I am trying to distinguish tasks between a community manager and a product marketer for running early adopter programs with our customers. The roles seem to overlap a lot. How would you recommend to split the work?
I think in order to draw the line between a CM and a marketer we need to understand what each of them is responsible for. My view is that a marketer is responsible for bringing new users to the platform (i.e. ‘market’ the community or the product to the general public) where a community manager is responsible for working with the existing users, the community. I usually split the work as follows. The product marketing team is responsible for driving traffic to the site. Next, if we do software in-house, the platform team is responsible for converting incoming traffic to users. What happens next is the responsibility of the community management team.