The Community Corner with Beth McIntyre

Today, we’re joined by Phoebe Shin Venkat, Former Director, Community Strategy at Okta, an online access management platform with over ten thousand B2B customers. Phoebe believes that every community manager has their own style based on their unique experience and how they choose to help and support people. She also advocates a bottom-up approach of stakeholder buy-in that leverages the reach of early internal adopters of the idea of community. Phoebe lists empathy, data-backed storytelling, and flexibility toward plans as great qualities for people to add to your community management team.

Today, we’re joined by David Spinks, Co-Founder at CMX and VP of Community at Bevy who’ll give us the run-down on CMX Summit Rise: 2021. In this episode, you’ll learn about the brave origins of CMX Summit and the pandemic-sized challenges experienced along the way. Community has taken the business world by storm and this year’s summit will ingrain the community in business for the long run. Participants in the CMX summit find a community where they don’t have to explain their job anymore because they’re among other community management professionals. David and Beth discuss the meaning behind this year’s theme RISE, the Community Career Path, and Community Culture and Innovation. CMX Summit Rise will be completely FREE with a 1-day workshop on August 31st and a 2-day conference on September 1st and 2nd. Join community professionals from around the world and register for your free tickets here: https://bit.ly/3vEW76k

Today, we’re joined by Molly Masterson, Senior Program Manager, Community & Product Insights at Okta, an online identity management platform with over ten thousand B2B customers. Molly helped Okta identify the criteria and characteristics of people to nominate into their superusers program, which will invite community-based nominations next year. She also helps the Okta product team monitor customer sentiment and gather feedback based on important criteria which then moves forward to help streamline product workflows. Her contribution to the overhaul of Okta’s customer feedback platform called Okta Ideas helps alleviate customer concerns around not being heard.

Today, we’re joined by Sofia Rodriguez Mata, Director of Community at Venafi, a cybersecurity company that protects machine identity and ensures safe machine-to-machine connections and communication. Sofia talks about her career growth in the community space and how Venafi realizes the power and the energy of their community. Sofia also describes the challenges she has faced in creating the Venafi community and how communication with management can help make things easier for community builders.

Today, we’re joined by Maddie Bertschmann, Senior Customer Marketing Manager, Global SMB at Braze, a fast-growing B2B SaaS platform delivering powerful, relevant, and personalized customer experiences in real-time. She describes how soft launches and internal enablement in the pre-launch phase helped their Slack-based customer community channel, Bonfire, grow to 500 members on its launch day. Maddie describes the tools they use at Braze to drive automated registration and reengagement inside and outside of the Slack channel. She also shares how different types of events helped foster community engagement when people were overloaded with virtual meetings during the pandemic.

Today, we’re joined by Andreia Tulcidás, Community Engagement Manager at OutSystems, an integrated app development platform with AI-powered tools and a cloud-native platform. Andreia talks about how OutSystems nurtures its community and cultivates super users to lead their community. She also shares actionable advice on creating a super user program using a purpose-oriented model focused on achieving business goals. Andreia fondly shares stories about how incentivizing and collaborating with these super users, who naturally love to contribute, helps them feel more included and in turn enriches the community.

Today, we’re joined by Logan Johnston, Community Manager, Community Partnerships Team at Facebook. In this episode, Logan describes how their team at Facebook identifies, trains, and supports community builders to maximize their social impact. He also shares which community metrics Facebook monitors and how they empower group managers with learning resources, tips, and tricks. Whilst an increasingly larger number of brands are beginning to realize the benefit of creating and engaging in communities, Logan shares that the true power of community in the creator economy is yet to be realized. Logan then goes onto cover what community builders can do to keep their communities engaged beyond video calls.

Today, we’re joined by Alyssa Vigil, Community Manager at Code Academy which is a learning platform for coding that enables greater economic opportunity to curious learners and masters of coding. Alyssa uses fun-filled metaphors to describe her team’s “hands-off” approach with their self-managing community of volunteer leaders that share a common goal. While the number of community participants are important, their focus is also on tracking metrics that help them actively support learners of all levels. She also describes challenges to community management on disparate platforms.

Today, we’re joined by Emilie Dellecker, Co-Founder and Community Builder at FoodHack. Emilie shares FoodHack’s journey from a single chapter community in Switzerland into a community that empowers food tech entrepreneurs globally. Emilie also shares how FoodHack overcomes language barriers and how they protect their brand’s values. She stresses on empowering local community chapters to have their identity & autonomy while simultaneously ensuring uniform brand identity for FoodHack across all chapters.

Today we’re joined by Whitney Raver, Director at EnrollBoom. On the show today, Whitney shares the biggest challenges she experienced whilst monetizing her community, the intersection between community and marketing and why she personally interviews each new community member. Whitney also shares how she limits churn, who in the community world she would love to take for lunch (not who you would expect!) and how Whitney uses a free Facebook community to build relationships with members.