Community Leaders Magazine - Issue 3 by communityleaders

MAGA ZI N E F E B/M A R

2 02 2 MONETIZING YOUR COMMUNITY

TRIPLING COMMUNITY RETENTION

HOW TRUSTWORTHY IS YOUR ONLINE COMMUNITY

WEB 3.0 AND COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT

D& IL U G R E D N U O F , IN E L D IE R F Y ASHLE HIS P M E M , IX L C T A K A E P S O T Y ECONSULTANC 4/5 APRIL 2022

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CLI Members get a $200 discount. Register today and quote

JOIN US IN MEMPHIS

CLI200

DAVID SPINKS

VP of Community at Bevy/ Co-Founder of CMX/Author of The Business of Belonging

CLIX TRACKS: √ √ √ √ √

Strategy/Business Value Cultivating and Nurturing Connection Community Leadership Organization Communities (Internal/enterprise social network) Online Trust and Safety

ASHLEY FRIEDLEIN Founder eConsultancy & Guild

Community governance and moderation addressing trust and safety - Kelly Schott,

Manager, Community Programs at Pragmatic Institute

RICHARD MILLINGTON CEO Feverbee, Author of Buzzing Communities & The Indispensable Community

Why you need a community manager and what to look for - RD Whitney, Founder and CEO, Community Leaders Institute

- Laís De Oliveira Author of Hacking Communities | Program Director at On Deck | Entrepreneur

Social Media vs. Community Platform: What to consider when building your online community - Luke Zimmer Online Community

Community Feedback - Adrian Speyer Head of

KPIs and ROI - Proving Business Value -

Monetization strategies for your community

Community at Higher Logic

SPONSORS

Operations & Strategy, Principal | Skariphos Marjorie Anderson, Community Strategist, Storyteller, People Connector

CONTENTS

WELCOME 022 is shaping up to be an incredible year and we can’t wait to bring you all together for the first live Community event since before the pandemic - at our inaugural CLIX event in Memphis this April. If you haven’t yet booked your ticket, make sure you fix that today and take advantage of the $200 discount that Community Leaders Institute members are entitled to – simply quote CLI200 when booking - www.clixevent.com. The connections, conversations, inspiration and learning combined with the culinary and musical delights that Memphis has to offer make this an event not to be missed. You’ve been behind your desk for so long – come on out and join us for an incredible 2 days of curated community content. ‘‘We can’t wait We’re delighted to bring to bring you you another smorgasbord all together at of insight and innovation CLIX in Memphis in this month’s magazine – get inspired by your this April.’’ peers as COO Sarah Hawk shares her story of how she became COO at Discourse and discover Richard Millington’s tips (including some donefor-you templates and scripts) on increasing retention. Learn about different monetization strategies, the value of cross-team collaboration, community maturity curves, measuring success and ensuring online safety. And, get a solid introduction to Web 3.0 and what it means for community management – and some innovative ideas on how to get the best value and re-engagement from your video content. Finally, if you haven’t already joined our facebook group – come and join the conversation. We’ll be hosting regular facebook lives and this month’s focus is community monetisation strategies. Come and introduce yourself, share your knowledge, ask questions, post jobs and be at one with your tribe of fellow community builders and community professionals. We look forward to seeing you online – and in Memphis

Heidi

Driving Cross-Team Collaboration in Online communities

6 Community & Measuring SaaS Goals 9 HOW TRUSTWORTHY IS YOUR ONLINE COMMUNITY? 10 How Feverbee tripled a community’s retention rates, by Richard Millington 14 COMMUNITY IS FUTURE OF VOC 16 Why social media algorithms are ruining your community 18 Building your community technology stack 20 Community-powered market networks, by Ashley Friedlein 22 Creating an online challenge 24 MONETIZING YOUR COMMUNITY 26 The untapped opportunities of video in communities 28 Web 3.0 and Community Management 30 CONVERSATION IS THE CORE OF COMMUNITY 32 RD Whitney interviews Sarah Hawk, COO, Discourse

Publisher RD Whitney Editor Heidi Williams Reporter Emily Brounger Membership Manager Amy Tkaczyk

Contact Us 59 Deer St #517, Portsmouth, NH 03810 amy@communityleadersinstitute.com +1 603-440-9332 This is YOUR magazine – let us know what you’d like to see more of. Send your feedback to amy@communityleadersinstitute.com. Or, if you have an idea for an article, would like your community to be featured, or would like to submit content – we’d love to hear from you.

