How can mentoring help online communities?

The job of the community manager is not an easy one. He or she has to juggle competing internal cultures of IT, senior management, and the community itself in order to deliver results. Results in terms of engaged, active discussions as opposed to corporate generated content which is typical of traditional websites.  At SiftGroups we recognise how difficult this balancing act is. I've written about helping your community manager avoid burnout in the context of trying to run a customer-facing service without the skills and experience to meet those demands. But that said what positive tools can help you build a sustainable community and support your community manager?

Whether you call it empowerment or mentoring the basic aim is the same. To give the community manager the kind of support that’s going to help them meet the demands of the role. If you are planning a new community site, or a community within your existing website, you are often going to work with people who are skilled in the job of website management, and may not realise that this skill set while obviously relevant in technical terms if not sufficient. For the job of the community manager is centred around a fundamentally different environment, one where conversation is king, rather than static content.

What this means in this context is that the mentoring process needs to involve engaged discussions, to guide the community manager through the set up phase in such a way that they come out with both a community technically set up and ready to go to deadline, but also that they properly understand the role of the community manager. This means in practice working through the differences in working as a web manager (which can often be a more stand alone function driven by the routine of content updates), to the more embedded role of the community manager who needs to connect to all parts of an organisation to get full value out of the community.

Helping build the confidence of the community manager through addressing the core elements of the pre-launch phase such as setting up metrics, which are embedded within the organisation in a way that often traditional website stats are not. Not surprisingly what is often the ‘elephant on the table’ is the degree of cultural change which needs to take place within an organisation to take full advantage of this new two-way conversation with its audience. The hard part is that the community manager can find him or herself at the centre of this change process during a period of community build. Mentoring recognises these difficulties and empowers the community manager to take a lead in his or her daily activities to communicate the different needs of the community to internal stakeholders as a granular means to embed that change.

To be honest there’s always going to be some community software consultants who can talk the talk in order to dazzle the client with what the kit will deliver, but who fail to understand in terms of the reality of how communities work online that it’s not like traditional software implementation. To make communities work online the community manager has to be supported. It’s a complex job in which you are trying to juggle the demands of working with people to get it running, working with community members to generate value-rich conversations, and working with staff so they fired up enough to take time to contribute and enrich the community as part of their day to day job, not as a bolt-on extra.

Part of the skill of mentoring then is to adapt the basic components of a typical three month mentoring process including key elements such as setting and agreeing performance measures such as KPIs and recruiting and motivating champions, to the specific needs of the community manager and his/her host organisation.  So what adds value in the context of managing the change from web manager to community manager, and embedding a community within the organisation, is knowing how to tailor the basic consultancy package to achieve those specific needs! It's an end-to-end empowerment process I guess you could say.