In this episode we welcome Alison Flood, a culture marketing savant, as we like to call her. 

Originally Alison cut her teeth over at Gawker, producing original content & events around pop culture and web trends. She then jumped over to Recognition Media where she produced Internet Week Europe, US, The Webby Awards, and Lovie Awards. Went on to start her own experiential agency, ROOD Studios, where she worked with a variety of clients like Diageo and Cheil. 

Most recently, she’s been VP of Experiential over at BuzzFeed working with a range of clients like Band of America, Petco, Amazon, and more.

In the episode we cover: 

• Why knowing your brand is critical in building communities and targeted experiences for your audience.
• Finding fun ways to create engagement within the community and beyond, operating outside of traditional marketing channels.
• Alison details her approaches for feeling the pulse of culture and how she translates trends into brand stories, with truth and joy as core principles.
• How sometimes you just need to come up with a great idea and hack growth, getting out of your creative comfort zone to build unlikely and informal communities that fulfill the brand purpose.
• IRL experiences pivoting to the new normal and how this translates to online events. What are the better strategies to merge online & offline, and most importantly: can you measure feeling?
• How ROI metrics changed as we move online and how this can evolve in the future.
• What are the toughest things to crack when producing online events and why keeping the human connection in online activations is so important to keep consumers engaged.

*This was recorded before the news about Marilyn Manson was made public

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In this episode we welcome Andrew Losowsky, Head of Coral by Vox, a tech platform that helps improve communities on websites. 

Andrew was Coral’s first hire when it started as a very unusual collab between the New York Times, Washington Post and Mozilla, tasked to figure out how to build software that helps readers engage with journalists, with a focus on sustainable community growth.

We cover: 

• How to empower & enable communities to be supportive of each-other and the journalists, how to look for what audiences genuinely need and what it takes to properly scale communities.
• Using AI in a creative & responsible manner, while still keeping the human connection, learning how strategy & a tactical approach are important to improve your audiences’ lives through software.
• Where are the gaps in design & organizational culture that need to be filled in order to make marginalized communities feel welcome?
• How to measure success in community moderation at scale and understanding how much people value the community.
• What pitfalls to avoid when growing communities as a startup, with actionable advice.

Great reads referenced in the podcast:

• Brand Community by Albert M. Muñiz, Jr. & Thomas O'Guinn
• Building Successful Online Communities by Paul Resnick and Robert E. Kraut

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To pre-order David’s book releasing next week, go here: http://bit.ly/biz-of-belonging

David is a 3x startup founder, an experienced community leader, and has personally advised and trained hundreds of organizations in community strategy over the past decade. 

David is the Founder of CMX, the world's largest and most passionate network for community professionals. Thousands of community professionals come to CMX for support and education in community strategy. The community industry's largest event, CMX Summit, brings together thousands of attendees each year, and 50+ local CMX Connect chapters gather regularly around the world.

In 2019, CMX was acquired by Bevy where David serves as the VP of Community. Bevy is a leading provider of community software, powering live community events and experiences for companies like Slack, Twitch, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Duolingo.

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For our first episode we welcome Andy Krainak, the EVP of Team Gary Vee. Andy is responsible for developing and executing upon the content and strategies that have helped Gary turn into one of the most impactful and famous entrepreneurs in the world, and helped grow VaynerMedia from a startup agency to over 800 employees in 10 years. In the episode we cover: Creative ways to listen to your audience online and use that to inform your strategy, how they’ve structured their team and the core principles of their approach that’s enabled such incredible growth in Gary’s brand, how to come up with good content ideas that will build community amongst your brand’s target audience and much more.

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In this episode we dive into our co-host, Sam Hysell. Sam is the Co-Founder/Partner of NOX where he helps artists, brands and entrepreneurs grow and convert communities online. Prior to NOX, he was a Brand Strategist @ VaynerTalent where he worked with Gary Vee to help super charge community & business growth for around personal brands for industry titans (Tom Bilyeu & Ray Dalio) and musicians like Black Coffee. Prior to that he was a Community Champion at Moves the Needle - a company that helped Fortune 500 companies create a culture of innovation through developing customer empathy, and running experiments to validate different business ideas.

In the episode we discuss:

• Why do you think growing a community is so vital to driving business growth?
• What are some examples of communities you’ve helped build throughout the years?
• What are some of the biggest takeaways in building those communities?
• How has your approach to building communities changed as a result of COVID?
• What are some examples of great communities that you’re a part of?
• What do you think are the most important things to focus on when trying to build impactful communities that can ultimately drive business results?

To learn more about NOX Media, visit wearenox.co

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In this episode speak with Chris Whitman, the Chief Growth Officer. Chris has a great track record building communities... He's currently the Co-Founder/Chief Growth Officer @ CRONY Creative and helps bring brands and consumers together through brand experience. Prior to CRONY he was a sales executive in adtech @ Giant Media and worked with brands to help make their content go viral on the web. He also has experience as an online video strategist for J&J @ Universal McCann and is the former co-founder of underground music collectives We In Cloudz and Replay Ceviche.

In the episode we cover some of the following topics:

• What are you currently working on
• Why do you think building community is so important for driving growth for brands
• How do you think the current climate has impacted community growth and engagement efforts
• In the absence of IRL events, how have you seen brands effectively activate and engage their audiences?
• How have you participated in and helped develop/champion communities over the years
• What are some of the biggest pitfalls you’ve seen in community development?
• What are some of the biggest areas of opportunity you’ve seen in community development?

To learn more about Chris and CRONY, visit cronycreative.com

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