Erick Linares got his start working for FitBit where he helped manage a community of over 800,000 users. Now Erick is at Pandora and had the unique case of launching Pandora’s entire community program in September of 2019. We will talk about what he learned launching a community for a well-established company, how to create superuser programs, increasing engagement, tracking success and so much more. Take a listen!

Too Long; Didn't Listen

1. Since Pandora had never had a community before, Erick started talking to internal stakeholders to see what the needs had and the community could be valuable and fill those needs. He found that he could highlight and educate features to get better product usage, reduce support costs and get the opinions of users for new features.
2. Erick touched on the main metrics he is currently tracking with the launch of Pandora’s community. His main metric is user registrations, he also tracked time on site, pageviews versus user registrations and solutions to questions.
3. At Fitbit Erick helped build a thriving user group program, he mentioned that to start one it’s important to give it time (at least 6 months) to identify the true super users. After that, make sure you have an NDA and everything squared away with legal so you can give them exclusive updates before the public gets them. Finally, think of an incentive that will really get them excited. He used the example of Fitbit giving new Fitbit products for free and shared he’s thinking about trying to give Pandora super users a premium account for free.