The Community Corner with Beth McIntyre

Our next guest is Mindy Day who is currently the Senior Community Manager at Patreon. She has worked as a community builder for over 7 years for brands like Imgur. Today we are going to talk about how to actually measure trust in a brand through community, the path of becoming an engaged member and so much more. Take a listen!

Too Long; Didn't Listen

• We kicked off by talking about how at Patreon they are measuring trust in a brand through communities. Mindy and her team spent six to eight months to measure this important metric through a trust survey that goes out every month to a random selection of creators in their communities. It asks the same question every month and calculates a trust score. Through this, they can find the creators that are active in their communities and forums against those that aren’t.
• Mindy also shares the interesting spectrum that they use for their Patreon creators which shows the stages of the commitment of patrons. At one end of this spectrum is pure altruism, meaning people support creators because they love their content and want more of it. And on the other end is pure transactional scale where people want value for their money. Mindy believes this spectrum also holds for communities as different members have different needs. Some come looking for an answer and never come back whereas some become active members and want to get involved, helping others and build better communities.
• Talking about people that go an extra mile in communities, Mindy talks about how important it is to encourage those that are most active in the community. She believes that giving them recognition for their work, like a badge or sticker or even a message that you love what they are doing can go a long way. It’s all about letting them know that you appreciate what they are doing and making sure they are not ignored.

Today's guest is Mike Porath, Founder and CEO of The Mighty. The Mighty is the largest digital health community in the world and this recording is from his talk at CMX Summit. Not only does Mike share how The Mighty grew to 3 million members with zero marketing spend, he also tells one of the most inspiring stories we’ve ever heard about starting a community.

Too Long; Didn't Listen

1. Mike realized early on that solutions to many medical problems can be incredibly simple. There is an infinite amount of wisdom and knowledge out there as there are people that have gone through what you are going through. They have the experience and sharing that with others easily through their platform really started things for them.
2. Storytelling is what defines The Mighty’s success. Mike was curious as to why there wasn’t another platform like theirs already online. What he found was that previous attempts to create an online communities were focused on the tech part. The Mighty was focused on content. To share stories of people living across the world, telling others how they faced their medical problems. This helped others to open up, to empathize and become part of the conversation.
3. Engaging your community members is important for building a healthy community. Mike and his team knew this and he shares an incredible campaign they ran. Ensure no one is alone over the holidays, they created a video to encourage their community to send over greeting cards to those spending their holidays alone. Like those that are in rehab centers or in health facilities. They got an overwhelming response! Over 10,000 cards came from the Netherlands alone.

Sarah Leary, the Cofounder of NextDoor, joins us for today's episode. NextDoor is a social network for neighborhoods. This recording is from her talk with David Spinks at CMX Summit. Sarah will share NextDoor’s story and the tactics behind how they launched a community in 94% of US neighborhoods. Yes you heard that right, 94%. She talks about how they got their first users on the ground, recruited extremely committed local leaders, and how they scaled the community.

Too Long; Didn't Listen

• Sarah shared the origins of the different companies she started, before she cofounded FanBase before NextDoor which ended up being not working. She shared it was more a feeling than a metric but she did say that new users coming on, having an experience and not coming back was a big part of the decision. She also shared that that having early power is crucial to building a great community and they felt that didn’t happen.
• Nextdoor had a few tactics that spurred the growth of their platform which were a bit counterintuitive. One involved creating a very long and though onboarding form which was a test to get the most committed local leaders, they found much more success in a smaller group of heavily dedicated leaders. They also found physically went to the communities to find leaders, while this was slow again it was more important to find the best people and get the deepest understanding possible of how to operate in that neighborhood.
• As NextDoor grew their user base and optimized their processes an issue of racial profiling came up. They looked to other platforms but didn’t find a robust solution, so they partnered with Stanford Professor Jennifer Eberhardt to combat racial bias. They decided increase the friction in the crime report process to heavily educate users on racial bias resulting in a 75% decrease in racial profiling.

