Everyone in the tech space seems to complain that great engineering talent (regardless of specialty) is the single most difficult human capital resource to find in Silicon Valley. Even before Google was gobbling up engineers, the general sentiment I heard was that hiring great engineers who fit a company’s culture is a really hard (and never-ending) challenge. I am willing to concede that hiring the best engineers is probably job #1. That got me to thinking about what might be the second most scarce human capital resource in the valley today.
I am willing to be that the second most scarce resource in the valley is (sadly) not business development. The most difficult position to fill at the moment has to be what I will call “community marketing manager” or the person who is responsible for growing, developing, and nurturing a user community to build a great social networking or community site. Why do I think this is such a hard position to fill? First, there don’t appear to be a lot of people who have shown competence in building strong, engaged user communities until very recently. There are a number of contemporary examples (Yelp, Meebo, Pandora, Meetup, Threadless, and perhaps a few others) of companies who have managed to make engagement between the company and the user base a very personal and real connection that reinforces user engagement with the core service or brand. It’s not about building a sticky site or having ridiculous retention or usage metrics — it’s really about the way in which the site or service cultivates a relationship with the user community. The number of companies, either in contemporary terms or from web 1.0 who have been good at this is fairly small in my opinion.
Second, most great community marketing manager types I know do their job with little to no budget. Many of the most effective things I have seen really are about superior customer service (responding quickly to customer emails, acknowledging mistakes when you make them, communicating proactively about upcoming features and changes, and meeting unspoken needs from the user base all come to mind) than they are about marketing budgets and ad spend.
Last, I think this is a scarce skill set because it’s hard to write a spec for a great community marketing manager. Writing a tight spec for a classic marketing manager is fairly straightforward. But good community marketing managers seem to combine great customer service skills, personality, an intuition for marketing, and the ability to achieve great things with fairly limited budget resources. If that’s not a tough spec to write and fill I don’t know what is.
If there is another job function that you feel is more deserving of the #2 spot, go ahead and make your case in the comments or just email me directly.
The key thing about the best community marketing managers is that they are almost always best when they come out of the community that they would be supporting. That way, that person would have the standing credibility and trust of the community from day 1. That’s why that is a hard job to fill. Yes it can be done by outsiders, but it takes more time/effort/etc.
The key thing about the best community marketing managers is that they are almost always best when they come out of the community that they would be supporting. That way, that person would have the standing credibility and trust of the community from day 1. That’s why that is a hard job to fill. Yes it can be done by outsiders, but it takes more time/effort/etc.
Gen, I agree completely and that’s a point that should have been noted in the actual blog post itself.
I think that is the hardest and easiest job to fill.
1- Grab someone WITHIN your community who is doing it for free and pay them
2- I don’t think it is something you can learn, hire or foster. It is a natural thing for someone who is passionate and interested in their specific community.
PS. I would love to be the Charles Hudson’s blog community manager. Maybe that will get me a link on his Favorite blogs one day=)
-Noah
I think that is the hardest and easiest job to fill. 1- Grab someone WITHIN your community who is doing it for free and pay them 2- I don’t think it is something you can learn, hire or foster. It is a natural thing for someone who is passionate and interested in their specific community. PS. I would love to be the Charles Hudson’s blog community manager. Maybe that will get me a link on his Favorite blogs one day=) -Noah
Noah, I added you to my favorite blogs. Thanks for the comment.
Great post. Similar to my recent post on hiring an evangelist, you said it better:
http://ben.casnocha.com/2007/03/the_role_of_eva.html
Great post. Similar to my recent post on hiring an evangelist, you said it better: http://ben.casnocha.com/2007/03/the_role_of_eva.h…
The point about how to hire/foster this type of position is a difficult one. It insinuates that there is some understandable nature to growing a community. Online communities are only a few years old (say, less than 10). I don’t think that there’s any body of thought about what really drives the development of an online community. It may not even be from somebody who is actively involved in the community (were any of the early ebay employees big in beany baby sales?)
Most likely, it is a confluence of many individual things. The trick is understanding which are controllable by the site owner and working on the things that you can’t control. But it may not be something that any one person could be able to evaluate. Perhaps that’s why these people tend to be in short supply.
The point about how to hire/foster this type of position is a difficult one. It insinuates that there is some understandable nature to growing a community. Online communities are only a few years old (say, less than 10). I don’t think that there’s any body of thought about what really drives the development of an online community. It may not even be from somebody who is actively involved in the community (were any of the early ebay employees big in beany baby sales?) Most likely, it is a confluence of many individual things. The trick is understanding which are controllable by the site owner and working on the things that you can’t control. But it may not be something that any one person could be able to evaluate. Perhaps that’s why these people tend to be in short supply.