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Driving Cross-Team Collaboration in Online Communities Alok Ramsisaria, CEO, Grazitti Interactive discusses how brands can harness the power of community to cross-collaborate and deliver ROI – and how each of your teams can benefit from your community

nline communities saw a surge in usage as the world shifted from offline to online. Not only did they become a key medium for businesses to stay connected with their customers, but they also emerged as a crucial channel for organizations to ideate and innovate. For many organizations, the true meaning of online communities was to maintain a humanized relationship with their members and ensure customer success. However, increased virtual engagement highlighted the multi-dimensional nature of online communities. When leveraged the right way, every department of an organization can benefit from the think tank that a community is. When seeking to advance their innovative portfolio, brands can harness the power of communities to cross-collaborate and develop solutions that cater to the needs of their customers, and bring ROI to the table.

CROSS-TEAM COLLABORATION - UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF ONLINE COMMUNITIES Primarily, online communities were designed to better understand customers

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and stay connected with them. But the role of communities is not limited to this. Your sales, product, and marketing teams can benefit greatly from communities if given access.

Sales Team - Boosting Conversions With Lead Management Through Communities

“When leveraged the right way, every department of an organization can benefit from the think tank that a community is”

A key part of any sales process is establishing trust, interest, or incentive for the customer to move from their status quo. However, the reality is that even if your product/service is better or more efficient; customers will still be skeptical.

Communities generate a lot of customer data. Different organizational departments can gain better customer insights from this available data to analyze customer behavior. This will enable them to create products and services that revolve around the customer’s preferences and needs. Let’s deep dive into how each team can benefit from this super tool.

That is where online communities can help. One of the cornerstones of the sales process is to deliver helpful content to aid prospects, highlight what makes your products/services unique, and establish yourself as an authoritative source of information. You can break down the community into four main sections to arm your sales teams with relevant content, as well as build trust among their prospects.

• Stories: To encourage members to share their experiences with peers.

• Forum: To arrange all the topics in a

manner that your community members can easily navigate through them and ask

questions, give feedback, or advice.

• Articles: To feature content created by forum members to help their fellow members.

• Events: To showcase any

upcoming events that may be of interest to the members. And communities give you a place to gain ‘super users’ who can tell prospects how great your service/product is instead of your sales team pitching it.

Product Team - Innovating to Create Robust Products and Services With Communities Online communities are a goldmine for the generation of powerful ideas. Members contribute to the community by exchanging ideas, sharing their feedback about a product or service, and discussing solutions for complex challenges. This is where product development teams can benefit immensely. Online communities provide access to tons of data that product managers can leverage to analyze user psychology, challenges, and ideas to innovate. Online communities are a key medium for product development teams to make customers a part of a product’s journey and boost engagement. Also, for organizations, it is an opportunity to connect with their members on a deeper level and generate loyal brand advocates.

Marketing Team - Amplifying Marketing Efforts With Communities

Like what you read?

Your online community is as much a product as the core products you sell. Based on who your community is for, it can be the ‘product’ people engage with before they buy your core product or after it. Communities can be a great way to identify when your audience is in the buyer’s journey, and when they become a part of your community.