IndieHackers is a community that helps developers by sharing the strategies and even revenue numbers behind successful software projects. Courtland Allens is the founder of IndieHackers and joins us on today’s episode on how he built a community with tens of thousands of people from scratch.

To start Courtland got inspiration looking through the popular site Hacker News, a site run by startup incubator Y Combinator. He found a community called Nomad List that served as an inspiration, instead of showing you where to live Courtland’s community showed you how to build successful software projects.

Courtland built the site himself, he knew that having a unique site and a great user experience would stand out. Even before he finished building everything he had brilliant ways of testing what features people would want. For example, before he built a forum he put a tab that said “forum” and then had an email subscribe option to join the forum when it was live. That got enough traction for him to prioritize him building it out.

There were lots of things that didn’t scale but helped, when he was interviewing people for his blog he would send hundreds of cold emails every week to try get people to share how they built their business, with revenue numbers!

For people that are just starting their community, he shared that the work might seem daunting at first but once you get in and actually begin it’s not as hard as you think. Also, while it might seem like a lot of manual work that could be automated or outsourced the depth of understanding you will gain from being so in the weeds of the community, at least at the beginning, will help you, in the long run, know how to build and care for your community.

Former VP of Community at Salesforce Erica Kuhl joins us on this episode, Erica started the Trailblazer at Salesforce which has become the gold standard of both online and offline community. This is one of those episodes that you need to relisten to with a notepad because there are that many strategies we covered. We will talk about the key to growing an in-person community, building a community team, the best metrics for community and so much more. Take a listen!

To Long; Didn’t Listen

• How did Salesforce get to 1,000 in person groups? Erica thought the biggest contributing factors were that they made it very low friction to become a leader (especially in the beginning). They also made sure that they had onboarding materials and tools to give them when they become a leader in order to make them effective. As far as attracting them the leaders being apart of the brand was huge, tie leaders into your brand as much as possible. A great way to do that is with swag, titles and even rewards they can earn by hosting more events, getting more attendees etc.
• One thing most people haven’t touched on is C2C communities will create tons of content for your brand with local leaders hosting in person events. Both that could recorded but also, as Erica pointed out, as a means of people finding out how to use the tool better which reduces how much customer support they need.
• Erica shared some incredible metrics that her the Trailblazer community generated, here’s what she shared: Deals from the community have 2.5x more pipeline, 2x larger deals, 35% higher product adoption, they stay a customer for 3x longer (share these with your boss)!

Jennifer Dulski has had a legendary career, she has worked in senior positions for Yahoo, Google, Change.org and was previously the Head of Groups & Community at Facebook . Not to mention founding DealMaps which was acquired by Google. She recently launched her new book “Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter” which breaks down how to build a movement around your cause and community. In this interview we talk about just that and her favorite example of people and brands that have created a movement, how it applies to community professionals and so much more. Take a listen!

To Long; Didn't Listen

• Jen touched on a topic from her book called “The 5 Stages of Engagement” (more on her book here), which starts with denial and ends with engagement. She shared how Virgin America enlisted the help of their customers to petition for a new runway for them! The morale of the story is to listen to your customers and learn how to engage them in a way that serves you brand and your customers.
• She also shared the unusual community Starbucks has called “The Leaf Rakers Society”, a group of people who are enthusiastic about fall. Jen showed it’s a great example of a company just supports and isn’t overbearing which allows people to build a surprisingly deep connection. If you’re building a community, you can consider using this to create a community associated with your brand that will create a richer connection than a help forum.
• During her time at Facebook they conducted a survey and found that communities with a true, deep connection usually contain 3 things. The first was intentional time in that group, actively engaging with posts (not just lurking) and being connected with one another. If you’re able to build a community the specifically goes to your group and not only engages but become friends with others in the group chances you will have a very dedicated community!

