Fully agree with both points. A major challenge that comes with this is the need to align so many people with so many conflicting interests so you don’t screw up your own career:
- Upset your boss and budgets/requests get tricky
- Upset your users and numbers drop, complaints reach your boss, so you’ve now upset your boss meaning budgets/requests get tricky
- Upset your boss’ peers and end up in meetings with people who think they understand the topic and demand you do things which don’t make sense. If your boss knows community this is not too bad. If your boss doesn’t know community then you’re going to get really good at PowerPoint as you attempt to educate these guys
- Upset your boss’ boss and… well you get the point
So who’s best placed to own Community at Enterprise level?
In my opinion: Outward facing should be owned by Customer Service, and Inward facing should be owned by a team that scales across the business in some form of supporting role: DevOps, IT, or Learning and Knowledge Management. And if your community is both inward and outward facing, then I would setup a specific Community Department who would basically be a mix of representatives from each of Customer Service, Product etc. This provides the best of both worlds: autonomous leadership from Head of Community, and cross-functional governance from the melting pot of department representatives.
You may have noticed I omitted Marketing, the most common owner of community, from my list. Personally, I’m not a fan of communities that are owned by marketing. I just don’t feel like those communities are in my best interest. I mean, how could they be? The objective of Marketing is to find/attract people who might buy the product, and this regularly means “convince people to buy our product even if its not the best option for the person”. Not always, but often enough for me to approach them with a prejudiced level of skepticism.
Customer support on the other hand, I love seeing as a community: here is a place that is owned by people whose raison d’être is to improve my experience as a user/customer. If a community is outward facing, I would put it in the hands of Customer Support - with a requirement that they also build a really good and close relationship with the product team.