The Community Corner with Beth McIntyre

Our next guest is Jeff Roe who is an Associate Strategist at Khoros. Prior to that Jeff built his social media and community skills working for brands like 2U, graze.com and Sirius XM. On today’s episode, we will cover what a C2C program looks like from the volunteer’s perspective, launching a community, metrics for SaaS communities and so much more.

Too Long; Didn't Listen

• Jeff shares he’s the CMX Connect organizer in Austin, TX (3:05)
• Jeff talks about the best part about being the Austin CMX Connect leader (4:47)
• Starting a community from scratch and the best place to start (7:58)
• The most important type of metrics to focus on when building a community for a SaaS company (12:01)

You can find the podcast on Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Next on the show is Kevin Lau who is the Global Head of Customer Advocacy at Adobe. Kevin has made a career in community and customer advocacy. Before he went to Marketo, which was acquired by Adobe, he worked at AOL, Google and NetBase. We are going to go in depth on how to create raving fans out of customers, his strategies for running events, the growth of their Marketo User Groups and much more.

Today WordPress is powering over 60 million websites, and it is the most popular CMS in the world. It is being used by one third of the internet. This has created a global community that includes business owners, developers, digital marketers, students and more, who are all contributing to its Open source project.

What is both impressive and astonishing is that this community is closely knitted together and connects through locally organized, in-person community events known as WordCamp. Here participants mingle with each other over one thing – their shared love of WordPress and open source.

We are lucky to have with us Andrea Middleton from Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Andrea is part of a team that includes fourteen individuals who help WordPress community organizers. They are offering these organizers planning support for events, connect the community and contribute to the WordPress project. Her role is specifically focused on these in-person community events, meaning she is the best person to share with us how this all works.

With Andrea, we will get a complete walkthrough of how WordPress has today 700 groups across the world since their first community event back in 2006 which was Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic. Together, we will trace back how Automattic ensured these communities were fostered by offering them support from full-time professionals dedicated towards these community events and gatherings.

The biggest challenge here is obvious: how do you bring together so many diverse communities together and ensure the events are engaging and interesting? Andrea shares with us how at WordPress.com and Automattic the goal is to offer guidance, training and freedom for anyone that wants to host these events in their local community, creating events expressive of their localities.

It’s a classic “bottoms up” approach where organizers are supported by WordPress while given freedom to do what they want to do: to bring WordPress enthusiasts together, inspire people to contribute to the Open source project and encourage participants to do more with WordPress.

With over 2,000 volunteers and organizers all working independently, in coherence with Andrea’s team, WordPress has truly achieved something wonderful: a community of individuals that not only love WordPress but are working to make it better.

Get ready to take some notes because our next guest is Rosemary O'Neill. Rosemary has been in the community space since 1998 when she co-founded Social Strata. Social Strata’s flagship platform, Hoopla, lets you build a branded online community. In this interview, we walk through the process of starting a community and cover topics like getting internal champions, legal buy in, content calendars and more. Take a listen!

Too Long; Didn’t Listen

• 4:27m- When it comes to metrics, Rosemary starts with making sure NOT to solely focus on engagement. It’s what bosses ask for but the community should tie back to deeper goals like the corporate mission and goals, monetization and getting new customers for example.
• 6:44m- It is crucial to get your community goals wrapped into whatever your corporate process is for setting goals and talking about what you want for the next year. If you can get those incorporated into that process naturally it will help your community get prioritized instead of being off on it’s own island.
• 14:06m- Business needs can sometimes diminish creativity, which means us community managers need to always be thinking about what fresh content we can provide, like C2C or in-person events.

Our next guest Scott Dodds is a Customer Enablement Leader and Community Strategist! He’s had a historic career in the community industry, starting off launching Khoros’ first community, the Lithosphere and then went on to build community and engagement at Zenefits, LivePerson and Box. In today’s episode, we will cover why SaaS is driving community growth, getting early adopters, measuring ROI and so much more!

Too Long; Didn’t Listen

• 3:04m - We had to first drop our preconceptions and listen to our community. We invited a range of currently active folks on the site and asked them what they liked, what they want more of and what they would change. And the biggest thing we learned was that customers didn’t see us as a community site or a support site or a knowledge base or training. We weren’t the sales team or customer success team or product team. We were all Box to them - one brand. So the first thing was to reimagine it as one experience that customers could engage with. And by giving customers one place to go, it also became easier to start integrating this one place into other parts of the experience, like our customer marketing campaigns, our product contextual help, our product news and updates, etc. This drove greater awareness, greater traffic, and greater engagement with the community.
• 8:13m - What you measure needs to either be the same metric your organization cares about the most. So you need to thoroughly understand your business and what numbers your boss, your VP and your CEO care about and why. For instance, deflection is important to support when they need to reduce costs and improve efficiency, but at a certain point your VP may stop caring about deflection because they are more worried about renewals than cost savings. So you need to find out how your community is impacting customers to renew, which means you need to understand what metrics in the customer lifecycle most impact renewals.
• 10:07m - If you are only meeting your community members online or in virtual spaces, you are missing out on so many opportunities to build greater connections and learn so much more deeply than you could otherwise. Would you limit your personal and professional contacts to online? Of course not. So much more valuable connection and communication occurs in person.

