The current process for recruiting online community managers is crazy.
Forget the job description.
Instead, invite interested people to create a fan group for your product/brand. Give them a month or two. Then hire those who built the best fan groups.
You get a great community manager and a great community.
Likewise, if you're looking for a community management job stop applying and start building. It's much harder to turn an applicant down if they have already built a community for you.
Hi Rich,
Nice post! Although trying to build the "best fan group" is a good strategy, what happens to all the other people who join another fan group(s)? They are part of the community aren't they? Sure you get a nice community, but you also exclude all the other community members when you hire the other person.
I'm not sold on quantity when building a community. Sure it's nice to have a large community with a lot of followers but to me, it's all about the quality of the interactions taking place that matters. Seth's recent blog post touched upon that a little bit. I'd rather have 15 people who I constantly interact with and are an active part of the community vs. 10,000, and of the 10,000 only a hand few are active.
Perhaps an explanation on what exactly "the best fan group" is and how companies decide would really help me in understanding the value of this strategy.
But great idea and nice post.
Posted by: David | Tuesday, 27 October 2009 at 10:55