I’m not a big fan of the term Community Manager. Manager implies command and control to me. From my experience of building online communities (eg Recruitment Asia Pacific), this Manager nomenclature just doesn’t seem to fit. Joining a community is typically voluntary and community members don’t want some person pushing them to participate. The cold hard fact is that most people don’t participate in an online community. This should never imply that they themselves necessarily feel disengaged from the community.

A colleague of mine, Phil Bilbrough suggested the term Community DJ. I think this term is very appropriate to building and maintaining communities on the social web. The Community DJ provides the venue, selects the right music to get people on the dance floor, and lets people dance to the beat of their own drum.

The Community DJ has to show up, keep things fresh, experiment a bit, and create an environment where people want to participate. The show isn’t about the DJ, they are merely a sort of passionate facilitator. As Chris Brogan, the co-author of Trust Agents, puts it “the difference between an audience and a community is which direction the chairs are pointing.”