You all know it by now. Every fourth monday in January is a day when you get to say 'thanks' to your friendly local community manager and when community managers throughout the world meet up and discuss their trade, either virtually in a
G+ hangout or with real live glasses in their hands at real live venues. Started by Jeremiah Owyang in 2010 and called
Community Manager Appreciation Day , the event
went swimmingly this year. According to
Hashtracking- the hashtag #CMAD garnered
- 1.9k Tweets
- 1.4k Participants
- 9 million impressions
- 6.4 million reach
Along with WOMMA's newly-launched
Community Management Online Certificate Program, (in which eModeration is proud to be playing a part), that pretty much confirms how large a role community management is playing within social media these days.
We thought it would be a good time to look back over our eModeration Community Management milestones of 2011. It's been a big year for us.
We provided over 9,500 hours of Community Management services last year.
We started the year with 15 people on the team; we ended it with 44 community managers.
In January 2011 we offered Community Management in 3 languages. We now cover 11 languages, and have built communities across the Americas, Europe and Asia.
Just for fun, last week we did a rough count-up how many years of community management we hold, purely in the CM team, without including community management experience found within other departments in eModeration. The results of this poll were so incredible that we are reluctant to publish them (well since you insist, it's over two centuries' worth, with a couple of staff having started at the dawn of time - well if we qualify BBSes as the start of the dawn of time). That's A LOT of hands-on knowledge and experience we share with each other.
We've worked with 44 different brands and agencies, in FMCG, Automotive, Publishing, Food & Beverage, Pharma, Finance, Retail, Recruitment and Media.
We added a dedicated mentor resource, to train and guide, and we refined our internal training resources and processes.
We're working across
owned sites, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Twitter, Tumblr, forums, and are starting to receive requests for work on
Pinterest too!
I asked members of the eModeration Community Management team what they enjoyed about their jobs, and what they thought would be the next Big Thing for communities. Here's a selection of what our experts said:
"I enjoy being embedded in a Community, so that I have a good grasp on what their interests are and what they want from a Company. I feel like I'm a conduit between the two. Heady stuff!"
"I enjoy working with the client initially to determine their strategy and approach to a CM project. It's lovely and collaborative, and makes me realize each time how lucky I am to be in this industry."
"Online mobile communities are what is next, I think, in terms of a trend"
"I don't see Facebook slowing down at all this year, especially with their recent changes and additions to the layout and applications. Pinterest was one of my favorite sites in 2011, but I'm hesitant about "need" for brands to join these new social networks, and believe that there will come a time when a social network is lovely and wonderful for the fact that it isn't used as a marketing tool."
"I think that tracking social media activity relative to return on investment by companies will become more important as more companies will invest or consider investing more into social media as a part of their marketing strategy."
All of us at eModeration wish you a very happy Community Manager Appreciation Day! P.S. We're not hiring right this very second, but we're always interested in hearing from experienced, talented, enthusiastic community managers, especially if they are native speakers of languages other than English. You can send in your CV via our website at
www.emoderation.com/careers and we're keep it on file (we really will).