Tom Humbarger gave us some musings about similarities between Community Managers and Quarterbacks.
Here are some of the things I did to build and grow the B2B niche Catalyze community (for professionals who design and define software) from 0 to over 4,000 members in 13 months - and things that define “Active Community Management”:
- Member communication
- Content generation
- Day-to-day management
- Analysis
- Marketing, guerilla marketing and brand evangelism
- Vendor/platform coordination
- Community strategy
I like the detailed thinking under each of these elements. In particular, his whole perspective on community management is that you can't just expect a community to grow without regular care and feeding. Some communities evolve their own gardeners (such as at Wikipedia), and other communities need people whose role is to explicitly do these kinds of things.