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How I Lost My Job as a Community Manager
Hi, My name is Idris, and I’ve been a community manager for the past year or so and counting. I got a job as community manager where I was in charge of the Discord server and Telegram group. I’m going to talk about the things I did wrong that made me lose my job and the lessons I learned from everything that happened, so I don’t make such mistakes ever again and maybe if you're an aspiring community manager or an established community manager you can learn from my mistakes.
How It Started
I was just laid off from my first job because the project founders couldn’t keep paying its community managers as they were low on funding, which made me start applying for jobs. A day or two after I got laid off, I caught the attention of this CEO, with whom I scheduled a call, and we spoke about the problems he was facing and the goals he wanted to achieve. He told me he wanted to get his project’s Twitter account to 50k followers in the next 3 months, and he also told me how he wanted his community to be more engaged in the project's activity. All of this was something I wasn’t familiar with, but I felt I was up for the task, so I told him I could do it confidently! So I got the job. My team was paid a total of $2,000 per month, which included everything we wanted to do and more. So we started creating campaigns, reaching out to podcasts to host the CEO, and scheduling Spaces. Due to the promises I made to the CEO, we had to look for a way to start creating engagement quickly! This is where the first mistake occurred because we took the easy way out by hiring chat engagers, (these are people who pose as investors or enthusiasts chatting about things we tell them to chat about), we didn’t tell the CEO this was what we were doing, so he was quite impressed and curious of how we are doing it I told him we knew some investor groups were the investors are very active and looking project to join so he took our word for it, then the next task was to increase the followers of the twitter account we did this by creating a game contest which did well in driving engagement and awareness, but we wanted the results to be outstanding so we paid to make the likes of the Twitter post for the game contest to be inflated and the followers to be increased, which didn’t end well because this was done through bots and they were getting fried as it was during the period were twitter was detecting bots and frying them. But in general, the contest was a success as it increased awareness of the project, but we had some difficulties figuring out who won the contest because individuals cheated, making it hard for us to discover who were the real winners. But we were able to give some contestants their reward; we weren’t quite satisfied, but we just had to move on. Although we didn’t have access to the Twitter account because our inability to get verified with our identity cards, we had to use international passports for the KYC, which we didn’t have. The next mistake was our approach to investors in the group. At first, our approach to answering investors in the group was great, but the CEO spoke to people in the group in a nonchalant manner, so we started naturally using his approach to answer investors in the group, which seemed cool at first, but after sometime we stopped as it wasn't the most optimal way to talk to investors. One of the major reasons for this was that we were receiving a lot of backlash from the community that we weren’t naturally creating engagement and that it was all fake and manufactured, whenever members of the community confronted us I would tell them to prove in which they couldn't so I continued. We tried looking for ways to increase the members in the group but it was difficult. At this point we just stifled and just kept doing our thing, we were now pressured by the CEO to increase members in the group fast as this was what we agreed on. So we did this by paying a subscription to inflate the group with real members; they were real but they weren't the target audience. At that time we felt we had accomplished the mission, so we kept doing that until we discovered paid ads, which was interesting because it brought in real members, real engagement, and also investment, but paid ads were expensive. Reflecting on it, we should’ve just doubled down on the paid ads. But we just continued as this was our comfort zone and we weren’t even listening to feedback, also we took everything for granted as the CEO wasn’t showing any concern, although he did raise concerns sometimes, and I always just found a way to maneuver his concerns. At the end, we got fired because a launchpad said they didn’t like the way we handled community operations, so he had to fire us and go with the launchpads recommendation.
Lessons learnt:
Be transparent and honest with your community and employer.
Being transparent with your community is vital because it filters out the people who don’t actually align with the values and mission of your project or the project you work with. People who actually align with the values will also be transparent and engaged because they believe in what you are doing, they will put effort into what you are doing, and they will participate in your community activities when they can. When you are transparent with your employer, you are able to test out your ideas without being scared of the results. Community management or any other job is always about testing out ideas and learning from your execution. When you are honest, it gives you the opportunity to manage expectations, which is what makes you a better community manager. It will be slow, but it's the best approach. Trust me.
