The ABCs of the Community Manager – Social BlaBla

Community Manager He is the fashionable professional figure lately. So much so that it even has its own association with about two years of history, AERCO, and more and more job offers are seen in digital and not so digital environments. Here in the north he is a figure that still appears timidly but in Madrid and Barcelona we could say that he is fashionable. Of course, the new generations of advertising graduates would do better to focus on this profile, because many of the jobs that this sector will generate in the coming years will have a similar profile (whether they are called advertising or not). community manager).

There was a time when the blogger They were the panacea and the blog the definitive tool. Today we know that there is a digital world beyond the blogosphere (and a lot) and that blogs are not the spaces in which Internet users are preferably moving, but rather social networks. We could define the Community Manager (according to AERCO itself) as it is that person in charge/responsible for maintaining, increasing and, in a certain way, defending the company’s relationships with its clients in the digital field. The Community Manager must know the needs and strategic approaches of the organization, as well as the interests of the clients.

But the digital world has its particularities and primary literacy is not enough to navigate it. The Community Manager (or Community Manager) must handle a series of digital skills to fulfill their role. There are several courses in different areas on digital marketing that aim to develop these skills and some of them expressly use the word community manager. In a way, the keys to New Marketing were intended to serve as an introduction to the different areas that this digital professional must master. However, personally I am still thinking about a hypothetical agenda of community manager for professionals and students from the field of communication or marketing.

There are a series of skills that seem fundamental to me. They are the following:

1. Hypertext mastery – Writing for the Internet is not comparable to conventional writing on paper. The reference-rich writing of hypertext could be compared to that of academic texts but contains many more nuances: reading levels, highlighted elements, use of multimedia elements… Writing aimed at Internet sales must also be persuasive and take into account aspects of usability and information architecture. All of this requires specific training that I have not seen in practically any digital marketing course.
2. Guanxi digital – This is difficult if not impossible to offer in a digital training course but what is clear is that a community manager You will be more successful in your job the more personal/professional contacts you have with others. webmasters o community managers of Internet websites. One of the advantages of being blogger It is the amount of opportunities it offers to meet people and be known in the field of your blog. Without a doubt, training can be offered in terms of methods to make oneself known, ways of contributing to the community that engender respect and another series of issues that we can encompass within what we usually call networking.
3. Basic knowledge of XHTML+CSS – It can be argued whether community manager You must go so low in your work as to know the ins and outs of the source code. In today’s job market, where the jack-of-all-trades prevail with an enormous ability to adapt to new positions and functions, I believe that basic knowledge of web design certainly won’t hurt you. They have certainly been fundamental to me and have allowed me to access knowledge related to:
4. Web positioning – Search engines continue to be a very important source of traffic for most websites today. It remains to be seen if Facebook and other social networks will eat the toast but for now that is the Internet we live with.
5. Nose for virality – I don’t know whether to call it digital creativity, link baiting or viral marketing or what, but of course the community manager You must have a sense of smell so that your messages are referenced on the network and spread through email or Facebook. In another time, this would have been the ability of public relations to make their corporate information perceived by the media as newsworthy events. In the Internet era, we speak vulgarly of viral messages, which attract people and make them collaborate in their dissemination.
6. Listening ability – Know the tools, know the meaning of numbers, manage the RSS subscription, manage your email inbox effectively. He community manager You have to know what is being said about your topic, your brand, and your online community to be able to respond skillfully.
7. Web Analytics – Everything on the network can be measured. We know how many visits our content receives, how much time is spent analyzing it, where it comes from, what words search engines identify us with, and much more. It is not necessary that a community manager be an expert in analytics but you certainly have to have notions.

So much for the digital skills that seem fundamental to me for the Community Manager. I have not included the basic skills that traditional communication/marketing training is supposed to offer you (analysis skills, strategic thinking, negotiation skills…). I keep thinking about more aspects that should be included in a course of these characteristics. Any input from the audience?

Via: Taller3D