Original Post: Differentiating Between Social Media and Community Management, by Rachel Happe
As someone who works with social media managers and community managers, it seems the line between the two types of positions is not terribly clear – and maybe doesn’t need to be – but I think it would be helpful to distinguish between the two. Why? Jim will often say that everyone is a community manager and he is right – everyone has a group of constituents which could be cultivated to drive better performance. However, not all companies want, need to, or can cultivate a community. I may see this differently than many and here is my take:
Community infers the following:
- Tight interlinking relationships between a significant percentage of members
- An acknowledgment of shared fate or purpose
- A potentially wide range of topics/conversations within that shared purpose
- A distributed leadership network – sometimes with a single leader, sometimes not
- A core membership that is relatively stable and active
Social media on the other hand infers the following:
- Socially- or conversationally- enabled content
- A loose network with the predominant structure being a hub and spoke model of interaction between an audience and the content creator
- Comment/response transactions
To me this means that communities and social media are good for different types of business outcomes.
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