At the Client’s Service, on the Community’s Behalf

With the rise of conversation platforms on the social web, the facilitation of “online communities” has gained strategic importance for companies and brands. The administration of these new promotional communication spaces has led to the emergence of community management. This article analyses how the actors of this emerging function seek recognition for their intermediation work throughout their interaction with their clients, and sheds light on the tension that is central to the quantified measurement of the activity’s results. Community managers’ efforts to determine evaluation conventions that match their own representation of the social web are studied from a pragmatic commercial intermediation perspective, based on an ethnographic study carried out in a communication agency for over two years.