The Future of Marketing... and community building

I found another really awesome blog - Chief Marketing Technologist, written by Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec). He writes from the intersection of marketing and IT - and as you must know by now, anything that blends boundaries is interesting to me!

I wanted to specifically comment on this amazing post, where Scott talks about "five new skills for the future of marketing". I thought his five skills were equally significant viewed through the lens of the future "community manager".

I should say as a preface that I think the term "community manager" completely sucks - but, as of right now, it's the one that seems to be sticking in describing the role of someone in charge of listening on behalf of an organization to the social web, analyzing what they hear, and providing strategic direction based on that information. There's still a lot of debate as to how this role is defined in terms of where it might live (comms? marketing? membership? PR? etc), who does it, is it a full time role for one person or part of every member-facing or stakeholder-facing staff person's job, but in my ideal world it would be all of those things - namely, every staff member who is public-facing would have community management as part of their job description no matter what department they are in, and there would also be a full time person who could provide organizational, strategic oversight to the whole shebang.

Anyway. Scott identifies five new skills at the intersection of marketing and technology which he thinks will be crucial to develop. I agree wholeheartedly with these and think they relate quite naturally to community management and community building (which is really the goal of engaging stakeholders). They are:

1. Analytical pattern recognition - "the ability to look beyond the numbers to see the underlying patterns and trends".

Many people can be good listeners and active participants (on behalf of their organization as well as personally) in the social web - but not many, I think, will necessarily be able to see and extract the bigger picture for pushing strategic imagination.

2. Agile project management - "Now, you've got hundreds — often thousands — of micro-opportunities, swirling around the extended enterprise every week, the best of which must be quickly snatched and efficiently executed. Priorities can change overnight, and near instantaneous social media feedback demands a near instantaneous response."

Knowing how to act and react in public is definitely part of having an agile management style; knowing how to involve your people (staff and members) in the continuously evolving, iterative feedback process of building community by consciously giving them ownership is another.

3. Experimental curiosity and rigor - "The far majority of marketing activities at this point should be run as tests, continually trying new alternatives, pushing on the edges, constantly on the lookout for shifts in response that portend new threats or opportunities. Thriving in this marketing laboratory requires the imagination to come up with new ideas, the cleverness to figure out how to test them with minimal risk and resources, the courage to overcome status-quo-ism and actually carry out the experiments (remember, even if they don't work, the organization can still learn something from them), and the discipline to run the tests with enough rigor to draw meaningful conclusions."

This one speaks for itself, I think! A strategic community manager will be continuously beta testing new ideas and designing in public.

4. Systems thinking - "Marketing can no longer be managed in silos. Tactics in one area (e.g., a particular trade show presentation) impact the effectiveness of others (e.g., your search marketing ads) almost immediately. Social media has not only accelerated cross-channel effects, it's blended and mashed-up channels and partners with independent communities into a completely new, living ecosystem. If engaged properly, that can be a powerful force multiplier; if mismanaged, it can be a train wreck.
The key is to grasp the emergent relationships between the different moving parts, their positive and negative interaction effects, and optimize for the evolutionary dynamics of the whole."

I think social media has the very obvious and direct effect of breaking down silos, which is a great thing as long as someone has the bigger strategic "systems" picture in mind.

5. Mashable software fluency - "Not all marketers have to become programmers, but those who understand how software is built and deployed in the new "mashable web" — a world of mashups, widgets, and APIs — will have a competitive advantage. (And if you can whip up a quick script yourself, more power to you.)"

This is absolutely true of the community manager. You have to be in it to win it. You have to understand at a semi-decent level how all these new technologies work and how they fit together, if only because that understanding tells you a lot about how people use them and why. If you know your members you'll know why one thing works and another doesn't, and you'll know how to show them how to use certain tools when it comes time to help the digital immigrants catch up to the digital natives in your membership.

What do you think? Make sure you read his whole post - it's really good and has lots more thoughts and good links too, particularly those linking to some of his other posts. Think any of these are off base (or just too optimistic)? Anything missing? I'd also love to hear if anyone has started hiring for a community management position and how they developed the job description...

[Interesting related side note via Ben Martin - read this great post from Realtor blogger Rob Hahn to the newly hired social media manager for the National Association of Realtors. I think it touches on some of these same points but from a totally different perspective.]

[Intersting related side note 2 - this discussion on YAP asking "who does SM at your association?]