Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand” – Chinese Proverb
We’ve tried both seriously and humorously over the years to explain “What does a community manager do?” While recently talking with an experiential agency I was reminded of the above proverb and found myself wishing more people in companies and agencies could see what a Community Manager really does.
Two of ours CMs, Dermot and Amanda, stepped up to the challenge and wrote this excellent ‘A Day in the Life of a Community Manager‘ post. I learned loads and I’ve been working with Tempero for over 3 years ( obviously never as a CM). I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. HUGE thanks to the guys for writing it and for the snaps of the office.
A day in the life of a Community Manager
08:30 am – Catch the bus and pass the journey by catching up on latest social media news and Twitter
09:30 am – Arrive in the office and grab a tea. There’s a variety of emails in the inbox, but most of them are from out-of-hours mods who have asked questions about a property [ED: property means any interactive space we manage like a forum, Facebook page, or blog] or referred non-urgent issues for a second opinion or further guidance.
10:00 am – Where possible, we’ll send each moderator an individual response to their referrals. Some issues, however, need to be referred again to the client. This usually happens when a particular issue isn’t clearly covered in the guidelines the moderators work to.
10:15 am – Before sending any referrals to the clients, we’ll take a quick sweep through the properties to check for any technical issues the clients (and mods) need to be made aware of, such as moderation tools not working or site server downtime.
10:30 am – An internal meeting brings together AMs, CMs, in-house mods, Insights, and Finance to discuss upcoming projects and ongoing issues.
11:00 am – There’s a shift opening for moderation on a client’s Facebook page. One of our existing moderator team has volunteered for the shift and needs to be trained on the guidelines. Over the last year, Facebook moderation has become one of the most common requests from clients, so our mod and management pool is very familiar with the issues that commonly occur on Facebook Pages.
12:00 pm – One of our clients has requested a catch-up call to go over the general ‘health’ of their online community and confirm social media strategy for upcoming months. As CMs, we come armed with stats and user sentiment to feedback to the client to help them inform their strategies and make them aware of customer issues.
12:30 pm – After the client meeting, a different client calls with an urgent notification: their site has suddenly become the target of a small group of protesters who are upset with the company after seeing a documentary exposing some of their business malpractices. The client wants to make sure that the posts are handled sensitively and gives us extra guidance for dealing with any comments from protesters. We update the moderator on shift and put out an intranet bulletin to the other moderators to make them aware of the issue and give them details on how to proceed with moderation.
1:00 pm – The smells of Exmouth Market—barbecuing sausages, sizzling curries, and frying kebabs—waft into the office and signal that it’s lunchtime!
2:00 pm – We have content matrices in place for several clients’ Facebook pages, which specify updates to be prepared and scheduled across the afternoon. We’ll typically begin this preparation and scheduling process at about 2pm, customising each page’s updates based on the client’s specifications and engaging with page fans after each update is posted.
3:00 pm – A client has requested additional management on a property that has become exceptionally busy. We take a look at the resourcing that we have in place, and set about allocating further resourcing in the best way possible, including making recommendations to the client on the amount of extra resourcing that may be required. We also need to check if the additional resourcing can be covered by the existing moderation team or if we need to introduce a new moderator to the team, and if the latter is the case we identify suitable moderators and schedule training for as soon as possible.
3:30 pm – One of the moderators on our monitoring properties flags an urgent tweet that mentions a client in a high-risk capacity. We immediately escalate the tweet to the client based on the escalation protocol in place, and recommend a course of action based on the severity of the content.
4:00 pm – Many of our clients have requested regular reports on their properties, with a number opting for weekly reports. These reports can cover a wide variety of areas – thorough statistical analysis, insights, community summaries, as well as short- and long-term content recommendations. A typical basic report can take anything from one to three hours, depending on the level of detail required – data gathering for a report may take substantially more time, again depending on the level of detail.
5:00 pm - Another check through moderator referrals. One item of referred content is an Italian-language post from an English-speaking moderator who is unsure of the correct translation. We consult with our in-house foreign language team in order to ascertain the correct translation, as well as whether that post is contextually appropriate for the property in question.
5:30 pm – We take a final sweep through all properties to ensure everything’s running as it should be.
6:00 pm – Although it’s time to leave the office, the CM’s day isn’t quite over yet…
8:00 pm – Due to the working times of our moderators, training sessions can’t always be fitted into the regular working day. Tonight, a training session worked from home has been arranged for two moderators whose daytime commitments mean they can only do after-hours training. No worries, though—without the bustle of the office and onslaught of emails, the session is a bit more relaxed, and the two hours seem to fly by. The moderators leave the session feeling confident about working on the new property.
1 am – From time to time events may happen on a property we look after which the client has requested we escalate to them immediately. Usually it’s pretty quiet but at least once a month we have to make an awkward call in the middle of the night waking someone up. It may seem like a hassle but it’s literally led to saving lives in the case of suicide threats in the past.
If this sounds like your dream job you can email your CV & cover letter to
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These community managers sound wonderful! Hard-working and hilarious! Working at Tempero sounds AWESOME!