Community managers (sometimes also referred to as moderators) play a number of roles in the community: host, facilitator, mediator, analyst, reporter and technical support. The many benefits they provide include: highlighting interesting contributions, promoting the “brand” voice and messaging, monitoring community health and sustaining overall community engagement.
Although the roles of community manager and moderator are very similar, and we interchange between the terms in this guide, there is a subtle difference between them – a community manager is a proactive role, which involves seeking and nurturing engagement within the community, whereas a moderator tends to be more of a reactive role. With this in mind, you should make sure your team goes beyond just “moderating” a challenge.
As a community manager you are accountable for:
Shaping the culture of your online community
Write constructive comments that help people improve their ideas, and others will follow your lead.
Identify “super-users” who will nurture other participants and their ideas (most idea-management platforms will collect this user-activity data under user-management).
Make sure the debate is constructive – you don't want people's friends to write lots of generic comments, such as "great idea". However, some of these sorts of comments are inevitable, so it’s important to respond with a question (eg, "what makes this idea so great?"), so that they are prompted to give reasons, and then others can respond.
Act as a role model for other community members – the community manager sets the tone of the community.
Moderating and mediating the community
Occasionally, participants will go off topic or start marketing their services instead of submitting new ideas. If this happens, you’ll need to direct them back to the topic in focus – it’s best to do this publicly, so others can learn from it.
In very rare cases, you may need to intervene by deleting comments that are clearly inappropriate (eg, when other participants are insulted). However, the community will most likely moderate itself without you having to “police” conversations.
Providing technical support
People will get in touch with you if they encounter technical problems: for example, they may be confused of the way votes are counted, unsure of the difference between votes and activity points or surprised that it takes a few seconds before a vote is registered.
The most frequent problem to arise is difficulty logging in. In most cases, participants did not receive the email with the activation link because it ended up in their spam folder. This is frustrating for both the person trying to log in and the moderator, so stay calm and friendly, and do your best.
Many platforms will also have a technical-support site for Admins. Ensure you give your team clear information about this.
