Can a Community Manager be part-time?
Sparkeo’s Director of Community and Social Media Talia Klein tweeted a few days ago that she disagreed with the concept of part-time Community Management, on the basis that an Online Community manager’s role is far too complex to fit within any less of a time-frame than full-time.
I agreed at the time, which led to Social Media Strategist Debra Askanase suggesting I write this blog post to attempt to answer the question of whether a Community Manager should be full-time or not. There are pros and cons of the four main approaches, which I will outline below.
Delegated to intern
Particularly with Social Media Management, but also seen commonly with Community Management, the company delegated such tasks to an intern as it percieves them to be low value or easy dredge work.
Pros: Tasking an intern with the management of your Online Community is a cheap way to implement such a strategy and raise awareness of the value of having an active Community Manager in your organisation. Darika Ahrens, Sales & Marketing Manager at Tempero Ltd, suggested: “[An intern] often bring a knowledge and enthusiasm for online communities which may not already exist in-house.”
Cons: Darika goes on to say: “Using interns for social media work seems to have a negative connotation these days. There are cons if they’re not trained and supervised properly – they can be ineffective, or worse case scenario balls up on an embarrassing and public scale – but surely that’s the case for any role they might take within the company? Putting the most tangible asset a company can have – ultra-engaged customers willing to interact with your brand on a regular basis – in the hands of someone with little professional experience and no accountability. Communities can provide marketing data, content, valuable feedback loops, case studies, etc – is an intern best placed to implement, mine and manage these?” Strategist Ramzi Yakob said “From a consumer perspective – the more authority the person I’m talking to has – the more likely I am to believe that my interaction with that person is valuable. Its the typical scenario of “I want to speak to your manager” when you’re really pissed off at the customer services department of XXX brand and feel like you’re getting nowhere with the muppet on the other end who’s being paid £6/hour to not actually give a shit about your problems.” Jorge Jaime said “It really depends on the talent of the person doing it, but I think it should be a more “senior” position.”
Part-time
Sometimes a company might not have the resource to allocate to hiring a full-time Community Manager, so rolls such responsibility into an existing role.
Pros: This is generally easily implemented as the resource exists already, and it can be scaled depending on the size and growth of community over time. It’s an easy way to dip into managing a community and training someone on the job. It also allows staff to be in the thick of their community and can allow for quicker dispersal of information especially in small startups and companies.
Cons: Laura Murphy, Community Manager for The National Magazine Company, said “[Part-timers would be acceptable] perhaps on a purely customer service level, but such a role could involve lapses in communication between the company and users, and could make it hard to keep up with day-to-day changes within the company that could affect Community Management practices and policy.” The person tasked with managing the community will be much less likely to have expert knowledge and skills to run an online community effectively, and dependent on the time available, their other job can suffer due to the nature of Community Management when some tasks can erratically take longer than usual. On the flip side, management of the community can be easily neglected if there’s a lack of interest on the staff’s part.
Outsourced
There are a number of very professional agencies providing outsourced Community Management solutions, such as those listed on the Community Management resource page. They can provide everything from Content Moderation to full-blown Community Manager solutions for a lesser cost than employing a full-time employee.
Pros: An agency can provide the all important neutrality good Community Management requires, efficiency due to tried and tested procedures, and minimise issues with staff turnover as they are usually set up to cover absences. Darika said “For a blue chip brand, the greater your brand presence the more time your community management will (and should) take. The greater the risk, the more essential this is managed by experts. The current reality is that this is often best met by outsourcing.” Ramzi suggested: “Some brands might use their community managers from a ‘reputation management’ angle only and keep an eye out for negative mentions and then try to resolve whatever it was that caused that individual to be upset in the first place. This extension of the Customer Services department could probably be outsourced because for the most part its a matter of digging, and finding these unhappy people – with the response actually being decided upon by the customer care team.”
Cons: An agency might no be experts in your community topic or have the understanding of your customer base that your company has. They might not provide the level of commitment a passionate employee would, who would be more willing to work out of hours without extra cost being incurred. You may not be able to afford to pay an agency for a dedicated manager, so there knowledge gaps may develop during handovers. Finally, the flow of information and executive ability can be restricted due to the longer communication chain in place.