Always measure your results.
When we never executed on our ideas, we never really measured our performance; we just took whatever we did at face value and never really considered measuring our results to know how we actually performed. This made us unaware of what works or what doesn’t work; we just did what we could and moved on to the next idea. Always measure your results; you will always discover something new and what actually works so you can iterate(make tweaks) and double down.
Never take the easy way out.
If we hadn’t taken the easy route, I think we would still have the job. The chat engagers, the members boosting, the followers increasing—none of these things ever actually brought value to the project; they were just a waste of time and energy. This also caused a lot of problems for us as we began to work with unprofessional entitled people. A chat engager ripped us of $800 because he said we agreed on paying him and his team a thousand dollars a week for just chatting which was outrageous, because he(chat engager) and my colleague only agreed on a $100 weekly but he misunderstood the message and hired a lot of individuals, after the 1 week trial they were requesting for payments were my colleague told them they misunderstood his message, so they got discharged(my colleague blocked them), after two months one of the chat engagers who wasn’t even the individual we were communicating with when we hired the chat engaging team started calling the project i was working for a scam, spamming the comment section on twitter saying the project was a scam and people shouldn’t invest, effectively getting the attention of the CEO, he then messaged him saying we the community managers are owing him $1000, after the conflicts and back and forth denying by my colleague on a call with the chat engager and the CEO, the CEO concluded that I should find a way to solve the problem in which I did, which was to pay him because that was the only thing I could think about at that moment in time also because I was scared I would loose my job. So while I was paying on Installment, that’s when we got fired, and so we just had to stop paying after paying him $800. He was still keen on receiving the remaining money, which we couldn’t give him, and he was still in contact with the CEO, disturbing him that we have refused to pay him his money. Then he got blocked on all social platforms for disturbing the CEO. This was after we discovered this is what he does for a living on his Twitter account, which is calling projects a scam and requesting payments, he does all this after he gets into a disagreement with the team in a particular project.
Don’t be scared; be confident. It's Priceless
Reflecting back at it, I could've told the CEO a lot of times he was wrong and his approach to things was wrong. The most painful part was that I didn’t even try; I just assumed I would regret it if I ever made a statement or spoke out, and in the end it still cost me my job. My point here is don’t be afraid to say the truth or tell your employers what you think; after all, you're the person managing the community, so it’s your duty. You should be able to tell them that things may not go as planned and you may have to go through a trial and error phase to achieve the stated goals, but you have to assure them that you’re going to solve the problem or achieve the stated objectives no matter what.
Be clear on what you want.
You have to be very thoughtful in making your decision so you don’t end up making mistakes that could cost you your job or even worse, ruin your reputation as a community manager. Not being more thoughtful with my decisions cost me my job. If I had been more clear about the goals I and my wanted to achieve, I wouldn’t have been chasing vanity metrics that didn’t add any value to the project. So be very clear on what you want to achieve and have concrete reasons why they are important to achieve; this will put you on the right track to achieving worthwhile goals.
Apply these Lessons and Become a Better Person
In General Reflecting back on my mistakes, I realized that all these things I’ve learned from my mistakes apply to all parts of life: if you aren’t honest and transparent, you will always meet the wrong people; if you aren’t measuring or analyzing anything you do, you can’t improve; if you take the easy way out in anything you do, you’ll pay for it in the end; if you're always scared to do something, you’ll never really do anything worthwhile, and you’ll always live in other people’s shadow; if you aren’t clear on what you want to do, you’ll always engage in pointless time-consuming activities; I hope you take these lessons and apply them to your life, as these are some of the things that will take you very far in life. If you’ve read to this point, you're a real one. Apply these lessons to become a better person. Have a nice day 🙂
How I Lost My Job as a Community Manager
Hi, My name is Idris, and I’ve been a community manager for the past year or so and counting. I got a job as community manager where I was in charge of the Discord server and Telegram group. I’m going to talk about the things I did wrong that made me lose my job and the lessons I learned from everything that happened, so I don’t make such mistakes ever again and maybe if you're an aspiring community manager or an established community manager you can learn from my mistakes.
