Question: What’s the collective noun for a group of online community managers?

Answer: 'Swarm'.

On the 13th and 14th September, Hub Melbourne hosted the Swarm Conference, a chance for practitioners and thinkers in the online community management sphere to get together, network and learn.

Some of Australia’s leading experts in the field and other international speakers highlighted the conference, including:

Laurel Papworth, who warned community managers to gear up as the front line warriors in the debate surrounding community management, regulation, representational democracy, brands and sales.

Craig Thomler presented the results of research to help answer the question of whether community management is a profession or task.

Maria Ogneva from Yammer provided her insights into taking a strategic approach to managing communities in order to help organisations thrive in change and be more adaptable to disruption.

Justin Isaf talked about community management on a mind-blowing scale at the Huffington Post, with 70 online communities to manage, 28 full-time staff moderating 10 comments per second, and a sophisticated artificial intelligence system.

A big focus of the conference was online community management as an emerging profession and organisational discipline.

The discipline is at an important stage of evolution as online community managers face questions and challenges around professional identity and recognition, demonstrating strategic value to organisations and the broader community, and having their work shaped by legislation and regulation.

Unsurprisingly given the current public debate, the topic of trolling came up many times. Swarmers shared their experiences of good practices for reading ‘digital body language’ and moderating difficult community members, and talked about ways to deal with sensitive topics.

Together, Swarmers developed insights into navigating the ‘community GPS’ – the health, culture and direction of online communities.

Another theme of discussions at Swarm was the dichotomous relationship between social media versus online communities, which are often confused as one and the same. There was a definite view that organisations need to define different purposes, aims and metrics for these two streams.

The language used by a profession is always an interesting insight into their identity and mindset, and some of the recurring words I noticed were passion, mobilisation, co-creation, social change, networks, collaboration and vision.

The metaphors for community that surfaced during Swarm such as ‘ecosystem’, ‘connective tissue’, and ‘DNA’ had a distinctive biological flavour that captures the visceral and human side to the work of managing online communities.

Check out the Swarm website and blog if you would like to know more. There’s an in-depth review of the conference, a Storify of the conference tweets, speaker profiles, conference papers and more.

And watch out for Swarm 2013.

Justine Hyde is a communications and information management professional with a senior management background in state government and professional services. She has a geeky passion for all things digital, social and community, with a soft spot for libraries. She writes a blog, hub & spoke.

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