Host Travis King of the Community Builder Podcast talks with David Spinks, Founder of CMX Media, about how the internet changed the gaming community, repeat interactions, supporting other organizations, and more.

Episode Highlights: 

• CMX provides education and membership for community professionals in all sorts of professions.
• David’s parents were both immigrants so they worked hard to build their new communities around themselves.
• He has always loved bringing together different groups of people.
• When he struggled with finding community and belonging in real life, he found community online.
• You don’t get to choose to belong, other people decide if you belong, and that’s where the struggle is.
• To build community, you want to put yourself in situations where you’re having repeat interactions with people over time.
• Despite the negative impacts of social media on sense of community, it is also what created David’s sense of community and helped him develop his career.
• Travis suggests maybe we’ve simply been using the tools wrong—social media isn’t where we should be all the time, but it is a tool to facilitate real relationships.
• In behavioral economics, people operate in either a social interaction or a market interaction, the latter being transactional.
• We don’t think about social interactions as transactional and we don’t think about transactions as social interactions, but both are both.
• The transactional relationship people have with brands makes it difficult for brands to build authentic community around their product.
• Every business needs to be extremely aware of their cash flow, but not make it a central factor in decision-making.
• Business is becoming decentralized, with cryptocurrency being the ultimate example.
• Every community has people who contribute to value and people who consume value.
• The group of people contributing value is typically smaller than those consuming it.
• Spotlighting your power users provides an example for your other users of what success on a platform looks like.

3 Key Points:

1. The ultimate job of a community builder is to know your members and the identities of the people you’re trying to bring together, and to create a space where they feel safe and comfortable.
2. Most brands have not figured out how to solve the issue of community and social interaction.
3. Community is how you keep your contributors engaged.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “Yes you need cash, yes you need to be sustainable, yes you need gas in the tank, but what you do around that, assuming you have gas in the tank and you’re able to be sustainable and healthy, your road trip is about exploration and creation.” –David Spinks

Resources Mentioned:

• www.CMXhub.com
• David Spinks: Twitter
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• Travis King: Linkedin
• communitybuildershow.com

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