Community Signal

Recently, community pro Danielle Maveal joined Community Signal to discuss her experiences reporting into the product organization at Burb. In this episode, we're getting the opposite perspective from product leader Gitesh Gohel.

Gitesh and Patrick worked together at CNN, where community reported into product. And while the product and community that they were building were short lived, they both speak highly of their time working together. Gitesh describes creating a team atmosphere where each individual's expertise was respected and given room to ladder into organizational goals, giving each person the opportunity to see the impact of their work. Patrick shares how this fostered trust in processes and created great experiences for the community and the brand.

If you're debating a community role that reports into product, this conversation will give you insight into how that can be productive when the team has a strong foundation.

Patrick and Gitesh also discuss:

• Gitesh's first experience managing community pros as a product leader
• Why community pros should be excited about reporting into product
• The successes and promise of CNN+'s Interview Club

Big Quotes

Making room for each individual's expertise within your org (11:35): "One thing which is really important, especially when it comes to collaboration, trusting each other, and being able to lean in on the skill set or experience that everyone brings to the table to accomplish a shared vision, is being able to create space and autonomy for folks to be able to do their jobs. One thing that we did at CNN, specifically working on Interview Club, was create goals which your team had by itself, but also having those goals be integrated into the success of the product itself." –@giteshg

The background of a product professional (12:54): "Most people don't train to be a product manager or to have an expertise in product development. … Most of my training came through experience. It was being part of a team who was building a product and being able to play a small role in it, being able to see what really good successful products look like, being able to see what do really healthy relationships look like across cross-functional teams." –@giteshg

Is product the right org for community? (25:42): "When you make community part of product, [you're saying] that your users are important, that the relationships that you develop with your users are important and positive, that you want to be able to not have a transactional relationship with your users, but actually one where you proactively engage, where you're proactively identifying ways in which you have your users connected." –@giteshg

Why should a community pro be excited about being part of the product org? (26:50): "[When community sits within product], in a way, you're closest to the decision maker, and I think that's important. What you are able to do is influence product strategy and how you think about what you build and who you're building for, and being able to bring the skills and expertise that you have directly into that conversation. [Product is] where you get to do the most fun stuff. It's where you get to say and explore different ideas that you want to try. It's a way in which you get the voice of the user closest to the way in which you think about what you end up doing." –@giteshg

About Gitesh Gohel

Gitesh Gohel has 14 years of experience as a product leader solving user problems in the startup, consumer, media, political, and civic tech space for organizations like CNN, Tumblr, Giphy, Facebook, Jumo, and Obama 08. He is currently the VP of product for Narwhal.

Related Links

• Gitesh Gohel on LinkedIn
• The Pros and Cons of Community Reporting to Product, Danielle Maveal on Community Signal
• Brigade
• Bassey Etim, who has been on multiple episodes of Community Signal

Transcript

• View transcript on our website

Your Thoughts

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

If you're wondering how you can more actively foster safety and belonging for LGBTQ+ folks in your online community, there's precedent to learn and borrow from. In this episode of Community Signal, we're joined by Samantha "Venia" Logan, the CEO and founder of Socially Constructed. Venia shares lessons from her decade of experience building community for LGBTQ+ individuals, which started when she began sharing her transition journey on YouTube.

Patrick and Venia discuss tools, policies, and practices that can help build queer friendly spaces over time. For example, how easy is it for someone to edit their profile information within your online community? What specific policies do you have in place to protect LGTBQ+ people? And a big one – how are others in your organization (outside of the community team) contributing to diversity and inclusion?

At this point you might be asking, "how do I measure or communicate progress?" To this we ask, what are community-based outcomes that indicate someone feels safe contributing and like they belong? As Venia explains (15:23): "As a person feels more and more comfortable self-disclosing, they're going to use more organic language, they're going to talk a lot more, their rate of inclusion is going to increase, but so will the length of their posts." Work with your community to figure out which behaviors relate to their sense of inclusion and measure those over time.