Our next guest is Max Rothery, the VP of Community at Finimize. Previously, he lead Innovation and Transformation at the private bank SocGen which gave him a deep understanding of how the financial system works. In today’s episode, we are going to cover how to tell your community’s story, leveraging your user base for your events, metrics for success and much more.

Too Long; Didn’t Listen

• 1:47m- Finimize started off as a newsletter, not an app. They focused on building the community through useful content before they built the product which was extremely useful to make sure they were building to solve an actual need.
• 4:17m- Max shared that while they have lots of community activities events are where people really catch the bug to become a “Finimizer” aka part of their community. The real magic is walking into an event with 200 people who all share the same goal, Max says.
• 12:04m- When it comes to getting buy in to launch a new in person community program Max said you should take the example of companies like Startup Grind, CMX, Duolingo and TED and present it to your leadership as well as how it could affect the bottom line.

Tessa Krissel is the Developer Outreach Manager at Pantheon and is incredible at creating normal users into passionate advocates. We broke down how she is building, scaling and measuring the growth of her community while making sure she is giving value back to that community.

Tessa took a standalone slack group and transformed it into the “Pantheon Heroes” which focus on giving back to and lifting up Pantheon’s community. She explained it’s all about relationships when it comes to developer outreach but building the platform for having that relationship is key since you can’t personally chat with 1000’s of people a day. Here is a breakdown of some of the most effective methods that Tessa used in her program to grow the community:

User Missions- Each user decides how they want to contribute with “missions”, each “mission” is based around a certain area and members can suggest new ones that don’t exist yet. This gives each member a “role” essentially, whereas before you might not know what to post about you now have a topic to help take the mental load off of contributing.

Serena Snoad is today’s guest, she is the Online Community Manager at Alzheimer's Society. She has been a community professional for 11 years and she helps run the CMX Connect Chapter in London!. Serena shares how she runs a huge community team, gets budget, creates scalable systems and tells a heartwarming story about a woman with Alzheimer’s finding a support network.

Too Long; Didn't Listen

1. We discussed how to get stakeholders to fully buy into your community program, Serena mentioned the key is mutual benefit. You can go to different stakeholders, get an idea of what their needs are and leverage your community to help achieve that goal. And Serena shared the example of getting stories from the community to give to the marketing communications and policy teams at Alzheimer's Society.
2. In regards to budgeting, Serena pointed out that anyone who thinks that a community should be free is wrong and that’s a red flag if you hear that from leadership. If you are in that scenario she suggested to find and articulate how your community is providing value to the organization and practice empathy to figure out what really drives them and speak their language to help them see the benefits of community.
3. Alzheimer's Society puts out a survey every year and they decided to ask if people want to share their story and 38% of respondents shared their story. Serena mentioned the heartwarming story of a woman who didn’t have many family or friends and was diagnosed via a paper instead of the doctor telling her in person. She found Alzheimer's Society and thankfully found the support of people in her area who not only helped her but became her friends which dramatically helped her situation.

Get ready for our next guest Emily Snowdon who is the Head of Operations at Product Hunt, which was acquired by AngelList! Emily’s story is interesting, she started off as a consultant but was brought onto the community team full time to ultimately be promoted to Head of Operations. We will talk about her rise to Head of Operations, how they keep a massive community growing and so much more.

Too Long; Didn’t Listen

1. When it comes to metrics, of course, you have your typical indicators which are visitors, new community members, etc but there are more metrics that paint a better story of how healthy the community is. For Emily, that’s interactions which for Product Hunt are upvotes, hunting products, chatting in discussions and setting goals in their maker groups.
2. Emily started as a consultant and through her community work was promoted to Head of Operations, her advice for those looking to also get promoted was to take advantage of the autonomy of community work. Community is a lot less defined than something like coding and that freedom means you can look for new ways to build out value for the company.
3. Now that Emily has hired for her prior role in community she mentioned that the biggest thing to look for is empathy. With a junior hire, she says, it’s pretty simple to train them and have them learn the technical side but hard for them to be effective if they don’t have a strong sense of empathy.

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.