A really great article in Harvard Business Review, titled, "Fire your marketing manager and hire a community manager" has created quite the stir. You really want us to fire our marketing managers for the shiny new penny job?

No, they don't want you to really fire your marketing manager and hire a community manager, but the point is to begin thinking about what a community manager does versus a marketing manager, a corporate communications person, or even the advertising department.

What Is A Community Manager?

A community manager does the following:

• Actively monitors, participates in, and engages others within online communities

• Organizes a community for philanthropy, advocacy, or business growth

• Acts as an ambassador for your organization

• Provides a face to an otherwise faceless brand

• Communicates effectively with the community, on your behalf

• Understands what is important to the community

• Has a strongly developed sense of ethics

• Acts as the company's spokesperson, communicator, network, brand ambassador, and representative...all at once

• Works with your webmaster to update your site for web 2.0, create compelling content, understand SEO, and create and execute email marketing

• Gets all employees excited about and communicating on behalf of the company online

• Develops relationships with clients

• Looks at boring stats and makes them interesting in order to show how they affect business growth

• Is well-connected, enthusiastic, and understands this job is 24/7

A community manager can be internal or you can outsource. We serve as the community manager for several clients, but we also coach community managers who work internally. How you handle it for your business depends on your budget, your comfort level with the web, and whether or not you already have talent internally who either know how to use the web for business growth or have the ability to be trained.

How Am I Supposed to Know What Value the Community Manager Adds?

In June we hired Daniel Hindin as our community manager to build traffic on Spin Sucks, with the goal of eventually monetizing our work there. When he started, we didn't really know what he'd do, other than find extra bloggers. So we created goals that were very traffic specific.

The 75 day goals we created included:

• Increase traffic by 36 percent (actual was 63 percent)

• Increase subscribers by 23 percent (actual was 164 percent)

• Increase visitors by search by 11 percent (actual was 57 percent)

• Add one guest blogger per day (accomplished)

• Increase visibility on blogs by 100 percent (actual was 80 percent)

• Increase the number of page views per visit by 47 percent (actual was 11 percent)

• Create a Twitter account with 1,000 followers for the sole purpose of delivering content and increasing search; i.e. no engagement happens from that account (actual was 1,149)

We thought we were being really aggressive in our goal setting in June. What we found, instead, is that having a community manager focus on this full-time knocked the ball out of the park with every goal except two.

So Traffic Has Increased, but Sales Have Not. Now What?

Now that we know how well having a community manager works, it's time to begin monetizing our traffic. Our goal is to keep the blog content free, but we've also invested a full-time person and about 20 hours a week of my time so there has to be some ROI.

The goal, between now and the end of the year, is simple: Drive $96,000 in new revenue. Whether or not we do it remains to be seen, but we set the goal based on converting just one percent of our unique visitors to a $200 per month sale.

We share this not to toot our own horns, but so you can begin to think, in very real terms, about how a community manager can help you build a community of people who care about your business.

Think you can drive $100,000 in new revenue in fourth quarter by hiring a community manager?