The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve talked about how the Community Manager role is the “loneliest job in business” – it’s a job caught between customers and colleagues, where both expect that you’re on “the other side”. But the truth is, great community managers are great because they don’t choose a side, they understand, advocate, explain, and support both.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

- Antoine de Saint Exupery

A good Community Manager supports the activities a group of fans/customers are already doing. A great Community Manager has an ability to look at a situation and see below the surface. They find the people who are true leaders, not just talkers. They offer support that is more or different from what is being asked of them because it’s what matters. They constantly look at groups and social engagements and people who, to the execs on the 24th floor just look like “unwashed masses” and see something revolutionary.

Viva la Community Managers!

Q: You talk about linchpins being artists. What’s the difference between a conventional marketer and one who thinks like an artist? Can you give an example of a marketer who is an artist?

A: Art, by my definition, has nothing to do with painting and everything to do with connecting with people in a generous way and causing a change to take place. A movie director is making art when she makes you cry. A product designer creates art when the UI is better than it needs to be and it creates efficiency or even joy. Marketers can find plenty of Dummies books and manuals and insider PDFs that demonstrate, step by step, how to follow the rules. That’s easy and not particularly valuable. A marketer becomes an artist when she goes out on a limb, does the unexpected or the risky and makes a difference. I’d argue that you two do art when you stand up and give a talk about the 1%. Or Biz Stone was an artist when he figured out how to launch and scale Twitter’s marketing. Or Scott Monty at Ford when he does a car show rollout that bypasses the cocktail parties at AutoWeek in favor of individual interviews with social media mavens. The second time someone does something, it’s a copy. The first time, it’s art.

Social engagement/community building work is absolutely an art form. You’re taking complex, deep seated business practices and personal emotions and bending them into something new and amazing. As Seth mentions above, Scott Monty is doing something pure, unique, and quite amazing. Art doesn’t “just happen”. Art takes work, work that may not be obvious. I recently attended a lecture by a well-known art curator who talked about a number of projects that he had overseen. At first glance, the projects seemed obvious: create a theme, open a space, invite artists in to fill a theme. But as he explained the details that went into the creation of each project, it was obvious that there was years of skill, hours of thought, and months of preparation that each event was based on.

And nearly all of that time was impossible to track, much less apply an ROI calculation to. And that’s OK. Look at how Seth describes the idea of quantifying this art:

Q: We love this quote in the book: “The easier it is to quantify, the less it’s worth.” Can you tell us, and our MBA friends, why this is true?

A: If you can quantify it, then probably someone before you figured out a why to grind it out. And if you can grind it out, someone can grind it out cheaper than you can. On the other hand, the really valuable stuff, the stuff we pay a lot for, is unquantified. Things like creating joy or security or happiness. No easy measurements for those, thus they are art, and art is always worth more than the predicted. We measure the quantified because we can. But we should create the unquantified because it’s so rare.

To be clear, branding something “art” and therefore giving the artist an excuse to create junk is unacceptable. I went to design school, so I know that far too many artists get away with saying “You just don’t get it” when people rightly look at a lazy piece of junk and wonder “WTF??” Amazing art is the distillation of a complex concept into a unique and emotionally satisfying form. If I don’t “get it”, the artist has failed, not the viewer.

Community management is a tough gig because it’s primary function is to create art in the form of experiences, products, or relationships that satisfy an emotional need. Even though a customer might not understand their own emotional needs enough to ask for them, the Art of Community Management is understanding customers enough to distill that emotion into an amazing form. Apple, Amazon, Zappos, Alice.com, and many others understand this and have succeeded because of it.

As with truly great artists, community management is about way of thinking that allows you to find beauty in a variety of places. It doesn’t end when you walk out of the office, nor do you ever really stop thinking about projects (or relationships or programs or interactions) you’ve built in the past.

Community management and interaction, like art, doesn’t have to always be “good” or immediately understandable. It doesn’t always have to have a specific objective beyond the process of creation. And it most certainly doesn’t discount passion in the face of measurement difficulty. Community management, like art, is simply the process of showing enthusiasm for giving joy where you can and explaining the process you attempted when you can’t. Most importantly, it’s about picking up the brush and giving it a shot.

