The “community manager” role is a fraud and a farce

Re:The “community manager” role is a fraud and a farce by mattzito on Monday September 15, 2014 @08:26AM (#8318368)

This is such a non-event that it seems not even worth posting about, being in the same vein as:

- gasp "Sometimes corporate-sponsored open-source developers have their corporate employers' interests at heart"

- gasp "Sometimes support people toe the party line instead of telling customers really what is going on"

- gasp "Sometimes marketing teams amp up new features to make them appear more important than they are"

and so on and so on. Good community managers help represent the community to their employers as well as helping to coordinate the community at large. Bad community managers exploit the community as a marketing and PR channel at the expense of honest communication within the community.

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Re:The “community manager” role is a fraud and a farce by madeofpalk on Monday September 15, 2014 @10:31AM (#8319090)

I'm not sure if it's a non-event as much as a whinge about nomenclature.

I get the feeling the author would feel a lot better if we didn't use the 'community manager' euphemism and just said like 'PR' or something instead.

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Re:The “community manager” role is a fraud and a farce by mattzito on Monday September 15, 2014 @11:49AM (#8319549)

Community management by defintion includes "PR" in that it includes "Public Relations", but a good community manager is much more.

They're often there to help facilitate conversations, user group meetings, keep the community civil, agitate for better customer support, and so on. Yes, they're cheerleaders to a certain degree, but pretty much any customer/public-facing role at a company needs to have a bit of cheerleader in them.

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Re:The “community manager” role is a fraud and a farce by johnkpush on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:18PM (#8320047)

A whinge about nomenclature is what I got out of it. At SimplyBuilt we have staff members that foster communication, provide support, and delete spam/irrelevant posts. In our case (and in most cases I guess) the word 'community manager' would have a high handed sound to it, even though they are technically managing a forum.

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Re:The “community manager” role is a fraud and a farce by Disruptive_Dave on Monday September 15, 2014 @08:45AM (#8318442)

this

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