Social media and community managers: The people battling anti-halal trolls and online abuse

DEATH threats, sexual harassment, long hours and underwhelming pay. Welcome to the world of social media management.

‘Sadly harassment is part of the job’

DEATH threats, sexual harassment, long hours and underwhelming pay.

While most people might think the life of a social media manager is as easy as sitting on Facebook all day, the reality is much less glamorous.

That’s according to the first major survey of Australian online community and social media managers, commissioned by social media firms Quiip, Dialogue Consulting and SWARM, which reveals an industry struggling as the first line of defence against online trolling.

One in three respondents had been criticised or antagonised, either online or offline, as a result of their work as a community manager, the study found. Of those who experienced harassment, only one in four received support from their employer.

And contrary to the image of a gen Y straight out of university behind the keyboard, professionals in the industry tended to be older, well educated, but underappreciated for the work they put in.

“Sadly harassment is part of the job,” said Venessa Paech, head of communications at 5.5 million-strong online community Envato and co-founder of SWARM, a community management conference.

“It’s not the gen Y millennial profession people might expect. They tend to be middle-aged with quite a high level of seniority, which reflects the scope of things they’re expected to do — reputation management, customer service, selling products.

“They are on the cutting edge of the digital economy, and in many cases are responsible for the public reputation of their organisations. The problem is they’re really not getting the remuneration that deals with the scope of that work.”

The survey found the fulltime salary for a community manager ranged from $65,759 to $88,270 nationally, meaning approximately 40 per cent of respondents earned less than the national average.

Despite the low pay, 43 per cent work more than five days a week, and almost one in 10 work seven days a week. More than three quarters (77 per cent) work more than an eight-hour day.

Fifty-per cent were between 26 and 35, three quarters (76 per cent) hold a Bachelor’s degree or higher, and one in five has studied communications at tertiary level.

More than two thirds (66 per cent) said they intended to leave their job within two years.

Overworked community managers are often forced to put out fires of “social media fails” like hijacked hashtags conceived by marketing teams, who have often been warned by the community managers against it.

“They’ll be saying, ‘Maybe that’s not a good idea’, but they get overruled,” Ms Paech said. “Their job is then to mop up what’s left and deal with the crisis.”

Ms Paech said she had experienced harassment since managing Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree forum in the early ‘90s, but argued the problem had gotten worse.

“We used to have a serial pest who would visit us daily for many years, who would make regular death threats, threats of harm, graphic rape threats to community members and team members,” she said.

“They would stockpile accounts and use floating IPs and VPNs to escape detection. Looking at that kind of toxic or graphic content became a working condition.”

On the most common kind of trolling experienced, Ms Paech said the anti-halal movement had become so vocal in Australia, it had become a “running joke” among the people tasked with maintaining brands’ social media pages.

“There is a bit of a running joke among Australian community managers about the anti-halal movement. It is a particularly common trolling faction,” she said.

“I use the word carefully because they’re clearly very passionate and may not consider themselves trolling, but it makes its way onto a really wide array of businesses and brands’ social media presences, whether they’re relevant or not.”

Despite the findings, Ms Paech stressed community management was a rewarding role and that it was not all negative. The survey of 262 community managers was conducted between March and April this year.

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Originally published as Social media and community managers: The people battling anti-halal trolls and online abuse