Stefan Mey hat auf der Social Media Week David Noël, den Comunnity Manager von Soundcloud, vor die Kamera geholt und entlockt ihm die Geheimnisse des Musikdienstleisters zum Thema Umgang mit der Community der Nutzer im digitalen Raum.

Transkription/David Noël Interview:

Why do you need a community manager?

You need a community manager if you believe that your product or company’s key driver for success and growth is the actual people using the service and product that you have. In order for customers, users or members to go into a long lasting trustworthy relationship with your company you need someone in the company who represents that ideal and that’s where you need one.

Who’s your community?

For us at soundcloud a member of the community is every one who uses the service and connects with other people, so the product is designed to enable participation and encourages people to connect with other people. Because that happens you naturally have people who have a shared interest and a common purpose and who find meaning in connecting and going to conversations with other people.

What does your regular day look like?

A regular day starts around 7 o’clock, then I wake up and check my emails and everything that happened online over night. Then I kind of go through the daily casts and try to stick with the daily casts, because you never know what is going to happen. So sometimes you have a day that is kind of like a roller coaster ride where you don’t know what happens. Suddenly something urgent happens – an emergency – and you try to come up with a solution. On a different level now two and half years on the job it has more of a strategic approach. What are things to improve the experience that users have when they use the product.

What does that mean concretely?

We have two parts that we are responsible for. One is the reactive part that is member support and then the other one is proactive, what we call community development. So the support side is just we try to support and connect with users when they need our help, which is a fairly straight forward process, which means I try to be superhuman, friendly and fast ??? and the proactive part means that we kind of try to identify nice stories and use cases from within the community and then tell these stories on places like Twitter or Facebook and Tumblr in our Blogs and something we call community series. So for instance every day we pick a soundcloud of the day. Someone or something is a very exemplary member of the community so we kind of elevate him and give them some exposure across our channels. We actually started a T-Shirt Tuesday today, where one member can nominate another member they like. This nomination gets submitted to a group and we pick the best and most creative story out of these nominations and then both users/members receive a t-shirt.
A few things we do like this. At meetup.com we give people a platform so they can meet locally across the world. So we have now over eight hundred local communities around the planet with thousands of people involved. Actually we have a ‚Global Meet up‘ at October 5th.

How can you start in this job?

You can become a community manager by being a great communicator and a person how really genuinely passionate about the company or the product and the people who use it, because in essence it is really not about the usage of a service but about who is that person behind that usage. So you want to try to find out where is the motivation and what drives them, what do they care about. And then you try to be a connector between the company, the product and the member.

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Schlagwörter: community, Interview, Management, soundcloud