The burnout risks for E2.0 community managers

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The Black Art of Community Management

Dennis -

You add some really excellent social context for Dion's more operations-focused post.

You bring up some really good points:

- Community management is a cross-functional responsibility. Organizations are not set up really well for cross-functional activities currently. At a minimum community managers should be seen as facilitators/coordinators/ombudspeople/translators - not the person who is responsible for *doing* it all. Some of the community management leaders are treating the job as that but many other are trying to wear lots of hats. No question that a broad background helps understand all the issues though.

- Community managers are typically motivated (at least right now) by passion and as you say they are very attached to the success of their garden/community. But mostly, they are not senior enough to have corporate-level influence. I think this will change as the discipline matures but we're not there yet. Anyway, it means they are typically put in a tenuous position of trying to make the community and the business happy but without real internal political leverage. Talk about burn out. And since companies haven't been great at listening for a long time, there is a lot of pent up anger. That eats at anyone but the community manager often takes the brunt of it - often without being able to do anything about it.

- The community management discipline is not well articulated or understood... but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of un-articulated expectations. I see a lot of community managers trying to understand a moving target of expectations that are not really clear to begin with.

Uff - it's a lot for anyone. Add to that a lot of community managers are relatively young and eager to change the world... so they try and don't push back on the organization to be about expectations and to fund their expectations appropriately. Community management, in an of itself, is only one piece of the puzzle.

Thanks for such a though provoking post!

Posted by: rhappe   Posted on: 09/30/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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