I recently attended the annual Enterprise Network conference hosted by Active Website. The conference is a private event and this year's theme was cultivating a new breed of agents.
Jennifer Sable Lopez, community manager at SEOmoz, gave an informative presentation about developing a community through blogging, social media and content marketing. The material had some real take-home value for real estate pros.
As the community manager for SEOmoz, Jennifer is often the first point of contact. She understands the importance of leveraging your online community to increase business. SEOmoz is a successful search engine optimization community that provides tools, education, consulting and other resources.
The following is my Q-and-A with Lopez:
Q: Talk about your roll as community manager at SEOmoz
A: As the community manager at SEOmoz, my role is to not only build and nurture the community, but to also understand and be the voice of the community internally. When we are working on building out our software or making any changes to the website, my focus is always on how it will affect the community and how they may react. On the other side, it's my responsibility, and our whole team's responsibility, really, to make sure folks are adhering to our community rules, are getting their questions answered, and are getting great content sent their way.
Q: How does a community manager differ from a social media manager?
A: This question comes up a lot, and a community manager usually looks at the bigger community and not just social media. For example, at SEOmoz we have a blog, Q&A forum, community-created blog and such that are on our site, which is where the community started. Within the community team we have someone whose role is to manage all the social channels. Her job is to ensure that everything's getting done as needed (not necessarily to do all the work herself) and help strategize for growing our social channels specifically. Whereas my role is to look at the whole community, which includes social.
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