The first conference I had the pleasure to hear on the Social Media Week Buenos Aires, was from Amalia Gerpe and Debora Lambrechts, both very experienced on Monitoring Communities and working on the field as Community Managers for quite some time now.

They made a very nice presentation on how to work independently here in Argentina on this field of Online Social Communication. All the way from which documentation you should have till how to deal with your clients.

But since I’m running to my next conference and chocking on a Big Mac, I’ll try to make myself very brief.     

Debora L. told us how she got started a few years back monitoring and keeping track of several game chat rooms and from there went all the way into the big agencies and kept working  as a freelancer for some extra experience and income.

And a good tip for our youngsters out there is, “just because you’re good surfing online doesn't make you a Community Manager.”

  So, what is that a Community Manager does?

Create and maintain all public profiles that the brand/product uses, such as Facebook, Twitter and many others that just might be where you will find your target consumer. And by that you must understand the company’s principals and desires of going online and also evangelize the contractor of how you believe it’s the best way to go with the communication you will be applying to their brand.

Also important to create a plan of how you will be applying the communication, if you will go with a “Call to Action” or just hunting for followers, or even if the plan is to go viral.

Another good point is to generate and maintain an open line of communication with your users.

  And for last but no least on this first part always prepare a crisis communication plan, which I suggest you to develop while you are working on which content you will upload and how things might go wrong from there.

We also heard about the different Community Management profiles out there. But that part I’ll leave it for a next post, as well as the 7 Cs of a Community Manager and how to take the first steps depending if you client is represented by an agency or a brand.

Keep tuned for more info tonight!  

You speak Spanish and want to keep up with these girls, then go ahead and follow