What makes a good community manager? Hear from the experts

Social Media September 30, 2010 3 Comments

More and more brands are starting to employ a full time online community manager – or sometimes a whole team of them! I’m in interested in this as as new job that’s come about through social media and I wanted to talk to some of the best community managers around to find out what makes them tick. As brands and businesses start to build bigger communities around them and those communities start to spread in both reach and influence it’s important to have somebody there who both understands and is able to manage the community. Here are some tips and pointers from people who have already managed communities…

What’s the one piece of advice you would give to other community managers?

Mecca Ibrahim, community manager at Ehow

Grow a very thick skin because as much as you want to support the community, there will always be times when you have to deliver bad news or even deliver good news that is bad for some community members.  It takes a time and emotional effort to build up a relationship of trust, but that easily be broken when you need to deliver news people don’t want to hear.  Just don’t take the complaints personally!”


Rob Hinchcliffe Freelance community management consultant.

“Know more and do more. Sounds vague I know, but the role of the community manager is shifting quite considerably right now. In the next few years there’s going to be a community-facing team at the heart of every business/brand/organisation that cares about what its customers/community/users are saying. Community management will overlap with marketing, PR, HR… etc etc, and that entails a certain amount of strategic and commercial thinking; assets which community managers haven’t been known for up to now. But it’s coming.”

How do you deal with unhappy customers?

Poppy Dinsey (unofficial) ex community manager at Globrix

“Quickly! The longer you take to respond the more unhappy they’ll become, so deal with an unhappy customer as soon as possible. The best thing to do is take the conversation offline, if you can start exchanging emails rather than public forum posts/tweets then you should. If you can talk over the phone then that’s even better, people are usually a lot more understanding once you can talk to them, apologise and explain what’s gone wrong.”

Rob Hinchcliffe

“Be quick, response time is everything. Provide one point of contact, don’t shift responsibility around. Get past the histrionics and the ranting and find the route of the problem. They’re not going to calm down until you’ve solved the problem, so don’t be a councillor, be a mechanic. Identify the real problems, and know when to walk away. Realise you can’t please all the people all of the time.”

What’s the most difficult part of your job?

Mecca Ibrahim

“Trying to manage community enhancements with demands put to the technical team.  A strong community will usually suggest more product enhancements than your technical team can deal with.  Managing a growing wishlist can be challenging when you can see the overall roadmap.”

Poppy Dinsey

“It’s not 9-5, the internet never sleeps and in that sense – neither does a Community Manager. If someone chooses a Friday night to have a massive rant on Twitter, you can’t really ignore that until Monday.”

Why do you love your job?


Mecca Ibrahim

“When you actually see a community of what were initially strangers coming together and supporting each other, it’s fantastic. I love it when community members get to a stage when they can do parts of my jobs and reply in ways that I couldn’t improve on myself.”

Rob Hinchcliffe

“Because it’s so varied and it’s so hands on. You can’t be theoretical in community management. You’re not dealing with figures on spreadsheets, you’re dealing with real people. Because of that, every day is different and every day throws up new stuff to get your teeth into. There’s not many jobs that offer that.”

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