Our client is a major public sector outsourcing company and we are helping them recruit a Web Community Manager to form and implement a communities strategy for their customer’s enterprise scale website, become the voice of the website externally and the voice of the users internally and to champion and nurture a strong and vibrant web community.

Objective:

• To develop a strong and vibrant web community.
• To establish a personal connection with our users, with a view to providing valuable insight to user behaviour, wants, and needs, and to be the key driver of user centric improvements, and community focussed enhancements to the site

Responsibilities:

• Develop and implement a medium to long term community building strategy/plan with senior management
• Suggest changes that need to be made to the community areas of the site in order to make participation a more attractive proposition to our users
• Identify and analyse issues, patterns and trends in user behaviour from a community perspective and transfer the information to the appropriate internal teams so that they can respond accordingly, including:
• Opportunities and new ideas to product development/architecture teams
• Bugs and issues into development/fix queue
• Identify threats and opportunities in user-generated content surrounding our brand, and remove/report to appropriate parties
• Monitor online conversations and participate in them to build brand visibility and thought leadership
• Author blog posts, articles, etc to creatively communicate with users
• Establish metrics & report on them on a monthly basis including recommendations for improving the community aspects of the site.
• Identify & engage advocates from within the user base
• Communicate issues, opportunities and insights to interested parties
• Stay up to date on new social media tools, best practices and how other organizations and companies are using them, so that the team can continue to be an early adopter of these technologies
• Participate in professional networking by interacting with peers and influencers & attending events

Skills and knowledge required:

• A bachelor’s or associates degree (or equivalent work experience) in music, advertising, marketing, graphics, web development, communications, English, IT, music, theatre, anthropology, history or related disciplines
• Excellent and proven research skills
• Excellent writing skills and the ability to rapidly produce high quality editorial and technical writing output
• Good knowledge and insight into the education sector in Britain
• Full knowledge of social media universe including YouTube, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Flickr, Forums, Twitter, Wikis, blogs, etc…ideally formed through a personal mix of participatory expertise from among these channels
• Functional knowledge or some experience with HTML/CSS is preferred but not essential
• Knowledge of search engine optimisation including basic keyword research
• Discretion to identify threats and opportunities in user generated content
• Proficient with Microsoft Office products
• Ability to communicate results to management and in a fast paced environment
• Ability to jump from the creative to analytical, able to demonstrate why ideas are analytically sound
• Eager to meet and exceed objectives and take on more responsibility

Essential experience:

• Proven web related experience with demonstrable history in a Community Manager role
• Must have recently held a senior community building (strategy or management) role for a large, busy website where you were directly involved in mapping out a community strategy and then driving that strategy forward (the success of which was able to be proven by analytics, testing and other metrics)
• Must be able to demonstrate creativity and documented immersion in social media with examples from previous roles
• Team Management experience
• Experience of working with technical staff to develop new user focused features
• Experience of working with assurance teams to ensure developments meet user needs

Pay rate:           £350 - £500 per day depending on skills

Start:                ASAP

Duration:           at least 6 months but probably until end of the year