Marie Connelly is not a Guru.

One of the things I find most interesting about the field of community management is the wide range of backgrounds and experiences that people are bringing to the table in this role – there are a lot of different ways to prepare for a career in community management and social media, and I think it’s encouraging to see such a wide range of perspectives represented.

While most of what I learned about community management came from, well, being a community manager, there are a few things that really helped me out along the way.

In (roughly) chronological order:

Having lawyers for parents - few things prepare a person for making logical, persuasive arguments better than a lifetime of practice debating with lawyers.  It sounds a bit silly, but I’ve realized that everything I learned from years of trying to convince my parents to let me take the car, or extend my curfew, were the same skills I use now in working with community members and companies looking to get involved in social media – anticipating concerns, seeing multiple sides of a situation and proving yourself to be a trustworthy mediator are all important tools in the community manager’s kit.

Wearing an apron to work – Most community managers I’ve met have had some prior experience with customer service.  Mine was working “rush” at a college bookstore.  I had the apron, the nametag, and a whole slew of people angry at me personally for denying their requests to return books without receipts. Turns out, working in a customer service role is always an adventure – and that’s true whether you’re talking to people face to face, over the phone, via email, or on Twitter.

Studying English in college – Spending four years answering the question, “What are you going to do with that? Teach?” wasn’t a blast – but over the past three years, I’ve been consistently surprised by how relevant my degree has been to working as a community manager. On the most basic level, four years of writing essays is pretty good practice for finding an effective written communication style.  But one of the most important things I learned as an English major were the analytical skills necessary for close reading: identifying key themes and making connections between texts, authors, and different time periods.  As a community manager, I’m still reading closely, it’s just that now I’m looking for common themes and conversations about specific health topics, or for connections between different health communities.

Of course, there’s nothing like learning by doing, but it never hurts to have a good foundation to build on.

I’d love to hear from other community managers out there – what do you think best prepared you for this role?

Fun fact: I cannot ride a bike.

See, I’m a Navy brat. And, like a lot of Navy brats my age, my father spent a decent portion of my early childhood years in the Middle East during the first Gulf War. Since those aren’t exactly the kinds of tours you can bring a young family along for, my mom, older sister and I remained state-side. …

Let it be Alexis Madrigal’s response to Zadie Smith

As an English major, and an occasional student of linguistics, I was particularly fond of this quote:

“If your vision of the past language is mostly Melville — the stuff that’s endured — then, yeah, English seems like it’s in damn sorry shape. But if it includes all those other low and middle-brow writings, the bad letters, the …

The lovely folks over at the Metaverse Mod Squad beat me to the punch on the title of their recent post, “Listening and Hearing Aren’t the Same Thing“, but I wanted to go ahead and add a few thoughts of my own the matter, since it’s something I’ve been noodling on for the past couple of months.

I feel like the most common …