Marshall poses the question (and does analysis and conducts informal interviews) do startups need Community Managers? He points to my growing list of enterprise class companies who are adopting these roles, but we should also examine the startup.

First of all, if you don’t know what a community manager is, start with these four tenants on my blog, or read the Forrester report (aimed towards corporate, not startups) how to staff for social computing.

An excellent piece, but let’s step it up and look at the bigger question, for startups, corporations, or mid sized companies. The real question to ask is “Should companies engage customers and prospects in a collaborative nature online”. The answer? “it depends”.

Marshall’s post gleans opinions from those that agree and disagree with the notion, all of them make sense, and I’m sure I’d agree that you don’t always need one. For example, the cash strapped company, having a dedicated role to manage community relations is costly, especially when you’re trying to get the next product iteration out. Another thought is that for small startups, nearly everyone is doing community relations, it’s not one specific role. Lastly, a few reasons why it doesn’t make sense is if there is no social aspect to your product, if it’s just being consumed, and no one has questions or needs to develop or share it with others (a component part perhaps) they the need to have relations doesn’t make sense.

Of course there are lots of considerations, Dawn lists out others, for some financial companies this may be a challenge due to legal restrictions (although Mint had Damon Billian as the community manager for some time). But taking a look at most startups (as to how Marshall is referring to them) he’s often asking about the web startups.

Startups are unique compared to large funded corporations, so, let’s list out when it makes sense and when it doesn’t using this scorecard

Score one point if the startup has a thriving online discussion around their product

Score one point if the startup has a thriving discussion around the “lifestyle” that the product provides (different from above)

Score one point if the startup has an online web product or service

Score one point if the startup wants to improve products from direct customer feedback

Score one point if the startup’s business model requires third party developers to help growth

Score one point if the startup has a competitor with a community

Score one point if the startup has a strong product in the market and is ready for mass adoption

Score one point if the startup has a competitor that has a community manager role

Score one point if customers are ‘banging at the door’ with questions, suggestions from forums, blogs, and other resources.

Score one point if your customers are specifically asking for a community manager

Tally your positive score

Subtract Points. Startups should NOT have a community manager for the following scenarios
You should tally check marks as “-1″ for each of these:

Minus one point if the startup is in stealth mode and the product isn’t yet revealed

Minus one point if the startup is small enough where everyone can participate

Minus one point if no one interacts with your existing products, or perhaps it’s quickly consumed and not discussed

Minus one point if the startup is small enough where every employee can act as community liaisons

Minus one point if the startup if there is no current online discussion at the “lifestyle” level

Minus one point if the startup’s product is failing and all resources should be focused on building the product

Minus one point if the product can be supported by the community at a 95% or greater threshold

Minus TWO points if the startup’s management and the orginization is not prepared to take in community feedback to make changes.

Tally your negative score

= combine positive and negative points

I’m not going to give you a single number where a startup should or should not hire a community manager, as I think there are internal factors that will set each companies ‘go or no go’ threshold number, but instead, use this checklist as an internal discussion point and conduct your own self-analysis.

Update: Constantin has created a new wiki of Social Media Managers and Strategists at the New PR Wiki.

I stand by my research, personal experience, and industry monitoring that the need for social media managers will continue to be in demand for the foreseeable future.

This post is a direct response, refuting and correcting Steve’s post that the Social Media Manager will go extinct.

While I enjoy Steve’s predictions (as well as a peer) that the Social Media Manager will be extinct, I’m here to respectfully correct him and leaning on my research findings from my recent Forrester report: How to Staff for Social Computing. In fact, we’ve found that there are two roles to be found in corporations serious about online communities.

Steve comes from the PR agency perspective and from his view, this makes sense. Yet, I come from where demand actually happens: in corporate enterprise marketing, where I was a social media manager at Hitachi.

Currently, in large corporations, specialized marketing managers, are found often sorted by industries, but also sorted by mediums and channels. For example, there are corporate marketers that focus on Web Marketing (my background) Advertising, Direct Marketing (email, mail) Search Marketing, Event Marketing, and even Print Marketing.

While I agree that social media skills will eventually become a normal bullet point in nearly every marketing resume in the future, today, and the foreseeable, we’re needed specializing for the following two reasons: 1) The specific duties are foreign to most other marketers 2) Online communities (like the support team) require a dedicated role.

In our recent report, we indicated that there are two distinct roles appearing within corporations, the social media strategist (I gave the example of VP of Social Media, Ed Terpening at Wells Fargo) and the community manager, who is responsible for being an online face to the community (Lionel Menchaca is a great example).

So, until the roles of medium based marketers (like direct marketer, web marketer, event marketer) go extinct or this skillset completely normalizes or the role of communities (another way of saying customers) go by the wayside, we’ll continue to see the growth of these dedicated and specialized roles.

Steve is wise to assert that the blur between social media and traditional media as we know it is correct –from a PR perspective. But when it comes to corporate communities, developing social media programs, these are skills that the majority of traditional marketers have –nor understand.

As an analyst, many of my clients (at Fortune 5000 companies) consult with us for social media guidance, I’m increasingly on more and more concalls where these individuals have a dedicated role in this new medium.

Lastly, to drive my point home, I’ve been publishing a series of blog posts called “On the move” that list out (in groups of 5-6) individuals that have been hired to fulfill this specific job. If you notice, the rate has been increasing, not decreasing over the past weeks. Looking at actual job movements is a more accurate –and telling—way of looking at social media jobs than keywords from a job site.