Don’t tell my mum I’m a community manager, she believes I play piano in a brothel

January 16, 2012 By 3 Comments

Summary : There’s a tendency to call “community manager” any person that communicates online for an enterprise…even it the activity has nothing to do with communities. This excessive use of a buzzword seems to start worrying applicants that want more precisions on the nature of the work and how it articulates with “real” operations. A search for sense and perennial positioning that also comes with the fear of seeing this title being a millstone around their neck, now and in the future

NB : the title of this post is inspired by a book written by the advertising leader Jacques Seguela at the time the advertizing industry was in its early days and did not look very credible. The title was ‘Don’t tell my mother I’m in advertising, she believes I play piano in a brothel”

In the last months I saw some contacts asking me things about the same concern. Enough for me to think that there must be something really important around. Each time the question was quite similar : “I’m about to get a new job, I’m close to the end of the recruitment process and we’re discussing the job description. I don’t know why but I’m very uncomfortable with this community manager thing. What do you think ?”.

The first idea that came to my mind is that they were lucky enough to be discussing with enterprises that were open minded enough to refine the job description and even the job title with the people on the short list regarding to their understanding of the challenges and opportunities. And that’s already a good point.

Now let’s focus on the core issue. It seems that more and more people fear that once the trend will be over, they’ll suffer from the buzzword nature of the community manager job. What makes them be very cautious about what the work is really about and wonder if having such an job mentioned in their CV will have a negative impact once fashion will be over.

The problem with community management is that it’s a position being held by people with very different profiles, from interns to experienced 40/50 years old people. Surprising ? Not at all because the title apply to many possibilities in terms of job description and experience. From the “young guy talking in the micro” to the experienced manager leading a global strategy. If I had a look at what real experts say, we can learn from the Community Roundtable that, in fact we have :

  1. Community specialists
  2. Community managers
  3. Community strategists

Let me add one more specie : customer service professionals who are being called community managers by anyone for the only reason they now operate online. I recently talked with one of them who told be with a bit of irritation. “I’m not a communication person and will never be. I’ve been put a ‘community manager’ sticker on at the time I began to use online tools. But if I’m a CM, the guy answering on the phone or the one solving clients’ problems in our shops is a CM too ! What I see is a dangerous shift toward a job that’s not mine, with goals that may be contradictory to mine. Maybe we have an online community…but what I see is thousands of individual cases to be solved”.

This diversity is poorly understood by enterprises that often think that’s all about the same thing. Not surprising that experienced people now start to make things clearer when they’re being offered such a job.

The people I was talking with were having, in my opinion, a very relevant questioning. In addition to the job (managing what ? A community ? A community strategy) they were also raising questions about the scope and goal.

- scope : will my job be an online only one or will I have to operate offline. If it’s about mobilizing an ecosystem of stakeholder, the online part should be a part of a global program aiming at doing much more than creating and managing communities.

- that leads us to the goal. Communities…but what for ? Communities or stakeholders ? What do we want to do with them ? For what shared value ?

What lead these person to conclude : “in fact I should position my job in a ecosystem, stakeholders and value approach. There are many kind of stakeholders to mobilize, in different ways, for different purposes. Online activities are only a part of the job and some actions will be 100% offline, others 100% online, some will be a mix depending on the target and the need. It the job is confined to online communities we will miss a huge part of the challenge and spend a lot of energy on it without even knowing why. I need to be vigilant on the job description and title. It will even be better than a buzzword title that means both everything and nothing and won’t help my partners and colleagues to understand my mission. It will make me more credible”.

Interesting thoughts on the very nature of professional community managers and their role in a logic that goes beyond fashion.

 

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Too big to last ?

August 5, 2009 By 1 Comment

Is the myth of the “critical size” close to its end ? The concept of enterprise always comes with the concept of “growth”. Growth of the turnover, but also growth of its size. Today’s big companies count tens or hundreds thousand employees. But, at a time when performance is not only about the net force obtained by adding up hands but about the ability to make brains interact together, does critical size become a weakness ?

Today, some voices are rising to say :

- current efficiency issues are caused by inappropriate size. That’s because enterprises are not as good as making people interact as they were at adding up hands 30 years ago, that they were forced to find on financial markets the growth they could not get at the operational level.

- once companies have reached a certain size, their impact on economy can be dramatic and their failure could cause a systemic threat to the whole system.

