Unintentional Serendipity: Our Journey into Community Management and beyond

  • 19 April 2023
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anirbandutta
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Starting this thread to bring out the interesting and unique falling-into-Community Management-stories we all have. 

Let’s try to bring out the 2 key milestones that accent any Journey:

  1. The Origin story - How we officially get started started on a Career path
  2. The Lightbulb moment - When we detect that flicker of Passion in our path 

______________________________

 

My Origin Story

My work life has always been in the domain of the front-end web, except for a 5year departure when I was away doing stuff very different like Agile IT Services Delivery and team management.

Web Producer with a stint as a Podcast editor💡 >

  Online Community Manager + Social Media [2008-2016] >

      Agile Project Management >

          Online Community Manager [2022]

 

Opportunities presented itself and when the Social team was formed at BMC Software in 2008, I got inducted as an admin for the BMC Developer Network ‘Forums’, that’s what Communities were referred to around 2008 if you remember. :) 

That’s how I fell into Community Management.

 

That phase of super personal-growth of 2008-16 fed me everything that I would end up building my career on, FF to today when I am empowered to architect the GameChanger Community experience at Gainsight as a part of an All-star Community team.

@Alistair FIeld and I speaking about the story of our 2 communities from the Pulse Europe 2022 stage

 

Skills along the way

In my case, the world of the web front-end, not only gave me exposure to design meaningful Customer experiences following high brand standards, How information is structured and messaging, delivered, which, in retrospect has been a key ‘outside-in’ lens to develop early on: the correct orientation for a Community Manager I believe.

  • html, css and Photoshop skills I picked up during my Web Dev days really comes in handy to customize UI components beyond the OOTB experience 
  • Project delivery experience helps structure, governance and timelines around those massive, hairy projects that need to happen
  • The Product Management lifecycle and principles I pick up in my current role partnering with the Product org helps me design and build key UX improvements, like for e.g. our upgrade of the Ideation module, and also helping me tailor this boundless idea of ‘Continual Improvement’, into sizable features that can be released.

 

The Lightbulb moment

💡 This side gig I got roped in to help tailoring content for an Enterprise-leadership podcast.

I needed to tidy up show-notes, trim and upload audio to libsyn pro (remember that?) and other handy admin work to get the shows in a pipeline. Although it appeared a menial role at the time, that internship showed me a glimmer into the world of ‘fostering conversations’, ‘building connections’, ‘enabling thought leadership to spout’…

That is when the filament glowed for me.

 

My journey is only a happy accident of happening to be with the right brands, at the right time, that prioritized and grew Community functions at a time when the Community-Industry itself was so formative.

Moving within functions, from Marketing to Product to Customer Success, and also working for medium to large IT SAAS to mega-scale IT Services companies...

I feel super grateful for the serendipitous arc my career took. 

______________________________

Thanks to my good friend, @revathimenon for nudging me to share my story + a timely session update by @seth about his Career story at Pulse 2023 to get this going.

So let’s hear from you, the long and short of your journey, about:

  1. Your Origin story
  2. The Lightbulb moment
It's an opportunity for engagement

2 replies

revathimenon
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I’ll never get tired of hearing stories of community managers - so unique! 😊

Don’t mind me hopping in along this ride-along!

Origin story:

I have an Arts & Communications background where I spent majority of my time nurturing communities for brands on social media. Funny enough, I literally did it all for my first 2 companies since social media was only starting to boom then, so they were no large teams (not that I’m complaining, cause it really helped boost up my skills).

From creating the strategy for multiple brands, to making designs on illustrator and photoshop, editing videos, writing content and posting on social media channels, planning and convincing clients for new campaigns, creating success reports in order to continue the brand relationship - you say it and i’ve done it enjoyably!

Things levelled up when I moved companies and my focus moved more towards nurturing client relationships and strategising for content and engagement for different brand channels. 

Lightbulb moment:

I took a break from my professional life for a bit cause it was getting overwhelming (I normalised a start up non-stop life for too long). 

I knew I wanted to change up things in my career, wanted to move my focus and energy into nurturing communities/community for one sole brand. I also REALLY MISSED human conversations, seeing those organic conversations being nurtured in different spaces of brand’s channels.

I patiently waited enough for that opportunity and so glad that I did!

Currently happily nurturing the GameChanger Community as a Community Manager, and on most days we paint the future of it over untimed conversations, am I right? @anirbandutta 😁

Looks like the 3 C’s - Content, Connections & Conversations are things I love about being a CM 😉

Where focus goes, energy flows.
Alistair FIeld
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Thank you @anirbandutta for starting the thread!

Nice Follow up @revathimenon !

Here is my journey into Community Life! 

 

Origin story:

A Mechanical engineer by education, I wanted to design formula 1 cars 🏎️ .  I discovered I liked the Fluid Dynamics Simulation field, applying models to correlate with experimental data and use the simulation results to drive design change.

I moved to the New York and got a role as a Dedicated Support Engineer for the very software I had previously been honing my skills on. This was what I would now consider a hybrid role of CS and Support. I would have my book of business and deal with technical support situations as well as conduct onboarding / training and Business Reviews. 

As part of responding to support tickets I became a leader in the team for creating support content for our knowledge base which led me to take over the role as Knowledge Manager for the customer portal. At the time we were wrapping in a community functionality and my title became Knowledge and Community Manager.

I continued the journey with support portals and self service in my next two roles before taking the position of Head of Community at inSided.

 

Lightbulb moment:

The lightbulb moment came when I realised I had a knack for explaining complex issues and got fulfilment in the knowledge my efforts would help customers achieve their goals. 

With this in mind I embraced a Knowledge Centered Service mentality and always look for ways to efficiently share my experience and information with a wider audience in order to elevate the collective knowledge.

That can be expanded further into making the customer digital experience relevant, useful and enjoyable 😀

Community management gives me the opportunity to be free to experiment with content types and methods of delivery, while getting my analytics fix to drive strategy decisions.

 

 

I leave you with a quote I like. The Irish playwrite George Bernard Shaw said

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few. 🖖

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