1) A Community Advocate
As a community advocate, the community managers’ primary role is to represent the customer. This includes listening, which results in monitoring, and being active in understanding what customers are saying in both the corporate community as well as external websites. Secondly, they engage customers by responding to their requests and needs or just conversations, both in private and in public.

2) Brand Evangelist
In this evangelistic role (it goes both ways) the community manager will promote events, products and upgrades to customers by using traditional marketing tactics and conversational discussions. As proven as a trusted member of the community (tenet 1) the individual has a higher degree of trust and will offer good products.

3) Savvy Communication Skills, Shapes Editorial
This tenet, which is both editorial planning and mediation serves the individual well. The community manager should first be very familiar with the tools of communication, from forums, to blogs, to podcasts, to twitter, and then understand the language and jargon that is used in the community. This individual is also responsible for mediating disputes within the community, and will lean on advocates, and embrace detractors –and sometimes removing them completely. Importantly, the role is responsible for the editorial strategy and planning within the community, and will work with many internal stakeholders to identify content, plan, publish, and follow up.

4) Gathers Community Input for Future Product and Services Perhaps the most strategic of all tenets, community managers are responsible for gathering the requirements of the community in a responsible way and presenting it to product teams. This may involve formal product requirements methods from surveys to focus groups, to facilitating the relationships between product teams and customers. The opportunity to build better products and services through this real-time live focus group are ripe, in many cases, customer communities have been waiting for a chance to give feedback.

Web Strategy Matrix: Social Marketing Approaches, Shotgun vs Laser

	Shotgun	Laser
Description	Hiring multiple agencies to conduct social campaigns	Building a deeper relationship with a core group of influencers
Similar to	Interactive Advertising, “Fishing”	Influencer Relations, ‘Friending”
Benefits	Efficient way to get started, identify hot spots to pursue.	Deeper relationships with core influencers who may spread word of mouth, and become brand evangelists.
Risks	Brand burnout on community, risk of appearing disingenuous	Spending more resources on a smaller few reduces chances of spread.
Costs	Inexpensive. In this case, it was 15k X 8 agenices, for a total of 120k.	Costly. Relationship marketing estimated 50-100k in agency costs. Loaning 100 economy cars at 15k each around 1.5 million.
Takeaway	Ideal for the company that doesn’t understand social marketing and is willing to test on their own customers.	Ideal for company that’s ready to invest time, people and money on relationships.