Patrick and Venia also discuss:

• Making pronouns part of everyday conversations
• Twitter's policies and handling of a recent high-profile deadnaming case
• Being intentional about your metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

Big Quotes

Make space for everyone to share their pronouns in everyday conversation (08:48): "Pronouns are not just a segment that you're going to put on your profile. … At every meeting, [if] you invite people to share their pronouns – cis, trans, doesn't matter – it essentially says, pervasively speaking, this is a queer-friendly, queer-safe space. … Oftentimes, you want to implement these rules so that you're not looking for explicit consent, you're looking for implicit acceptance." –@SamanthaVenia

Focus on tracking the behaviors that matter most to your community (14:23): "[With behavioral metrics], we need to return to a notion of simplicity, where we are recording things that people actually want us to listen to. When people engage in our online communities, they are leaving behind comments, behaviors, artifacts of conversation, and they want us to pay attention to those things, so why are we recording every single move they make in a community and not recording anything about the nature of the comment they left?" –@SamanthaVenia

Perfectly accurate data reporting does not exist, instead, try replicating your results (18:06): "Instead of worrying about gross amounts of accuracy in your data … [measure] it again. The exact same thing that you did, in a second spot, in a second scope, just do it again, and again, and again. Once you repeat the same process and you have four corollary actions that are all telling you the same thing and one that's different, what is the resolution of your action? It just skyrocketed without you ever having to be accurate. Social science is not about causation, it's about enough correlation to infer causation." –@SamanthaVenia

Keep spaces safe by upholding the commitment to exclusivity (20:50): "Don't expand what's working for a safe space because keeping an exclusive space is what made that place safe. Instead, go over to the other place, reproduce your success, diversify it. The phrase that I use is 'Don't expand, diversify.' Exclusivity breeds inclusivity." –@SamanthaVenia

If you're creating a space for everyone, you're creating a space for no one (23:56): "When you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one, and you end up having no one because no one feels particularly special, or catered to, or welcome in those spaces." –@patrickokeefe

Focus on your role of setting precedent, building momentum (24:59): "I will boil down any community management job from architect, coordinator, moderator, facilitator… it doesn't matter what you do in community. Your job is to set precedent, to do a thing, then build momentum for that thing until the community is doing it on its own." –@SamanthaVenia

About Samantha "Venia" Logan

In 2010, Samantha "Venia" Logan transitioned from male to female and shared her entire 10-year journey on YouTube. Over the next decade, that decision snowballed into an active and healthy career in community management, diversity, education, and measurement in anonymous community health. In 2012, Venia founded RESCQU.NET, a nonprofit organization that simultaneously marketed to an invisible audience and catered to their anonymity. In 2017, she graduated with a degree focused on community management and became a full-stack marketer at DigitalMarketer.

For the past five years, Venia has built quantitative and qualitative data measurement tools for brand communities online. Through SociallyConstructed.Online, she is committed to helping businesses build robust, self-sustainable communities.

Related Links

• Samantha "Venia" Logan on LinkedIn
• Venia on YouTube
• Venia on Twitter
• RESCQU.NET
• SociallyConstructed.Online
• "3 Takeaways From a Decade Building Queer Community"
• 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer
• Chris Mercer
• Twitter's hateful conduct policy
• Socially Constructed's Discord and YouTube channel

Transcript

• View transcript on our website

Your Thoughts

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Which team or leader does your community organization report into? And which would you like it to? Community teams can be successful as independent pillars or as part of other verticals, like product, ops, or marketing. In this episode of Community Signal, Danielle Maveal, the CCO (chief community officer) at Burb, shares how community professionals can be successful within a team's product organization.

All reporting structures have their pros and cons, but product and community share the job of "deeply understand[ing] what the user wants and what their motivations are, and how to get them from point A to point B (2:17)." With a shared mandate, community and product teams that effectively partner can expand each other's influence and success.

No matter what team you report into, creating a foundation in which all teams have respect for each other's knowledge, experience, and processes is critical to every team, the business, and the community itself. Tune in to hear how Patrick and Danielle have fostered product relationships at Burb, CNN, Lyft, and more.