In short, we’re shiftting from a context where size was reassuring to a context when it may mean incontrolability and risk.

Can we think that a constellation of partners would be more efficient that the current mastodonts ? That businesses should lose weight and organize a their value chain with external partners ? An extreme application of value chain 2.0 ? Anyway, we still don’t know how Coase’s theorem will apply to our new born knowledge economy. No one knows what future will look like but it’s not irrelevant to think that value chain socialization will bring a new form of enterprise, more designed to hunt in packs than for solitary tracking because of their lack of agility. Or, maybe, some cleaver CEOs will manage to make  make elephants dance..

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

What perimeter for and enterprise social network

February 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Maybe you remember of my posts about external networks and the relevance of enterprise 2.0 logics for SMBs. In both case the underlying issue whas about the perimeter of those networks.

As a matter if fact, in small of medium businesses, assuming that contacts are more simple (or are supposed to be…), the benefits of interconnecting people in order to build stronger synergies seems to be less obvious than in large ones.

This takes us to the point I raised for all kind of businesses : why do tools that favor collaboration and synergies must share companies’ borders while value is created, specifically in B2B, not inside the company but on the contact zone where internal and client’s teams work together.

Experience taught me two things : the size of a company of team isn’t a relevant indicator to estimate how easy of difficult it is for its members to work efficiently togehter and the weak point of many processes is  interconnection between businesses.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

The Next Step in Open Innovation

June 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Distributed innovation, collaboration with clients and partners are becoming central in companies’ strategic reflexion.

To learn more about this subject I often discuss here, it’s at McKinsey’s.

Filed Under: Innovation, Management & HR, strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,

Can we organize without organization ?

April 27, 2008 By 2 Comments

In a previous post I was wondering if we were heading to what I called a project or a partnership economy. In the same way, after meeting Don Tapscott and read “Wikinomics”, the idea came to me that we could soon experience a reverse application of Coase’s theorem. Nothing but logical : if high transaction costs made organization become larger, low transaction costs on immaterial capital may cause exactly the opposite.

This is exactly the theme of an interesting discussion that emerged on Transnets[fr], following the reading of Here comes everybody. [Read more...]

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Enterprise 2.0 : the last step before the project economy ?

April 15, 2008 By 1 Comment

A few months ago I wondered if we were on the road to an externalisazion of enterprise’s non structuring function, which may paradoxally put value creation outside the enterprise. In this situation the enterprise’s only job would be to manage outsiders according to its needs. I don’t say it’s a good or a bad thing, it’s only an objective possibility.

Someone reminds me of this note and told me : “it’s more real than you may think : if we could measure ressources used to fight against the weight of the system compared to those reallu used to create value it would scare a lot of people”.

Let’s come back to the model that may be offered by the future enterprise. Let’s have a look on the engagement model proposed by the digital natives which looks more like partnership than employement. Let’s, at last, have a look at the Coase Theorem (enterprise’s size depends on transaction costs…but how much costs information today ?). Let’s also consider solutions like innocentive for example…

The most obvious conclusion would be to say that if companies can’t, internally, combine employement and partnership model, decreasing not only information acquiring costs but also the cost of use of all its intangible assets (ie making them available and usable, not only being satisfied they are “inside”), we may soon reach a tipping point. [Read more...]

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Switching from work to partnership

March 14, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Many people try to guess how enterprises will look like in the future. I’m afraid no one can answer thins question. In the other hand there are trends we can’t ignore : in the same way baby boomers dramatically transformed the companies they joined, digital natives will dot the same with our companies.

But prudence is required : everything we can read is sometimes “overplayed”, and I have no doubt our digital natives will have to climb down when they’ll realize some of their expectations are not viable on a long term track within an enterprise. And they won’t all be the mutants that are often described. But one thing is sure, an heavy trend is emerging.

I’ll also consider this evolution in relation to a phenomen I wrote about some times ago : the risk (or opportunity) to see , for economic reasons (information acquisition cost) or sociological (better personal standing), people positioning themselves outside the enterprise, as partners, service providers, instead of being salaried. French speaking people can also read this note about the end of defined work time, as new generations think of goals to achieve and no more about time you owe your employer. So we can draw some conclusions. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Recommended Bookmarks Tagged With: , , , , , ,