Former Community Manager Jeremiah Owyang calls out a few more challenges to being a Community Manager:

• Many challenges are internal: Most companies want to hide customer issues, and shuffle them into existing support systems. Additionally, measuring ROI in new media when a company wants to keep the kimono shut, increasingly becomes a challenge.
• Seemingly never ending job: Customers never stop having problems, and with the global internet, the questions, complains, and inquires never stop.
• Emotional drain impacts lifestyle: The sheer emotional strain of dealing with a hundreds of yelling customers and the occasional trouble maker will take a strain on anyone.
• Privacy risks in the world of transparency: In an effort to build trust with customers, they expose their real name exposing their personal –and family– privacy forever on.

These last two really stick out to me. I’ve been trying to dial back my public data access for a number of reasons, not least of which is general concerns around my 3 year old daughter. It’s nearly impossible. When I signed up to do community work in 2000, I had no idea that it would be a permanent state that I’d basically never be able to quit.

But perhaps the most challenge aspect of the job for me was the sheer time involved. When do fans and customers tend to actually do stuff related to their communities of interest? Evenings and weekends… i.e. when they’re not at work. When do they put on events? Holidays, when there’s plenty of time off to enjoy them. When I was at LEGO, I rarely had a holiday weekend at home – most of them were spent on the road, attending and supporting fan events. I’m not complaining, but I’d bet my family certainly would have.

When I was considering leaving LEGO, I had lunch with the always genius Guy Kawasaki. We were talking about my general confusion about leaving a company as great as LEGO and a job as amazingly fun as a LEGO Community Manager. When I asked how long someone can be productive as a CM, and his answer was brilliant and spot on: “If you make it to 3 years, you’re good. If you make it 4 years, you’re amazing. If you make it to 5 years, you’re stupid.” Guy was rightly pointing out that that much stress, 24 hours a day, being caught in between two parties who never truly believe you’re looking out for their interests has a shelf life.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my job and I’d do it all over again without thinking twice.

As a way to celebrate this vastly underrated job, Jeremiah has kicked off a novel concept: Community Manager Appreciation Day #CMAD – a day focused on recognizing those in our companies, communities, or daily contacts that have done great work at keeping positive in the face of a very tough job.

So head over to Jeremiah’s site and call out someone you think is doing great community management work. Or use the comments here. Or post on twitter. Or send a postcard. Just thank a Community Manager. It really does help.

Last week on the Ant’s Eye View blog, I posted an interview with Amy Krause from Velocity Marketing. Velocity, together with CBS Radio and the North Texas Chevy dealers built a very cool outreach program to get the word out about the new (and highly awesome) Chevy Traverse.

To find out more about the program, check out the AEV blog post.

I had a chance to get a few questions answered by Donna, one of the Mommy Madness mommy bloggers.

1. How did you find out about the Mommy Madness program?
I heard about the promotion on the radio, and had every intention of going to the website to apply but I forgot. Then a few days later, I got a message via Facebook from the contact at CBS Radio who was running the program for them. I think they found me via you actually.

2. Tell us about how you were immersed into the program?
We had a meeting a few weeks before the program kicked off with the CBS Radio and the agency contacts, we got to meet each other and swap blog names and emails. The day of the kick off we had a big meeting with the people from Chevrolet and the North Texas Chevy dealers, as well as the CBS Radio personalities who would be talking to us and about us throughout the program. We were given cards to hand out, a video camera, and documents on how to blog our adventures. We also were given gas cards and the materials for our first Mommy Mission. Then we got to spend a long time with our dealers going over all the details of the cars.

3. What was your favorite part of the program?
I loved the Mommy Missions – they were fodder for our blog entries and created stuff to talk about.

4. You were able to drive a new, cool car for 8 weeks – was it hard to give it up at the end?
Horribly painful to part with it. I still miss that car every day. Especially when I am at the store or loading and unloading. I really want the auto liftgate back.

5. You were given “mommy missions”, specific tasks where you were asked to generate and share content. Did you like doing those?
I loved them. I wish we had had more of them to do!

6. How did you explain the program to friends and family who asked where you’d gotten a new car from?
I explained how Chevy was rolling out the perfect family vehicle and I was lucky enough to be chosen to test drive one and write about its features and how versatile it is.

7. Did you befriend the other moms? Do you still talk to any of them after the program ended?
I did. We were all very friendly with one another during the project. I started doing “unofficial” mommy missions with Brooke and her daughter (although we invited all the other moms, we were the only two who seemed able to get together at the same times). We both have left Dallas but we still keep in contact. Also Jen and I met up at BlogHer and had some fun chatting.

