Quote of the day for community managers

This article is definitely worth a read, but the best stuff was in the comments (spoken like a true community person…).  Here’s the best one:

The debate is still raging on whether the work involved in online community management should be considered marketing or not, but perhaps this is due to the lack of consensus regarding what modern marketing itself involves given the rapidly morphing nature of online communications.

Community management is, in many respects, a marketing discipline in that it plays an active role in collecting qualitative and quantitative market data (through two-way communications and analytics), as well as in disseminating the message about the product to the target audience. In that sense, community management is both a listening and a communication tool that can actively influence high-level marketing decisions and, in that respect, it has its own place within the broader marketing plan.

Where Deb takes a different turn is in the way she treated Minority’s audience, rather than in the role that her position played within the broader marketing structure. She makes an important point in reminding that, beyond the data, beyond the trends and the numbers, her audience first consists of people with lives, personal challenges, experiences, aspirations and fears: human beings. As a community manager, Deb’s first priority was to treat Papo & Yo fans as human beings…and the result has been a uniquely supportive and dedicated fan base.