What do most people get wrong about community management?

So based on that cumulative 5 years of experience, what do most people get wrong about community management?

Um, so I'm going to take this from 2 approaches, right? So the approach— the first approach is what people think it is and what they get wrong about it, and then only is what organizations totally get wrong about it. So I've had people walk up to me coming from the people perspective, and they're like, oh, community management, what is community management? And then you explain that one. And then some people that I have worked with, they say, oh, community management must very easy, all fun and vibes. Just organize events, bring people together, pictures, you know, and put it on social media. And then I laugh. If they catch me on a good day, I go deeper to explain. But if they catch me on a not so great day, I'm like, whatever you think it is, and I move on to the next thing. But then coming back to organizations, um, the first thing is that organizations, the first thing they get wrong about community is that most of them don't even know if they need a community or not. All right, so there was a time it seemed like community was like the buzz, the next big thing for every company. And then we saw every company just setting up a community, you know, putting out ads for community managers. And the way you know communities that don't even— or organizations rather— that don't even recognize or understand what community management is, is you can see the JDs on social media. You're putting out a role for a community manager, but you're asking for someone that can manage social media, you're asking for someone that can do influencer marketing and all of those things, right? So social media can be a bit embedded into a community manager's role, but community management is not social media management, and it's not managing like influencer marketing, right? So most of them don't even realize or understand what community entails, and then what community or how community— like, let me use the word— gets, or like, what would I say, aligns with their goals or with the product that they are building. So there's like that first mistake, which is organizations have not sat down to understand their why. Why do you want to have a community and why are you building that community? And it leads me to the second thing, which is they think that community is a very quick fix, right? Oh, you have a terrible product, what do you do? Boom, open a community. Tell the community manager, oh, get us reviews, let people talk about it on social media and all of that. Oh, let community just act as a support. We don't have strength to bother our support agents really. Just boom, anybody that has issues, direct them to the community. People will help them figure out— they figure out, you know, what they're supposed to do. So that is like the second mistake that organizations make. And then the third, which is that is very personal to me is that they think that community management is a quick fix. They expect like the biggest results in a very, very, very short timeline, right? So community management takes time. And the thing about community management is that most or some of community work is largely invisible, right? A little bit hard sometimes to measure or quantify community work. Now I'm not saying that community should be vibes, there should be no ROIs or whatever on all your community initiatives, but the thing is that community work takes time. Right? You're building trust, you're building loyalty, and it's not something that you do in a day. It's not something that you achieve in 2 months. It's not something that you achieve in 3 months. It's like builds up, it compounds. But the thing is that most companies just expect that you establish a community today, boom, it picks up, boom, people suddenly start loving your product, boom, people start doing things. So there's like a lot of pressure, and that's why you get most of them telling you, oh, we're not seeing what you're doing, oh, 1,000 people have not used our product, oh, you were supposed to sell this 1,001 things and this has not worked. Is that Again, it ties back to, I think, the first part I made, which is that most companies do not understand what community is and why they want a community, you know, integrated into what they are doing. And then they expect it to be a quick fix and a fast route to maybe customer growth or whatever that the company is trying to achieve. These are 3 recurring mistakes that I've seen, and it's also common among my community manager friends that, you know, I've spoken to over time. Yeah.

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