8. If you were running Mommy Madness 2, what would you change? What would you keep the same?
I would make more Missions, and I would make them more formal. For example, sending us to the Rangers game was nice, but they could have made some arrangements with the Ballpark to make a fuss over us, maybe set up a table so we could talk to people and show them around a parked Traverse, give away the gift certificates for the massages. Same with the outing to Six Flags. Those were opportunities to reach a TON of people who would totally have stopped at a table and a parked car for freebies. We could have convinced them to go test drive more cars. Also at the very end, they came up with the idea of asking us to throw a party for our friends, and have a Chevy dealer bring a Traverse and let people take test drives. That was great, but it was so last minute that I couldn’t pull it off. They should have come up with that at the beginning and more of us would have been able to have the parties and attend each others’ parties. As it stood, only one of the five of us was able to host a party. Also, I think we should have been on the radio more. We did one group recorded interview, but we could have scheduled a call in interview once a week to do something one on one and in more detail.

–

Don’t forget to check out the interview with Amy!

I had a hard time getting on their calendars, much less convincing them that they needed to stop working on the 95% audience and turn at least some of their attention to the 5%.

The Idea
One day over lunch, I noticed four colleagues reading the comic strip in the back of the instruction book included with one of the LEGO sets we were producing that year. Overhearing their conversation about whether the explorer was going to get out the clutches of the tiger in time made me start thinking about the power of visual story telling. Here were four grown adults having an in-depth debate about content meant for kids 7-12 years old!
Using this inspiration to guide me, I worked with one Greg Hyland, an artist and AFOL to create a series of comic strips that told the story, for those uninitiated in the hobby, of it was like to be an adult fan of a”child’s toy”. Together we developed a series of hilarious, relevant four-panel strips that were then printed, color copied and stapled.

(As a sidenote, Greg worked in exchange for a huge box of new LEGO sets that I sent him. He delivered dozens custom designed illustrations for a box of LEGO sets that cost my budget center about $300)

The Internal Roadshow
After assembling the comics into physical form, I put together a presentation, a short video (created by fan clubs, of course), and some other materials that I used for a multi-city, multi-office internal roadshow to “formally introduce colleagues to the AFOLs”.
When I walked into each stop on the roadshow, I threw down a handful of the comics on the conference table and started talking through my presentation. I’d start off the meeting pretty casually, because inevitably the attendees would get so wrapped up in reading and discussing the comic, they’d largely ignore my presentation until they had a question about one of the scenarios highlighted in the comic.

Fairly quickly, I modified the presentation to focus primarily on talking through the sixty scenarios we’d outlined in the comic. Within a few weeks after this roadshow, there was a clear shift in the way colleagues were talking and thinking about the adult fans. To this day, I still hear from former colleagues who reference those scenarios in conversation!

Why comics work
Comic pioneer, Will Eisner, uses the term “Sequential Art” to describe comics. In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud tried to expand this definition but ended up right back at these simple, albeit sterile two words. While this may be a good definition, it misses the point of why comics do such a great job explaining complex concepts. Here are five reasons that might explain that phenomenon:

Approachable – If you had the choice between reading a 60 page TPS report or reading a 60 page comic, which would you be more inclined to do? Exactly. Comics speak to us on an emotional level; they use storytelling rather than fact sharing as a foundation. And who doesn’t want to hear a good story? Evangeline Haughney from Adobe Systems asked that same question and turned to comics to help share research findings in a compelling way with her colleagues.

Universal – Due to their visual format, comics have an ability to transcend language . After all, seeing a businessman trapped under a huge pile of paperwork is clear regardless of the language used. You could probably take out the words from the comic adaptation of Moby Dick and still pick up much of the meaning.

Expression – Comics combine imagery and content to deliver impressive clarity for their message. Look at the two versions of the 9/11 Commission’s findings: One was delivered in traditional text form while the other was delivered as a graphic novel. I’m not sure how the numbers play out, but it’s a safe bet that those who read the comic adaptation had a vastly more emotional experience seeing a dry report brought to life.

Imagination – Through abstraction people engage with the content much more deeply because they can more easily put themselves into the scenarios depicted. The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is a book about magic chopsticks and a pixie spouting career advice, yet as you read the pages, you find yourself wondering where magic chopsticks can be found!

