The Community Corner with Beth McIntyre

Episode Summary

We usually talk with community managers on the show, the boots on the ground that sadly usually aren’t the decision makers on budgets and what programs get greenlit and which don’t. Luckily for us we’ll hear from Sydney Sloan who has not only built community programs from scratch but she is also now the CMO of SalesLoft giving her the unique vantage point of seeing knowing how to build these programs and knowing what is needed to get approval from the C Suite (which we talk about in the episode).

Too Long; Didn't Listen

1. Being a CMO, Sydney knows what it takes to get buy-in from the C-Suite to get funding. She shared how when she was at Adobe an executive  wanted to take their Java Developer community from 1500 to 1 million developers. The audacious goal was helpful and she backed it up with strategy, she aggressively tackled both online and offline community. She found local ambassadors and made sure the company equipped them with what they needed to run events and spread the word.
2. When it comes to building your in-person community try to go deep with the small handful of your most passionate ambassadors. If you have 2 amabadours in Japan and London meet with them, understand the differences in their culture and their needs. If you get a large group of ambassadors it’s actually good to focus on your top 5 or 10 before scaling up, better to serve a small group deeply then a large group poorly.
3. When it comes to metrics Sydney suggest first looking at users as a good starting point and then going finding metrics around engagement that are meaningful to the company. She referenced a study from EMC that found direct correlation of community engagement and revenue growth, tying revenue to community engagement is crucial to proving the worth of the program.

Joining us in this episode of C2C Podcast is Julie Perino, the Senior Director of Customer Marketing at Marketo and Adobe. Marketo is one of the foremost marketing automation software and was acquired by Adobe back in 2018.

1. Julie loves the idea of companies engaging with their users both online and offline. While there has been an upward trend in engagement online, she believes in meeting customers wherever they are because nobody can deny the value of face-to-face connections. So when Marketo’s customers meet together through Marketo User Groups or “MUGs”, it becomes a community where everyone has something to share and learn from others.

2. She also describes the “Fearless 50” program. This program celebrates marketers from across the globe that are using bold, fearless marketing, out of the box thinking and driving innovation at their companies. Through this program, Marketo helps the chosen 50 individuals because of their marketing efforts, offering them opportunities to learn and grow their career.

3. It’s hard for community managers to prove that their work impacts revenue. For Julie, she has done it with customer adoption scores. It’s interesting to learn how they are connecting the dots with their community work with how customers are adopting Marketo at their work.

In this episode, Derek is talking to Elizabeth Kinsey who is the Developer Marketing Manager at Slack.

Elizabeth knows how to create communities. She first created the Mobile Growth community at Branch Metrics which became the premier community for app developers and marketers. But her streak didn’t stop there,  when she joined Slack she helped create the Slack Developer Communities from scratch, which has been a huge success. Here’s a rundown of what we will talk about.

Elizabeth will share with us how two things are most crucial to creating a successful community: tools, and resources. Tools that allow you to monitor your community leaders, help answer their queries and manage your community. And with resources, she refers to the “how-to” guides that have all the information that helps in fostering communities.

Elizabeth will talk about the biggest mistake people make: assuming they will be able to measure ROI as soon as they start the community.. It’s better, in her opinion, that community managers focus on impacting one area of the business first and then move to the next area of impact and so on.

An interesting part of the episode will be around the choosing chapter leaders, who are integral to spread the community. We learn how at Slack she is recruiting new leaders and what characteristics appeal to her most when selecting new ones. Enjoy!

Joining us on this episode of the C2C Podcast is Cesar Manara, Community Manager at Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. 

Cesar believes in creating long-lasting and meaningful relationships between customers and companies. With him joining us, we are going to deep dive into different facets of creating online communities and learn from him what it takes to create one. 

1. So how do you build a community? Cesar shares that it’s important to nail down why you are creating a community. What purpose is it going to serve? What are your business goals? And once you know this, then you have to focus on what your members want. What are their needs?

Consider Stack Overflow where they are focusing on providing tools, resources, and knowledge to programmers so they can do a better job. And that’s not all, the job board on Stack Overflow today is better than LinkedIn.

2. Online trolls and the negativity that spreads easily in communities is a menace that many community managers have to deal with. For Cesar, the answers lie in changing the culture of the community. He will talk about why it is important to change what your peers think is right or wrong. And this can be changed through rewards and punishment. You reward those that act in a way that you want them to be and punish bad actors.

While Cesar knows how to create an online community, he also knows that he needs data. Data that will help him make decisions and drive his community forward. 3. With data, he believes you can figure out what your community members want? What activities do they want to spend their time on? Why are they spending time on your website and so much more? You can then see how those activities can be translated into business needs. Find the sweet spot in between these two and create something awesome.

So many metrics, so little time! Luckily on this episode Jess Burnham from Unbounce breaks down for us what some of the key metrics and areas of impact community has. If you are in any way trying to show how valuable all the community work you do is this episode is a must!

Jess shares that while sign ups and total number of community members is good what you really want to track are ACTIVE members. For example, you have 10k community members but many are attendees at your events? You can easily get lost in the big vanity metrics and end up with almost no one actually engaging so focusing on those metrics makes sure you actually move the needle. In Jess’s case, she tracks the weekly active users (aka return visitors) on her forum.

She also mentions that product development is a huge area of impact that the community contributes to the company. Her top community members get direct access to alpha and beta features and give it thorough testing and share the positive and negative feedback that Jess relays back to the product team.

She also has created a group for the top 1%-3% of community members called “Unbounce Experts”. These are the people who are sharing feedback, helping other community members, sharing the product with potential customers and sharing on social. Jess knows it’s extremely important to engage and reward the “Unbounce Experts” so she gives them perks like a private slack channel, free tickets to their CTA Conference, access to the early features (mentioned above) and much more.

