Every day is different in startup life. My title may be community manager, but I wear many different hats throughout the day. It’s been a crash course on every aspect of the business, and there is no better way than to learn by doing. But one thing I have not been doing, is blogging.
Shame on me! I am on blogs all day long, reading, learning, commenting, sharing…other times I’m running tests in WP-Admin, trying new plugins, attempting to change the CSS. So why don’t I spend some of that time on my own blog, to share my knowledge and experience with my community? Because there aren’t enough hours in the day!
Luckily, that is about to change, as I now have three awesome interns on the Livefyre Community Team. Each one of them jumped right in without me even telling them what to do! I can already tell I will be learning as much from my team as they will with me.
To my team (I say team a lot, but that’s ok because we’re all working together as one):
I’ve had a lot of different jobs and internships in my short life and one of the worst things is busy work. Sorry guys, you aren’t getting paid, but that means it’s my responsibility to make sure you getting more than just another job on the resume. I want you to come away with a developed personal brand, skills in managing communities, and network of people in the field.
Aaron (theSTOVE) and Sujin (Sushi) both have blogs and regularly add content. Jeremy (JMattHicks) just started his blog and has already written several thoughtful posts. I better start to practice what I preach! I finally figured out the best way to do that. If I’m going to share my tips and tools that I use for community management, why don’t I share them with everyone? Every blog is a teaching mechanism, a place where people can come to learn from my trial and tribulations. So I’m starting (or restarting) right here, right now.
The best thing about blogging though, is the conversation. The main thing I’m teaching my team is that the best way to learn is by getting involved in online communities and learning from peers. That’s why I want you to share your thoughts right here on my blog. They say it takes a village to raise a child. Let’s build this community to raise us all, because we are never done growing, and I hope I always have some youth in me.
So let’s start the conversation. What advice do you have for my team, just starting fresh as community managers? What was the one thing you wish someone told you at the beginning?
[...] blog has been a long time coming. Thank you to Jenna Langer for her recent post that encouraged me to finally take action and start writing. She points out an easily overlooked [...]