Community Managers are all the rage these days. If you’re online (and you SHOULD be online!) you want one to represent you on your own external community and the most utilized social networks. If you have an internal enterprise collaboration platform, you need one to help facilitate and promote your community’s interactions.
 
So just what do community managers do? It really breaks down to which bailiwick they govern—external or internal community (or both).
 

 
External
 
Describing the core tenets of this job is a well-traveled path, for the most part, as most companies have at least entertained the idea of hiring a person whose sole responsibility is to manage their online community interactions. External community managers are chiefly responsible for
 
1) Responding to and interacting with community users. This role ideally carries with it a great deal of trust in the manager’s ability to react quickly and diplomatically to any and all commentary, whether positive or negative, without having to go through an involved message approval process. The manager needs to both advocate for the organization and gather feedback from the users, both in a way that promotes the community itself as much as the organization.

2) Listening. This cannot be over-emphasized. Too many community managers are so focused on creating a certain arbitrary amount of content that they fail to listen to the individuals in the community. Let’s face it, one of the reasons people join and interact in communities is to get their voices heard, and giving them the satisfaction is just good politics.

3) Shaping the direction and tone of the organization’s community content.
4) Sifting through the feedback and conversations to see what customers and users want in the future from the organization, whether a product or service.
5) Promoting the organization, the organization’s news and events, and generally engaging in more traditional and targeted marketing efforts on behalf of the organization.

Internal
 
1) Replace “organization” with “internal community” in the above list.
Yes, I am aware it’s not quite as simple as that, but as it’s the same job title there were bound to be similarities. You expected this, yes? There are some other differences, naturally:

2) The end goal is to promote adoption and facilitate use and interaction, not necessarily increase a bottom line somewhere (at least, not as directly) or directly evangelize the organization.

3) They often engage in knowledge collection, management, and distribution. Internal communities can easily turn into quagmires of forgotten posts and blogs, necessitating a manager with a fine and critical eye to keeping collateral both peaceful and orderly so that items are accessible when people need to find them.
4) Internal managers are often involved more in both supporting adoption activities and mediation pursuits than their externally focused counterparts. It’s a finer line to walk, and necessitates sometimes more gentle encouragement and appropriate responses than external community managers. The key difference is that, for the most part, users in external communities are generally there because they choose to be, but that’s not always the case in internal communities where management insists on adoption and users may not be as comfortable with the expectations, applications, and responsibilities.
5) These managers are in the trenches, so to speak, and know the people, keeping a finger on the pulse of the community. They know who the experts are, they know the weak areas, they know the groups, and know who does what and how and how often. The ideal manager will use this keen extra sense to help cultivate the passions of the users to promote adoption and use organically, making suggestions and offering advice when needed and getting the heck out of the way when that’s called for, too.

Community managers are often uniquely situated to be anything from a powerhouse of brand promotion to a counselor to a leading-edge researcher, all with a deft personal touch and a rich personal network. These employees wield a lot of power, and their position necessitates a great deal of autonomy and trust to make them effective.

TRUST and AUTONOMY. I can’t emphasize them enough. A community manager can function without them, barely, but his or her efforts will be more or less completely futile.

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