Kim Scott has changed not just the entire tech industry but work culture globally. She is the author of the best selling book “Radical Candor” which pioneered a new way to communicate by caring personally but also challenging directly. She’s had a legendary career which inspired the book. At Google she led the AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick Online Sales efforts, then she went to Apple to develop their leadership seminar.

In this interview we break down how to use Radical Candor to get resources for community, the art of storytelling, her own community around Radical Candor and so much more.

To Long; Didn't Listen

• Radical Candor became a cultural phenomenon, Kim shared that ultimately it took off on it’s own but did share 2 reasons that helped it explode. The first was that she was vulnerable and shared embarrassing stories she learned from (quoting Brene Brown’s “The Power of Vulnerability). The second was that she put a simple structure to an unarticulated idea (the Radical Candor Framework) which gave people words to what they felt but could never describe.
• Kim shared that if you are a community professional looking to get buy-in for your community program you should look at them as a fellow human and not a tyrant to be toppled. Then both ask for honest feedback to genuinely improve and find the things you appreciate about them and communicate with them. After some time, approach them by asking if you can be radically candid with them and share your vision for your community program.
• When measurement fails Kim suggested not just finding stories but fine tuning them to communicate your point. If you can measure something, find a story that supports your point that could get people to support your vision where they might not have otherwise.

Continuing our streak of having decision-makers on our podcast, with us today is Max Altschuler. Max is the founder of SalesHacker which was acquired by Outreach, where he is now the VP of Marketing. Max was also the cofounder of CMX which was acquired by Bevy. Max has a deep knowledge and background in creating communities. We are going to talk about the growing trend of communities getting acquired, how can you start a community from scratch, what to focus on when creating value in a community to have an impact on a company’s core product and much more.

Too Long; Didn't Listen

1. There is a growing trend of communities getting acquired by companies. Max believes it’s all about providing value to your potential customers through communities. With a community, a company can offer an immense value that in the end, encourages community members to ask about the product. This is the reason why companies are acquiring communities as it helps in their sales funnel.
2. Max also shares his advice on what every community manager needs to do when building a new one from scratch, focus on authenticity. Being authentic helps you to connect with like-minded individuals, Max pointed out that the best communities like SaaStr and CMX were built through authenticity.
3. And for metrics, Max shares with us how they rely on vanity metrics like how many people attend their webinars. But they are also focusing on the deeper side of things like loyalty and engagement. As Max points out, when you spend money and time on creating content, you want people to keep coming back to you and not just read an article and leave. That’s what a community is all about. You want every member to continuously engage with you.

Udemy has over 24 million students and over 100,000 courses, James Dunbar who is the Senior Manager of Community Programs & Strategy at Udemy shared with us how they look at community and support their huge base of online instructors.

The instructors on Udemy are key to the company’s success, without incredible courses in areas where students want to learn students won’t use Udemy. That’s why they have focused a lot of their community efforts to support the instructors, that’s where James focuses his efforts.

What we’ve seen over all the episodes of The C2C Podcast is the most successful (and most funded) community programs do a great job of tying back to business goals. James shared a way of accomplishing this that we hadn’t heard of before which seemed like it could really be powerful. Most will find a way to tie back metrics like revenue, churn, customer support requests in whatever software is used to track those metrics. Of course, there are many variables that go into making those metrics improve so the needs of the sales, support and other departments aren’t always the same. James will get coffee with key people in those departments and ask them “What are some problems you are running into right now?” and see if the community can help.

He figured out after talking with the person who is running social that she needed help creating more content, James knew the community could help. He turned to the community to help create user-generated content and it was a huge success. This method is pretty manual but the brilliant part about it is it allows you to change your focus if a larger area of opportunity arises for the community to impact the company.

Another tactic that we talked about that we don’t normally cover is appointment content. This is anything that is scheduled like a live webinar or Q&A that is a great way to constantly activate the community. If it was just a video or helpful piece of content there is no urgency, the fact that it’s scheduled makes the community activate. James is someone who has worked at a 2 person startup and a 500 person company, community helps at every stage.