[...]Community Management Education (and Certs) a Sound Investment –Yet Experience Trumps All « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing[...]…

But in this domain, I have a bigger concern. In certifying “community managers” or other forms of social media professionals, there is an implicit and overwhelming assumption that “social/community” is THE way to solve problems for a company including “engagement”, for example. It starts looking more and more like a “when you are a certified hammer professional, EVERYTHING looks like a nail scenario. Then you end up with the problem we are already seeing so much of today: companies out-social/community/engaging their competitors, when they SHOULD be focusing on fixing the reason they even need theses things in order to compete (assuming the business is not itself a social media product or service).

The thought experiment is something like, “assume a future where every one of your competitors has an equally awesome, certified, capable community manager/social media
strategist. NOW what? And what if “increased engagement” is not what the company — let alone their users — really needs? As a user, my attention is not scalable. My ability to engage is not scalable. The companies that may “win” in the near future are those who realize this, and make products, services, and marketing that frees my attention for doing things I love to do rather than competes to attract it back to the company. For example. I do not want to spend time “engaging” with Apple… I want to spend time editing in Final Cut Pro. And when I DO engage, it is with a local non-Apple community user group.

Any of use can look around our home and professional workspace and name some of our most beloved and most-used products, and realize that we would nearly kill for some of the things we own that come from brands with which we have never engaged. If you look to most hobbies, for instance, the communities we are involved with are NOT from a specific brand but from the far more compelling context in which those brands are used. I might attend a snowboarding club, not a Volcom group. A photography club, not an Adobe meeting (though Adobe might sponsor part of it, and it might even BE an unofficial Adobe user group). A horsemanship club not an Astund saddle-maker group. A maker/DIY group, not the Radio
Shack club.

Not that a brand cannot use community in this way — to support the bigger, cooler context in which their products are used as opposed to trying to suck users into engaging “with the brand” (whatever that actually means). Sooner than later, we must recognize that users are not All About Us, and if we deeply care about our users, we will not try to seduce them into spending more time with us. The best community manager, in my opinion, is the one who asks, “what the hell are you doing clicking around our site and posting content when you SHOULD be out there kicking ass USING our product…” and then putting all of their resources into enabling users to do just that.

So, yes, I fear that too much emphasis on certifying social media professionals (including community managers) will only harden the view that user engagement is about engaging with US / the brand, rather than the far more sustainable and user-healthy view that users have far better uses for their precious time, including actually USING our products and services to do something amazing *for themselves.”