This month’s Expert Interview is with Dawn Foster, Online Community & Social Media Consultant at Fast Wonder Consulting in Portland, Oregon.
Dawn Foster is a consultant, community manager, event organizer, blogger, podcaster, technology enthusiast and business professional. She provides consulting services for companies wanting to engage with online communities and has more than 13 years of experience in business and technology with expertise in strategic planning, management, market research, social media, blogging, podcasting, rss, community building, web 2.0, and open source software. Dawn regularly blogs about online communities as the author of the Fast Wonder Blog, and she blogs for GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily. She is a co-founder of Legion of Tech and is an organizer for the Portland BarCamp and Ignite Portland events. She is also the community evangelist for Shizzow, a new Portland start up.
Dawn holds an MBA from Ashland University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kent State University. Previously, she worked at Intel, Jive Software, Compiere, and a Midwestern manufacturing company in positions ranging from Unix system administrator to market researcher to community manager to open source strategist.
How do you see the role of Online Community manager evolving?
One of the only things you can count on as a community manager is change: communities evolve, members come and go, new technologies replace the old, and the role itself is still emerging. Currently, people holding online community manager positions are often doing very different jobs from others with the same title (moderation, administration, community strategy, and more). I suspect that this is part of the reason that compensation varies so widely within the field. As the job of online community manager starts to mature, I expect to see more companies breaking the responsibilities into more specialized roles. The community manager role may become more of a strategic position responsible for content plans, content creation, determining new functionality, and evolving the community while more people have titles that specify narrower roles, community moderator or community administrator, for example.
How do you see the economy impacting community managers, and community teams in general? What tips might you have for Community Managers in the trenches?
Even while the economy has been down, I still see more companies continuing to hire community managers. In general, community management has not been hit as hard as other jobs during the downturn. I suspect that companies are turning to online communities and social media as a way to engage more deeply with customers while they try to spend less money in other areas, like traditional advertising. As a consultant in this space, I have been seeing more inquiries focused on engaging with existing communities or improving an existing corporate community and slightly fewer companies wanting to large build new communities, which also points to companies looking for ways to engage while not spending large amounts of money.
As community managers in this current economic environment, we should increase our focus on showing a return on investment for community efforts by looking for ways to improve how they monitor and respond to conversations, reach out to new members, and grow the community with less budget while being prepared with numbers and examples of how the community efforts add tangible value to the company.
In your opinion, is the community / social media function best served in commercial organizations by a discrete community team, by having community staff embedded in other divisions, or some other org structure?
The answer to so many community management questions is … “it depends”. The community management function in any company needs to be structured in a way that makes sense for the company and for the type of community. I’ll give you a few examples to illustrate my point. If you are a small start up of 10 people, it might make sense to have at least some portions of the community staff embedded in other organizations. For example, when I was at Jive Software, I was the only full time community manager, but I relied on people doing web development, support, product engineering, marketing and more to accomplish various tasks within the community. For a company with only one community focused on supporting their products, it might make sense to put the community management function under the support organization. For large companies with many communities, a community management organization reporting to senior management could be the best structure.
Companies should take a hard look at the goals and objectives they want to accomplish and make sure that the organizational structure they define will help to ensure that they can accomplish their goals and objectives in the most efficient and effective way possible.
What do you see on the horizon for online communities in the next 12-18 months.
In the next 12-18 months, I expect to see more people starting community management careers, and I expect the role to continue to become better defined. As the economy improves, we’ll also start to see more companies creating new online communities focused on their products and services; however, as more and more communities compete for people’s limited time and attention, community managers will face increasing pressure to make their communities stand out against the competition.
We will also see more and more social features creeping into corporate communities. Friending people, joining groups, status messages and other social features have been more popular on sites like Facebook; however, we will start to see more companies embracing these features that put the focus on the people in their community.