Danielle and Patrick also discuss:

• The value that community pros can bring to product teams
• Learning and leveraging product's processes
• How the OKR (objectives and key results) goal structure can be adapted by community pros

Big Quotes

Community can be very repetitive (7:37): "[Product] structures don't always work for a community team. Sometimes product teams are very much into launching features … and then feature usage. Community is a lot of repetitive tasks or maintenance. These things are important. It's hard to fit under almost any team actually because we do have this kind of work where mostly, especially in tech, everyone's trying to launch something and get awesome feedback on it. That's not always the case in community." –@daniellexo

Product and community can partner to expand each org's influence and success (18:16): "Having community in your product team is an opportunity for product leaders to increase their mandate and increase their influence. It's not just one way. It's not just community influencing product. It's increasing the influence of product within the wider org, too." –@patrickokeefe

Approaching your product team with community feedback (22:35): "It's really important to bring problems. Bring as much data as you can, make partners with other teams who are also getting this feedback and data. … Have as much support as you can around this problem. You can even tell stories from the community about this problem, but just don't barge in with the solution that the community wants because it's never going to get people on your side. It's not going to motivate them to want to work on that project." –@daniellexo

Maintain a bird's eye view of issues impacting your community (25:14): "Fires are burning. People are fighting. People are upset. … There's a little community [forming] that's making this thing look like an emergency, and it's not always an emergency. [It's] really important to have partnerships with other teams; data science, research, customer service, and make sure you have a really bird's eye view of a story before you go to product or engineering, trust and safety, or legal with your requests." –@daniellexo

Being on the defensive for product enhancements can rob you of creative opportunities (31:38): "When you're spending a lot of your energy, time, and mind thinking up all [the counterpoints to expected criticisms,] the defensive positions, and backing up everything you say, there's little room to come to the table with someone and actually dream up something better. Usually, you're just defending the bare minimum. If you can build that trust, and if you have a team that will trust you and work together to build that trust, you can use that time to be creative. Go leaps forward versus, 'Ugh, we just need to maintain the status quo, so I need to fight for this one little thing.'" –@daniellexo

Being a community person on a product team can make you better (32:16): "Ultimately, I think that being on a product team can make, with some exceptions, you a better community person, and a broader community person." –@patrickokeefe

About Danielle Maveal

Danielle Maveal is a serial founding team member. She's been building community at Etsy, Airbnb, and Lyft for 15 years. She's the chief community officer at Burb, a messaging, automation, and CRM toolset for community builders. Danielle also coaches community professionals and runs multiple support groups for community builders.

Related Links

• Danielle Maveal on Twitter
• Danielle Maveal on LinkedIn
• Burb
• Danielle's past appearance on Community Signal

Transcript

• View transcript on our website

Your Thoughts

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Do you manage an international community? How do you thoughtfully foster community across different continents, languages, and norms? Mercedes Oppon-Kusi, the community manager for Europe for the International Legal Technology Association, is working to do just that for their community of technology pros working at law firms.

With ILTA originating in the U.S., Mercedes shares the differences in behaviors between U.S. and Europe-based community members, and how she has approached expanding the European chapter to include more countries. Her strategy comes back to advice that's helpful no matter what stage your community is at: Overcome your biases as a community professional. Take time to learn the interests and challenges that impact your community members and scale thoughtfully.

As Mercedes puts it, "[It's] about building that practical knowledge of the market, and then figuring out where to go first."

Plus:

• How to help community members break through the "I don't have enough time" barrier
• Why U.S. members are more engaged than their European counterparts
• In-person events that help members feel bought-in to the ILTA community

Big Quotes

How ILTA community members help each other grow (6:45): "You have the people that have been there and done it, you have people that are looking to branch into it, and you have the people that want to grow in it. That's what our communities do. They help our members learn how to become better than they are." –@M4Mercedes

Tech pros at U.S. law firms are more likely to share experiences (7:38): "[With] our membership pool in the U.S., you will not struggle to get a big firm to share. They're proud of it. They're like, 'We've done this so well because we're amazing, and this is how we did it,' but in the UK, they're decidedly more reserved. It's very hard to get the big firms to share about anything. I don't know what it is, but it does seem like people are nervous because they do not want to be seen as bragging, so it differs according to the geographies. It's not really by firm size." –@M4Mercedes