Desire – Because of the reasons outlined above, content delivered in comic form is simply more enjoyable to consume. Comics can turn a dull product manual, for instance, into an entertainment experience. The Nintendo Wii game “No More Heroes” actually delivers their gameplay instructions in the form of a comic, which makes learning the button combinations part of the experience, rather than something to get through before the game actually begins.

Using comics for community workCommunity professionals have a range of activities they’re responsible for but one of the most foundational is the task of communication. Whether bringing information from the company to the community, connecting colleagues to community members, or delivering community feedback into the company, communication is a keystone of any community professional’s daily to-do list.
That said, what better way for a community professional to increase their success than to improve their communication? And what better way to improve their communication than to utilize comics, which pack more punch than plain text alone? Outlined below are four scenarios where using comics may help to improve community interaction. What else can you think of?


Social Outreach
Whether you’re pitching bloggers or introducing yourself to an existing community, comics can be a fantastic and fun way to introduce yourself and your company. The brilliant folks at Capulet Communications did exactly that when they used comics as part of a blogger outreach program for Brothers Printers. They grabbed photos from the Flickr streams of various bloggers and worked them into a comic strip that they then emailed to each blogger.
Tell me you wouldn’t respond, and respond positively, to someone sending you something like this!

Introducing the Team
While we’re thinking about introductions, why not put together a short comic that introduces you and your colleagues to a larger community?

When you, as a company/brand employee begin to engage with communities, it’s important to let a bit of yourself come through, to share some of your personality. This helps build a certain “reality” around you that helps community members believe that you’re honestly interested in engaging and helping them, not just performing marketing activities on the sly. Build a comic strip (or strips) that use humor to share a bit about you, and also about your team members. While you can’t necessarily say “I’m a nice guy who loves to play paintball with friends” to any positive effect, you can show through a comic story a funny paintball incident that others can identify with. Comics make you more approachable because they are more approachable.

Explain Complex ConceptsUsed effectively, comics can distill large amounts of knowledge into a small footprint. Imagine, for instance, the amount of text that would be needed to explain how to create a mini-hovercraft rather than the few comic panels shown below.

Perhaps one of the most difficult tasks of working with community is taking the business realities that you face and distilling them into explanations that both make sense to community members and that also generate support for those realities. Rather than simply typing up a long blog or forum post, how about turning that discussion into comic form? It will probably make your point more effectively and it will definitely be a much more enjoyable exchange.
Help create offline Word of MouthThe AFOLs comic generated an amazing reaction among internal colleagues and clearly helped increase their understanding of the adult LEGO enthusiasts. The AFOLs were constantly asking the community team for help and tools for explaining to the outside world that they weren’t “weirdos” simply because they had a unique hobby. What better way, we thought, than printing and distributing a comic that fans could hand out to friends, family, co-workers, and attendees at their events?
With some minor alterations of the comic, we made it print ready and distributed 10,000 copies to various fan groups and clubs around the United States. They handed these out to other adults who voiced interest in learning more about joining the ranks of adult LEGO fandom as a way to encourage them to join the community.
We also released a PDF version that was quickly translated into multiple languages by the fan community themselves.

Of course, one factor to consider when printing copies is the number you print and the way you distribute them. Fans love collectibles, after all, and they want to keep a copy of the “artifact” for themselves. One lesson learned is that we should have sent around a small number of copies to fans first, given them a chance to let the excitement of receiving the artifact wear off, then distribute the bulk of the comics to be used for giveaways. As it was, the AFOLs often had a hard time tearing themselves away from their copy to give it out as intended!
Comic Creation ResourcesIf you’re interested in getting started making your own community communication comics, here are a few places you might want to start.
Author Scott McCloud has produced three amazing books about comic creation, all of them told solely through comic form. Start with Understanding Comics and work your way to the other two. Scott also has his own Web site at: http://www.scottmccloud.com
When you’re ready to start building your own, these are two tools that you can use. Both are cheap and easy to use.

• Comic Book Creator (PC)
• Comic Life (Mac) (If you have Mac OS 10.4+, you have Comic Life already installed. You can also pull it off your 10.4 installer disc)

(This content was originally posted at the Online Community Research Network and reposted here with permission)

I know soon-to-be-ex-Governor Sarah Palin is busy tweeting and taking one last swing around Alaska on the taxpayer’s dime. But if, as I suspect is the case, she’s got more on her post-gubernatorial to-do list than: (1) play with the kids, (2) clean up theb house and (3) make a Costco run, she’d sashay herself and her fancy pageant walkin‘ to Chicago where almost 1,500 women bloggers (and a few brave guys) are gathering for the biggest ever BlogHer conference.

