Community managers don’t sell anything

Ad Age published an article claiming that “clearly being a community manager is a marketing job”. Let me say where I stand on this issue: I believe this is not true at all. Community managers don’t sell anything; in fact it is just the opposite. The purpose of any good community manager is to build relationships, to leverage the enthusiasm of the people around a product/company, to listen to them, to engage them… It’s not about packaging and selling what the company produces. As a matter of fact, marketers define the identity of a company, while community managers build and manage its online reputation.