Localizing matters to your community members (19:07): "A lot of our material has the word attorney, which doesn't exist in the UK. We have solicitors and barristers. … There are little tweaks around the material and our language that we've had to do in order to localize what we're providing to [the UK] region. … It's a big deal to people." –@M4Mercedes

Growing the ILTA community and reaching new members (24:25): "The challenge is finding your first [community members] that are going to be your champions. Once you have that, they're usually a good insight into the networks and what topics exist, and they're really good at introducing you to other individuals that might have similar interests." –@M4Mercedes

About Mercedes Oppon-Kusi

Mercedes Oppon-Kusi is the community manager for Europe for the International Legal Technology Association, a community for technology pros working at law firms.

Related Links

• Mercedes Oppon-Kusi on LinkedIn
• International Legal Technology Association (ILTA)
• The Chatham House Rule

Transcript

• View transcript on our website

Your Thoughts

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

WordPress, the popular open source CMS, powers a reported 43%+ of the web, including this site. It is backed by a global community of contributors who volunteer their time in all sorts of ways, from code to documentation to training. But did you know that many of the project's biggest contributors are sponsored by their employer to provide that time?

As we discussed with Brad Williams of WebDevStudios, the success of WordPress has created an economy around the software, growing and launching many businesses that serve the needs of its users, from personal blogs to major corporations. And one of the way those companies give back is through these sponsorships.

No company is more tied to WordPress than Automattic, the owners of WordPress.com, which was founded by the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg. Hugh Lashbrooke is the head of community education at Automattic, which sponsors him for 40 hours a week, primarily to contribute to WordPress' training team.

Hugh joins us on this episode to give us an inside look at these sponsorship arrangements and how they influence WordPress team dynamics. Plus:

• What happens when a company stops sponsoring an employee to contribute to WordPress?
• The flexibility you need to work with volunteers on such a massive project
• "Public by default" as a standard of work

Our Podcast is Made Possible By…

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

Big Quotes

How sponsored contributors bolstered WordPress' training team (6:49): "[After COVID struck, the community team] realized that people weren't getting the training they normally get at events. … It started off as an informal conversation with the existing training team, which wasn't huge in terms of numbers. … We came together and now, we have this platform called Learn WordPress, which is where all of this content is housed. The idea for Learn WordPress existed in the training team before but because they were a small team … they didn't have the resources to really get that going like they wanted. When we came on board, and because we are sponsored volunteers and we have more time and access to more resources, we were able to help them do more and now, we're working alongside them very closely to make the platform better." –@hlashbrooke

Automattic can't track the financial impact of contributors they sponsor (21:16): "As WordPress improves, and becomes more popular, that helps Automattic improve profits and revenue. In our division, we don't track financial ROI at all. We don't have anything to track in that sense, so we don't. But our work in the open source project does benefit Automattic financially. … As people get better with WordPress and WordPress becomes more popular, easier to use, and more well-known, Automattic's business grows." –@hlashbrooke

COVID led to volunteer drop-off (27:18): "COVID had a big impact on [volunteers dropping off]. The lockdown, everyone being at home, and just the general stress of what's going on in the world. As we got to mid-to-late 2020, and then going all through 2021 and even now, a big dip in contributors. People weren't as committed as they were before. People who said they would be committed, they just slowly disappeared. There was just a trend that we saw, and it was very clearly because of the response to everything going on and the world being so stressful." –@hlashbrooke

Allowing people to weigh-in can slow things down, but increase long-term engagement (35:40): "If you make a decision about how we're going to lay out the homepage of something, for example, if we say, 'This is what we do' and we do it, then people look at it like, 'Oh, okay.' If you've had 15 people in the community contribute their voice to it and give their input on it, they'll be more interested, and they might be more interested in contributing further because they're like, 'Oh, my voice actually matters, so I want to contribute more.' Sure, it makes things take longer, but it means they generally stick around for longer because they can see the impact and the effect of their input." –@hlashbrooke

About Hugh Lashbrooke

Hugh Lashbrooke is a long-time community builder, currently serving as head of community education for the WordPress open source project, sponsored by Automattic. He leads a team that is building and managing an education program for the WordPress community.