How It Started
I was just laid off from my first job because the project founders couldn’t keep paying its community managers as they were low on funding, which made me start applying for jobs. A day or two after I got laid off, I caught the attention of this CEO, with whom I scheduled a call, and we spoke about the problems he was facing and the goals he wanted to achieve. He told me he wanted to get his project’s Twitter account to 50k followers in the next 3 months, and he also told me how he wanted his community to be more engaged in the project's activity. All of this was something I wasn’t familiar with, but I felt I was up for the task, so I told him I could do it confidently! So I got the job. My team was paid a total of $2,000 per month, which included everything we wanted to do and more. So we started creating campaigns, reaching out to podcasts to host the CEO, and scheduling Spaces. Due to the promises I made to the CEO, we had to look for a way to start creating engagement quickly! This is where the first mistake occurred because we took the easy way out by hiring chat engagers, (these are people who pose as investors or enthusiasts chatting about things we tell them to chat about), we didn’t tell the CEO this was what we were doing, so he was quite impressed and curious of how we are doing it I told him we knew some investor groups were the investors are very active and looking project to join so he took our word for it, then the next task was to increase the followers of the twitter account we did this by creating a game contest which did well in driving engagement and awareness, but we wanted the results to be outstanding so we paid to make the likes of the Twitter post for the game contest to be inflated and the followers to be increased, which didn’t end well because this was done through bots and they were getting fried as it was during the period were twitter was detecting bots and frying them. But in general, the contest was a success as it increased awareness of the project, but we had some difficulties figuring out who won the contest because individuals cheated, making it hard for us to discover who were the real winners. But we were able to give some contestants their reward; we weren’t quite satisfied, but we just had to move on. Although we didn’t have access to the Twitter account because our inability to get verified with our identity cards, we had to use international passports for the KYC, which we didn’t have. The next mistake was our approach to investors in the group. At first, our approach to answering investors in the group was great, but the CEO spoke to people in the group in a nonchalant manner, so we started naturally using his approach to answer investors in the group, which seemed cool at first, but after sometime we stopped as it wasn't the most optimal way to talk to investors. One of the major reasons for this was that we were receiving a lot of backlash from the community that we weren’t naturally creating engagement and that it was all fake and manufactured, whenever members of the community confronted us I would tell them to prove in which they couldn't so I continued. We tried looking for ways to increase the members in the group but it was difficult. At this point we just stifled and just kept doing our thing, we were now pressured by the CEO to increase members in the group fast as this was what we agreed on. So we did this by paying a subscription to inflate the group with real members; they were real but they weren't the target audience. At that time we felt we had accomplished the mission, so we kept doing that until we discovered paid ads, which was interesting because it brought in real members, real engagement, and also investment, but paid ads were expensive. Reflecting on it, we should’ve just doubled down on the paid ads. But we just continued as this was our comfort zone and we weren’t even listening to feedback, also we took everything for granted as the CEO wasn’t showing any concern, although he did raise concerns sometimes, and I always just found a way to maneuver his concerns. At the end, we got fired because a launchpad said they didn’t like the way we handled community operations, so he had to fire us and go with the launchpads recommendation.
Lessons learnt:
Be transparent and honest with your community and employer.
Being transparent with your community is vital because it filters out the people who don’t actually align with the values and mission of your project or the project you work with. People who actually align with the values will also be transparent and engaged because they believe in what you are doing, they will put effort into what you are doing, and they will participate in your community activities when they can. When you are transparent with your employer, you are able to test out your ideas without being scared of the results. Community management or any other job is always about testing out ideas and learning from your execution. When you are honest, it gives you the opportunity to manage expectations, which is what makes you a better community manager. It will be slow, but it's the best approach. Trust me.
