The Community Corner with Beth McIntyre

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.

Building an online and in-person community today for companies is tough. Customers are smart enough to spot marketing even if it’s hidden under layers of personal and emotional messages. But at Asana they seem to have cracked the code with “Asana Together”, an online community of like-minded individuals created around shared interest in teamwork and productivity. 

And with us is Josh Zerkel, Head of Global Community and the brains behind “Asana Together”. “Asana Together” is a success with over 33 countries represented through customers, leaders and certified experts, coming together to learn and connect with each other. 

We will take a deep dive with Josh who will share with us how he kick-started the program by talking to different stakeholders on how he wants to create a community that has become “Asana Together” today. We talk about how they are managing the program, getting more people to sign up for their events and what analytics they are using to gauge their performance. 

Together, we will break down the community program and learn how its involving everyone by ditching the “one size fits all” approach and focusing on creating a multi-faceted community where you can attend Asana events, become an ambassador or even establish yourself an expert through “Certified Pros”.  

It’s no surprise that they could pull this off so amazingly (they make it look easy). Asana is at the forefront of workplace communication, collaboration and productivity and creating a platform that brings together customers, experts, and employees together was only a matter of time for them.

Today on the show, we welcome the “Dalai Lama of community,” David Spinks. David is the Founder and CEO of CMX – the world’s premier community for community professionals. David consults with top innovative companies on building community, such as SalesForce and Facebook, and is super passionate about seeing his own community succeed.

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.

Points- They have gamified their contributions by offering points to people who contribute to that community. The community can then use these points to buy things like shirts, pantheon sites, access to the team and more.

In terms of metrics, Tessa keeps a close eye on the Users, Missions, and Influence. More specifically she looks at For Users they look at both retention and participation in the Pantheon Heroes platform. Within the missions metric, they track the points-based system. Behind the scenes, they have values that associate to specific mission categories that help them better understand when missions are helping to grow revenue & retention on the Pantheon platform. And the final metric for the Heroes program is Influence. This metric digs into their influence outside of their communities. They work to break down how valuable it is to Pantheon is a user posts on a blog, social media or elsewhere about them. They don’t care how many followers you have, per se, they care more about the engagement of your followers & audience.

Customer to Customer marketing is still new, many are still breaking into this budding industry. That’s why we talked with Justina Fenberg who is a Community Manager at Digital Marketer. Justina herself recently broke into the Community Manager role so we got her take on how she got in.

Those who have “Community” in their title come from many places but one place is customer service. Justina was incredible in her role in customer service but found out that the “Community Manager” was a role and realized she could help customers at scale but still in a personalized way. She was then able to find Suzi Nelson who helped her realize she could break into community. Justina’s suggestion was to find a mentor in the space and get to know the community team or even community-minded people at your company.

Since she has gotten into the role one of the most powerful things she has found that community can do can turn a negative experience into a positive one. She shared how they had some marketing campaigns that were more general or going to people that it might not have been as relevant for. Being a marketing company the community asked why they didn’t have more segmentation in their emails. Then, a VP at Digital Marketer hopped in to address with honesty and transparency saying that they too are experimenting and learning the community was right in their suggested improvements. This really humanized the company and showed people that everyone has room to improve, Justina saw that people really appreciated the company responded inside the community the way they did.

Justina also shared the values that Digital Marketer has as a company and how they shape the community and create a great space for customers to learn. Their first core value is “Loving, Protecting and Respecting the Customer”. That leads to them realizing they needed a space not to sell more but to help, provide value and foster customer to customer connections.

We talked with a community member to hear how he believes a company should build a community for developers instead of the community builder like we usually do. We wanted to hear from the source what he loves about communities so we talked to Karan Malhi who is Head of Product and Marketing at Datacoral.

He has been a member of the Apache community for a long time, he loves community because you are able to connect with people that do what he is doing and build on technologies he works on. The ability to give back and to learn is something that Karan loves about being a part of the Apache community and others like it.

One mistake he warned companies who want to build community is not to make it strictly about the product, sales and recruiting. The idea is to provide a space to connect and learn about how to become a better developer and help the ecosystem as a whole. He mentioned that you don’t even want to censor talk about other tools in the area because not only is that the natural conversation but the fact that there is no restriction on the content will lead developers to trust your brand.

Overall, Karan’s message is to make sure you are building a community that encourages the developers to work together and learn and they will naturally grow to discover your product and build a relationship with your brand.

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.

With a decade in the game and an extremely sharp and strategic approach, Suzi Nelson is one of the best in the community industry. The main topic of conversation is something that not all community professionals love to talk about but can dramatically increase the resources your community program gets and help everyone at your company realize the value of your community, tying community back to sales.

The first step if you are starting a community from scratch and to help people realize the value is to find what part of the funnel needs the most help. What does that mean? Since the basic components of any sales funnel are awareness, consideration, closed/sale and retention/renewal those are the places you want to focus on. Once you have identified which part of the funnel figure out the metric that matters for that, you can talk with the sales and marketing department to find a better idea of that. For example, your company might want to keep customers longer so you can pick renewal rate and lifetime customer value as two metrics to affect. While tying back to metrics directly is always tricky you can tie into your companies CRM or at a minimum make sure you have those metrics before the community started so you can show a before and after.

Another key point she touched on was how to get community members to become your biggest advocates. The vast majority of people in your community are passive so the key is to help guide them on a journey to get them active. Suzi references the “Commitment Curve” famously created by Douglas Atkins which, put simply, says you need a series of tasks that get them more engaged until they are ready to help

Today on the show we welcome Laura Nestler. We refer to Laura as the “community unicorn” as she is the Global Head of Community at Duolingo and spoke at Startup Grind’s Bevy summit earlier this year. If you haven’t already heard of DuoLingo, it is the world’s most popular place to learn a language – for free, from your phone. DuoLingo is currently reaching over 200 million users and one year ago, Laura did something that we have never seen done before. She decided that she wanted to get all of these DuoLingo users together… in person. 

At the end of the day, the community is about culture. Webster defines community as “the people with common interests living in a particular area”. People come together because they have common interests and values which all combine to define the culture of that community.

Our guest for this episode, Kim Han, is the Global Head of Community at Consciousness Hacking which is a global community of people get together to become more mentally, emotionally and spiritually whole and build a future that helps us instead of harming us. Kim starts off by sharing her description of what Consciousness Hacking is and that each member has their own definition but they are brought together by their mission and values. 

She started running the San Francisco events and got a strong understanding of how the events are run and then iterated to start having other cities host events. When looking at whether or not to take someone on as a chapter director her number 1 criteria is if they are aligned as a person with their values and mission. 

Now that she has 50 cities and continues to organically grow she has and continues to put together a playbook of how local chapter directors should run their events. Kim shared that it’s important to keep that playbook iterative and not stagnant. As the community grows and changes the way chapter directors host events will evolve as well. Making sure that your playbook evolves with the community is crucial to making sure you continue to grow and serve the ambassadors who are hosting events for your brand.