Here’s more from our community hub: [Case Study] Setting Up a Customized Search Community From Scratch on Vanilla Forums to Connect Family Members Globally [Blog Post] 4 Quintessential Reasons for Small Businesses to Leverage Online Communities

This can help marketing teams create effective marketing strategies to:

• Engage and nurture prospective buyers • Create content that is relevant to your members

[Webinar] Understanding the 202 of Security in Online Communities

• Boost brand awareness It only takes a single idea to create products and services that stand out. But identifying these gems is an uphill battle. With tons of information available, your teams get the largest incentive to read between the lines and take your product/ service to the next level. Communities that support cross-collaboration between departments empower your teams to unlock the wisdom that members share, thus enabling them to harvest ideas, conversations, and feedback to innovate and boost ROI.

[Event] Community (re)Focus, 2021 Check out our resource center for the latest updates on community trends, innovations, and more. Take Me There

Grazitti Interactive is a digital innovation leader with extensive experience in developing robust solutions that unlock the true potential of your online communities.

• IdeasPro

We offer a wide range of products and services that empower you to take your community experience a notch up. Our products include:

Our Community Management as a Service (CMaaS) has a broad spectrum that encompasses elements such as strategy, design, development, moderation, and more.

• Khoros- Salesforce Case Connector

Our community-building prowess caters to a variety of leading platforms such as Khoros, Salesforce, Jive, HigherLogic, Vanilla, Insided, and more. The silver lining- we’re also partners with these industry giants!

• Salesforce Knowledge and Khoros Connector • Higher Logic-Salesforce Case Connector

• ScoreNotch • Community Utilities

“ORGANIZATIONS, TODAY, ARE REIMAGINING THE COMMUNITY LANDSCAPE BY LEVERAGING ADVANCED COMMUNITY TOOLS LIKE AI AND ML. AND WE SEE COMMUNITIES ENABLING BRANDS TO IDENTIFY OPPORTUNITIES AND CAPITALIZE ON THE BENEFITS THEY BRING TO THE TABLE IN THE FORM OF INCREASED ENGAGEMENT AND ADVOCACY.” ALOK RAMSISARIA, CEO, GRAZITTI INTERACTIVE

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Community & Measuring SaaS Goals Adrian Speyer, Head of Community, Vanilla by Higher Logic

f you’ve spent any time in any SaaS company, you learn quickly there are three main goals at the top of mind for the executive team:

• • •

Demand - Increased booking/ revenue NRR - Net Revenue Retention Reduced Cost to Serve

It’s amazing how many conversations will end up in one of these three buckets. However, it can be daunting when you need to align your community with them - especially if you are newer to the community game. So, let’s dive in…

How Does Community Play in Approaching Each Goal? Demand - Increased booking/revenue

This is likely the most common goal. It’s about leads - pure and simple. Of course, you can’t boldly go into a community and say, ‘Hey, we need y’all to fill in some form.’ The thing you can control though, is content. Facilitating content creation for marketing teams and making sure your best and brightest members have a space to write amazing content is where you step in. All the excellent content you create translates into great content found in search engines (think SEO). However, it’s also about shareable content – creating content that starts conversations in other channels. Some of the pieces of content could include community-driven eBooks for top tips, spotlight interviews from behind-the-scenes, or doing a question 6

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series with experts. It’s about regular and scheduled content. If a public community is not possible, the focus obviously won’t be new sales but on cross-sell and upsell to the customers who already have access to the community. In this case, there are three goals you aim to achieve:

reports. The Data Analyst in your company will be happy to help if you direct what you’re trying to measure. We all know your community has an impact on organizational goals. Let’s make sure we measure and prove it!