Always measure your results.
When we never executed on our ideas, we never really measured our performance; we just took whatever we did at face value and never really considered measuring our results to know how we actually performed. This made us unaware of what works or what doesn’t work; we just did what we could and moved on to the next idea. Always measure your results; you will always discover something new and what actually works so you can iterate(make tweaks) and double down.
Never take the easy way out.
If we hadn’t taken the easy route, I think we would still have the job. The chat engagers, the members boosting, the followers increasing—none of these things ever actually brought value to the project; they were just a waste of time and energy. This also caused a lot of problems for us as we began to work with unprofessional entitled people. A chat engager ripped us of $800 because he said we agreed on paying him and his team a thousand dollars a week for just chatting which was outrageous, because he(chat engager) and my colleague only agreed on a $100 weekly but he misunderstood the message and hired a lot of individuals, after the 1 week trial they were requesting for payments were my colleague told them they misunderstood his message, so they got discharged(my colleague blocked them), after two months one of the chat engagers who wasn’t even the individual we were communicating with when we hired the chat engaging team started calling the project i was working for a scam, spamming the comment section on twitter saying the project was a scam and people shouldn’t invest, effectively getting the attention of the CEO, he then messaged him saying we the community managers are owing him $1000, after the conflicts and back and forth denying by my colleague on a call with the chat engager and the CEO, the CEO concluded that I should find a way to solve the problem in which I did, which was to pay him because that was the only thing I could think about at that moment in time also because I was scared I would loose my job. So while I was paying on Installment, that’s when we got fired, and so we just had to stop paying after paying him $800. He was still keen on receiving the remaining money, which we couldn’t give him, and he was still in contact with the CEO, disturbing him that we have refused to pay him his money. Then he got blocked on all social platforms for disturbing the CEO. This was after we discovered this is what he does for a living on his Twitter account, which is calling projects a scam and requesting payments, he does all this after he gets into a disagreement with the team in a particular project.
Don’t be scared; be confident. It's Priceless
Reflecting back at it, I could've told the CEO a lot of times he was wrong and his approach to things was wrong. The most painful part was that I didn’t even try; I just assumed I would regret it if I ever made a statement or spoke out, and in the end it still cost me my job. My point here is don’t be afraid to say the truth or tell your employers what you think; after all, you're the person managing the community, so it’s your duty. You should be able to tell them that things may not go as planned and you may have to go through a trial and error phase to achieve the stated goals, but you have to assure them that you’re going to solve the problem or achieve the stated objectives no matter what.
Be clear on what you want.
You have to be very thoughtful in making your decision so you don’t end up making mistakes that could cost you your job or even worse, ruin your reputation as a community manager. Not being more thoughtful with my decisions cost me my job. If I had been more clear about the goals I and my wanted to achieve, I wouldn’t have been chasing vanity metrics that didn’t add any value to the project. So be very clear on what you want to achieve and have concrete reasons why they are important to achieve; this will put you on the right track to achieving worthwhile goals.
Apply these Lessons and Become a Better Person
In General Reflecting back on my mistakes, I realized that all these things I’ve learned from my mistakes apply to all parts of life: if you aren’t honest and transparent, you will always meet the wrong people; if you aren’t measuring or analyzing anything you do, you can’t improve; if you take the easy way out in anything you do, you’ll pay for it in the end; if you're always scared to do something, you’ll never really do anything worthwhile, and you’ll always live in other people’s shadow; if you aren’t clear on what you want to do, you’ll always engage in pointless time-consuming activities; I hope you take these lessons and apply them to your life, as these are some of the things that will take you very far in life. If you’ve read to this point, you're a real one. Apply these lessons to become a better person. Have a nice day 🙂
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