While she has made sure to track metrics and scale to 16k members she also knows that some parts of community are unscalable. She still has regular conversations with the “Unbounce Experts” and remembers fun facts about them that they appreciate. That’s the art of community, creating a system where the community can scale and grow itself while still engaging deeply and meaningfully.

Derek is joined by Tara Eudy from 99Designs where she is the senior manager of designer experience. At 99Designs, Tara is at the forefront of managing client-designer relationships and representing the designers whenever business decisions are being made at 99Designs.

99Designs is a global creative platform that helps bring clients and designers together so they can create designs they want and love.

It’s a global community that spans from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and offers designers an online platform where they can not only share their designs with potential clients but also learn from others.

The folks behind 99Designs can happily brag that they have more than a million designers from all over the world. One brilliant way they keep their massive community engaged is through their awards program, 99Awards. It celebrates the best designers on the platform. 

At 99Designs, the key performance indicator that Tara relies on is how much designers are earning and how 99Designs can increase that. 

While she started her career in radio today she's managing a community of more than a million designers, she's seen a lot of success growing and fostering the 99Designs community which we break down in the full episode. Take a listen!

How did Moovit create and incentivize a community that provides maps for 500M users?!? That will be answered on today's episode with Leo Chanea. We talk with Leo about how he built and grew the community of "Mooviters" that provide transit map data and how the "Mooviters" contribute that data for their entire user base. 

Derek sat down with 3 of the best community builders in the world to talk about how they built their communities. The guests were Elizabeth Kinsey (Developer Marketing Manager at Slack), Leslie Lee (Senior Director, Customer Engagement at Atlassian) and Erica Kuhl (VP of Community at Salesforce).

They talked about how they got started and got the initial buy-in to create the program, what strategy they used to gain traction and get people to their events and how they were able to measure their success for themselves and to prove value to the C-Suite. Here are some of the top tidbits from each of our guests.

Elizabeth Kinsey (Developer Marketing Manager at Slack)

(starts at 15:21)

Not only did Elizabeth build community with the people attending her events at Branch Metrics but also she did that with the panelists who spoke. She focused on the speakers being extremely knowledgeable in the space to provide a lot of value and being very diverse to show the attendees that the community was like them.

That went a long way in both building the brand and setting the expectation that the events would always provide value and that they really cared about showing that anyone no matter their background could attend the events.

Leslie Lee (Senior Director, Customer Engagement at Atlassian)

(start at 12:24)

Atlassian is invested in getting feedback from their users and get NPS (net promoter scores) from their users, knowing this Leslie and her team measured NPS on customers who attended community events and didn’t. They found strong correlation with that showed NPS was higher when customers attended community events.

Erica Kuhl (VP of Community at Salesforce)

(starts at 10:30)

Instead of assuming what the community what Erica asked the community “What do you want?”. The answer she got was that they wanted to get connected to each other and get connected and become apart of the brand. The ability to put Salesforce on Linkedin, featuring them at their Dreamforce conference was extremely meaningful and motivating for them.

(starts at 18:18)

Erica knew that the future of community would be data-driven so she decided to attach the community metrics with the top 4 business metrics that Salesforce had which were: Pipeline, ACV (Average Contract Value), Adoption and Attrition. By doing that she was able to prove that the already beloved community was irreplaceable to the business.

Gina Bianchini is a strong believer of in-person communities.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone as she created Ning, an online platform where you can create your own communities on your custom social networks. She then created Mighty Networks, where anyone can create community powered businesses easily.

For her, niche communities have always been fascinating which is why since the early days of social media, she has been observing how people have been coming together online.

And with Mighty Networks, she is kicking ass as she brings entrepreneurs, businessmen, creators and brands together, on a space where they can create communities and share content directly with them.

But that’s not all. With Mighty Networks she is empowering community leaders by helping them monetize their passion projects.

Gina brings an interesting perspective on the table that we usually don’t think about - community building and social media are polar opposites of each other. Why? Because people like to interact and work with those that are interested in the same things and want to learn more about it together. Just like in video games where gamers from across the globe come together, form communities, share tips and tricks with other and do much more.

What’s interesting about Mighty Networks is how they are measuring the success of these communities. Unlike other platforms, Mighty Networks focuses on knowing whether the communities are actually supporting the idea that they are trying to master together and not just focus on blunt performance indicators.

This one is for the books as Gina is the person you need to talk to if it’s about building online communities.

We had a chat with Celina Zamora, who is the Senior Community Manager at Atlassian. Atlassian is known for its products like Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence. Today, Atlassian is serving over 135,000 customers across the globe. 

Celina’s job is all about building communities. She manages and supports Atlassian in-person communities within the Americas by working with community leaders, offering support and steer them. Her work involves engaging the online community by creating avenues for customers to easily connect with others like them. 

With Celina onboard with us, we are going to learn how Atlassian built an online community where developers, content managers, project managers and others came together where they collaborate, connect and share valuable insights with each other. 

It’s not easy to explain the value of having a community and Celina understands this all too well since she saw how everyone was apprehensive towards the idea of having them. 

But today, Atlassian product teams see great value in these communities where they get to enjoy actual face time with users, learn about their problems, offers them real time feedback and hear customer stories. 

We will also be inquiring about the metrics they are using at Atlassians to gauge the effectiveness of these community events.

Also, Celina shared with us how they are scaling their communities by building everything with heart and balance. They do this by focusing on where their customer is in terms of the platform they are using and how they are using it.