community is hot, or what?
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.
Late last year, Mick Liubinskas was the only other person I knew working as an online community manager (and that's really only half his job.)
It's probably just because my new job title at bluepulse.com is "community manager" and LinkedIn is showing new roles that include those keywords in the title.
But I do feel there's a new growth area in helping companies communicate and connect with their audience and customers; using not just Facebook and Myspace but social networks of all kinds, such as bluepulse, twitter, flickr, blogs, social tagging sites like de.licio.us, video and music.
There are community managers who write blog posts and FAQs, community managers who help herd disparate clouds of users into people with similar interests, and with the growth of Web 2.0 open platforms, community managers who work with developers to help them build cool apps and widgets on those platforms.
Because it's still really in its infancy, there are very few tools available, and those we do use are being repurposed from their original intent.
For instance, yesterday I experimented with adding a statscounter.com javascript snippet to a Facebook Page, and blow me down: it worked. So now I have a way to track usage of bluepulse's Facebook page that is considerably more informative than the lame reporting Facebook offers.
