Yahoo Inc. has a new job posting out at Flickr looking to hire a “Senior Community Manager.” I’m not sure if this opening is meant to replace current Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ or if they are simply looking to bring on another person in this department, but it looks like a pretty good job if you are in the social media / photography space.
Responsibilities (from the job posting):
“* Engage and communicate with the Flickr community within the Flickr Help forum and on FlickrBlog to communicate news, help solve problems and ensure that every member has the experience they desire;
* Represent the needs and desires of the Flickr community with the Flickr team;
* Developing and hosting programs and opportunities for Flickr members to meet and collaborate online and in the real world;
* Working with the Customer Care team to navigate the occasional troubled waters (ie, abuse mitigation)”
Minimum requirements include:
“* 3+ years experience working with a team developing web-based communities or social software
* 2+ years experience managing and moderating online communities
* Exemplary communication skills
* Has maintained a weblog or other online personal site
* An understanding of web development and web functionality, to be able to explain processes to user and understand bug reports
* Sound judgment”
Personally I think that it’s good news that Flickr is hiring in this area. I think Flickr’s not done the best job with community management and especially recently has been hitting the delete account / censorship button a little too much / hard. Hopefully whoever they hire for this important position will work towards building a new system that doesn’t make account deletions permanent and works a little harder to ensure that flickr remains as free from censorship as possible.
I have noticed you are becoming very critical of flickr (quiet rightly in my opinion). Someone has to give them a hard time over what they are doing and you are in a great position to do that.
But until recently you always took pains to point out you are CEO of Zooomr. Arch rival of flickr. I was always pleased to see you point that out at the start of your posts. Laying out the playing field as it were.
But you seem to have stopped doing it. To the point the only way most people would know is to either to have been reading your posts for quiet a while, or read to the every end of your profile page.
Why have you stopped doing that? I think its important that while you have a view on what flickr are doing (and you are right, it is wrong), you are not entirely impartial.
Binny, I do disclose my affiliation with Zooomr on my about me page here as well as on my Flickr profile.
That said, especially over the course of the past year or so, I don’t really consider Flickr and Zooomr competitors these days. By way of comparison of the two, my own personal Flickrstream on any given day gets more traffic than the entire site of Zooomr. I don’t think Zooomr really is any sort of serious business competitor to Flickr.
In terms of my own involvement on Zooomr these days it’s less and less. A few years back I was putting more time and energy into Zooomr because I saw it as a viable vehicle to launch a stock photography business. Kristopher (Zooomr’s founder) and I disagreed over the direction of the company and he moved to Japan and started working more on a sort of Twitter like mobile phone service for Japan, which really is what Zooomr has become (much to my own personal disappointment). We went from spending hours together ever day to talking now maybe once a month at best.
I’ve never received any money from Zooomr. I invested some of my own personal money into the site when I thought the direction was different which was probably a mistake.
Even though I suppose I still hold the title of CEO at Zooomr (which was always a two man operation) I’m not really making any decisions about Zooomr at this point. Kristopher is largely running Zooomr how he wants out of Japan.
In any event, my thoughts on Flickr have nothing to do with Zooomr and I think bringing it up over and over again only distracts from the issues at hand. Certainly am not trying to hide anything at all, just don’t see the fact as relevant these days as I felt it was a few years ago given where the company Zooomr is/has gone and my lessening own personal involvement.
Thomas,
Your revelations about Zooomr and your current relationship with the service and Kristopher probably deserve a whole post on your blog. It sounds like you are heading in a different direction then Zooomr, and considering your involvement in the photosharing community at-large that information is/was big news to me.
Well, it looks like I have some stiff competition, but I applied for the job. Thanks for the heads up!
I’ll send over some of my people!
Thanks for that.
As I said, I don’t disagree is what you have said. In fact is has made me question whether I want to be involved with them as a user. Largely from what you have said here, and how they have been trampling on their customers.
As I said I only mentioned it because you seemed to be coming up on the heels of flickr with zooomr, and I often thought you were a viable competitor. I stand corrected.
Thomas,
Any chance you might throw your hat in the ring?
Thx fer da Headz Up on dis one Hawk! My Rezume is Flying there as we Speak!!
I’ve always wanted to “Work” alongside ShheXXXycorin!! ;PPP
actually I arrived here via PeopleBrowsr.com which allows U to View yer Friendz activity on Flickr + FacePOOP + Twitter etc.
very c0ol + powerful interface* ;)) Peace*
I was wondering how long Heather would last. That’s an incredibly thankless job.
I went to Japan to save Zooomr and to built a 20 man team.
Flickr cannot legally do business in Japan, so it’s somewhat of a safe-haven here.
We’d love to do Stock Photography but when it all came down to execution (back in 2007), it was too costly to operate for two guys, so we postponed the operation — investors really didn’t care about stock photography as a main/duel business, even though Thomas and I think it would be really awesome to do for photographers.
Needless to say, Zooomr has a slick mobile site for Japan and we’re working on Zooomr Mark 5 which will be coming out this year on both Web and Mobile — it will be the first new revision completely built by our team.
Outside of that, I can’t say much — but Zooomr is certainly not dead and not looking to die anytime soon 🙂
These are trying times and we’re all trying to do our best. I hope all the best for whatever remains of the core flickr team; they certainly built a great product that Thomas and I certainly very much respect.
kristopher
The job no longer exists! so I guess they got their match 😛