I don’t know if it’s a case of recency bias, but I keep noticing community content management roles everywhere. I’m part of two large Slack communities: one for community managers and one for content marketers, and I swear I’ve seen so many postings for community content roles. I myself started as a Community Content Manager a couple of months back, and it’s really not a title I’d heard before.
If I had to describe what a Community Content Manager does, I’d say that you pretty much do everything that a Content Marketing Manager does, but then there’s the added component of starting and growing a community for the folks that your content would resonate with the most. It’s a cool way to help folks that are into content marketing to building rapport and relationships with the audience they create for every single day as it is, and a gateway for gathering direct feedback on the content in question.
Why are these types of roles becoming more prevalent?
I don’t have a definite answer for this. But if I had to guess, I’d say that it has to do with Covid and the disconnected feeling that a lot of folks have as a result of shifting to a remote-first or remote-only work environment. Of course, not everyone has a job that keeps them tied to a computer, but for folks in that situation, being at home and in your own bubble has been normalized over the last couple of years. Some folks are really nervous about getting back out into the world, and therefore human connections have suffered.
I’m just starting to come around to the idea of gathering indoors with people again. I have a certain number of folks that I consistently hang out with, but for a while there, we were doing everything over video calls. A lot of us have talked about how weird it feels to suggest certain activities because everyone has a differing comfort level, and also about how our social batteries are much lower now than they were in 2019.
I say all of this to say that people are craving connection, and that’s where the idea of building and partaking in community/ies has the chance to shine. I’m not quite ready to go to an in-person conference, but I love the idea of taking part in a virtual conference or being part of a Slack community. These sorts of opportunities have allowed me to continue learning, growing, and building my network despite the drawback of the global pandemic.
Do you need specific experience to succeed in this type of role?
From what I can tell, not really. If I’m being honest, I haven’t put a great deal of action behind building the community at the company I work for yet, but I definitely have a lot of ideas about how I want to go about doing that. Even though I don’t have formal community management experience, my last role was at a community tech company, and I’ve been a part of different communities throughout my life. My approach is just to take the learnings from being a community member, taking stock of the positive aspects, and forwarding those types of experiences for the members we attract to our future community space.
Khadijah Plummer Consulting 