We’ve been talking about how community management is as much of an internal process as it is external for a while now, but I was glad to see some affirmation of our argument from Quy Huy and Andrew Shipilov on the Harvard Business Review blog yesterday:

Firms that lack leaders with social media skills are often tempted to outsource community management to outsiders, such as web development firms or advertising agencies. Unfortunately, this increases the risk of failure. The problem is that when community development is outsourced, the organization doesn’t learn and people inside communicate like they always did, even though the use of social media might have speeded up internal communication and flattened the hierarchies. As a result, the company is often very different from the face it portrays online, which almost always gets discovered.