Update: Here’s a Wrapup of #CMAD 2013, which Trended.

Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day, in celebration of saluting this important role changing the face of corporations and customers everywhere, I wanted to share original data and insights on the state of the space. Community Manager Day (#CMAD) is hosted globally every fourth Monday in Jan, I’ll do a wrap up post and cross-link for this fourth year. Why do Community Managers get their own day? Essentially, they serve customers every other day, so they should get a day of thanks to highlight how they’re changing the face of business, customer care, and our industry. Here’s key stats on the essential skills, requirements of community managers, as well who they follow the most on Twitter.

1) Top Required Skills of the Community Manager

Altimeter Group conducted analysis of 30 global job descriptions of Community Managers to ascertain patterns on job requirements and skills.

Above: Out of 30 Community Manager job descriptions, the most critical requested skills were writing ability (83%), customer relations in online channels in normal daily conditions (76%), and working with other departments (53%). Other critical skills included reporting, and providing feedback to product teams on innovations and improvements. A few of the requirements included passion/tact/clever people skills, as well as passion for the topic and vertical the CM was covering.

2) Top Tools of the Community Manager

Above: Interestingly, 43% requested that Community Managers to participate in social networks –not just online communities owned by the brand. The heritage of the term originated with online communities (before Facebook and Twitter were founded) but the job requirements now suggest that 43% of community manager roles must interact with customers wherever they go.

3) Top Experience Requirements of the Community Manager

Job Experience Requirements: Out of the 30 job descriptions, 13 (43%) required bachelor degrees, and a majority required that they have Years required about 2.5 – 3 years of experience in social/marketing/customer service. Additionally, 6 companies had a requirement that the community manager have 2.5 – 3 years of experience in the specific vertical which they were serving.

4) The Most Followed Community Managers are in America, Western Europe

If you’re seeking to reach community managers in person, you’ll find key global hotspots in East Coast US, Western Europe, and a scattering up and down the West US Coast. This represents the top 500 followed community managers (update: Little Bird has provided a method and list of top 1000 CMs), and is not representative of the thousands of total CMs in the entire industry.

5) Most Influential Community Practitioners

Long time friend, Marshall Kirkpatrick (RWW, now entrepreneur) provided me data on influential community managers in Twitter. While I’m not involved in creating his social analytics product, Little Bird they provide this service analysis to any topical community. By analyzing which Community Managers are most followed in Twitter by their peers, he generated a list. Here are the most followed (thereby highest potential of Influence) Community Managers followed by their peers. Caveat: I recognize that measuring influence can’t be a sole number, but the data provided is interesting on heat maps on a social graph.

Community Managers followed the following folks, who are mostly providing services, resources, information and guidance to other community managers. Out of the top 500 Community Managers on Twitter, the 5 most-followed by their peers are:

Jenn Pedde (@JPedde) Community Strategist at 2U and Co-Founder of CmgrChat is followed by 74% of the top Community Managers on Twitter Blaise Grimes-Viort (@blaisegv) Head of Community Management & Social Media with @eModeration is followed by 66% of the top Community Managers on Twitter Rachel Happe (@rhappe) Principal at The Community Roundtable is followed by 64% of the top Community Managers on Twitter Jim Storer (@jimstorer) Founder of The Community Roundtable (like Rachel, above) is followed by 61% of the top Community Managers on Twitter Tim McDonald (@tamcdonald) Community Manager for @HuffPostLive is followed by 53% of the top Community Managers on Twitter

Yours truly (@jowyang), is followed by 43% of the top 500 CMs, thank you!

6) Most Influential Community Managers at Corporations followed Community Managers

The top 500 Community Managers followed the following corporate community managers the most:

Maria Ogneva (@themaria) at Yammer (which is a social business vendor, kudos Maria) Lauren Vargas (@vargasl) at Aetna Paco Vázquez (@pakvazquez) at Telefónica

7) Top Software Vendors Followed by the top 500 Community Managers

The following are the most followed social software vendor corporate accounts (not personal accounts, like Maria) of the top 500 Community Managers. While just one data sample, this gives light to the mindshare owned by actual product users in the industry:

Salesforce MarketingCloud (@marketingcloud) is followed by 26% Wildfire (@wildfireapp) 11% BuddyMedia (@buddymedia) 8% Lithium (@LithiumTech) 8% Cotweet (@cotweet) 8% Sprinklr (@Sprinklr) 6% Spredfast (@Spredfast) 6% Adobe Social (@AdobeSocial) 3% LiveWorld (@liveworld) 3% Involver (@involver) 2% Little Bird (@getlittlebird) 2% Oracle (@oracle) 1%

8 ) Most Influential European Community Managers

Out of the top 500 Community Managers in Europe, the ones most followed by their peers are:

Camille Jourdain (@camj59) Christophe Ramel (@Kriisiis) Cédric DENIAUD (@cdeniaud) Flavien Chantrel (@moderateur), Jean-Luc Raymond (@jeanlucr) Isabelle Mathieu (@isabellemathieu).

9) Rising Stars in Community Manager Space

Globally, the most Emergent CMs this year, defined as new but already followed by a large number of other leaders in the field are:

Hootsuite’s Laura Horak (@laurahoots) Rolando Cuevas (@cuevas_rolando) of Spain’s Community Next Mark Schwanke (@AdoptACM) formerly of Motorola Mobility Fer Rubio Ahumada (@FerRubioAhumada) Patricia Fernandez (@triciafernan)

10) Most Connected Community Managers

Globally, the CMs who are following the largest number of other top CMs on Twitter are:

Nissim Alkobi (@nis519) at Payoneer James Baldwin (@TwistedEdge) of the International Game Developers Association Paulette Bleam (@paulettebleam) of stealth startup Sumazi Jim Storer (@jimstorer) of Community Roundtable Robyn Tippins (@duzins) of ReadWriteWeb

Summary: As the broader category of Social Business continues to proliferate around the globe, these day to day business programs will be staffed, run, and managed by Community Managers serving on the front line with customers, employees, and partners. This key role represents the shift to digital real time communications in the business workplace, and demonstrates the changing role of authentic and human customer interactions.

Credit to data analysis by Julie George of essential skills in data point 1-3.