Related Links

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Hugh's website
• Automattic, where Hugh is head of community education, sponsored to spend 40 hours per week contributing to WordPress
• Brad Williams of WebDevStudios on Community Signal
• Learn WordPress, an educational resource that Hugh's team works on
• A Dedicated Volunteer Program for the Training Team by Hugh, covering the "faculty program" idea
• Exploring WordPress Certifications by Hugh
• Hugh on Twitter

Transcript

• View transcript on our website

Your Thoughts

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

As the former director of community for HuffPost, where he led the management of an active, massive comment section, Tim McDonald has had a unique vantage point to the mass closure of news media comment sections. Patrick and Tim go in depth on that topic on this episode.

Toward the end, Tim shares what he believes will be his greatest community ROI story: He has stage IV colon cancer and is in need of a liver donor and could get a lot closer with your help. Please visit TimsLiver.com for more info.

Plus:

• Why Tim believes he doesn't make a good soccer referee – or content moderator
• Keeping track of your community wins – both qualitative and quantitative
• Leveraging relationships with influential community members to get your message across, rather than being the face of the community yourself

Our Podcast is Made Possible By…

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

Big Quotes

You can't make everyone happy in moderation (10:56): "I would hate it when there was a close call [as a soccer referee] because I knew in my head what the call was but I knew if I looked at it objectively from one team's viewpoint and from the other team's viewpoint, half were going to be happy with me, half were going to be upset with me, and I wanted to make everybody happy. You can't do that in comment moderation, and you can't do that being a referee." –@tamcdonald

Allowing influential members to do the talking (11:34): "I didn't need to get into the [HuffPost] community and be the face of the community. I could just have relationships with about a dozen of our community members who were very well respected and let them do the talking. But in exchange, I would take phone calls from them at home, at night, on the weekends. I would listen to them, I would understand what they were going through, but I would also be able to convey what, from a company standpoint, we were trying to achieve. When I did that, they started understanding." –@tamcdonald

If we aren't going to invest in it, why spend so much effort? (19:08): "My very last day [at HuffPost was] when we pushed the button and [switched to Facebook Comments]. Everybody looked at me like I was crazy, but I just told everybody, 'I've come up with solutions. I've come up with options. Nobody wants to pay for this. If we can't invest in it, and we're not willing to invest in it, and we're not going to generate any revenue off of it, why are we supporting it?' That was the end of it. Obviously, they still had comments. They still do have comments, but it's nothing to what it was back when I was at HuffPost." –@tamcdonald

Document your community wins (22:53): "The subscriber growth of The New York Times is often cited … by media folks and executives as an example of the D2C model, but I think people would do well to remember that The New York Times never closed their comments. … People want that success of, 'Look at all the people they have paying for news,' but they don't necessarily want to do that work that is moderating comments for 20 years to build a section that is befitting of The New York Times." –@patrickokeefe

Document your community wins (30:02): "We say [document your wins], but we don't necessarily always talk about the process through which we capture that, and so it fails. … If it's easy and it's comprehensive, then you're going to do it. Whereas if it's manual and it's slow, not only are you not going to do it, but when you don't do it, you're going to not be able to access that information as easily." –@patrickokeefe

Generous giving is the greatest community ROI (34:16): "When I find [a liver] donor through [the communities] I've built up over the years, that is going to be the greatest ROI because I don't think there's a price that we can put on our lives, and I don't think there's a price that we can put on the amount of giving that that would take from another human being." –@tamcdonald

About Tim McDonald

Tim McDonald is the community account manager for HomeRoom.club. He is the former director of community at HuffPost, founder of My Community Manager, and director of communications for Social Media Club Chicago. Tim works with organizations and individuals who are stuck to get them unstuck. He helps people connect with their voice and stories. He is also a speaker and facilitates workshops.

Recognizing how fear held him back, he has changed his relationship with fear and has used it to get unstuck and end a 17-year marriage, meet his life partner, move to a new city, twice, leave a toxic job, and currently looks at having stage IV metastasized colon cancer as a gift. Tim is in search of a liver donor with surgery planned around September 2022. If you think this could be you, please visit TimsLiver.com for more info.

