In spite of my magazine journalism degree from the University of Missouri, I wound up backing into the marketing field upon my move to Chicago. Through my random path to community management, I found that communication is communication, no matter the word count, style or medium. I was working in the marketing department of a commercial printer and technology solutions provider and was looking for a creative challenge. After a year, I was beginning to feel that my journalistic skill set was beginning to die, as it lay dormant due to my “real job.” I began freelancing as a marketing and business coordinator for w2wlink.com, a premier networking community connecting professional women. I was writing biweekly newsletters, planning monthly webinars, coordinating expert speaking events and seminars across the country, and building our membership base through social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I was busy, impassioned and loving the connections I was making online every day with powerful professional women across the world. Still looking for an inspiration outlet, I began my personal blog as a way to jump-start my creativity and create an outlet outside of the 9-5 space. After awhile of performing this balancing act between my full time job, my freelance job and my personal “job,” I was looking for a way to tie my communities together and get back to the basics. Enter Prophet. Three months ago the strategic marketing and branding consultancy was looking for a community manager, a person who could further exude and promote Prophet knowledge, expertise and culture online. I manage, maintain and grow not only the Prophet community but those of our thought leaders, too. The role at my current company was created with my hiring. There is no predecessor, no precedent. The community manager frontier is widely unexplored. It’s a free for all, where you make your own rules. But that’s what makes it exciting! In order to succeed, we must keep up with social media blogs, monitor the various social channels and connect with each other like mycmgr.com allows. Community management comes with a single requirement: an addiction to communication. I’ve always been a natural communicator, all the way back to kindergarten when I got written up for “talking excessively.” There will be trials and tribulations to be sure. I’m sure I’ll see increases in clicks, increases in followers, increases in web traffic – only to then see decreases in those very same statistics. I’ll monitor and report those statistics, learn from them and report back to this very same blog with my community manager life lessons. As the saying goes, it’s not work when you love what you’re doing.
