, a joke (pretty good one, actually), a report about a 5 mile run, a complaint about AT&T (of course) and a picture of two zucchinis on a plate (WTF?!).

What are all these messages doing in the same place? The only reason for them sharing a page is that I followed their authors.

But what is a follow anyway?

In Twitter’s early days as an SMS status sharing system, you followed your friends in order to get an SMS every time they updated their status. But Twitter evolved. It’s not really a status sharing service anymore, and SMS is not a major way of reading updates. Twitter grew into a publishing platform.

Follow means simply that your tweets will show up in the main feed of my client. Permission? No – most users tweet in the open. Being able to send DM’s? There is email for that.

So what did I do?

I organized all the people of interest to me into lists – “VCs and Angels”, “Coders”, “Advertising”, “Media People and Journalists”, etc. And then I unfollowed everyone.

Unfollowed everyone? What an ingrate! Follow is not a mere technical detail – it’s a “social construct”! Think of the etiquette of following back (mutually assured follow?), “friends to followers ratio”, “get 10000 followers a day while sleeping” spam, calls to unfollow someone as a way of ostracizing an offender against social norms, such as putting ads in your feed, etc.

Measuring one’s influence by number of followers makes as much sense as measuring success of an ad campaign by click-through rate alone. Well, that’s another story.

How is it working for me so far?

Fine, thank you. My main feed is no longer of any use to me – I go straight to my lists instead. I read Twitter like a newspaper – the gossip section, the sports section, the business section. It’s a much more pleasant experience – take this list of NBA players for example.

This system is far from perfect. Although a lot of Twitter clients support lists, none sees lists as the center of user experience. Members of a list do not tweet exclusively about the list’s topic. Tweet volume is still too high.

But this is the right direction.

————
Disclaimer: I’m a co-founder of MustExist, Inc., the developer of apps for Twitter and other social media platforms, and one of whose products uses lists to monitor reputation: http://www.mustexist.com/list_tags

RSS Subscribers or Twitter Followers: Which Are Worth More?

“They don’t click on anything I share“, complains a marketer about his Twitter followers, as quoted in this GigaOM article.

He goes on to compare the value of Twitter followers to that of RSS subscribers: “I would need to test first to find the optimal valuation, but I am guessing it would be between 5 and 10 Twitter followers for each RSS subscriber.”

Is it true though? Depends on the quality of your followers.

How did the marketer from the article gain his followers? Here is a hint: “After they increased to several hundred only days after creating a Twitter account, the Internet marketer was encouraged by the prospects.” Gathering hundreds of followers in several days sounds like a result of an aggressive spammy campaign. These followers are not “qualified” and not genuinely interested in what he has to say. Of course, they don’t respond to his tweets.

May be, what works on Twitter is quality over quantity – followers that really follow you.