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While David Hargreaves was off at Social Media Week New York, I was fortunate enough to attend a few SMW events here in lovely San Francisco. One such event was entitled “Why Community Managers Won’t Exist in 5 Years (and why that’s a good thing.)” Understandably, as someone with the words “social media” in her title, I was both amused and frightened. I pondered the idea like a double-rainbow, “What does this mean?”

So, stairs were climbed, beers were opened, and I was seated (along with around 25 others) for a PowerPoint prepared and presented by Evan Hamilton of UserVoice on the imminent obsolescence of my career.

The deck began innocently enough, citing a positive statistics about the current state of businesses and social media. The mood was quickly changed however, when he listed the top three threats to community management:

1. The Social Support Bubble

Citing Comcast/@ComcastCares as a prime example (as we’re all wont to do when talking about businesses online), even if a company has a stellar social media campaign with active engagement and social support, it means nothing if a customer has a bad experience elsewhere. We might have a great rapport with a rep on Twitter, but if we walk into a store and are treated with less than respect, that relationship between company and consumer is going to suffer, great tweets or no.

2. Other Departments Have Discovered Social Media

You might be an expert in Facebook relations, but that doesn’t necessarily help if someone in another department hops on the company page and begins answering questions for you, and not always in the appropriate way.

3. We Have No Home

Evan revealed that in a recent survey, social media programs fell into a variety of departments, with 10% reporting to a mysterious “Other” department. What this indicates is that no particular authority can claim us or “have our back.” (More on this later.)

The inevitable response to all this is not that social media is going to go away. Far from it, what it means is that we may need to adapt and evolve into a new type of position all together, one that Evan deemed the “Chief Happiness Officer.”

I will admit that when he unveiled this, my face almost got locked in the attempt to simultaneously arch my eyebrow and roll my eyes at the same time. It didn’t help there was a picture of kittens cuddling.

Photo by Ferran

This term is not new; Alexander Kjerulf has built a career styling himself as a CHO, and Ronald McDonald has held the title at his restaurants for a few years now. And our own David predicted the blending of Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Communication Officers a few months ago. However, there is still a point to be made here, and it’s a good one.

As CHOs, Evan explained that we should be dedicated to “making sure all parts of the company are focused on making customers happy.” This doesn’t mean saying “Yes!” to every suggestion, complaint and concern out there, but seeing to it that we make our fans know that they are being heard. In general, “nice guy marketing.”

This means overseeing that social media not a vertical position, but rather a horizontal one, encompassing more than product and branding. Conversely, we should make sure that every department is cohesive in their communications strategies.

He also made it point that we should try to be the “3rd employee”, after founders. This is something I find more than a little hard to achieve unless we all want to be jumping to start-ups, but the point is that we must be heard and seen before the fact, not after. (Unfortunately, no one in the group had an easy or tangible solution on how to do this in organizations where this wasn’t always the case.)

The importance of metrics was not overlooked, although there was a minor focus on ROI (you can read Nils’s take on ROI here), nor was the not-so-lost art of the telephone.

I took this all with a grain of salt. UserVoice is, at the end of the day, a customer feedback tool, of course their employees would find precedent in consumer interaction above all else (which is not a bad view at all!)

But do I ultimately believe that community management will soon be delegated to a glorified customer/employee service position? Not really. At the core of all social media practices, I believe there should be a balance between company and consumer. Customer support is only so much of the conversation… does Happiness have room for content creation? Is it physically and mentally feasible to have one person (or even a team of people) to take care of content, community, branding, messaging, listening, measurement, analysis, and outreach all at the same time?

Of course. That’s what agencies are for.

Overall, this session left me feeling optimistic rather than frightened, that’s all you can really hope for with a slideshow. You can view Evan’s presentation here and be sure to find him on Twitter, he’s really nice.