How much experience should a community manager have?

Many marketers are strongly tempted to assign social media to a junior person who is willing to work for a low salary, because the ROI on social can be difficult to quantify. (I know some marketers who have pushed this logic to the extreme. Because the CFO won't approve additional salary without increasing the marketers’ revenue objectives, social media is assigned to interns.) There's no shortage of applicants, even for intern positions, because tens of thousands of recent graduates believe they are social media experts simply because they spend all day on Facebook.

I recently spoke with a marketer, however, who was disappointed with the minimal results achieved by this approach. The junior community manager was social, but struggled with the marketing aspect of social media marketing. (Establishing relationships is just the first step. Ultimately, the company must generate revenue.)

So how much experience should a community manager have? Everyone needs to start somewhere - I worked very hard to make sure that the people who gave me my first chance didn't regret it - and social media is rapidly evolving so even experienced marketers will need to learn on the job. Nonetheless, before writing "must live on Facebook" in a job description I believe it makes a lot of sense to think about the qualities that make a community manager successful, including:


Ability to write in a variety of styles. In a startup, the community manager will end up writing press releases, webcopy and blog posts. But even in a larger firm where the roles are more defined, if your community manager can only write conversationally, and is incapable of writing sales copy, there's a pretty good chance he or she won't be able to generate revenue.

Ability to improve Search Engine results. A community manager should be capable of generating high-quality links.

Sales or customer service experience. A community manager should have experience influencing people: getting them to take new actions or at least change their opinion. The ability to deal with unsatisfied customers is particularly valuable.

Capable of conversing with your audience: This is where my colleague had a problem. If you're a consumer focused web company, your community manager is going to be dealing with university students who use their iPhone to complain on Yelp while they're still in a restaurant and senior citizens who are not sure which version of Windows they have. If your target audience is partners at a law firm, your community manager must be capable of having an intelligent conversation with them. In my opinion, the most single most important criteria for hiring a community manager is making sure they are able to converse effectively with every member in all your different target audiences.

Understand the value of thought leadership and innovation. You can leave the writing of thought leadership pieces to your CEO or senior technical people, but your community manager must be an evangelist. (The community manager doesn't need to perform technical miracles, but they need to get nonbelievers excited about your miraculous technology.)

Understand the difference between tactics and strategy. I don't think the community manager needs to develop the social media strategy, but they need to understand that tweeting isn't a strategy. They need to understand what your company is trying to achieve, and the role social media plays in an overall strategy

Understand, and be capable of influencing, all the metrics. They need to understand that number of Twitter followers is a secondary matter and only matters in so far as it influences the primary metrics which the Director of Marketing, CFO and CEO care about.

Capable of measuring ROI. You should be tracking all your leads, by source, all the way through your sales process. The community manager should understand cost of lead acquisition and length of sales cycle by lead source. They should be comfortable comparing their metrics to other types of lead generation. Most of all, they need to be able to suggest ways they can improve the impact social media has on the bottom line.