Today's beer
Chris had Paulaner Hefe Weisen https://www.paulaner.com/us/our-products/hefe-weizen/
Michael had Lakewood Lager Vienna Style  https://lakewoodbrewing.com/year-round/

• Happy #CMAD
• Hear how we spent our holiday season.  Some traveled, while others ate
• What is self-care and listen to our perspectives
• Learn how we manage our stress
• Chris seeks others to help him broaden his roadmap view to destress
• Michael digs into research to understand to destress
• Perhaps community managers need self-care since we tend to be lone wolves
• Don't be afraid to say no
• Is self-care needed because out new work normal is a smaller workload that added responsibilities stress workers?  Hear us opine. 

This episode's beer was from Golden Opportunity from Peticolas Brewery 

1. What is an open source community
2. How did beagleboard.org start
3. How important was "guerilla marketing" for the site's release 
4. What made the beagleboard so successful?
5. The one thing you should ask yourself when you are asked to start an open source community

This episode starts with how a community manager can kick start content using one's subject matter experts.  We discuss:

• The idea of " tribal knowledge"
• How to get employees excited to generate original content
• How original knowledge articles can drive content and interaction

We then go into a Case Study of how we built a social brand in the German Market with "Elektrohelden" .

• How one's company brand can help or hurt your community's success
• How knowing one's customers will make your community successful
• Finally, we discuss how all of these activities are the result of the efforts of a community manager.  When kickstarting a community, you are the "jack-of-all-trades"

• Chris Detzel spends some time asking Michael Sandoval how 
• Case Study on to drive new content when kickstarting a new B2B community.
  • Develop industry leading content (wiki content)
  • Sales support answers 
  • SEO trends to drive new insights
• How we used new content to drive traffic to the eCommerce sites
• How using personal customer stories on the community helped drive excitement internally.

More like show questions answered:

What is a community manager?  Is it more than what the word states?
How does an online community help a customer through the online experience? 
How can an online community lead a customer through the purchase cycle?  
What is a community manager's career path?

Lastly, Chris then gives me, Michael Sandoval, some Chris pep talk career advise.  It's good for everyone to hear.  I will give you a hint.  It involves running and confidence.  Listen in and find out.  

As mentioned, you may always DM or connect with us on LinkedIn.  The details are in the About Us Page.

Highlight discussions from this week's episode:

• Where does one go to find help with a problems arises in your community
• The importance of finding mentor(s) in the community management space
• Why you should build your professional network of community managers.
• The importance of learning from your peers.

Sponsored, by no one, yet, but we are open to sponsors. Beer Sponsors would be amazing! 🍺🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻

• For our first episode, we will start with Chris Detzel who will talk through his work so far in getting Imperva's new customer community through launch.  
• We will also talk about the importance of customer engagement and its automation
• A mini case study on how Chris and I solved our customer engagement problem whilst at Rexel 
• Note: The interruption you hear about mid way through the podcast was a public radio canvaser who kindly reminded me that I have yet to renew my membership.  I of course did with the gentleman.  

Transcript:

