What Does a Community Manager Do? And Other Big Questions - The 2009 Brand Communities Survey

In conjunction with nGenera and my company Agent Wildfire, we have been asking online community sponsors, gurus, marketing heads, developers, planners, managers and evangelists from around the world to answer our key "need to knows" about community building and business.

It's our inaugural 2009 Brand Communities survey. Why make this a study of work?

• Communities are becoming commonplace, Gartner says 60% of them will be in place in Fortune 100 companies by 2010

• Communities are failing just as often as they are succeeding - it's estimated 50% of them will fail to establish a common purpose with their members

• Communities, at least those sponsored by companies, have been so recently been embraced that the whole territory lacks a history of rigorous analysis and insight

• Experiences and learnings can be translated across platforms and communities

• Selfishly, we've made a habit out of providing thought leadership on and building of communities

We've broken down the survey into 9 separate sections and hope to generate an aggregate of responses from the pros leading these community building efforts in the real world.

The sections of analysis are: the basics, focus and objectives, audience and outreach, incentives, rules, tools and platforms, staffing, metrics and ROI and overall advice and include the 55 key questions, we always wanted to ask but never had the time. Now we do...

Here's one of them, "What are the top 3 tasks of a community manager's life?":

·         Ongoing Facilitation

·         Content Creation

·         Community Evolution/Feature Development

·         Enforce Rules/Moderate Disputes

·         Technical Decisions

·         Metrics Reporting

·         Internal Rallying Cry

·         Community Administration

·         Member Recruitment/Crowdsourcing

·         Event Host

·         Company/brand evangelism

·         Communication

So if interested and currently involved in planning, building and executing communities, three asks:

1) Take our survey (it should take 10-15 minutes)

2) Join us at @communitygurus on Twitter

3) Give us a shout and we'd love to hear your insights firsthand too  416-255-4500

Any respondent who fills out our survey has a chance to win a small token of our affection and a topline version of the results in May when we get all our responses back.