Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day so let’s talk about the vital (yet often overlooked) role of community manager.

First of all, since “community manager” is a squishy newly minted title, we should define it. Jeremiah Owyang’s Four Tenets of the Community Manager defines the role as a mix of ombudsman, evangelist, forum admin, and feedback gatherer.

Here’s my working definition:

A Community Manager is a highly visible person who serves as the company’s user experience eyes, ears, and mouth, and who works to make their product better.

• Community managers must be visible because you want zero ambiguity about where users are supposed to go for help. If your community manager is not highly visible, or if you don’t have one, the users will appoint a community manager (more on that later).
• As the eyes, ears, and mouth of UX, Twitter is the natural habitat of community managers. Twitter is usually the first place users go to complain because it gets results. Users know that Twitter gets monitored and measured, and influential users know to use the medium where they have the most leverage. I believe these are good things. Twitter is public (vital for accountability) and easy for both customers and companies to use. Essentially Twitter is the best bug reporting software ever devised.
• Crucial: community managers must have the authority to make things better for users. This doesn’t mean that every feature request gets built, but it does mean that when patterns emerge in user feedback the community manager works with the product people to make the product better. This is a delicate and politically charged internal feedback cycle, much harder to get right than it sounds.

Now, back to the title of this post, which I adapted from a poker proverb. You need a designated, visible community manager because otherwise your community will appoint one.

For example, Google never ever wants paid humans to handle support. It’s all either help documentation, bug report form black holes, or the hell of Google Groups. So what ends up happening? Matt Cutts, the most visible and accessible Google employee, becomes the de facto community manager.

Or take Twitter. Their help site doesn’t offer an obvious way to report problems or feedback. The @Twitter account isn’t an obvious support/feedback account. So what happens when Twitter rolls out a feature and everyone hates it? Users seek out the most authoritative Twitter employee they know of (I like to hit up @al3x of the API team because he listens and responds. I’ve reported bad UI bugs to front end people at Twitter and gotten no response.)

So anyway, good community managers are like my friends @melle and @miz_ginevra. They’re out there on the front lines, monitoring the internet for mentions, engaging users, defusing hot situations, and figuring out how to make the product better. They’re bona fide UX heroes.