How The Community Management Role Evolves

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}.