Job Hazards of the Community Manager

I started out my social media career as a community manager, and can see why several community managers have expressed some concerns about our over connected world. It seems that some of them are cursed with the very technology that gets them paid.

You see, some community managers have a hard time separating their personal and their professional lives. In some cases, I’ve heard that the members of the communities they serve become so comfortable with them as a social contact that they send them friend requests in Facebook, (where some community managers may have personal and family info) follow their tweets, and connect with them in many ways.

As a result, the work of the community manager is never done, they’re now completely connected to the community they serve. While sure, an effective for way to build trust and really know your community at work, this leaves very little personal space. In some cases, I’m sure that community managers will get requests in Facebook to solve issues, or take feedback, as well as exposing their personal life to their customers.

Perhaps one of the most scary cases are those of troublemaker community members that become so livid when they are reprimanded or removed from a community that they seek personal revenge against the community manager, and are able to find out way more information than any phone support person would have supplied.

As a result, expect community managers to create more than one personal identity, withhold personal information, and potentially suffer from burnout or frustration at work and at home. These are the challenges of being connected to the community you serve –even during off hours.

Love to hear from the community managers out there, what are the other hazards of the job?

37 Replies to “Job Hazards of the Community Manager”

  1. While I’m not a community manager, I do a fair amount of social-media engagement on behalf of my clients, and I also do a lot of education and training within my firm around those topics, counseling account teams and AE-level folks about how to do this in a respectful, thoughtful manner.

    What I find, not just in performing the engagement functions myself, but with other account-team folks I’ve trained to do this kind of outreach, is that often, the blurry lines are a little bit arresting. For instance, on a recent campaign, I had a rather positive, friendly interaction with a blogger; he was very enthusiastic and very, very nice. Then, I got a notification that he had added me on LinkedIn. Recently, one of the account team members I’ve been working with on another account program got added on Facebook by an “outreach target” (I use that term while hating it; they’re not targets, they’re people, for God’s sake). Point being, those of us executing in the social-media space face a lot of the same issues and moments of “whoa!” when the professional collides with the personal.

    For the record, I went ahead and accepted the LinkedIn invitation. I advised the AE who was added on FB that they did not have to accept it if they did not feel it was appropriate. LinkedIn is more of a professional networking space, so I felt that that was okay; but Facebook’s a little more personal.

    (I won’t get into what happened the day that a client added me on Facebook. ACK.)

    So far, neither I nor anyone that I have counseled has been the victim of an attack, snarky email, or other assorted public backhanding (knock on wood). I try to approach all the people I reach out to with respect, and hope that that comes across, and I definitely try to get that across to anyone I counsel. I know that the day will come where somebody will end up on the Internet Snark-A-Tron, maybe even me, so I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

    I have the added luxury (ha!) of being female. This isn’t said to be sexist, not at all, but I do think women generally have a little more to fear in this universe just by nature of the unknowns we face when interacting online. I realize bringing up the ghost of Kathy Sierra is, to some, tantamount to invoking Godwin’s Law, but as someone who’s been stalked online by someone who came out of the monitor and up to her front door (not in relation to my job, and it was over six years ago), I totally understood how she felt. Someone coming completely unglued for reasons unbeknownst to us is a very real worry and fear for a lot of us, and I know several women that it’s happened to; no men, however. I’m not denying that it happens, but overall, I think behaviour like that skews in one direction. When I’m working with female account team members, I always add cautionary tales and tell them that if anything like that starts to brew, they need to CALL ME for help.

    As usual, YMMV.

  2. I am a little late in commenting, but wanted to post something from a slightly different perspective. I Have been responsible for a community based around a prize competition with millions of dollars in cash prizes on the line, and I have had similar experiences. It is a much smaller number of people than a mainstream social network but they are much more intensely engaged. Almost all of the interactions are done online. When the community members lobby you for something, it is the prize they are after and some don’t hesitate from using negative commentary in public (online) about you personally as a tactic to gain your agreement. Being attacked like this isn’t fun, especially when your primary reason for doing something is to bring about technical developments that can benefit the whole world. It can also reflect negatively on the other community members.

    While a good set of community guidelines and contractual requirements can help to mitigate negative behavior, there is always the possibility that a participant severs all connection with the community and complains in public and to the media. Even when a participant shoots themselves in the foot they still tend to blame the scenario on you as the organizer, possibly naming you individually.

    Ultimately, you just have to maximize the positive interactions to the point where the comparatively small number of negative ones are essentially below the noise floor. This is a case where openness works in the favor of the community manager and in some ways can be your only real defense.

    All that being said, when you get past the tantrums and good things happen by way of participatory engagement of the public in a community based around innovation, it is really a satisfying thing because everybody benefits from it.

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