I've just read your enormous post and I still don't really know what a community manager is. I challenge you in one sentence, using plain English to explain what a community manager is. - Charlie via FriendFeed MT Plugin

Depends on how far along that startup is... - l0ckergn0me

ok, will do -coming up as soon as I'm off the phone - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Good post... I agree with l0ckergn0me: it's about scope and awesomeness. Either of those gets large and the ability to adequately engage and speak to a community diminishes. - Clay Newton

Charlie, here's one sentence. A community manager is someone who communicates with a company's users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to amplify the work of all parties. Second sentence, just in case you'd like it: They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for. Thanks, by the way Charlie, I've added to post. - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Thanks a lot! - Charlie via FriendFeed MT Plugin

Great article! - Dmitry Paranyushkin via FriendFeed MT Plugin

My 2 cents: At the very beginning, when the startup consists only of founders you can select CM out of them. If you don't have a person that can pull it (meaning someone with marketing, PR, BDM skills) your startup is going to be in trouble anyway - it means you have just engineers on the team. Another issue: CM is not a PR2.0, it's CRM 2.0 - back in the days CRM was about getting input from one customer, processing it and giving output. Now, as customers sort of manage themselves in a group (thus forming communities) you have to manage community, not single customers. And as business and products are becoming more interactive (towards customers) it's a Read/Write relationship - customers are changing businesses (by proposing features, blocking canceling of some, criticizing and praising). - Marcin Grodzicki via FriendFeed MT Plugin

#53, and how exactly would you make profit without customers? - Marcin Grodzicki via FriendFeed MT Plugin

Marshall, thanks for thinking I was useful enough to quote. It turned into great article and well informative. How informative? Well, we just got a part-time Community Manager and the first thing I did was have him read this article, the comments, the Digg comments, and go from there. :) In our case, as a marketplace for video games, systems, and accessories - the community is more than just a userbase - and more than just content producers - they're the actors in our market. We only make money when our community is active - not just registered and checking in once a month. One of the things that would be good as a follow up is a discussion of what tools CM's should use - and which ones take more time than are worth it. Spamming invites to the Facebook and MySpace pages or engaging on Twitter? Blogging on the corporate site or leaving comments on others'? That would be something I'd love to hear, now that we've established that CM is a key part of any startup's strategy. - Sachin Agarwal via FriendFeed MT Plugin

Sachin, that's awesome! - Marshall Kirkpatrick

For me this new job description signals two important developments: first, the increasing confluence of PR and marketing; second, the end of thinking of the consumer as standing behind a huge wall that is only semi-permeable with (unidirectional) tools like market research (that's the way Rob Kozinets put it and I like this metaphor very much). So I would add that Community Managers could also develop an interesting relationship to market research. What they are (or rather could be) doing is to some extent ethnographical field research. Unfortunately in Germany Community Manager is all too often misunderstood to be the guy that manages the company's support forum and deletes the spam there. - Benedikt Koehler

I've settled on "Network Facilitator", but noticed the need back when I was heavily involved in NZ MovieFest - if a community is fostered, it flourishes into something is not only worth money, but worthwhile. Of recent times, I'm seeing more and more community managers - and not just for start-ups, but for larger companies as well. Bring back community, eh? - Jo Booth