Blaglash.com

I am now recovering from one of the more lengthy and painful periods of being more or less unemployed, and am currently working for a great team at a great startup working on great technologies.

Phew.  It was a close one.

However, before I ended up at my current place of employment, I had the opportunity to approach many startups about possible work, and as a Community Manager at two of them.

Now before I get started, I have to admit that I’ve grown as close as one can get to several Community Managers over the past year or so of working for tech startups, and this should not be viewed as a slam against the profession.  Rather, what I hope to point out is that the best Community Managers are good at what they do for reasons far beyond their job description.

So getting back to my point, in my time of being unemployed I approached two startups hoping to become their Community Manager.  I won’t discuss specifics, but one is one of those heavily-funded well-known companies you hear about once or twice a year when they clean house or secure a new round, and the other is one of the biggest and influential publications on the internet who is growing wise to the difficulties of peddling advertisements as a business model.

So, as I’ve mentioned, I didn’t get either job.  One led to email correspondence that didn’t amount to anything, and the second led to a rather painful interview in which it was repeatedly implied that I had no Community Management experience.

Again, I’m elated that I didn’t end up at either job, but it really made me think about the job description in itself.

First, it’s true.  I’ve never had the job title “Community Manager.”  All of my business experience now amounts to working for four tech startups, doing things from account management, marketing strategy, copy writing, design, software and business development, and recently, a bit of software engineering in the social software sector.

So while I certainly can’t say I’ve spent my hours between nine and five working exclusively as a Community Manager, it’s pretty obvious that by this point I’m starting to get a pretty solid feel for two things:

1. The external audience.  Things like community engagement, outreach, quality assurance, moderation, etc.
2. The internal business.  Since I’ve now worked on every side of a startup below the executive level, I have a pretty good feel for how the pieces work together in a puzzle and how to optimize it.  For instance, the kind of copy a Rails developer should add to their flash messages, or the kind of design that should be kept in mind when dealing with AJAX, or the kind of launch timetables to plan in accordance with development work, etc, etc, etc.

What I’m not saying is that I’m by any means a seasoned expert in the startup world.  What I am saying is this:

Startups should be thinking long and hard about why they’re hiring a Community Manager in the first place.

Usually it’s for a very obvious and extremely stupid reason: they have raised a great deal of investment capital and don’t need to see their precious social network overrun by trolls.

So on one side of the coin we have something weird going on.  Think of the biggest social networks in the world: Facebook, Myspace, Youtube.  I’m sure they have their respective CMs, but they’re primarily invisible.  The big guys rely heavily on the users themselves for moderation.  And, let’s face it.  Facebook’s brand is not going to be tarnished if some guy posts a pornographic image on a friend’s wall.

So the primary reason for hiring Community Managers is paranoia.  And that’s not good.

But what else?  When I think of the Community Managers at Myspace and Facebook, I think of good old Tom and Mark.  They’re the ones branding the platform, engaging the community, and both are the face of Big Brother in their respective walled gardens.

But Tom and Mark aren’t Community Managers, they’re executives!  Executives of the largest social networking platforms on the internet.  And yet the CEOs of brand new niche social networks with 1,000 or so users think they need to outsource community management?  Get real.

If I remember correctly, I think I saw that Seesmic has full-time Community Managers, but to say Loic himself is not doing his part would be absolutely disrespectful and insane.

My point of all of this is that if you are in the business of shipping social software, your community is obviously your most important asset.  And while you realize this (”That’s why we’re hiring full-time Community Managers!” you’ll say), what you’re really doing is outsourcing the management of your most important asset to people who may or may not know more about your community than a user themselves.

The best Community Managers, as far as I’ve seen and as far as I can imagine, are the members of your team who are familiar with the software development process, who understand and think about things like design and copy, and, most importantly, have a genuine enthusiasm for your application.

So if you absolutely positively somehow have no time to engage, interact, and listen to the members of your application’s user base, why wouldn’t you hire someone well-rounded?

Or better yet, shouldn’t community management be done by the members of your team who are enthusiastically using, testing, designing, and developing your application already?

If your whole team is too busy or too unenthusiastic about your product to spend time using it, I highly doubt that the solution to your problem is hiring an experienced CM.

It’s probably something much deeper.