Related Links

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Tim McDonald on Twitter
• Visit TimsLiver.com to help Tim find a liver donor
• HomeRoom.club
• My Community Manager
• Social Media Club
• Bassey Etim, many time guest on Community Signal
• When You Need Community To Save Your Life: The Story of Tim McDonald, by listener and Patreon supporter Jenny Weigle

Transcript

• View transcript on our website

Your Thoughts

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

What are the reasons why you would voluntarily end the interview process for a community role? If you give it some thought, you'll probably come up with some!

Ryan Arsenault and Patrick share real stories from their careers, giving the reasons why they decided against continuing to interview with certain companies, including some you've heard of.

This leads to a conversation on the community opportunists, and how Web3 and NFT projects often fit into this category. What does it mean for your career if a rug pull happens on your NFT project? What responsibility do community industry players have in hyping these projects? After they remove the .eth from their handle, who is left holding the bag?

Patrick and Ryan also discuss:

• The simple question Patrick asks recruiters to understand if what they are building is a community
• Using "community" as a manipulation tactic
• Why Web3 hype feels different from Web2 hype

Our Podcast is Made Possible By…

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

Big Quotes

A case where Ryan ended the interview for a community role (1:39): "[I have become] more experienced in identifying the red flags that might not set me up for success in [a community] role. … In one interview, the platform was purchased already. No community goals in mind. No strategy. How do you know if the platform is even going to meet your needs if you don't know what you need the community for yet?" –@RyanArsenault

Does the community talk to each other? (10:48): "I got to talking with the [recruiter for a community role], and I realized something. I said, 'Let me stop you for a second. These people that are in this community, do they talk to one another?' She said, 'No.' I said, 'Oh okay, I understand. I have to say I don't think I'm right for this.' … That's just a different role from what I do." –@patrickokeefe

Does buying an NFT make it a community? (12:35): "To me, the concept of buying an NFT, and then you're part of a Discord community, doesn't make it a community. A community's built on trust and moderation." –@RyanArsenault

Using "community" to keep people from leaving an NFT project (16:51): "When there's a rug pull … whatever they were thinking they would get out of this NFT project, it's gone now, or there's almost no chance. To use the term 'community' as a way to try to make people feel better or to ensure they stay bought in with that project and don't sell … it feels incredibly manipulative. … 'We're part of this community, we're all in this together, hold on for dear life, we're all going to make it,' all that stuff. It's all just social manipulation that's been going on forever." –@patrickokeefe

About Ryan Arsenault

Ryan Arsenault has been fascinated by the power of community as a member of online forums for two decades. He has managed communities for over 7 years, building strategy and scaling super user and advocacy programs, while establishing trust and lasting relationships. He has worked in pre- and post-IPO companies, and won a 2018 TheCR Connect Award for Best Recognition + Reward Program (for Mimecast community).

Related Links

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Ryan Arsenault on Twitter
• Intuit's TurboTax, where Ryan is a contact community manager
• "I worked at Vistaprint – maybe you've heard of them?," via Patrick
• Jacob Silverman on Community Signal

Transcript

• View transcript on our website

Your Thoughts

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Is speaking one-on-one with your community members part of your community strategy? For Tosin Abari, when building paid professional communities, it's an integral part. His phone calls with community members provide an opportunity to reset the tone and remind each member of what they can learn, share, and achieve with their fellow community members.

Through this work, Tosin often finds that these one-on-one conversations with community members translate into their first forum post, or later down the line, becoming a community ambassador. What personal touches help you form deeper connections with your community members?

Where'd this strategy come from? Tosin has also worked as a director of player development Vanderbilt University's football team. He explains how his work building relationships with students and their parents, helping them start off on this new chapter of their lives, prepared him for work in community management.

