Last year I came back from the Community Leadership Summit in Portland with the high-level message that we needed to be spreading our gospel throughout the company. This year, the overall vibe I got out of the event was much more practical:

We need to push back. We need to get serious. We need to take control.

From sessions on how community is marketing to how community managers should be CEOs, the vibe was clear: our craft is now legit, and we have the opportunity to not accept the status quo (“Sweet, we can all get jobs now!” as Jono said) but actually make a difference.

Maybe it’s because I read The Cluetrain Manifesto on the way in and out, but we are the employees in our organizations who deal with what the real world actually cares about: conversations. Real, honest, conversations. And we have the power to grow businesses if we not only encourage and join with these conversations, but also tell the other departments to get in line.

Let’s take these companies by the horn. There is a huge market for community managers, so we’re in a far less precarious position than we have been in previous years. We can get hired somewhere else, so as Danese Cooper of Wikimedia said: if your company doesn’t allow you to communicate freely, quit. It won’t actually hurt your profession. Might actually help (it did for her).

This is not to say that we should set fire to the other departments in our building. Rachel Luxemburg from Adobe came from a marketing background, and her comments were a fantastic foil all weekend: yes, marketing and sales and legal go too far. That’s their job. Our job is to push back. If we’re scared to push back, nothing will get done. If they don’t try to defend their principles, we’ll get our butts sued off. Find a balance. Don’t live in fear, and don’t trash their desks. You have to coexist.

We can make a difference. We have momentum now – let’s use it intelligently. Let’s move this from a silo’d effort to what business is about. I believe we can do it.

Footnote: thank you to everyone who came and contributed to CLS11. You can find notes from this year’s CSL at Wikia. There were some fantastic conversations and many more fantastic people, and I can’t wait to continue conversations with you on Twitter. Didn’t attend, but interested? There’s a CLS West in the Bay Area in January and you can keep up-to-date on CLS itself at communityleadershipsummit.com.

CLS photo courtesy of the wonderful Mark Terranova.
Crop photo courtesy of Tgrab.