We’re at “mainstream” with the idea of connecting with influencers. Not only were the list of brands sponsoring/participating at BlogHer insane, a potential presidential candidate (let’s be real here, she’s setting herself up to run) could start to change her perception by getting her geek on is a reality.

The woefully bad attempt at running campaign activities by Team Palin has, once again, completely missed an amazing opportunity. Not to get too political in this forum, but there’s an important lesson here for those of us not in politics: traditional channels aren’t always the best, and certainly not the only channels to consider.

Looking at the other big event this weekend, Comic-Con. Even just a few years back, Comic-Con was an event for nerds, looked down upon by the outside world, and considered irrelevant by the mainstream media and the entertainment industry. Looking at the sponsor list, speaker list, and twitter posts from all walks of life, the nerd threshold has been crossed by a great many people in the world and in companies.

It’s easy to blow off nerd culture as irrelevant, simply because you don’t like comics or blogging or whatever else. But if you’re not considering how your audience, existing and potential, spends their free time you are missing significant opportunities.

Time Magazine recently called YouTube one of the biggest tech failures of the past decade, which was hilarious. Hilarious in that the site is by far and away the most popular site for video on the web, and has revolutionized the way we view videos, period. Today brings another amazing stat about the site: Every single minute, over 20 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube.

In the time it took me to create this blog entry, nearly 10 days worth of video were uploaded. The power this represents is absolutely stunning.

I’m not worried.

As with any hype cycle, there are two parallel paths taking place:

• The Hype Path: Combining the “It’s new, therefore it’s amazing!” news cycle with a very vocal and enabled celebrity crowd creates a standard bell curve of hype.
• The Implementation Reality: On a more random, yet mostly trending upward curve, people are learning growing, doing, and gaining. More people try, some fail, but the trend overall is more not less social stuff.

Think about how many social networking sites have come and gone, yet Facebook is still a massive audience. And this isn’t a new trend: I remember dead BBS, dead Geocities pages, and dead email lists. But online discussion, personal Web pages, and email all carry on more robust than ever. Perhaps robust because of these early experiments that failed.

While many are talking about the hype of the shiny new thing, there’s a group of people working largely behind the scenes to create, learn, improve and create again. In the corporate environment, dead communities come in no small part from the lack of investment in anything past the launch. We’ve seen examples of simple, ugly sites generating large audiences and revenue (hello, Craigslist!) while impressive tech fails to bring in much attention at all (new Friendster, I’m looking at you!).

If community is about building relationships, we can learn a lot about community building by considering how we find, build, and support our personal relationships.

• We date many more people than we marry. (i.e. There’s bound to be plenty of failures in our quest to create something grand)
• If we blow a month’s salary on the first date, there’s not chance we’ll be able to afford the second date (i.e. If you’re budget, time, and energy are solely focused on the launch, what happens after you launch when the real work begins?)
• The backbone of a quality relationship is intimacy, and intimacy takes time and is difficult to get right (i.e. Expecting overwhelming success withing days or weeks or even years after launch is ridiculous)
• Outsourcing intimacy is call prostitution. (i.e. Saying to your agency “we give you a check, you give us an effective community is an unhealthy approach)

Honestly, I’m not really worried about the stage of the game we’re at right now. We’ve gotten through the “so that’s what the kids are doing” reaction, and now we’re onto the “how can we use this in our business” reaction. Dead communities are a sign of experimentation and experimentation leads to learning. Sure, some execs might be turned off by social projects that don’t work and pull the budgets for future development. But we’ve also passed the tipping point where that type of reaction means much for the long term. Businesses are all having to deal with customer expectations built daily based on what other businesses, inside and outside our own industries are doing. When my cable company is responding to my rants on Twitter, I start asking why my favorite shoe company (Nike) isn’t doing the same.

We’re in a fantastic place and we’re moving into a fantastic path towards the future. Failure is all part of the process as long as we’re learning from our mistakes and paying attention to the context those mistakes are taking place in.

UPDATE: Sam weighs in on this topic!