The Community Corner with Beth McIntyre

Tessa Kriesel who is Head of Developer Community at Twitter is our guest on today’s episode. Tessa is tasked with engaging with a community of developers, which comes with its own set of challenges. Luckily, Tessa uses what she calls the 3 step model to building trust! In today’s episode, she shares what this process looks like and why building trust is so important in any community.

Brittany Caldwell joins us on the podcast to chat about her role as Head of Community & Events Marketing at Webflow. She has over 13 years of experience building communities and has previously worked for companies like GitHub and Atlassian. On today’s episode, we cover her top strategies to kickstart a community with little to no budget, why she chooses to look at community like a product, and how she grew her user community over 114% in less than a year.

Bridget Sauer who is the Senior Content & Customer Programs Manager at Atlassian is our guest today. In her interview, we talk about User Generated Content! She speaks about the UGC programs she’s created, the strategies she has implemented, and how these programs meet both Atlassian’s business goals and their user’s needs.

We've been doing this podcast for over 2 years, we've interviewed many of the people who have created the largest C2C Communities on the planet. Today we are welcoming a new host! Curious to hear who it is, play to find out!

We are joined by a repeat guest and friend of The C2C Podcast... Celina Zamora! She is the Senior Program Manager of Developer Community at MongoDB. Now that she is running Community User Groups at MongoDB and starting that role during COVID we had her break down what it is like to build a new C2C community after having so much success with her last community at Atlassian. We covered other topics as well like how surveys have increased during COVID, making hackathons virtual (and still great), how to approach diversity and inclusivity, and a beautiful story about a community member helping veterans.

Welcome to our 50th episode! Since this is our 50th episode we wanted to do something special, this interview from Startup Grind Global 2020 is with the cofounder and CEO of Reddit Steven Huffman. We dove into some really unique perspectives we haven’t talked about before like what is the soul of community, and trying to figure out what a “healthy” community is beyond basic metrics and of course how the largest online community looks at building C2C communities.

Too Long; Didn’t Listen

2:28m- The way Steve looks at community today is a group of people with a soul. Instead of approaching it with the view of a product builder he approaches it as an anthropologist and trying to understand the people that make up that community rather than optimize for vanity metrics.

8:24m- Reddit now has 100,000 active communities and Steve talks about what other metrics are actually meaningful for a healthy community. He has looked at time on site, votes, comments, length of comments but they are constantly evaluating what a “healthy, interesting community” is internally so they aren’t just chasing a number and can actually achieve that.

21:10m- When he watched other platforms that are also roughly “community” based in being social networks blow past Reddit, he realized they are based on different values. Whereas instagram is looking at monthly active users through vehicles like influencers, Reddit is based around quality discussion which inherently lends itself to less growth. So focus on their on values not growing as fast made sense and that focus also kept users happy.

Viki Cumberbatch is our guest today, she is the Community Manager at Osmosis. On today’s episode, we will cover how she runs a community of medical professionals and the changes she’s had to make during COVID, protecting your mental health as a community manager and how they found events their community loved and scaled them virtually while still keeping a very personal touch.

There’s nothing that brings a community together like a shared language, our next guest Hugo Macedo helps run a global community around language and translation. Hugo is the VP of Community at Unbabel. In today’s episode, we will talk about how he implemented a community NPS score, improving product and marketing with community and how he proves the business case for community through reduced acquisition cost and churn.

Who is this episode great for?

B2B, starting and scaling, online community builders

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Being able to create a community from the beginning with the intention of actually fostering a loving environment and also making the work tie back to business goals are both extremely important. You can create a place where people can actually grow together and succeed in business goals without hurting either of those endeavors.

Our guest Erin Wayne is Director of Community and Creator Marketing at Twitch. She has worked at Twitch for over 6 years, she started off managing their partnership with Minecraft and is now Head of Community. We explore how a company with such an extremely active and passionate online community was able to bring that to real life with their C2C program!

I’m excited to have our next guest Chris Anderson who is Director of Community Learning & Love at Guru. We cover a lot of ground on this episode, we talk about how they turned there conference into an event series that lasted all summer, how he chose which business metric to prove community success with and how they are taking their C2C events virtual until they can bring them back to local cities post COVID.

Who is this episode great for?

B2B, starting and scaling, C2C community builders

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Right now many things are canceled because of COVID, especially large in-person conferences. Chris showed that you can take that content and break it down into an event series that can last for weeks. This is a great option for any community that had a large conference to actually utilize the content they prepared and not make people sit through a multi-day online conference.