The Community Corner with Beth McIntyre

Jono Bacon is one of the most notable figures in the community space. He’s helped some of the tech world’s best brands like IBM, Intel, SAP, Mozilla, and others build their community. He also wrote the book The Art of Community and recently published People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams by HarperCollins. We cover community models, why C2C marketing is important in 2020, governing open source communities and more!

Too Long; Didn't Listen

5:33m - Jono discusses the three different community models and how they further subdivide into two categories

8:26m - Provides insight on how he approaches and maps out achieving objectives

10:14m - Explains how the relationship between brands and consumers has changed; from online interactions to in person activations

17:52m - Speaks about two communities that have caught his attention

You can find the podcast on Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Next on the show is Claire Smith who is the Senior Community Manager at the world’s largest online learning platform for higher education, Coursera. She previously led community experience at e-Commerce platform, Storenvy, but she started building her first community - a World of Warcraft Guild - back in 2006. We discuss why Coursera has been focusing on retention over acquisition in light of COVID-19, how she pivoted when an initial program launch didn’t work out as planned, and how community works in tandem with customer success when it comes to an education product. Take a listen!

Who is this episode great for?

Virtual community managers, early-stage community leaders, educational communities

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Claire Smith returned to her role at Coursera from maternity leave to find a very different world. In light of the pandemic, while demand for educational content has risen, Claire and her team are continuing to double down on the retention of their users to ensure that their community is growing. Coursera utilizes the strategy of allowing marketing to focus on acquiring new users so the community team can put all energies toward making sure all users and superusers are happy with the product, engaged with each other, and meeting their educational goals.

Dino Kuckovic, Director of Community & Events at Falcon.io, stopped by this week to discuss his events strategy working at the social media SaaS platform. He shared with us how he organically built a community from scratch, how he makes community a company-wide focus with marketing and sales, and how he keeps his event attendees coming back for more.

Who is this episode great for?

In-person event managers, community leaders, sales and marketing teams

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Dino has had great success creating a framework for generating leads from C2C events. He makes it a priority to work hand in hand with the sales and marketing teams at Falcon.io to get a better understanding of what they are looking for so he can build these strategies directly into his events. Dino is very particular about tying his events back to business generating factors. He stresses the importance of building relationships and really listening to customer feedback so event attendees feel that their needs are being met which in turn leads to sales.

Emma Irwin joins us on the podcast from Mozilla Corporation. She is an Open Source and Community Strategist there and heads up diversity and inclusion strategy development for their open source projects and their communities. Prior to her role at Mozilla, she worked at Benetech as a Developer Community Manager. On today’s episode, we discuss Emma’s strategies for maintaining diversity and inclusion in the open source community and specifically why it’s so important in the tech industry.

Who is this episode great for?

Virtual communities, Tech community leaders, Community strategists

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Emma shares her experience with building community in the tech industry, specifically within the area of open source. Her strategy is to start with reaching out and listening to members of your community to understand their experiences while making sure you are asking questions in a way that feels inclusive. Secondly, your community needs to be a safe place where your members feel comfortable providing anonymous feedback. Lastly, devise a way to make changes and progress using the feedback you receive from your community.

Next on the show is Kevin Lau who is the Global Head of Customer Advocacy at Adobe. Kevin has made a career in community and customer advocacy. Before he went to Marketo, which was acquired by Adobe, he worked at AOL, Google and NetBase. We are going to go in depth on how to create raving fans out of customers, his strategies for running events, the growth of their Marketo User Groups and much more.

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.

Who is this episode great for?

Virtual event managers, In-person communities, Product marketers 

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Brittany has been super successful growing the community at Webflow 114% over the past year. She attributes a lot of her success to the ability to view community like a product due to her extensive background in Product Marketing. Brittany starts any community with a go-to-market strategy and a deep audit of the product. She has also been successful using the strategy of piggybacking off of other company marketing initiatives (such as a traveling product roadshow) to make the best use of available budget in order to grow her community and get to know her members.