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For some of us old, creaking community managers that have been around longer than broadband, it’s slightly dizzying that the role of ‘community manager’ is creeping into the general lexicon. So if 2009 has finally galvanised the concept that online community spaces need managers, is 2010 going to be the year when the role is formalised and ranked as highly as other CRM roles? Image by mira d’oubliette via Flickr As is traditional at this time of year, we’ve been looking back over 2009 and all the enormous leaps of innovation and learning that have happened

If you ask some people what an online community manager does, they’ll describe a moderator. Others liken it to being a gardener, keeping the weeds at bay and encouraging conversation to flourish. In our recent community predictions for 2010 post , many of our contributors thought that 2010 would see a tightly-defined, standardised ‘community manager’ role, with various spin-off roles taking on the work that’s currently supplementary to many of us running communities. Sounds like a stupid question, no? But actually it’s a valid one, especially in this time

Knowledge Management for Social Innovation A blog about Communities of Practice and web based approaches to leading change through better use of knowledge. « Communities of Practice: Lessons from Latin America | Main | OPEN INVITATION: GLOBAL JAM ONLINE COMMUNTIES FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION » Virtual Communities: At What Price? How much does a virtual community cost? The cost and benefit factors of virtual communities are coming into greater focus as more organizations use them and

We’ve put the question to leading community managers across the world, and they have outlined the classic community clangers that we should all avoid. Toby Metcalfe, Community Manager and Social Networker, is straight to the point on this: “The big mistake is to not be engaged – to have a forum and not be interacting with those in the community. Not listening to the community: building in features by Arno Arno Lack of engagement

She asked me what reading I could recommend for somebody looking to learn more about online communities and how they can be launched and grown. There are a whole range of great books out there on how social media is used and the impact this is having on society (anything by Gladwell or Shirky would be a great starting point), but she was interested specifically in things that help managing and growing communities online. Image by austinevan via Flickr A

On Friday we posted about an experiment running on one of our online communities , comparing paid and organic search strategies . This is just one of the ways that our clients measure the ROI of their online community - by increased traffic from organic search or significant savings on their paid search bills. Measuring ROI is an important topic in social media, all the communities that we build at FreshNetworks have very clear ROI cases. Image via Wikipedia We spend time during the planning and strategy phases working on the objectives of the online community

In any online community or social network, some people are more active than others. In fact, in a natural online community we would expect that out of every 100 users, only one will originate new content. They are unlikely to publicly create or add to a conversation themselves, but they are critical to the success of the the online community – without them, the others wouldn’t start or add to conversations. Image by Kraftwerck via Flickr Last week Facebook announced that it is rolling out what is, effectively, its own version of the retweet.

common debate among those working in marketing and social media is between engaging people on your own domain - in an online community that you build and manage yourself - and engaging people where they are - out in social networks like Facebook and MySpace or on YouTube, external blogs or forums. Your own online community, on the other hand, is better suited to real engagement - something that is long-term and sustainable rather than a one-off hit. Image by MattRhodes via Flickr A

For the second in our series of Online Community Examples , we move on to look at online communities in the retail industry. Online communities in the retail industry This is where online communities can come in handy. One good In an economic downturn, we’re seeing a real shift in retail shopping  patterns. Here in the UK there are reports of people switching from their usual supermarket brand for what they believe to be a cheaper alternative (as shown by the current price war between competitors Tesco and Aldi ).