Danielle Morrill

What kinds of jobs are companies hiring for right now? In the move towards a social media world, we’ve seen a series of hires in the past week for variations on the theme “community manager.” Companies are hiring, candidates are hunting and competition for the best people and positions is heating up.

More than just customer service or PR, new community managers online need a combination of old fashioned (authentic) communication skills and the ability to leverage new technologies for maximum impact. It’s a skill set that appears to be getting increasing recognition.

Kirkpatrick also mentions that it is “grinding work and something that’s much easier said than done”, and after a few month in the role I can see where he’s coming from with this statement.  The amount of time it takes to listen is the unseen timesuck of the role.  For every tweet, Facebook note, blog comment, etc that I post there is probably 20x more reading (listening) going on.  There’s also a sense of needing to be always “on”, which will be heightened even more when our product becomes available internationally.

Overall, I think the Community Manager role is a mashup of PR and customer service that is here to stay in one form or another.  I’ve met with various CEOs of startups here in Seattle, talking about how to inexpensively bootstrap marketing buzz for their products.  I’ve adamantly recommended AGAINST hiring a community manager for companies smaller than 10 people, simply because at that size I think the founder(s) and anyone who is passionate about the business should be actively communicating with users whenever possible.  It’s only when growth of the business makes this hard to manage, or the size of the company creates logistical problems (like duplicate responses to tweets) that a single role needs to emerge.  If it can be someone already within the company, all the better.