Why Hire a Social Community Manager?

If you use an productivity application such as ManicTime or RescueTime, you may be shocked to see the amount of time you are spending trying to build and maintain your presence on social networking websites. What you might not notice is the limited amount of leads and sales you’ve been driving from Social in your Google Analytics (or other web analytic program). Don’t bother logging in to check, because the number will be less than 4%.

So when all is said and done, you have to account for those hours and your market rate for whatever it is you do at your job. For a lawyer who makes $400 per hour to spend 20 hours per month (5 hours per week) on Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook, that’s a cost of $8,000 per month. For Joe Marketing Coordinator, his hourly rate is around $31 per hour. If he spent 20 hours per month on social networking, the cost would be $620 per month, in addition to the production/operations work that isn’t being handled during those 20 hours.

Neither the lawyer or the marketer in the example above have any training on how to monetize social efforts, so for the most part it’s just time wasting. Therefore, hiring a Social Community Manager trained in the art of growing, nurturing and executing viral marketing campaigns across various social platforms would be a much more efficient use of marketing budget (versus sacrificing internal resource time to the Gods of Time Wasting).

What Does a SCM Do Exactly?

Aside from spending 25% of their day getting better at what they do, a SCM is responsible for Brand Awareness and improving Online Market Reach by getting as many eyes to see the company they provide services to through various mediums, such as video, Flash media, bulletins/posts, widgets, direct communications and more. An effective campaign will not only encourage the community members to visit the target website (and make a purchase or inquiry), but will also spawn a viral marketing epidemic that’s too good not to share with others; such as the Elf Yourself campaign by OfficeMax in 2007.

At the end of the month and/or campaign, the Social Community Manager is accountable to providing detailed analytical data on the following deliverables:

SCM Deliverables:

  1. Reach / Impressions and Growth Rate
  2. Member Count and Growth Rate
  3. Traffic Generated From Social Networks
  4. Leads / Sales Generated from Social Networks (Web Analytics)
  5. Overall Campaign Performance & Recommendations

 

Community Manager Job Description
Do you tweet and use Facebook every day, all day? Is building social community so ingrained you just can’t stop? Do you take pride in customer service excellence and fancy yourself an entrepreneur? Do you understand the difference between a “brochure website,” a “publication” and why feeds are important?

We seek a highly a motivated individual with experience and fanatical passion for blogging, micro-blogging and community participation leadership. This position is full time salaried with benefits, including attending mainstream and niche’ conferences.

We are a [your company description here] in [city, state] with an national reputation for [your company mission here] mission. We promote our website by integrated organic optimization (SEO), social media optimization (SMO) and paid placement (PPC). Our Reputation Monitoring & Management objectives are comprehensive.

 

The successful candidate will join our internal marketing team at the managerial level, and interact with an external Search Marketing agency. 

Qualifications and Experience

  • Has a bachelor’s or associates degree in music, advertising, marketing, graphics, web development, communications, English, IT, music, theater, anthropology, history or related.
  • Excels at research, possesses excellent writing skills and the ability to crank editorial and technical writing output without brooding.
  • Has work experience or training in advertising, PR, online marketing or similar field
  • Proficient with Microsoft Office products.
  • Dedicated to blogging and use of Facebook
  • Understands the power of feed marketing
  • Demonstrated creativity and documented immersion in social media (really send the links)
  • Demonstrated ability to map out a marketing strategy and then drive that strategy proven by testing and metrics
  • Experience sourcing and managing content development and publishing
  • Ability to jump from the creative side of marketing to analytical side, able to demonstrate why their ideas are analytically sound
  • Management experience or obviously ready for promotion to management
  • Discretion to identify threats and opportunities in user generated content
  • Understands social media universe including YouTube, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Flickr, Forums, Twitter, Wikis, blogs, etc…We’re looking for a social media addict who maintains a personal mix of participatory expertise from among these channels.
  • Possesses functional knowledge or some experience with HTML/CSS
  • Knowledge of search engine optimization-think including basic keyword research. We name and tag our posts based on research..
  • Has excellent verbal and written communication skills and an ability to work individually on a project or in a team environment
  • Is eager to meet and exceed objectives and take on more responsibility
  • Brings to the position outstanding organizational skills and the ability to handle multiple projects simultaneously while meeting deadlines
  • Ability to communicate results to management and in a fast paced environment

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

  • Interact with our customers to align unselfish service of their needs, with our corporate objectives
  • Be the eyes and ears of our brand as if your own reputation depended on it
  • Build and maintain our content distribution network by way of social media channels
  • Minute by minute participation in conversations that surround our content and brand, answer comments, be a mediator.”
  • Identify threats and opportunities in user generated content surrounding our brand, report to appropriate parties.
  • Interact with legal, search, client and cross corporate agencies.
  • Create content for feeds and snippets in various social media sites.
  • Schedule and organize multiple departments which generate content on a daily basis
  • Conduct keyword research including cataloging and indexing target keyword phrases
  • Participate in social media, as yourself and white hat avatars, on our behalf
  • Optimizing tags, on our feeds, sharing sites like YouTube/Flickr and search engines through copywriting, creative & keyword optimization & buzz pocket mining.
  • Tag and title content, with an understanding of how the word’s chosen impact natural search traffic and rankings via recurrent optimized content
  • Manage and track link building campaigns, coordinated with all facets of our business.
  • Create and update daily, weekly and monthly reports
  • Analyze campaigns and translate anecdotal or qualitative data into recommendations and plans for revising the social media campaigns.