Bryan Person’s comments

If you spend any time at all reading blogs about the craft of online community management, you likely will have already heard of Connie Bensen, the subject of the second profile in our Managing Communities 2009 series.

Whether it’s sharing best practices on her blog, presenting at conferences, or just offering an encouraging word to a newcomer in the industry, Connie has been an a leading voice for community managers over the past two years.

She offers some insight insight into her work below.

Connie Bensen
* Community strategist for Techrigy, Inc.
* Twitter ID: @CBensen

Day-to-day role and responsibilities

My position is the ideal community position–but then, I created it! When I was invited to join a young startup, I was given much freedom in defining my role. I report to the CEO and work cross-functionally with PR, marketing, customer service, and product development. My responsibilities include creating customer resources, training customers, teaching internal staff, quality assurance (QA), reporting and tracking bugs (yes, I have access to that database!), and suggesting new feature requests.

I consider communication to be my most important function, and my role is a mix of strategy and tactics. I enjoy both approaches, and appreciate the opportunity to assist my company as we scale.

Techrigy is a very transparent organization. We have a free version of our product, so there is nothing proprietary about that. Internally, I appreciate having complete knowledge of the organization, including financial aspects. My CEO is very open to ideas and encourages teamwork.

Overall, my team is the whole company. Because we are a business-to-business (B2B) company, we have a sales team. I have trained everyone on utilizing and participating in social media, so Twitter and LinkedIn are key for us.

For listening, we use our own product, Techrigy SM2, to monitor real-time alerts and identify trends in regard to our brand and competitors. also use Google Alerts and Twitter Search (integrated into TweetDeck).

Key skills needed for community managers

• Excellent communication skills
• Able to think on your feet
• Willing to work tirelessly for the community and company, 24/7
• Strong leadership skills and ability to motivate others
• A creative spirit

(Managing Communities 2009 is a series of profiles on online community professionals.)