🧑💼 The Specialization of Community Management Roles
By Alex Angel
Community Managers have always been experts at wearing many hats.
You could ask 10 different individuals what they think ‘community’ is and you'll receive 10 completely different answers. This is why it’s not unusual to find a Community Manager (CM) involved in everything from marketing, support, customer success, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (DEI & B), and several other duties.
Because the community industry has largely gone undefined and touches so many different channels, the roles within it can be confusing. Companies conflate community with audience, confuse assisting customers as interacting with community members, or sometimes even assume anyone who is a CM is a social media expert.
While some of these assumptions aren’t necessarily wildly off from the reality of the role, some important nuances get lost and continue to add to the confusion about what a CM is (and does).
Many companies try to get by with managing their communities with a bare-bones team for as long as possible since there is a lack of understanding of the importance and ROI a community truly brings to the table. As a result, communities are often viewed as ‘cost centers’ and are therefore not given adequate resources.
The blurred lines between community and other internal channels, in combination with the confusion as to what exactly a CM does, have led to many 'hybrid' roles that tend to be placed under the community umbrella.
However, as more and more companies learn how to define community and understand its value, it will become commonplace for community to be its own department, similar to Sales or Marketing or Customer Success, and the team will ladder up to a Chief Community Officer.
Specializations like Community Success Managers, Community Marketers, Community Engagement Managers, Community Operations, good old Community Managers (the OGs!), and many other unique titles will eventually make up this department. Of course, not every company will have a need or want for all of these different roles, and there will always be some overlap of responsibilities because of that. But most importantly, community will finally have a seat at the table.
Some of these roles already exist today and are in their infancy, but what might some of these specialized roles look like?
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