00:03
welcome to our inaugural podcast of
00:05
peers over beers
00:06
your hosts michael sandoval me and chris
00:09
detzel
00:11
in our inaugural podcast we'll start off
00:13
with chris
00:14
chris is going to talk us through a
00:15
little bit about his new community over
00:17
at imperva
00:18
we're also going to discuss this idea of
00:19
the importance of engagement automation
00:21
in the community
00:22
engagement overall a little mini case
00:25
study of our
00:26
effort that we did at rexell with
00:28
regards to
00:29
engagement automation and you're gonna
00:32
hear an interruption somewhere about
00:34
halfway
00:35
that was the public radio canvasser
00:37
coming to my house
00:38
apparently i forgot them this past year
00:40
don't worry
00:41
yes i gave all coming up
00:45
next
00:46
[Music]
00:50
so i mean i just want to make sure i got
00:52
the name of the beer correct
00:54
of yours yeah it's called i think it was
00:58
number 21.
00:59
oh yeah beers over or piers over beers
01:03
got it it's from lewisville
01:05
or louisville i was thinking that too
01:07
that's why i brought a beer just i was
01:08
like we got to talk about
01:09
yeah it's called uh
01:13
old town brew house double vision
01:18
okay so we're recording um
01:22
my name is michael sandoval and i'm
01:24
chris dettel
01:26
and i'm chris detzel excellent oh go
01:29
ahead and have a seat if you do
01:30
is it better standing i like to stand
01:32
but yeah it's fine no no i got it
01:33
that's all right because i can do uh i
01:35
don't know let's lift it higher
01:37
i don't know do you guys
01:41
um so once again my name is michael
01:43
sandoval and i'm chris stetson well
01:45
hello chris how are you doing i'm good
01:46
how about you i'm doing good
01:49
so this uh this is a very interesting uh
01:52
point in how we got some discussion we
01:54
were just having a beer and we thought
01:55
hey we should probably record our
01:56
conversations because
01:58
they're pretty they're pretty good yeah
02:00
we're talking about a lot of cool stuff
02:02
yeah uh and mostly on the community side
02:05
and so we thought well hey how about
02:07
piers over a beer
02:09
wouldn't that be kind of fun so we are
02:10
having a beer and this one is that's why
02:12
i would look it up
02:13
old town brew house from louisville
02:16
texas an ipa
02:17
pretty good eh it's it's excellent
02:20
cheers
02:24
so with that we were already having the
02:26
discussion uh before we started
02:28
recording
02:29
but chris was telling me so well
02:30
actually i'll let you chris tell me
02:32
what are you doing yeah um
02:36
so i'm building or have built an
02:39
online community for um for a
02:43
cyber security software company called
02:45
imperva
02:47
so what why did they one
02:51
yeah i think that um it's a good
02:54
question
02:55
the biggest reason is to kind of think
02:56
about a few things
02:58
um is retention
03:02
so and then also case deflection
03:05
so we had a big issue with support um
03:08
not being able to answer
03:09
cases in a timely manner so you know
03:12
the thought was well if we can answer
03:15
some of those easier
03:16
questions online and have customers
03:19
really answer some of those you know and
03:21
share their
03:22
um uh share their experiences with the
03:26
products
03:27
then what better so i think that was
03:29
kind of the initial thought
03:31
right you had come on i mean they had
03:33
already made that decision right that
03:34
they wanted to do something
03:37
community-ish um
03:40
well if you want another real story is
03:42
or the big story is
03:43
that so yes and no um the story i got
03:47
was
03:48
so about a year ago i talked to somebody
03:50
that i knew
03:51
um and uh she was like hey look there's
03:54
this job description that
03:56
that needed the community and we needed
03:57
a community manager and i thought of you
03:59
and so um
04:02
they just started a customer success
04:04
organization
04:05
um the company's been around since 2002
04:08
i believe
04:09
and so they're like well we also need a
04:12
community manager and
04:13
she she went after it and they thought
04:14
of you specifically
04:16
um one person did yeah we'll look at you
04:18
specifically
04:20
so yeah i know it was a nice gesture and
04:24
so they
04:26
um thought you know
04:28
when i think of customer success i think
04:30
of retention and i also think of
04:32
case deflection so how do we help our
04:34
customers get the answers that they need
04:36
quickly and
04:37
community kind of came to their mind
04:41
and so i really started to develop the
04:42
strategy roadmap et cetera and
04:44
yeah so they you said they had a problem
04:47
with it already
04:48
obviously something was getting to the
04:50
top echelon of the company saying
04:52
you're having a customer service problem
04:53
yeah a retention problem
04:55
because also the customers are bolting
04:57
that's right uh interesting
04:59
and uh and so you came in and thought oh
05:02
i figured i know how to do this yeah
05:05
how do you know
05:06
let's go do a plan
05:09
so you recently launched it didn't you
05:11
yeah so i uh
05:13
you know we decided to go with a vendor
05:15
back in April
05:16
of 2019 which um and then we just
05:19
recently launched october 14th
05:21
so it's ready to go how did which
05:23
vintage use we use
05:24
uh we used a company called higher logic
05:27
what do you think of them
05:29
you know something I really liked about
05:31
higher logic is uh
05:33
they have this great marketing so before
05:37
you and i worked together um we worked
05:39
with a company called intelligent what
05:40
they didn't have was
05:42
kind of this engagement piece of
05:44
customer so when customers create a
05:46
login and
05:47
start looking at the content there was
05:49
really no not built in anyways some
05:52
some engagement type things that they
05:54
have um
05:55
what i call or what they call automation
05:58
rules
05:58
so you can set up different types of
06:00
personalization
06:02
and type different types of marketing
06:04
things that you can do within the
06:06
platform
06:07
and that really um is what sold m...