Life as a Community Manager

When I turned in my freelance kicks to become a full time community manager, I was on the receiving end of lots of confused looks and questions.

“So, you like, manage a pool?” One friend of mine asked.

As awesome as being poolside all day would be, my job is even more awesome.

My background is a little disparate; I’m a writer by necessity (couldn’t be anything else even if I wanted), researcher by education (degrees in Biology, English and Comparative Literature), marketer by talent/trade and, to be that much more marketable, pretty darn good at social strategy and just technical enough to be dangerous. That all looks pretty good on paper, but when it comes to looking for jobs, it can be tough to translate into assets for a particular position.

Copywriting, while it aligns with my primary passion for all things word-oriented, isn’t challenging enough. I’m too novice to do anything really overly technical, but that’s okay because I want to be more creative on a daily basis and create lots of content. I am definitely a people person, so marketing is often the way I go professionally, but whenever I work in straight-up marketing positions I always feel like a sales person, which SO isn’t my forte. So, in the end, unless I freelance and create a job that takes aspects of all of these things and wrap them up in perfect combination (reminiscent of a Chipotle veggie burrito) it is very difficult to find a job I get super excited about.

That is, until I landed a gig as a community manager at WellTok, a social health management company that just raised $18.7m in venture capital.  (BOOM!)

My job has its ups and down, just like any other job, but unlike most jobs, it has SO many more positives than negatives. 

This kinda sorta explains what I do on a daily basis. All in a day’s work, as they say.

I get to write
the day away (often from home or remotely if I need to!), talk with
people from all over the world, research, strategize and test ways to
increase awareness and engagement (i.e., strategize on ways to get and
keep people addicted to our site), promote content, events, information
and product offerings within and throughout the site, create ad
campaigns and strategies, crunch data to make sure what I’m doing works,
do research on best practices and industry innovation, manage a team of
amazing, talented individuals, use and expand my technical skills and
work in an office where I can make my own great coffee. 

I never thought I’d have a job that combines every unrelated skill I have into a cohesive daily mix o’ tasks and tricks.

All in all, life as a community manager is pretty sweet, wouldn’t you agree?