A manifesto about the dangers and opportunities for community managers in the next 5 years. Originally presented at Social Media Week San Francisco.

1. Why Community Managers Won’t Exist in 5 Years (and why that’s a good thing) Evan Hamilton Community Manager, UserVoice

2. Agenda Current state of the Community Manager Success stories The manifesto

3. Customer Engagement is Established

5. 60% on Twitter (35% more than 2009)

6. 79% of corporations doing social mediaData: http://www1.umassd.edu/cmr/studiesresearch/2010F500.pdf, http://bit.ly/hbHWTk

7. Awesome, right? (nope)

8. Community Managers are in danger

10. A good experience on social media doesn’t matter if your customers have a bad experience elsewhere

11. ComcastCares only raised Comcast’s ACSI score 5 points, still 15 points below the average for their industryData: http://bit.ly/fMKtmC, http://bit.ly/eSmWbp, http://bit.ly/hVSCIZ

12. Community Managers are in danger Other Departments Have Discovered Social Media Data: http://twitter.com/#!/BurgerKing/status/31019054902804482

14. Nobody is protecting usData: Altimeter - http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/career-social-strategist

15. There is opportunity

17. And we can be a resource

18. Social media strategies are still evolving

19. 82% long-term social media strategies are younger than 3 years, 52% younger than 2

20. We’re not behind the curve yetData: Altimeter - http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/career-social-strategist

21. What is our goal, then?

22. Nice Guy Marketing Customer generation and retention through niceness.

24. More budget spent on support than advertising

25. 75% of customers are return customers

26. Sales exceeding $1 billion in 2008Data: http://adage.com/moy2008/article?article_id=131759, http://about.zappos.com/sites/about.zappos.com/files/MasterMediaKit6.5.09.pdf

28. Transparent about revenue

29. Everyone blogs

30. $100k revenue in first 5 monthsData: http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/11/14/hit-100000-in-revenue-time-to-start-looking-up/, http://balsamiq.com/blogs

32. CEO spends time in their forums

33. Only 3.5% off each transaction

34. $400MM gross merchandise in 2010Data: http://tcrn.ch/eMQAyW, http://on.wsj.com/gSZGvT

35. Except…none of this was because of a community manager. It was founders, co-founders, and the like. Which is why we need to create a new position.

36. Chief Happiness Officer A position dedicated to making sure all parts of the company are focused on making customers happy.

39. Average of 3.1 social media employees in 1k-5k orgs

40. Siloed customer happiness is ineffective

41. See ComcastCares

42. Sometimes it’s the folks with the least power who have the most opportunity to delight your customers

43. Nobody is protecting usData: Altimeter - http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/career-social-strategist

45. Use existing systems

46. Oliver Branchard’s Social Media ROI, Jeremiah Owyang’s Social Marketing Analytics

47. There are tools

48. Google Analytics tracking, Tweetreach, surveys

49. Will be easier once we’re not in the trenchesData: http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/the-basics-of-social-media-roi-ppt-slideshare/, http://bit.ly/gIJUUX

51. Customers should be happy however they interact with you

52. Zappos: “The telephone is one of the best branding devices out there”Data: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/alissa-walker/member-blog/tony-hsiehs-zapposcom

54. Hard to change an organization after it’s set in its ways

57. Letting you succeed is in the company’s best interest

59. Thanks! More rants: www.understandingyourcustomers.com Me: @evanhamilton on Twitter evan@uservoice.com

60. Image credits Billboard: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tmray02/4474188424/in/photostream/ Dog & Cat: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mofle/2088197145/in/photostream/ Cat & Bird: http://www.flickr.com/photos/irenewn/2263552045/in/photostream/ Note: http://www.flickr.com/photos/75166820@N00/4568113/in/photostream/ Kittens: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ferran-jorda/4460510626/in/photostream/

61. Licensing This presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0), which means you should feel free to share it, use parts of it, and remix it as long as a) you’re not using it for commercial privileges and b) whatever you’re creating is licensed the same way. Because sharing is awesome.