Trend: Het uitbesteden van Community Management Activiteiten
Matrix: Four Levels of Community Management Services:
| Activity | What it looks like | Trends |
| 4) Strategy | Often behind the scenes, they lead the overall strategy of how customers fit into multiple business units. Often does reporting and responsible for return on investment. | This activity is likely to stay within the corporation as they have understanding of business goals, and key relationships |
| 3) Brand Representation | Represents the story of the brand (and of course that of customers) and is often a primary face of the company in online communities on an ongoing basis. | Often within the corporation, sometimes this role is being held by agency partners, such as “Jenny at Axe” who was a full time Edelman employee. |
| 2) Member Response | Responds to frequent product inquiries such as “Do you have this or that?” or “Does anyone know how to X” | Often this is being served by a Product Marketing Manager, Product Manager, or Customer service representative –all who have been trained and know where knowledge is. Like other customer service channels, expect more of this role to be shifted to third-parties. |
| 1) Moderation, Curation, Analytics | Often behind the scenes, this group reviews content, and conducts triage for the content. They also may curate content and conduct basic reporting. | Frequently, I’m hearing these skills are being leveraged by outsourced providers as they have minimal impact to customer relationships, I expect this to continue |
Expect A Change in Community Management Sourcing:
The one constant of business is that it is always changing. Due to weak financial markets and inability for most to measure social business, scrutiny of resources is always top of mind, as a result, expect the following trends:
- An increase in offerings of community management services from “emerging” markets. While in many cases, I’ve found that community managers are often in the brand or agency side that are close to the corporate HQ, expect to see an increase of service providers from Philippines, India, and perhaps in South America. They’ve over a decade of experience managing customer service operations for brands on channels like phone –and can benefit to use channels accents won’t be a distraction to the customer experience.
- Brands to continue to outsource some community manager activities –while strategic skills stay in house. Expect that brands will outsource activities such as moderation/curation and often reporting, and rely on knowledge workers who have specific product information or key client relationships to stay close to the brand. In the case of a few companies who enter the “holistic” formation, they will enable thousands of employees to respond –spreading the role across the company.
- Backlash from embedded community managers –yet savvy will “skill up” now. While we see that the number of social media accounts a brand has to manage on the rise (data), this trend won’t be met without opposition, in fact, many voiced their concern on my Google+ page how outsourcing key relationships between brands and customers is what gets companies into hot waters in the first place. Yet, I expect many community managers to move into high echelon activities such as community programming on the content side, reporting and analytics, and learning to manage outsourced teams.
While I’m no longer in a community role (I used to be on brand side for social media), I wanted to provide my perspective from my vantage point. Lastly, remember that Community Manager Appreciation Day is every fourth Monday in Jan, every year (this coming Monday, Jan 24th 2012), and should be used to celebrate all community managers, whether on brand side, agency, or outsourced.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2011 at 8:06 am and is filed under Community Manager, Matrix, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Mooie analyse en conclusies van Jeremiah Owyang die verwacht dat community management activiteiten meer en meer uitbesteed zullen worden.
Op zich lijkt het me wenselijk om dit juist niet te doen (zie de toegevoegde waarde van de kennis, expertise en bedrijfscultuur van oa Zappos en BestBuy met Twelpforce) aangezien niemand beter dan het eigen personeel weet hoe zij met klanten moeten omgaan.
Het outsourcen van community activiteit kan interessant zijn om als organisatie snel stappen te kunnen maken en in de tussentijd het eigen personeel op te leiden. Jeremiah maakt ook onderscheid tussen vier verschillende soorten van activiteit als het gaat om community management.
Waar de eerste twee, Moderation en Member Response, nog de eerste 'line of defense' van een merk betreft, zijn Brand Representation en Strategy toch echt zaken die je in mijn ogen binnenshuis wilt houden, al dan niet met behulp van interim-krachten.
Dat laatste blijft gevaarlijk omdat er dan wellicht te veel strategische kennis bij buitenstaanders blijft liggen, maar de realiteit is nu eenmaal dat weinig merken deze kennis vandaag de dag in huis hebben. Idealiter zou een merk in de situatie moeten komen waarbij de kennis en community-activiteit, met name bij Brand Representation en Strategy, door meerdere afdelingen en door personen werkzaam bij het bedrijf zelf worden belegd. Op deze wijze blijft de kennis in huis en ligt deze bij meerdere personen die elk vanuit hun expertise (bv Service, R&D, Marketing, HR) meelopen in het dagelijkse contact met klanten.
