While composing the preso for a talk about Crowdsourcing that I presented last Sunday at Stanford Business School, I thought of a catchy way to describe the Community Manager’s job. Community Manager = Chief Thank You Officer – the person that makes sure that everyone who deserves to be “thanked” in a community is thanked.
From my experience at both Yahoo! Answers and at FixYa, I came up with a theory that Crowd-sourced communities can best be described as a marketplace between providers of content (sellers) and consumers of content (buyers). The currency that makes most of the free content generation possible is “thank you’s”. The key ingredient to making this work is that most providers of content need nothing more than an authentic “Thank You” for them to feel that their contribution (whether its an answer to a question, a video, or photograph) is appreciated, and worth the trouble of posting.
From this perspective, I think that Community Managers are filling in a hole where sometimes the “market” doesn’t work and the content providers are not compensated with proper appreciation. This is especially true when there is not enough consumers of content – or when content production far outstrip the audience. So Chief Thank You Officer is also a “market maker” often found on stock exchanges.
A community manager’s job is also to curb abuse – which often is when there is improper feedback (mean-spirited, personal attacks, meaningless responses) from a consumer of content to the provider of content. Yes, there is also provider – provider conflict that community managers get into, but I do think the chief purpose of online community management for a crowd-sourced site is making sure that Thank You’s are doled out to the right people in the community.
