Community Managers Make Money, Money

You're lucky this isn't my MySpace page, or you'd have been greeted with a little hip-hop when you got here.  Connie Bensen, pretty much the go-to source for all things community manager related, writes up the question of salaries for Community managers, and tackles the question of working remotely.

The short version is 50-100K, but there's an important point she leaves describing why this is the correct salary (a level I wholeheartedly agree with).  Here's what she's

Salaries for entry level online community managers range from $50 k to $ 85 k depending on location. Please don’t insult people that have acquired the skills and are ready to build your brand & provide for your customers directly. I have recommended to people to turn down job offers that require them to work onsite & yet can’t afford the cost of living there.

The phrase that caught me was to not insult professionals by offering them less.  How could you insult someone by creating a position at a salary level?  There's a lot tied up in that statement, but it essentially boils down to understanding the role of a community manager.  If you're serious about building value in your brand and wrangling the social media crowd, you need someone who knows what they're doing.

Hiring a newbie and calling them a community manager is like hiring a med student and calling them an open heart surgeon.  Sure you can do it, but why in the world would you pretend to have an open heart surgeon on staff if all they were doing was fetching you coffee? 

Community managers need experience and authority to be effective.  They have to be able to respond to the public, communicate the message of your company, and work with executives without losing the human touch needed to gain credibility online.  That's not a job for someone making $20,000 a year, and it's not a job for someone you pay well but has no access to decision makers. 

In terms of remote work, this is very important.  You can't hire a contractor or employee to work remotely (or outsource to a company), and not have that person plugged into company decisions.  They'd be a fool to take the job.  I know I wouldn't take a search for someone like that.  Hiring needs to be based on success, and success is impossible in social media without knowledge and authority.

So if you want to build a social network and manage a community, or bring the disparate pieces of your social media profile into a coherent strategy, build a job description for someone with the intelligence and maturity to actually generate results.  We're past the time of hiring someone for the notoriety of having a social media program.  It's time we start building the long-term framework of delivering value.