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A user over on Quora recently asked about a salaries for community managers. I have posted my answer at http://qr.ae/KnS, but I want to expand  in my answer. Community Manager can mean so many things to so many people. I want to share what I believe is important when picking your Community Manager.

In today’s world, it is a given that certain teams are must haves for a business to survive. You wouldn’t think about offering up a new product or site without:

• A product team to build and keep your product going and growing
• A marketing team to sell your product and get people talking about it
• A leadership team to keep the company on track
• A support team to handle and track problems

By the same token, you need a community team to keep the needs of the community in mind. You need someone whose job it is to make sure that customer stories get heard. That customers know what is coming. That the world knows you are listening to your customers and joining in the conversation.

What should you be looking for in a community manager?

You need someone to run that team, to be your face to the customers, and to be involved. A community manager isn’t just out there to make sure that forum posts are moderated, that blog comments are sane and polite. A community manager is there to make sure that your customers are heard and understood.

By the way…

That isn’t to say that every customer complaint should change the direction of your company. It is to say that your community manager is responsible for knowing when to tell the customers both:

• “Yeah – you’ve got a point. Let me raise that to the teams.”
• “I understand where you are coming from, but that isn’t something we are focusing on right now. I will make sure you know if that changes.”

Community Managers do much more than create content, browse Twitter, and talk. A good Community Manager should be able to:

• Train staff
• Manage a team
• PR your community across the social web
• Work on keeping your community feeling involved, satisfied, heard and motivated
• Measure the progress and growth of your community and its involvement
• Find and report bugs in the platform, track them, and help prioritize them
• Advocate for your community
• Represent you on the social web
• Use social monitoring tools to track the conversation where it is happening
• Create content that your community needs
• Watch for new trends in social media and community and help the other teams understand which ones matter to your company
• Create help documentation – both text based and video based
• Represent your company at events, shows, and meet ups
• Perform moderation, posting, content, and discussion duties

In other words, a great community manager should be able to do many things well so that they can help your other teams look even better. A great community manager should be a Jack or Jill of all trades. They should be outgoing and entertaining, but still focused on making your products the best they can be. They should be able to communicate in almost any medium. They should have connections to those that can help you and your customers. They should be experienced in the social world, passionate about community and connections, and passionate about your product.

What does that mean in terms of salary?

You are going to need to pay decent money – think 80-90K per year, minimum. You should also be able to offer benefits and a travel budget so that the community manager can get out there and meet your community.

Someone who has experience doing what you need done is going to cost some money. BUT they are also going to make you money. They will be able to be professional, keep your community on track, and keep the rest of your management team in the loop about what is going on.

You can get people to do the work for less. But, you are going to get what you pay for. If you are looking to low ball the salary and benefits, think about what it will cost you in the long term. Someone who doesn’t know what you need them to know, who doesn’t have the experience you need them to have could cost you big time in reputation and results.

You need to be willing to invest in your community just as you are willing to invest in your product and marketing teams. Social Media can be done cheap or it can be done well. Pick which matters to you.

Hire someone for whom the community matters as much as your product matters to you. It is worth it.

(Disclaimer: I am available. I am good. I am known. I am passionate. I know measurement and community management. I know social media. I am not, however, cheap. This is my career. And I am worth it. For more information on me, see my Visual CV at http://visualcv.com/callkathy)

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I love Skype. It lets me sit in one place and talk with people in another place. Whether the person I need to talk with is in the other room or in another country, it doesn’t matter. It just works.

That said, there is one thing about Skype that bothers me. By default, Skype saves everything forever. For a screen recorder like me, that can leave me open for some embarrassing screen moments.

There is a fix: Clear your history. It is actually a two step process: Set Skype to not save the history and then clear the history itself. The process itself isn’t hard. It’s finding where to do it that gets complicated.

How do you learn what to do to clear the history? Watch the screencast – It tells you just what you need to know!

(See the video full size.)

What other tools would you like to see screencasts on? Let me know and I will pull them together. As QueenGeek can tell you, I take requests!