How’s Your Community Manager Doing?
Last week I posted a piece about measuring community efforts titled How Do You Measure Community? An additional interesting measure for your community is “how effective is your community manager?” Here an excerpt from an interview with Jono Bacon, Art of Community author and Ubuntu community manager on LinuxQuestions.org:
What do you consider the best metrics for evaluating how successful a community manager is?
Metrics are an impossibly complex topic in the space of community management, and it is difficult to answer this question without sounding a little too fluffy and unspecific. While there are many community metrics available at a more granular level, many of which we use in the Ubuntu community (bug numbers/linkages/growth, patch workflow, sponsorship queue triage, membership, growth of different initiatives etc), it is more complex to determine the combined efforts of a community manager on his or her community.
I think the most significant metric is the health and success of the community that they serve. If a community is productive, thriving and growing, the community manager is certainly doing something right. Then at a finer grained level we can gauge success by how that community manager inspires and encourages and how he or she can think outside of the box to build growth in new and interesting ways.
Naturally, I don’t believe the success of a community lands solely with one person’s job description or key performance indicators. But it’s a great idea to take a day and thank community managers who make it all happen, whether their work is behind the scenes or representing the members of the community, advocating for the members. In fact, yesterday Jeremiah Owyang called for a Community Manager Appreciation Day to occur annually every 4th Monday of January.
This day isn’t intended for head-patting or a bouquet of flowers, though I’m sure small gifts are always appreciated. Rather, it’s a day for community managers, directors of community, customer advocates, or company evangelists themselves to take time for themselves and their families and realize why they go through the challenges they do. A nice spin-off post from DJ Waldow who’s the Director of Community at Blue Sky Factory, tells people what it looks like to “play on Twitter all day” – ha.
I also like Jeremiah Owyang’s suggestions to thank people who made your experience better in the medium where you experienced the warmth of community getting things done for the you as a customer. If the service was on Twitter, people used the #CMAD hashtag to publicly thank people. I love the results of the search with the displays of gratitude.
Today I greatly admire and thanked Adam Hyde, founder of FLOSS Manuals for his recent collaboration authoring efforts, by posting to my blog at Just Write Click. So, how’s your community manager or customer advocate doing? What can you do to support them and thank them for a job well done? We’d love to hear about it.
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