If you’ve just launched a community, you will spend the bulk of your time inviting people to join and prompting them to participate. Your role is very focused upon gaining a high level of activity from a relatively small number of individuals. Anything else at this stage is a distraction.
But your role evolves. Once you've passed the critical mass stage, you need to focus on slightly bigger activities, such as organizing events, embedding processes, promoting the community, developing a strong sense of community, optimizing the conversion process and measuring your efforts.
You shouldn't be doing the same tasks you did a year ago. Your role should be constantly evolving. This is why task-orientated community job descriptions fare badly against goal-orientated community job descriptions.
The challenge is knowing when and how to evolve. You have to determine this in advance. e.g. Once we reach {x} we will begin doing {y}.
I think community management as a role will increasingly extend horizontally rather than just vertically.
As remote working becomes more commonplace the skills of a community manager will be increasingly in demand as organisations look to create a sense of belonging and community amongst people that don't meet physically all that often.
When you add in the reducing importance of money as a motivating factor it appears that community management will become central to cultivating both internal and external communities.
Posted by: Adi Gaskell | Monday, 14 November 2011 at 15:32