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Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 1

Distinction between a Community Manager, Product Manager and a Community Product Manager

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First of all, thanks to all of those who shared their thoughts with me on my last post - Trial offer to test the Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life. In general, there were two common threads:

1. Disticntion between a Community Product Manager and a Community Manager
2. Can't justify business case for that role

Despite my attempt at defining the former, most thought I was offering the services of a Community Manager. To be clear, my understanding of a Community Manager is based on Chris Brogan's post Essential Skills of a Community Manager. Here's a quick summary: Community Managers

• are like a good party host mixed with a fine restaurant host.
• must be experienced communicators
• are ambassadors and advocates in one
• are bodyguards and protectors
• must build actionable reports
• cultivate internal teams for further support

On the other hand, there's Pragmatic Marketing's Product Manager definition which can be illustrated as;

Pragmatic Marketing Framework

In my opinion, while a Community Product Manager is in between these two roles, it's much more aligned with the Product Manager's, except, it's outside the development organization's firewall. Which means, a Community Product Manager could potentially assist the Product Manager with the highlighted areas illustrated above.

In an earlier post, How to infuse Social Content 2.0 into your social software lifecycle, I reiterated Gartner's findings that many social software providers / vendors may suffer from lack of resources. And while I received a bit of flack for the "size matters" point, I still believe the Community Product Manager role need is there - to some degree, which I'll save for another time.

In my next post, I'll focus on the content by presenting some concrete examples of what I discovered over the past week & how I think it fits into the big picture.

Reflection
As always, all comments are welcome.

Thanks again to those who shared their thoughts and a special thanks to Alora Chistiakoff over at Social Computing Magazine for suggesting a few concrete examples will help clarify matters.

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 2 The most important pattern that emerged and lesson I learned...
2. Lessons learned from Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life – Part 3 My outside your firewall, shared listening and engaging Community Product...
3. Trial offer to test the Social Content 2.0 Circle of Life More on infusing community and product management for social software...
4. How to infuse Social Content 2.0 into your social software lifecycle This is about me taking a traditional role in software...
5. The Basis for a Social Experiment Basis for my outside-in social software experiment, benefiting non-techies and...