Online Community Management For Dummies®

Chapter 3

Becoming an Online Community Manager

In This Chapter

• Wearing lots of hats
• Promoting your community and your brand
• Seeing why your job matters

As far as jobs go, being an online community manager is one of the most enjoyable career choices. Think about it: You get to spend lots of time online, enjoying the social networks and chatting up new friends. Of course, there's more to the job than just trolling Twitter and updating Facebook, though. Community managers undertake a variety of tasks, some more enjoyable than others.

For the most part, though, there's never a dull moment. In this chapter, I describe the many responsibilities of an online community manager.

Wearing the Many Hats of a Community Manager

Defining your role as a community manager is difficult because you do so many different things. On one hand, you're advocating for the customer. On the other hand, your loyalty is to your brand. You answer to many different people and departments and perform a variety of tasks.

Fortunately, most of an online community manager's duties are enjoyable. They allow for creativity, and an outgoing nature can shine through. Other duties aren't so fun and exciting, but they're important nonetheless.

Make no mistake — despite the friendly nature of the job, community management is a huge responsibility. As the most public person in the company, you have to present an image befitting the brand. A major portion of the job is making sure that the customers and the community members ...