Community Managers Should Be Working Towards Unemployment – Community Leadership Summit 2010 Thoughts

This weekend I attended the Community Leadership Summit in Portland, OR. I got to know Portland a bit, had donuts that I sort of regretted, but most of all I learned a lot. Because of the “un” nature of an unconference, there isn’t a thesis built in from the start. But while the sessions this weekend bloomed out of topics proposed by attendees on the day of, I got the sense of a common thread throughout the discussions.

As Community Managers, we should be working ourselves out of a job.

From Thomas Knoll and Miz Ginevra‘s session suggesting that we’re killing our communities by over-managing them, to the revelation in my session on support vs community that everyone feels like they should and will become one organization, to Andrea Murphy‘s reputation system session generally deciding that they can’t be entirely based on numbers – everyone seemed focus less on how to handle the next tweet that came in than on how to build a community that was sustainable, self-policing, self-motivating and perhaps even (dare I say it?) beyond anyone’s “management”.

It makes sense. Community Manager as a profession is new – it’s not something born out of the tech industry. There have always been community managers, in some shape or form. As I mentioned in my post about the inauguration, Obama is a community manager (he just has a larger community than most of us). The guy who owns Woody’s Cafe in Oakland curates a community of passionate locals who just happen to also drink his coffee. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, embodies community management and makes it the key focus of the company.

The problem is that as a culture we’ve collectively forgotten how to have an honest relationship with our communities, and instead begun to focus on controlling and automating communities.

The marketing and business innovations that began in the fast food revolution of the fifties have turned our communities from real people into commodities that are pushed through an assembly-line system of targeting, advertising, harassment and gouging. If the customer is requesting support of some sort that is too costly, they’re ignored or dropped from the service. But with the power of the internet as their communication device, people are rebelling.

The answer to this shift isn’t a group of people at your company monitoring a Twitter feed, or some guy handing out stickers at a conference. It’s about bringing real community back into company culture. Even if it means we can’t find a job as a “community manager” anymore.

I’m not writing this post from a place of arrogance. I’m not writing this post from a viewpoint of “I’m right, you’re wrong”. I’m writing this post because this weekend I realized that I am failing horribly at this. I keep getting mired in the details of getting through the tweets of the day or writing a good blog post – instead of focusing on creating a vibrant community. So I’m sharing my confession and realization with you all in the hope that we can all help each other get there. Let’s do this, yeah?

Photo of Miz Ginerva and Thomas Knoll by Ginevra herself.
Donut photo courtesy of Marc Buehler.