For any microblogging platform, the community drives the life or death of the system. Some users left Twitter for Pownce when it first launched and others left Twitter to rally behind Plurk during consistent fail whale sightings. Kwippy, a microblogging platform out of India, is aiming to stay a step ahead by investing early in a committed community manager that can help them listen to users and engage with their audience.

What Does a Community Manager Do?

Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), Sr Analyst at Forrester Research, has a great community manager job description and it looks like Matthew Phillips will be following it fairly closely, at least as described by Mayank Dhingra, Kwippy CEO:

In an effort towards having better community interaction and engagement we’ve extended our team to include Matthew Phillips, popularly known as kestrachern. Apart from communicating with you guys and helping you out in case of any issues Matthew would also help us manage the problems created by time zone difference better.

How Will a Community Manager Help Kwippy?

With a team generally based in India and a product that is being used across the globe, a remote community manager located in the US makes a lot of sense. Matthew is able to stay involved during one part of the day while the Indian team watches the other half. Without having to worry about fixing bugs or pushing new features like other parts of the team, Phillips is able to focus on the community full time and make sure users are happy.

I caught up with him on Kwippy one day after hearing about his appointment to discuss a few questions I had. We had a great discussion about posting via Ping.fm and how it may impact the communities on each of the sites receiving posts.

Kwippy made a good decision in selecting Matthew and looks to be headed in the right direction by recognizing the value he can bring to their community.