Identifying the Intangibles in Community Managers and Social Media Strategists

This post was inspired by Google community managers, after being exposed to their work in June 2011, I became aware of the importance of their roles in a way in which I had previously had only a cursory knowledge. The openness of the Google team was an eye-opener for all in the social community and their work has been the subject of much deliberation by industry analysts and enthusiasts (a simple Google search will provide you with a bevy of links from which I draw the information for my opinions).

This isn’t so much a dictation of concepts but more of an open reflection on the ever-growing importance of the roles of social media strategists and community managers, or management teams.

These roles are growing. The use of these titles have yet to permeate the common eRhetoric that is used by “casual” users of social media, and we can safely say that these terms are somewhat alien to sporadic or non-users of social media. Yet, if one is an internet user who frequents a site with any consistency or regularity – part of their experience is in someway impacted by the existence of people in these roles.

It is hard, so far, to define these roles – though there has been no shortage of attempts to do so as people strive to become thought-leaders or to attach themselves to an origin point of a field that is sure to become more and more valuable as time passes. To me, it seems to be probable that the acquisition of someone who excels in one of these roles will be considered “invaluable”, if you will, to the building of the reputation of a brand.

Instead of trying to define duties of these people, some have tried to apply attractive attributes to the position – attributes that need to be filled as much as possible by potential candidates. However, as we start to apply attributes the focus becomes so narrow and the process so automated that there is a chance that the most important aspects of the qualities of these people will soon become trite buzzwords that fill the resumes of would-be community managers and social media strategists.

So what are the “intangibles” that cannot be defined? If they cannot be defined, how do we approach this question at all? Certainly the ability to interact and “understand” the community that will follow a brand across social platforms is an intrinsic part of both of these jobs: the strategist must see opportunities and the community manager must act as a liaison, yes? What qualifies as “understanding” then? What about interaction?

It would seem to me that good SM strategists and community managers primarily excel in a couple of areas:

1) Approximation of Truth: By “truth” I mean representing physical space engagement as closely as possible in the digital space: the replication of human-human interaction in a human-computer-human model. Being as human as possible helps in connecting with others on an individual basis and of course being able to approximate the collective notions of a larger group of people while effectively and efficiently reducing the “noise” of the digital interruption as much as possible. With the introduction of the technology we see in the “Hangout” feature on Google+ (accessible and free group video chat), it seems we have reached the ability to reduce that noise as much as possible before we reach an entirely new, science fiction-esque, level of technology.

2) Conversion of Engagement “Data” into Corporate Deliverables and back : While a good community manager or strategist may be able to make a consumer or even consumer base forget that they are interacting with a brand/corporate agent, they are still acting on the behalf of something larger than themselves. A good SM Strat/CM must be able to turn what they’ve learned about their communities into action items, suggestions etc. They must deliver these things to the “people who make things happen” within their company. They must also report to the community the things being done by their company and support those actions to the best of their abilities.

Seeing as how we are all in some way aware (at least after having read this brief post) of these positions – what else do the people in these roles need to be successful? Let me posit this idea: we will not, we can not, know for sure the extent that these roles will grow to – so let’s try to look at the roles as the exist currently and in the near future.