It’s been more than 10 years now that I started my first position as a Community Manager (CM). Despite a short break, in which I learned about digital marketing, the vast majority of my professional career was spent in community management, and there’s a good reason for it: Community management is the perfect mix of things that I like in a job. First and foremost, I enjoy being able to help people and making their lives better, but also the sheer variety of tasks involved in CM work.

Below, you can find the six most valuable lessons that I have learned over the years. Hopefully, they can help some of you, especially if you are new to community management or trying to figure out what the experience of other CMs has been.

Make Connections

As a CM, your primary role is to make connections within the community that you support. However, you are also responsible for making sure that your company is aware of what’s going on in the community. You’re pretty much at the intersection of it all. This means that it’s very important that you know who is in charge of what at your company. In addition to knowing who to reach out to with a question or request, you should also strive to become the person who others come to when they are trying to figure out who to contact. Once you start meeting with and messaging people, new connections may be suggested to you.

Don’t Make It (Too) Personal

Even if your community is the most loving and welcoming community on planet Earth, chances are that you are going to come across someone or something in your CM career that is going to cause friction. Conflict and having to convey unpleasant news to the community, while uncomfortable to deal with, are actually great growth opportunities. One of the most valuable lessons of my career was when I had to inform the very first community that I worked with, which therefore had a special place in my heart, that their beloved game was going to be “sunset” (i.e. shut down). I had encountered complaints and personal attacks before, but the flood of complaints that I encountered on a daily basis after the announcement was incomparable. - And, within reason, I could understand those reactions.

As a community manager, you have to be able to empathize with the community, so if there is something that gets in the way of their collective satisfaction, it should matter to you, as well. After all, you’re the one in charge of relaying the community feedback to your employer or client company. However, once you have taken note of a particular complaint, you also need to be able to distance yourself from it. It’s important to understand that any attacks against you aren’t actually directed at you. They stem from frustration with issues related to the product and can be based on misunderstandings of how processes at your company work. One great example for this is the common line, “Why are you posting on Twitter, instead of fixing the product?” Being the face of the company, you have to expect a certain degree of venting, as you present the opportunity to voice any pent up aggravations that customers have. To them, you are the company. It is your responsibility to educate the community on what your role as a community manager entails and that you yourself are not responsible for implementing bug fixes. Even if your company is very hush-hush about internal workings, you should at least be at liberty to discuss the very basics of who does what. The next step would be to attach a face to the individuals working on the product, as humanizing the company can help lessen the vitriol.

Now, even if you have done your due diligence to explain and communicate understanding for the community member’s (or members’) frustration, you can still experience foul language and insults against you. This comes with the territory, and it helps to grow a thick skin. But that doesn’t mean that you have to turn a blind eye to verbal abuse or shrug off doxing attempts. Those behaviors are unacceptable towards any community member, including you.

Be Curious

Never stop learning. Community management revolves around people and tools and both have a tendency to evolve over time. In addition to keeping a hand on the pulse of your own community, make sure that you join an online community manager group and regularly read articles from other community managers and community management platform vendors.

I personally like the Community Manager Subreddit and the private CMX Hub Facebook group for exchanging ideas. The Community Roundtable offers free and paid resources, such as the annual community management report that has information on CM career development, salaries, and more. If you enjoy learning via podcasts, David Dewald has compiled a list of podcasts for community managers. Following CM tags on blogging sites like Hashnode or Medium is another great way to stay in the know.

Find Your Superpower

The work of community managers is so varied that you are likely to perform a multitude of tasks each day. There is social media work, troubleshooting, metrics reporting, presenting, content creation, forum administration, event management, contest coordination, speaking engagements, marketing, PR… And the list goes on and on. This is one of the aspects that can be a lot of fun about being a CM: You get to dabble in different things, and there is no real routine in what you do. Every day is different.

As you gain more experience as a CM, this variety of responsibilities provides the perfect opportunity to figure out what your personal superpower is. One of the things that I learned pretty quickly is that I am great at things that involve organization and time management and that I am good at presenting findings to team members and stakeholders. I therefore always naturally gravitated towards projects that involved project management and, in my first role, officially became a Community Team Project Manager that oversaw the training of new team members, documentation management, investigation and management of new tools, standardization of reporting, and more.

Your own superpower may be in entertaining audiences in live streams or YouTube videos, or maybe working with developers has piqued your interest in software development. This is up to you to discover. Finding an area that you excel at will help you stand out among your peers and determine your career path.

Document Everything

Although this advice holds true the most, if you are a contract worker, and you know that your time on the team could be limited, it’s always a good idea to have a repository of documentation for the work that you do, in case you ever need to go on vacation or you start another job. There are many ways in which you can do this, including storing documents in a shared cloud drive, creating corporate wikis, or using ticket systems. Your company may already have a preferred system, and I recommend that you set up your documentation repo in the way that works best for you, your collaborators, and any stakeholders. Here’s an example for how different systems can be used: A CM has a biweekly blog series. They would like to go on vacation, but no one on the team is trained on the internal blogging process. Thankfully, the CM already has a ticket system in place that includes detailed instructions for each step for completion of the process and is accessible to anyone at their company. Before they leave to go on their vacation, they can tag team members in the related tickets. The people who have been tagged can follow her ticket comments to see which parts of the process have been completed and what still needs to be done. This can include tagging collaborators from other teams.

Another handy side effect of documenting all the things, no matter what system you use, is that, if you handle a complex one-off or rare project, you can go back and check your own documentation to replicate the process. This saves you the time of digging through email threads and document folders in an effort to remember who you had to reach out to and when.

My favorite example: Contests. Anyone who has ever had to plan and execute a contest for a large organization knows what I’m talking about. A lot of times, you need to know how long it takes until you get budget approval for prizes and any paid campaigns (if applicable), you most likely need to get your organization’s legal team involved in writing up the contest rules, there may be amplification channels that are not managed by you, and the teams managing those may need advance notice. There are a lot of things to consider and documenting a workback schedule and a list of contacts makes it easier to replicate your first run of the contest.

Words Matter

As the liaison between the community and the company, community managers need to have a good amount of PR savvy. In addition to having a genuine interest in making sure that all communication fosters an inclusive environment, CMs may find themselves weighing their words for other reasons. This is because very passionate communities have a tendency to hang on the community manager’s every word. Even if this is not the case, your company may have very watchful legal and PR departments that want to avoid lawsuits and unfavorable, incorrect, or premature media announcements. Sometimes, a single word can already lead to a press disaster.

Here are some example that illustrate how a single word can be important: If you think that an issue with your product has been resolved, it’s best to tell the community that it should be resolved now, not that it was or has been, as there is never a guarantee that the issue was, in fact, fully resolved for each and every user. Using a definitive word like “was” is likely to cause frustration on the side of the community members who are still experiencing problems. Unless you are completely sure that something will be the case, the word “if” is also more advisable than using “when”. Roadmaps can change and some releases may never see the light of day. Making your statement hypothetical avoids offering false promises. Qualifiers are your friends, so familiarize yourself with them.

If you are interacting with community members in-person, and you know that you will be grilled on prospective releases or tough business decisions that caused backlash from the community, discuss appropriate verbiage to the most challenging questions in advance internally. Then, practice, practice, practice. Having to respond to questions right then and there is a very different beast than sitting in front of your keyboard with time to think about your response.

Do you agree with my list? What are some of the community management lessons that you’ve learned? Let me know below.