Are Community Managers Managing Your Brand?

...or asked another way, are your community managers becoming brand managers.  I was on a call with Mark Yolton today who heads up the SAP Community Networks for SDN and BPX and we were talking about stakeholders for some analytics work, VOC etc.  One of the things Mark mentioned was that after SAP product managers and what they were doing with VOC and forum moderation, brand management is top of mind in terms of community management.  And this goes with what new marketing types have been talking about regarding brand management evolving into tribe management.  I paraphrased Seth Godin in a recent internal memo:

Brand management is evolving to include the notion of customer brand evangelism and the brand "tribe". Again, we start with permission, the understanding that the real asset most organizations can build is the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. As I said around trusted referrals, people really want to connect with one another NOT companies. So the permission is used to build a "tribe", to build a community of people who want to hear from SAP or any other company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about. Everything the organization does is to feed and grow and satisfy the tribe. People will form tribes with or without us. The challenge is to motivate buyers to join our tribe, work on our behalf and make it something better.

If you have a community manager, he or she should be thinking about how to take the brand to the next level and these folks should be working hand in hand with your brand stewards to make it happen.  Heck your community managers are brand stewards... now that would be an interesting job evolution, taking someone out of the branding team and dropping them into a community management role... gonna have to find the opportunity to try that one.