What is like to work as an online community manager?
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| COMMUNITY BUILDING |
Well, let’s start with a few considerations about the job.
You can not build an online community overnight so it takes
patience, dedication, determination, passion, maturity, hard work among others.
The first action when becoming a community manager is to get
to know your community by introducing yourself as the person that can help the
members with any questions, let them know you are there anytime they need thus
making yourself trustworthy. You also have to track members activity to
determine what they are interested in, asking them is not enough because most
people can not give you an straight answer on what their interests are, by
tracking activity you will be able to determine that for them.
Once determined what they are most interested in you can
start sharing such content. It takes a lot of experimenting to start building
their trust, slowly you will see that they will start sharing resources
themselves and that should be the ultimate goal of a community manager.
You have to ensure that members receive more value than they
contribute.
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| COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT |
Be passionate about the brand you are
representing and by any means do not loose sight of that. As a community
manager you have to engage users/members and to do so you have to think outside
the box and share content that is always aligned with your brand’s vision and
goals but that fits people’s interests, so you have to share content from other
brands as long as they coincide with your brand’s visions and goals. It is
important to show that you are open to collaborate and share content that is
not just generated by your brand but that will be aligned with your community
interests.
Be careful when sharing content just generated by your brand
because it will eventually look like spam and it shows your lack of interest
for anything else going on out in the world. You need a world vision in order
to captivate different interests.
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My almost 6 months of community management experience for
the WiserBrasil group on
Wiser.org and the WiserBrasil
Facebook page has taught me another important aspect of community building and
it is about being multi cultural and best of all, multilingual. So consider
that on your next community management job. Learn about different cultures and
language if possible.
Know the resources available that can provide translations
such as: Google translate, Bing translator among others.
That can make a huge difference on whether or not members will stay.
Here are some online resources on Community management or
community building:
Community management fundamentals
What is online community?
Bridging language and culture
Ideas on building communities
By: Sil Gabriell
Wiser.org Community Editor and WiserBrasil Online Community Manager
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