1 2 3

Net Revenue Retention is a buzzy term related essentially to keeping your customers happy and not churning. To be a bit more technical, NRR is shown as the percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers, including expansion revenue, downgrades, and cancels. The closer to 100% or above - the better. To simplify it further for you, it’s truly a measure of two things - perceived value and happiness with outcomes. If your members feel the product/service is valuable and are happy, they are less likely to churn. The more dedicated and satisfied they are, the more likely they are to advocate on your behalf. The goal of the community builder does not change - it’s to create a great space, to connect community people together, and make sure they see value as quickly as possible. This can be from content programming to events to networking. If you’re looking for ideas, check out this eBook. But how can we prove the impact of what you are doing? You can measure advocacy activity. How many case studies are you able to gather from community members? How many G2 crowd reviews can you connect? How are people scoring you on a Customer Effort Score (CES) or Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey? The main thing to know about NPS is that the higher the score, the more likely

Showcase the value of what they bought - via great content Make them aware of potential cross-sells Make them aware of possible upsells

This means showcasing to your current community of customers the product they have - and what other products they could buy or upgrade to achieve more. How does one do this? By inviting customers already using the product to share their experiences and creating content showcasing how it’s used. Some of you have the first part down, but you may be asking “how do I measure any of this?” This is the essential point: aligning community with SaaS goals. We live in a digital world, and your company has many touchpoints. You want to ensure your community is included in that tracking. You want to ensure your other tool capture community activity, so you can show the influence you are having. Even if you are not using huge/ expensive tools or have little access, most analytics tools have attribute

NRR - Net Revenue Retention

they will be to recommend your business. Having good NPS scores from your community members can help reduce churn. How do you go about it though? You never want to use an NPS score based only on the community. It can be skewed. You want to work with your Customer Success organization or whoever runs the overall NPS for your company. You want to overlay customer activity in the community and their membership in said community. The goal will measure data showing that the more active people are in the community, the more likely they will recommend your brand. If not, you hopefully get some guidance from their comments on what you can do better.

Reduce Cost to Serve

This is a classic metric for support communities. It’s about reducing customer frustration when it comes to using your product. However, from the executive standpoint, it’s about lowering support costs via ticket deflection or the ever more direct idea of customer avoidance. The goal is that the community acts as level 1 support to solve the most common questions so your support team can focus on the more complex issues. Essentially, the human-to-human support is a very costly channel. Community support is a much more cost-effective solution. It allows companies to scale support without significantly increasing headcount. I want to focus on how to measure and share what you do in the community, so you look like the community-building rockstar you are. There are a couple of ways deflection can be looked at. One is the idea of the self-service ratio, where you look at the total number of active users you have in your community and divide by the total number of users submitting a ticket. For example, if you had 1,000 members in your community and 100 tickets, the ratio would be 10:1. In other words, for every 10 members active in the community, only 1 submitted a ticket. You can measure this over time as a benchmark and show how the ratio improves. However, we want to get you a step further - and more numeric. We want you to be able to tell your management about the savings. Here is the breakdown to get there: 1. Find out the costs of a call or a ticket - non-community contact. Your support leader should know it. 2. What are the number of sessions people coming to your support section/ categories? Use Google Analytics or something similar to measure. 3. Create a survey to ask people on exit. It should have at least these three questions: a. Did you come to the community to find a solution to an issue you were having?

b. (If yes) Did you find information on the community that led you to a solution c. (If yes) Did your visit avoid the necessity to contact our team? 4. This will give you the percentage of people who found a solution that did not need to take another step. This will leave you the number of sessions deflected. 5. Multiply the number of sessions that were deflected by the cost of calling support. So as an example. A call to your non-community support is $50. In a month, there are 5,000 sessions to your support category. Your survey results show that 10% of people found the answer without contacting support. Therefore, you had 500 sessions that got their answer on the community at $50 a pop. This means that this month you saved your company $25,000. You now have a number you can be proud of and continue to grow.

Being a Rockstar

Only you can step up and share these wins with your company - no one will do it for you. It’s not enough to say you don’t measure because you hate math, or it doesn’t matter because no one asks. You are doing great things to advance your company - they need to know. It will also help you – showcasing the impact you’re making is the path to more support and resources for you to do more. Now go out there and shine, Rockstar!

