The Community Builder Show

On this episode, Travis shares a conversation from an Uber Pool. You'll learn how a simple "How was your week?" is all you need to open a conversation. Also taking uber pool typically takes longer than regular uber, so you'll have more time to connect. Instead of bringing home any potential negative feelings to your loved ones, spend that time growing and deepening your relationships instead of poisoning it with toxins that you brought home with you from work.

This was such a fun conversation and another example to share that might give you the space you need to connect. Trust me, it's not easy making time for yourself, but you need it. And companies like Uber sit at the intersection of our biggest challenge and hopefully this episode can be heard by someone on their team and we can connect. Because I see a huge opportunity to bring user closer together during 15 minute uber pools. Imagine how much progress we can make if 100,000 people a day know they can be vulnerable and share talk through their challenges together on the ride home from work.

Enjoy.

Travis

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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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Host Travis King of the Community Builder Podcast talks with Priya Parker about the difference between a gathering and a community, and the importance of vulnerability.

Episode Highlights: 

• Priya was born in Zimbabwe to scientist parents and her family moved every 6 months.
• Being biracial with an Indian mother and white father, Priya sees her entire life as creating “temporary alternative worlds” to belong to at any given time as she had to float between communities.
• We assume that in community building you lose the “I” to the “we,” but in reality the strongest groups maintain both the I and the we.
• Priya sees a major key and a minor key in gatherings, with the major key being the majority position, and the minor key being dissenting voices and paradoxical identities and difficult conversations.
• Gatherings and community are distinct things, with communities being built at gatherings.
• Don’t pursue vulnerability for vulnerability’s sake, it should still be true to the purpose of your gathering and community.
• Priya is trained in a practice called sustained dialogue, which is a group practice that says you can transform a conflict by transforming the relationships involved in the conflict.
• A failure at training a university in this practice taught her that an exercise that worked in one context won’t necessarily work in another, and that you should always know your audience.
• Her husband wrote a book that examines how the idea of changing the world has been co-opted by philanthropy so that no big structural change actually happens at a societal level.

3 Key Points:

1. Every strong community needs both an “I” and a “we.”
2. It’s important to find and sit in the heat of hard conversations or other challenges within a gathering or community.
3. Know the context of the situation you’re entering into and know your audience.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “Communities become interesting when they become disputable.” –Priya Parker
• “Whenever you have an opportunity where people are willing to take risks for you because they love you, it’s a beautiful thing.” –Priya Parker

Resources Mentioned:

• Priya Parker: Website, Twitter, Instagram
• http://www.thrivelabs.co/
• Travis King: Linkedin
• communitybuildershow.com

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Host Travis King of the Community Builder Podcast talks with Gary Chou, Founder of Orbital, about how to launch new ideas, help others launch theirs, and how he uses behavioral information to inform his work.

Episode Highlights:

• Orbital has found a major use case for people who are in between jobs or in-between stages of a new venture.
• Access to dialogue about their ideas and new projects is a key component of Orbital.
• They created peer-based learning programs for tech employees and recently started their 7th cohort, and almost all of the applicants for this round were referred by alumni.
• There’s an assumption that everyone knows what they’re doing, and it makes you feel like the only person who doesn’t, but really no one knows what they’re doing.
• Chou found he was making assumptions about what people wanted and needed at work because he previously only had access to his own narrative around work, but his view changed when he suddenly had access to 20-30 narratives around work as part of the VC fund.
• Getting the right people in the room is key to an effective community where people engage and share, but it shouldn’t feel like you’re setting people up on a blind date.
• Everything Orbital does is on a small scale since Chou decided not to hire anybody else so his energy wouldn’t be split by having to manage employees.
• He’s found there are advantages to growing at scale, but there are also advantages to staying small.
• All you can control is the space—you can’t control how people behave in the space or when they leave.
• You don’t get to bestow the label of “community” upon yourself; it’s something that has to be consciously practiced, and it’s an iterative process.
• Moving forward, we won’t be able to get away with the faux-connection enabled by the Internet because people have learned about the surveillance and data collection.
• If you don’t acknowledge human behavior and the fact that people may or may not behave in ways you anticipate, then you’ll be slow to innovate.
• A fundamental education shift needs to happen in order to confront uncertainty.

3 Key Points:

1. Community is necessary because the workplace is not an environment for open dialogue, it’s a performative space.
2. Having access to others in your field opens you up to new narratives and ways of doing things.
3. The idea of community and connection will need to shift in the coming years due to technology and a movement away from the fake community on social media.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “Food & the ritual of eating puts everyone on the same playing field where we're engaged in this ritual we’re both familiar with, so there’s not as much social awkwardness… it puts people in a place where they’re more willing to share things or engage.” – Gary Chou
• “The only truth out there is the chaos of the world.” – Gary Chou

Resources Mentioned:

• Travis King: Linkedin
• communitybuildershow.com
• Gary Chou: Website, Twitter
• https://orbital.nyc/

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Host Travis King of the Community Builder Podcast talks with Kevin Huynh, about building the People & Company community, improving processes, the community life cycle, and a sneak peak at his book, Get Together.

