L: It was really interesting speaking with Jenn Pedde, as prior to our conversation, I honeslty had no idea there was a difference between community managing and simply social media managing. It was interesting to hear her contrast the two, and to learn that each require different approaches to do well. It definitely illustrates that there's no "one size fits all" when it comes to social media.

Q: I should have asked Jenn but didn't: is community manager a role one ever sees within agencies, or it is really limited to in-house positions?

L: Thanks to Jenn I now know the difference between a community manager and a social media manager. It's really helpful because although I'm interested in social media, I would be much more interested in being a community manager rather than a social media marketer. She sounds like she has a really fun job!

Q: I don't really have a question for today... I feel like I've learned a lot this week!

L: Once again, I learned many today, including blog writing, interview tips, and a ton of tools. Jenn's speak was great. Learning is a lifelong process. One important thing I learned from Jenn, and also from this class is: we should always learn from peers, blog posts, new studies and conversations with other people. Especially in the industry that changes all the time, it is important to keep updating our knowledge so that we can be confident to say that we are experts in XYZ field. The other important point is building trust before pitching anything to others. We shall not try to sell our programs/ideas without providing others any value. 

Q: (Some companies may have 20 people to manage their social media, and they use many tools to  and invest a great deal of time on it. However, for some organizations, especially for nonprofits, they have a limited budget and they are lack of people to do the same thing.) I think it will be really hard for just one or two people to manage an organization's social media. Are there any tips for them in this situation?

L: Today I learned the difference between a community manager and a social media marketer, and finally understand what those job listings mean when they say 'community manager/customer service.' I have always skipped over these because I didn't think they were a public relations function. Now I know!

Q: What other titles should we be looking for during our job search? Are there synonyms, or other job titles we might not be looking for?

Waiting for the last day! Tomorrow will literally be the last class of my graduate life. Feeling pretty good.

L: I had better understanding about Sprout Social from today's class, which I think is an excellent and inexpensive social media monitoring and measurement tool. The best thing is that it allows people to get a free trial for a month. I'm actually considering using it in the summer. The speaker's interaction with class is also very beneficial to me. I found the idea of community manager very interesting. My understanding is that community managing is to build and maintain relationships with the community, which is pretty much the same with CR. I'm always thinking about how to initiate conversation and build relationship with the media online. The experiences and skills that the speaker shared with us are very helpful.

Q: I wanted to ask the speaker in class but I forgot: after sending the networking email or message to the journalist or blogger online, what should we do if we don't get any reply? (I bet that happens a lot).

L: I really appreciated the insight provided by Jenn Pedde today. As a community manager who has been a thought leader in the field, we were lucky to have spoken with her. With this, I learned that title of community managers is a position that is most referenced in our field as those who are digital experts, which I did not know previously. Organic engagement through social media platforms is the essential piece of social media utilization.

Q: I feel like for a weeklong class, we have really learned a lot. We can't possibly cover everything there is to know in such a short timeframe. With that, what are a few social media topics you think we should research on our own time after class ends tomorrow?

Q2: Will we have access to your extensive Diigo bookmark list after class has ended?

Learnings:

I have seen a lot of places looking to hire a community manager, so it was useful to discuss that in class with Jenn Pedde today. I liked what she said about how this position differs from a social media manager position. Social media managers attempt to get their audience to see the social media pages, whereas community managers take it one step further and facilitate interaction and engagement with users.

Questions:

I think it might be useful to talk about how agencies are setting up their social media strategists' team to work with clients. Social@Ogilvy comes to mind at the moment.

L: It was great learning the difference between community managers and social media marketers today. I have heard many different definitions of "community manager" before, but never really had a strong sense of what it meant. Thanks to Jenn, I now know that social media marketers would determine how to get people to come to your Facebook page. Community managers determine how to enagage with these people once they are there.

Q: When we are creating our budget, since much of social media is "free" - will there be many factors other than the price of monitoring programs? If our company is just creating social media outlets for the first time, would we include salaries for new social media employees within our budget?

L : Today's Skype call with Jenn Pedde from The Community Manager was very beneficial. It was interesting hearing her take on how to build relationships with journalists and how she pitches to them. I liked her point about providing them with value and that it's all about them. We've learned about how you should reference a journalist's previous material in pitches, but it was nice to hear from a different perspective and how one should do it for social media. 

Q : Do you think Facebook did as well as it wanted on its first day? Reports are saying no. Why do you think it fell flat? 

L: When I think of social media, I automatically exclude email as a social media tool. However, email is actually considered as a very important social media tool. We can initially use Facebook and Twitter to find media contacts to pitch to, but email is still the best way to pitch to the media in depth.

Q: Can you provide any strategies of pitching to media via social media tools?