I posted during the summer about news that some 69% of companies are planning, or already have, a community manager in place. Whilst this is undoubtebly good news for those of us in the profession I suspect that the majority of these individuals will have outward facing roles. They'll be charged with dealing with their employers social media or running the communities housed on their own websites.
An enlightened minority might employ such individuals to manage internal communities, to attempt to solicit and cajole knowledge from peoples heads and make it available to all. These individuals will manage internal talent communities aimed at getting the best from each employee.
I'm wondering however if a further shift is not in the pipeline. In Future Work Alison Maitland and Peter Thomson talk about the growing popularity of flexible working, with an ever increasing cohort of employees working from home. This army of knowledge workers would engage and interact with each other using many of the same social media tools that are commonplace in outward facing initiatives. They propose that the role of the manager in such a scenario will be to encourage those remote workers to share their work and their knowledge, to make them feel part of the team even when working remotely.
In other words to do many of the things that we community managers do on a daily basis. So my question to you, good readers of this blog, is community management set to be the key skill of the next decade?