Patrick and Tosin also discuss:

• Tosin's background in football
• Why Tosin started taking phone calls with members without mentioning it to Patrick, his manager at the time
• Where we focus our efforts in a world without vanity metrics

Our Podcast is Made Possible By…

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

Big Quotes

Helping members see the potential in the community (10:22): "There's so many people out there that have the same struggles that you do, or maybe something that you've conquered, and you have expertise that you can share with someone else. … [Each community member has] an opportunity to make a difference, or have someone else make a difference in their lives. They can make something beautiful happen." -Tosin Abari

Having phone calls with members (12:35): "Most places I've been at, they're like, 'No, we don't have time [for phone calls with members].' … We have X amount of members, we just got to do what we got to do through email orientation, and they'll figure it out. That always gnawed at me a little bit, because these people are paying X amount of dollars for a membership, and we want to give them the best experience of their life. … [These one-on-one calls can help] other people feel like they're not isolated, that they're in a place that holds space for them." -Tosin Abari

Giving each member the space to feel heard (18:06): "I don't know how many times I've gotten nasty emails [and] I'm like, 'Oh my God, this is going to be a very contentious call.' I let them talk [and] by the end of the conversation, they're like, 'Thank you for having this call with me. You calmed me down, and I feel so much better.' It was just because they wanted to be heard." -Tosin Abari

Owning your work with your manager (25:50): "Never let [your manager] be surprised by bad news. If there is bad news, [they] should hear it from you first, before anyone else. Don't let [them] be surprised, because if [they are] surprised, it's going to make matters worse. … You should be the person who delivers the message." –@patrickokeefe

About Tosin Abari

Tosin Abari (he/him/his) is a former collegiate football administrator turned motivated community manager and social media aficionado. With over 10 years of experience in community management and memberships, as well as front-end and back-end social media management, Tosin is extremely passionate in bringing people together with the goal of fostering authentic community.

Related Links

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Tosin Abari on LinkedIn
• Photos of Patrick's son, Patrick James
• Kindred

Transcript

• View transcript on our website

Your Thoughts

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Which community leaders helped you grow as a professional? Who in the industry do you study from or reference? On the last episode of Community Signal, our guest Mohamed Mohammed mentioned how his former manager, Joe Pishgar, helped him feel welcome in the industry. "You belong here" were Joe's encouraging words to Mohamed, and this phrase signifies an ethos that Joe brings to his role as chief community officer for VerticalScope.

Managing an organization of 27 full-time community pros, 30 contracted admins, and over 10,000 volunteer moderators across 1,200 sites, Joe understands the necessity of scale and delegation, but also realizes that delegating is not always as simple as it sounds. "There's competing thoughts in your head that surround the force of delegating. On the one hand, you don't have enough time to do it all. The time you spend in operational or in tactical, you're not spending at the strategic, and no one else is going to spend time at the strategic level." (13:18) Joe also explains that by delegating and creating space, we give our team members the opportunity to grow and experience community management for themselves.

How have leaders made space for you to grow as a community professional and how can you create that space for others?

Joe and Patrick also discuss:

• The difference between having community volunteers and exploiting them
• The ebb and flow of hiring booms in the community industry
• Unifying strategy in an organization with multiple stakeholders and individual contributors

Our Podcast is Made Possible By…

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

Big Quotes

Giving your team the space to grow (03:48): "Give [your team] as much space as possible within the quantity of trust that you can hand them, let them complete those tasks, learn the discipline, and develop in the discipline so that they develop that confidence. It comes with getting it right, having space to get it right, but also making sure that you as supervisor [are] around for when they bump into those really tricky questions." –@Pishgar

Autonomy will help newer recruits to develop their confidence as community managers (14:45): "If your name, clout, expertise, background, and experience is required for every single decision, you're in trouble. Then you've got a bunch of people who are basically your eyes and ears out there who aren't really taking things off of your plate as much as they need to be or as much as you need them to. … Sometimes you have to go hands-off, even if it means embracing that fear that it's not going to get done 100% to your spec." –@Pishgar

What drives your sense of fulfillment as a community manager? (17:15): "When I know that communities under my wing are growing, that I'm helping to make the world a better place, one individual forum member at a time, because they got an answer to their question, or they felt like they belonged, or there was something that they were shopping for that they got word of mouth on through a post that they found on one of our forums and they were only able to do that because the place was kept civil, that to me is fulfilling. That is my life work." –@Pishgar

About Joe Pishgar

Joe Pishgar joined VerticalScope as its chief community officer in 2020. Joe is an 18+ year veteran of online community management. Prior to joining VerticalScope, he served as vice president Global Communities at Future plc, where he launched communities for PC Gamer, Space.com, Live Science, What Hi-Fi, and more. Previously, he served as director of community for Purch Inc., where he built the communities for Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, and AnandTech.

