Why Community Managers Won't Exist in 5 Years (and why that's a good thing)

1. Why Community Managers Wont Exist in 5 Years
(and why thats a good thing)
Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

2. Agenda
Current state of the Community Manager
Success stories
The manifesto

3. Customer Engagement is Established

4. Customer Engagement is Established

56% of Fortune 500 on Facebook

5. 60% on Twitter (35% more than 2009)

6. 79% of corporations doing social media

Data: http://www1.umassd.edu/cmr/studiesresearch/2010F500.pdf, http://bit.ly/hbHWTk

7. Awesome, right?
(nope)

8. Community Managers are in danger

The Social Support Bubble

19% of customers feel that social support is just for show

10. A good experience on social media doesnt matter if your customers have a bad experience elsewhere

11. ComcastCares only raised Comcasts ACSI score 5 points, still 15 points below the average for their industry

Data: http://bit.ly/fMKtmC, http://bit.ly/eSmWbp, http://bit.ly/hVSCIZ

Other Departments Have Discovered Social Media
Data: http://twitter.com/#!/BurgerKing/status/31019054902804482

We Have No Home

Social Media initiatives report to many different places

14. Nobody is protecting us

Data: Altimeter - http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/career-social-strategist

15. There is opportunity

16. There is opportunity

Other Departments have discovered social media!

17. And we can be a resource

18. Social media strategies are still evolving

19. 82% long-term social media strategies are younger than 3 years, 52% younger than 2

20. Were not behind the curve yet


21. What is our goal, then?

22. Nice Guy Marketing
Customer generation and retention through niceness.


Customer happiness is #1 priority

24. More budget spent on support than advertising

25. 75% of customers are return customers

26. Sales exceeding $1 billion in 2008

Data: http://adage.com/moy2008/article?article_id=131759, http://about.zappos.com/sites/about.zappos.com/files/MasterMediaKit6.5.09.pdf


Free copies for open source, charities, high school students, etc.

28. Transparent about revenue

29. Everyone blogs

30. $100k revenue in first 5 months

Data: http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/11/14/hit-100000-in-revenue-time-to-start-looking-up/, http://balsamiq.com/blogs


40% customer support staff, 40% engineering & product, 20% everything else

32. CEO spends time in their forums

33. Only 3.5% off each transaction

34. $400MM gross merchandise in 2010

Data: http://tcrn.ch/eMQAyW, http://on.wsj.com/gSZGvT

35. Exceptnone of this was because of a community manager.
It was founders, co-founders, and the like.
Which is why we need to create a new position.

36. Chief Happiness Officer
A position dedicated to making sure all parts of the company are focused on making customers happy.

Must be a horizontal position

CEOs dont just focus on marketing or product, neither should we

38. We cant preach customer happiness from the cheap seats

Chief Happiness Officer
Empower the whole organization

You cant scale

39. Average of 3.1 social media employees in 1k-5k orgs

40. Siloed customer happiness is ineffective

41. See ComcastCares

42. Sometimes its the folks with the least power who have the most opportunity to delight your customers

43. Nobody is protecting us


Have metrics

Team with the BI department

45. Use existing systems

46. Oliver Branchards Social Media ROI, Jeremiah Owyangs Social Marketing Analytics

47. There are tools

48. Google Analytics tracking, Tweetreach, surveys

49. Will be easier once were not in the trenches

Data: http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/the-basics-of-social-media-roi-ppt-slideshare/, http://bit.ly/gIJUUX

Stop focusing on social media

Social media was our way around roadblocks now we have to move past it

51. Customers should be happy however they interact with you

52. Zappos: The telephone is one of the best branding devices out there

Data: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/alissa-walker/member-blog/tony-hsiehs-zapposcom

Join early

We should be the 3rd employee

54. Hard to change an organization after its set in its ways

55. People are already doing this, like Jenna Langer from LiveFyre

Work smarter, not harder

Were all burning out

56. We need to stop fighting and start leading

Turn down job offers

If youre not going to get the power and freedom you need to make the company succeed, they dont deserve you

57. Letting you succeed is in the companys best interest

58. Taking a limited job now just means youll be miserable later

Go do it.

59. Thanks!
More rants: www.understandingyourcustomers.com
Me:
@evanhamilton on Twitter
[email protected]

60. Image credits
Billboard: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tmray02/4474188424/in/photostream/
Dog & Cat: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mofle/2088197145/in/photostream/
Cat & Bird: http://www.flickr.com/photos/irenewn/2263552045/in/photostream/
Note: http://www.flickr.com/photos/75166820@N00/4568113/in/photostream/
Kittens: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ferran-jorda/4460510626/in/photostream/

61. Licensing
This presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike3.0 Unported(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0), which means you should feel free to share it, use parts of it, and remix it as long as a) youre not using it for commercial privileges and b) whatever youre creating is licensed the same way. Because sharing is awesome.

Why Community Managers Won't Exist in 5 Years (and why that's a good thing)

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Transcript of Why Community Managers Won't Exist in 5 Years (and why that's a good thing)