My Community Manager: The purpose and a realization

The purpose of why I started My Community Manager was simple. The realization I’ve come to since then has been anything but simple.

Going back to the very beginning, starts with a message I received from Rachel Yeomans, who I now work with at Astek. It was spring 2011 and Rachel asked me about the possibility of having a panel on community management for Social Media Club Chicago, for which I am a board member. I told her I had an idea and asked if we could get together for coffee the next time I was in the city. At that meeting I proposed the idea of starting up a community manager group in Chicago. The sole purpose would be to bring together community managers in Chicago to an in person event once every two months. We talked about whom to invite, what type of people would be considered community managers and much more. At that same meeting I suggested we have our first meetup in less than two weeks. We had a great turnout, have had 5 events and created one of the most valuable Facebook groups I belong to. Ever since that first meeting, I kept having an idea that finally turned into a reality.

The idea was simple. Create an opportunity to help mentor people wanting to become community managers, by creating a community of community managers and becoming a resource for organizations needing someone to fill this role. The first step in this process was establishing the community. Although community management is a pretty new field (I know this will gather some comments), there are some existing groups focused on community managers. The Community Roundtable and The Community Manager were two that I was very familiar with. While they both have great content and well-respected people involved, I felt one focused primarily on enterprise-level community managers and the other more on community builders, which focused more on startups. What I wanted to do was create a community for all community managers where a person could learn from all sides and get as many different viewpoints as possible. I wanted to create the most complete resource for all community managers.

My Community Manager started small, managed only by me. I reached out to fellow community managers to begin writing and sharing their experiences. It started to grow. We welcomed Megan Larsen to the team as our Community Manager which let me focus on taking the next steps in growing the site and the brand. One of the big steps was to have an event specifically for community managers, and that will become a reality on February 24 in Chicago at Google for the Community Manager UNconference. In addition, we have other plans in the works, including additional conferences and other ways for us to work on training more community managers.

Now for the realization.

What I’ve realized is when you invite all community managers, you get many different opinions. That is good. Those opinions often tend to be strong, which can sometimes alienate others that don’t share those views. It can be a delicate situation, but also serve as a valuable lesson. When managing a community, we don’t always get to pick who’s going to be in the community or how others in the community are going to react, but we can look at the content, balance it in a way to offer equal viewpoints from all sides, and remind all of what My Community Manager is about and ask their help in making this a learning experience for everyone.

This business may not turn out to be my original vision, and that is OK. What is for certain is we will continue to grow and expand My Community Manager in a way that will be unbiased in offering as many viewpoints of this field as possible.

That being said, what topics would you like to see written about? How open are you to working with and engaging with community managers outside of your field? I challenge you to write about your unique experiences and opinions in this role. Leave a comment or send me an email to tim@mycmgr.com with your suggestion for a blog post. Better yet, come talk with me and 100 other community managers on the 24th in Chicago!