Full-time
I’ve posted at length about the value of a full-time Community Manager; you can read my thoughts in detail here:
5 ways your community manager is the glue of your organisation
Pros: A full-time Community manager can develop very intimate relationships with customers and targeted broadcasters such as bloggers, which allows for efficient leveraging of these relationships down the the line. Ramzi thinks that “Some brands look to crowdsource ideas for product development or for an outsider’s perspective on the minutiae of their operations. In this situation, it’s vitally important that the Community Manager is someone with genuine authority in the organization. This way they can demonstrate real agility and turn consumer feedback into actual change in their products or services.” Finally, legal risk is greatly minimised when a Community Manager is in place, as pointed out by former BBC blog producer Robin Hamman.”
Cons: Having a dedicated resource can dilute the contact other departments have with the community, where the presence of the Community Manager inadvertently enforces a lack of widespread socialisation rather than promotes it. If you have a bad Community Manager, this can become a real problem. There is also a possibility that the Community Manager goes native, losing their sense of perspective when arguing for the community.
As a full-time Community Manager, it was hard to write this article without sounding biased, which is why I invited others to submit their views. The overall view seemed to be that the order of preference is as outlined above, which I thought at the outset.
What have your experiences been when hiring Community Managers? Were you introduced to Community Management as an intern or integration with your existing role? Have you had experiences that back up my conclusion, or contradict it?
I don't really see the problem with having part time community managers. I think we can all agree that being a community manager is a fulltime+ job. Why not hire a community manager on the side? Or set up a team with three part timers?
As long as the community knows there are different people helping them out and as long as the CM's are transparent in what they do, both in the community as towards each other, I don't really see the problem.
In fact, if you have the right tools, you can 'easily' monitor & interact with several communities at the same time.
Great post. Thanks for the credit
Here are my comments, that I was SO late in giving to you (apropos the work of a community manager).
Interns: My biggest issue is the fact that they are temporary. While some internships turn into full-time jobs, this is rarely the case. This, to me, is a bigger issue than the fact that it's an intern by definition. It's not like it will be listed. The intern, in my opinion, is the worst person for the job, simply because of their temporary status in the company – the community needs to feel that someone has their back on a regular basis, not rotating by semester. I agree with Bas, by the way, in that there can be a few people rotating, but these shouldn't be interns.
Part-time: Bas suggested setting up a team of 3 part timers – but that equals part time. The issue here isn't if a PERSON is part time, but if the ROLE is part time. The company I work for now just launched a couple months ago – we barely have a community and already I have more work than I can possibly handle alone (which it's fine, I enjoy it). Part time is better than interns because at least they are a permanent part of the company, but once the community starts growing, it will not be able to remain a part time job.
Outsourcing: I don't think outsourcing is necessarily bad, as long as your community doesn't have a complicated topic. If things don't change often at your company and there aren't any technical issues, this isn't necessarily bad. This is especially true for companies with a very small community and is really more into reputation management (like Ramzi said) and basic social media, but not in-depth community management – I can't see an outsourced person running a website's forum, for example.
Full-time: You listed the pros well. As for the cons, I don't necessarily agree. I think that it depends on the community manager and how you set it up. At Metacafe.com, I would send out a weekly email to everyone in management from all the teams at the company that listed the major issues from that week – I called it “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” – I also listed the major requests from people. My work, both there and at Sparkeo, involved being the voice of the company to the community and vice versa, but regarding the communication between the departments and the community, that was my job. The community's insights provide a way to see what FAQs need to be added, what features are most wanted, and what is unclear. We affected QA, dev, customer support, product management… the list goes on. It comes down to finding a community manager who is passionate about what they do, but can definitely balance the two aspects, friend vs. employee. If they can't do that, they shouldn't be a community manager period.
Great post. Totally agree that if you're looking to have engagement with your client community and leverage that for product development, brand building, etc… then it's difficult to do so with anyone less than full time
Excellent conversation and I've hired many part time and full time community managers over the years and I think the answer is – it depends. It depends on the nature of the community, the size of the network, the role defined for the community manager, etc. One size doesn't fit all.
Love it! So well thought out, and brings in all of the major considerations. I absolutely agree with Ramzi about authority of a community manager in an outsourced situation. A good example is Talia Klein of Sparkeo (referenced above, and in the comments below). When I'm talking with her, I know that she is responsible for community, has decision-making authority, and is invested in creating relationships with her community. I would trust her opinions not only about her company, but about the industry she is in.
One other note about outsourcing: I've been the outsourced community manager. And, while I consider that I've implemented very successfully and built community, I did not have the authority that an employed community manager would have. I also believe that an outsourced CM isn't as invested in the success of the company/organization as an in-house community manager. As a social media strategist, I always encourage organizations to employ a community-manager in-house for this very reason.
Hi Debra, thanks for your comment and for sharing your experience of outsourcing!
Thanks Talia,
Some great points in your comment!