Episode Highlights: 

• No matter who your organization serves, you can think about them as a community.
• Kevin is writing a book about how to cultivate community and is structuring it more like a cookbook than a business book.
• There are differences between building transactional and non-transactional communities.
• Even for non-transactional communities, money is still a critical resource so you can’t ignore it.
• Communities go through life stages, just like people.
• People often forget that you can’t apply the same framework to totally different communities.
• Kevin looks at community development as an initial spark, stoking the flame, and passing the torch.
• One of Kevin’s biggest interests is process improvement, with a focus on empathy.
• He acknowledges that for smaller startup communities, it is less about process improvement than it is consulting on process creation.
• This isn’t about finding weaknesses, it’s about recognizing that different organizational leaders have different skills and strengths and seeking to fill gaps.
• Learning a language can teach you a ton about community and culture.
• Kevin has kept the same Word document journal for the past 20 years.
• He had early experiences with community from going to various camps as a child, like an engineering camp and a Spanish immersion camp, that influenced his desire to be around people who weren’t in his bubble.
• Part of community is sharing energies in person.

3 Key Points:

1. One requirement, regardless of community size or stage, is the infrastructure for community members to communicate with each other.
2. As a community grows, there are tons of small lessons to be learned along the way.
3. Community is about expanding your circle and personal bubble.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “If you build the resources flexible enough, people can remix it on their own and share it with others, and hopefully that organism as a whole can support each other, and I think that’s a more healthy, thriving community when that’s happening.” –Kevin Huynh

Resources Mentioned:

• www.Kiwimonk.com 
• Kevin Huynh: Twitter, Instagram 
• Travis King: Linkedin
• communitybuildershow.com

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Host Travis King of the Community Builder Podcast talks with Jessica Lin, Co-founder of Work-Bench, about building an enterprise tech VC community and meeting the unique needs of the startups they fund.

Episode Highlights:

 Work-Bench hosts 200 events per year to support the needs of their community.

• To support learning, they not only host events but have developed a resource library and prioritize in-person connections and do some matchmaking.
• One of the biggest questions that comes up that’s specific to enterprise tech is sales compensation, and that’s something that the Internet can’t help you with and these in-person dinners help with.
• A challenge Jessica faces is how to keep staying ahead of the game and relevant?
• Work-Bench is able to stay friendly with other VC funds because enterprise tech is so specific and they aren’t necessarily in competition with startups at other funds.
• Within the Work-Bench portfolio, they’re very conscious and careful of who they bring in so there isn’t direct competition within their community.
• For events, their strategy was to try absolutely everything to find out what worked and what didn’t.
• Work-Bench recently launched their first-ever women in enterprise tech summit with over 250 women in attendance.
• It’s very difficult to quantify the value and ROI of the workaround events and community.

3 Key Points:

1. Even in tech, the best opportunities for learning and information sharing still happen in person.
2. When you see another fund’s approach to something that you admire and want to emulate, remember that you still need to tailor it to fit your community.
3. Don’t worry about proving the value of events and community through ROI because the effect is long-term and often not quantifiable.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “If you get asked something more than three times, you should probably put it into a blog post.” –Jessica Lin
• “I’m always pushing us, like, ‘If we did this three years ago, how can we “yes, and” this?’ How can we make sure we’re taking it to the next level and that we’re responding to what we’re hearing from our founders and our teams?” –Jessica Lin

Resources Mentioned:

• Travis King: Linkedin
• communitybuildershow.com
• Jessica Lin: Linkedin, Twitter
• https://www.work-bench.com/

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During the 2nd episode of the Community Builder Podcast, host Travis King, life-long student and community builder, talks to James Carbary, Founder of Sweet Fish Media, an agency for B2B brands. James is also the co-host of the B2B Growth Show, a podcast designed to help business-to-business marketing professionals achieve expansion. James shares strategies to organically create community, and make new friends in the process. 

Show Notes:

• James Carbary started Sweet Fish Media as a blog-writing shop 3 and a half years ago. 
• James is a contributor to Entrepreneur and has done B2B Growth dinners for networking. 
• Sweet Fish Media offers podcasting and they repurpose that audio into additional content. 
• The process of nurturing relationships that James uses has turned friends into customers. 
• Listen to your customers for opportunities to ‘wow’ them.
• Being around people in real life fills James with excitement. 
• Meeting people in person helps to expedite relationship building. 
• B2BGrowthDinners.com is a domain James’ shares to initiate offline community building.
• B2B Growth podcast averages about 75,000 downloads a month.  
• Some of James’ most valuable meet-ups have been small intimate groups, even with just one other person.  
• We are in the ‘attention economy.’ Everyone is fighting for attention. 
• Community building is brand building: building trust at scale. 
• Start with community and allow community to shape your product or service. 

3 Key Points:

1.  James Carbary cared more about building relationships with guests of his podcast than growing a listening audience.

2.  If you treat people like friends, you can successfully scale community.

3.  Creating magic moments is contingent on listening.

Tweetable Quotes:

-   “If I just ask my ideal clients to be a guest on a podcast, they all say ‘yes.’ And then once they’ve all been on a show and we’ve collaborated and created content together, they are much more likely to want to do business with me.” – James Carbary.

-   “We pivoted from being a blog-writing shop into being a podcast agency.” – James Carbary.

-   “I think community is friendship.” – James Carbary.

-   “When I think about friendship, I think, there is no agenda. I genuinely want to be as helpful as I can to my friends. I want my friends to win.” – James Carbary.

-   “The reason you get into entrepreneurship is for the freedom and the flexibility.” – James Carbary.

-   (B2B Growth Dinners) “One thing I’m starting to introduce is allowing the people that I’m inviting to bring someone else. And so when they bring someone else, they are obligated to show up because they invited someone else to it.” – James Carbary.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Community Builder Podcast
• Travis King’s Linkedin
• James Carbary
• Sweet Fish Media  
• B2B Growth Show
• @JamesCarbary 
• Itunes to access the podcast

Contact James Carbary on