Community Manager - What’s That?
What’s a community manager? The best way to define that is…to review the best of the web, which would be Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist blog. In his 11/16/2006 post, What a Community Manager Does, he describes the five top things a Community Manager can do (listen, respond, inform, shut up and sit back, & listen more); and his 11/25/2007 post The Four Tenets of the Community Manager post, in which he describes the four tenet’s, as gleaned from web response to his related queries as well as 16 job descriptions: a Community Advocate, a Brand Evangelist, have Savvy Commumication Skills, and "Gathers Community Input for Future Product and Services".
More recently, on 7/17/2008, Connie Bensen describes her Community Strategist blog a Community Manager’s Responsibilities & Goals. I think that her first paragraph sums it up:
"Ensure that Company continues to remain strategically opportunistic by
continually evaluating & revising Company’s online marketing and
outreach strategies, including both tools presently being used to
emerging technologies."
Essentially, start and maintain a conversation about the company with various online communities, while maintaining internal contact with those who manage the company’s "voice": the PR, Marketing and executive leadership.
Why Friendster, then? Isn’t this just a site for people meeting people? Of course…but people meeting people mean that conversations start, are sustained and end, and restart. Why not allow for some of those conversations be about the technologies that underpin all of these activities, e.g., the internet, marketing, communities, advertising, etc.
As I type these words, I have an advertisement to the right for "imvu", billed as "The Worlds Greatest 3D Chat!" Go to their website and you see further explanation for what imvu is - perhaps attempting to be Second Life, but strictly for chat purposes. It would appear that imvu’s community will be principally teen-age oriented.
Blogger David in Singapore describes imvu in his I want to say everything blog. David keys right into the imvu monetization method:
"Anyway back to how the company profits, so you see you can buy items for your cute little character. While you can earn free credit, it will eventually run out and you have to pay via chas [charge?] online. While you can earn credits, its very slow and tedious."
Looks like Friendster is following Connie’s suggestions in staying current & remaining "strategically opportunistic by
continually evaluating & revising [Friendster's] online marketing and
outreach strategies"…the imvu ad plays right into Friendsters real and perceived target market: young people with time and presumably some money to spend. Let’s see how community managing develops here in the Friendster space.
-CM