Related Links

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Joe Pishgar on Twitter
• Joe Pishgar on LinkedIn
• Joe Pishgar's website
• VerticalScope
• Mohamed Mohammed on Community Signal
• Joe King on Community Signal
• Joe and Patrick shoutout the following community professionals: Rebecca Newton, Linda Carlson, Sanya Weathers, Valerie Massey, Troy Hewitt, and Gail Ann Williams
• Rebecca Newton on Community Signal
• Gail Ann Williams on Community Signal

Transcript

• View transcript on our website

Your Thoughts

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

This conversation with Mohamed Mohammed, a community manager and a PhD student studying deepfakes, is timely. Just last week, a deepfake emerged attempting to spread misinformation that the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, was announcing surrender to Russia's invasion. In that situation, preparation and rapid response helped minimize the spread of misinformation.

So, what's your community strategy against deepfakes? Mohamed recommends starting with learning from the information and experts in our field. He also shares an important reminder: As community professionals, while we may want to prevent all harms from happening, we simply can't. However, we can minimize the harm that's caused, and we can educate our community members to identify and flag suspicious behaviors. Just as many platforms adjusted their community guidelines and enforcement rubrics to prevent the spread of misinformation, deepfakes represent a new area for us to learn about and help our communities adapt.

Mohamed and Patrick also discuss:

• Why science denial is banned in the Space.com community
• What good governance on deepfakes might look like
• Mohamed's PhD on deepfakes

Our Podcast is Made Possible By…

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

Big Quotes

Ground your moderation in your guidelines (6:13): "There was no way to not iterate our [community] policies when the world shut down because of a global pandemic, when flat Earth or conspiracy theories found their way to the forums. When these things happen, you have to make changes. Otherwise … we look shadowy. We start banning content or removing forum posts simply because we think it's a bad thing. Even if everyone agrees with us, the perception is so important. The perception that we're consistent within the scope of our guidelines is massive to being able to, for lack of a better term, keep the peace." –@MMohammed_Comms

If your community has the same problems as a big social media platform, why should people stick around? (9:24): "If you're not consistent [in your community moderation,] and if you happen to have the same problems as bigger platforms, then what's the difference? Why am I investing all of this time as a user into this forum of yours when all of my efforts are being met with inconsistent approaches to keeping the place safe?" –@MMohammed_Comms

Antagonizing people to engage (11:30): "I don't think it's a coincidence that [the antagonistic content we discourage as forum managers] is the same thing a brand whose KPI is engagement on Twitter will post just to get engagement and to antagonize someone into giving the rapid-fire answers that get people. Nothing brings engagement on a place and an echo chamber quite like a divisive question. We're trying to be the opposite." –@MMohammed_Comms

In the words of Sam Gregory, "Prepare, don't panic" (40:48): "Don't get scared about this apocalyptic vision of deep fakes … [just] read as much as you can about them. I know it's going to sound scary, but the more you understand them, the more you get comfortable with the fact that tools are advancing." –@MMohammed_Comms

Shoutout to the supportive managers out there (46:01): "Having a [supportive] manager is to me the difference between having this long career that can be fulfilling and rewarding and can help you feel better about yourself versus something where you have to build this foundation all by yourself." –@MMohammed_Comms

About Mohamed Mohammed

Mohamed Mohammed is a community manager at Future Plc, managing forums for brands such as PC Gamer and Space.com. He is also a PhD candidate at the QUEX Institute, researching the platform governance of deepfakes.

Related Links

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Mohamed Mohammed on LinkedIn
• Mohamed Mohammed on Twitter
• A Zelensky Deepfake Was Quickly Defeated. The Next One Might Not Be, via WIRED
• Future PLC
• PC Gamer
• Space.com
• QUEX Institute
• Amanda Petersen on Community Signal
• Truepic
• Communications Decency Act
• Sam Gregory of the WITNESS Media Lab
• Joe Pishgar

Transcript

• View transcript on our website

Your Thoughts

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.