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Hi all, I wanted to chime in here because there are a lot of perceptions on what a community manager is and I’m happy to shed some light on this. Of course, I can’t give out every little detail but I can offer a high level overview.
First thing I want to address is that the SWTOR community expands outside of these forums. While we do post official communication here, this platform is included in spaces where I interact and gather feedback. Players and their experiences, feedback, and engagement can be found all over the internet.
Second, not every community manager’s responsibilities will be the same from team to team. There are different types of CMs in the industry and there can be overlap and similarities in responsibilities and also different responsibilities entirely based upon what the role requires and what the CM’s skillsets are.
ThanderSnB’s bulleted list is pretty close! Some other things that can be added is answering players' reports whether they be bug reports or a heads up on problematic behavior. A lot of these happen behind the scenes. Sometimes, these reports go beyond the initial report and there are additional conversations that need to happen to find a resolution, so that takes up more time.
Another thing I enjoy doing is surfing through SWTOR streams and listening to players' experiences, especially if they are newer to SWTOR or coming back. I will interact every so often regardless of the size of their audience. What matters to me is their overall game experience.
Along the same page, I also manage the content creator group as well. They and the players from their respective communities are yet another source of feedback we pull from as well.
Last but certainly not least, CMs tend to work with every department of a given project so they have a base understanding of what’s being worked on, what future plans are, etc… That doesn’t mean that we can do another dev’s job. That just means CMs have a broad understanding of what’s going on so they can interject as needed, offer insight based off of player feedback, and/or assist with marketing initiatives or helping plan future projects.
That’s the general idea. Of course, there are other things that can pop up from time to time that were not anticipated and I have to adapt and change course, but that’s the nature of any role ever.
Overall, the role of a CM is one part publicly/privately engaging external community, one part managing internal community (the dev team), one part processing and generating a variety of reports, one part gathering and processing feedback, one part writing various communications, and one part handling issues or projects that pop up unexpectedly.
I know there are a handful of players who are actually interested in becoming a CM as well. If that is a career you would like to pursue, I’m happy to offer more insight and give some pointers. Feel free to send a PM! Hope this helps shed some light!
Last note, as this thread isn’t about the game itself, the mods will be moving it over to the Off Topic section at the end of the day.