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Maximize your Community in 2022 In Vanilla’s 7th Edition of Community Predictions, 22 experts weigh in on what’s coming for community in 2022 This year, it’s bigger and better than ever! Get your hands on a free copy today! Download Now

22 EXPERTS

Amanda Petersen MURAL

Beth Arritt Higher Logic

Brian Oblinger Brian Oblinger, LLC.

Dani Weinstein Kaltura

Erica Kuhl Erica Kuhl Consulting

Esther Heide

Kara Adams Foundant Technologies

Kiely Monteiro FloQast

Lana Lee Zoura

Todd Nilson Clocktower Advisors

Jeﬀ Breunsbach Higher Logic

Carlos Moreno Carrie Melissa Jones King Online Community Strategist

Jayashree Rajagopalan Jenny Weigle Researcher Jenny.Community, LLC

Lauren Krawitz Qualtrics

Rachel Silvano Zapier

Marjorie Anderson Project Management Institute

Adrian Speyer High Logic / Vanilla Forums

HOW TRUSTWORTHY IS YOUR ONLINE COMMUNITY? By Todd Nilson, Clocktower Advisors Todd Nilson is an experienced digital strategist with over 25 years of consulting experience, specialized in community-building, digital workplace transformations, and marketing strategy. He has additional background in competitive intelligence research, gamification, recruitment, employer branding, and virtual collaboration. For more information visit www.clocktoweradvisors.com

“Engagement cannot happen if your online community doesn’t seem like a safe or trustworthy space.” Over the years, I’ve come to see how organizations can overlook one or more areas of the community architecture that can result in a loss of member confidence. To help address this, I’ve created a three step framework for assessing levels of trust and safety in your online community. Check your community by assessing these three critical levels of safety.

DOES YOUR TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM INSPIRE TRUST?

At its most fundamental level, the technology upon which you’ve built your community needs to make people feel safe. Ask these questions to ensure that your community’s technology does not send prospective members fleeing in the other direction: • Does the community domain have a valid security certificate? • Is it easy to sign up? • Is the user experience consistent? • Are subgroups used sparingly? • Does your gamification match the community tone? • Does your platform guarantee 99.9% uptime? • Does the platform cache member post data?

DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION INSPIRE TRUST?

Your members have a reasonable expectation of knowing why you’re running an online community and how you might use their unique contributions. Ask the following questions to make sure your members know exactly what to expect from you as the host of their community. • Does your organization clearly disclose the purpose of the community? • Does the community regularly remind members about this purpose? • Does the community clearly explain how and when member content may be used? • Is the community visibly and responsively defended from spammers and other bad actors? • Does the community have a visible, responsive, and empathetic community manager? - Who regularly participates? - Who encourages sharing diverse and inclusive opinions and ideas? - Who recognizes great contributions? - Who models kindness and reciprocity?

olent because of a set of shared values. But that’s not always the case. Here are some questions you can ask to assess the level of trust between your members. • Do members show that they are empathetic and reciprocate kindness to one another? • Are your members tolerant of new ideas and diverse opinions? • Do members use inclusive language so that newcomers feel welcome? • Does the community have established etiquette for posting (not rules but unspoken or spoken guidelines for getting good responses)? • Do community members regularly welcome newcomers? • Do community members share their profiles? • Do community members regularly @mention each other to encourage conversation?

Conclusions

DO YOUR MEMBERS TRUST EACH OTHER?

A community that has a trustworthy platform and demonstrates organizational transparency can still fail when it comes to engagement if its members fail to trust one another. Most communities operate under an assumption that its members are reasonably benev-

Checklists are a great way to assess your community for top performance, especially when you’re so close to the day to day processes that you may miss big things that could be going better. I’d recommend a quarterly or at least annual review of these safety points that can help your members feel safe in your online community, especially if there has been a major platform change, reorganization or acquisition of your business, or influx of many new members. Each of these situations signals a flashpoint for reevaluating and shoring up your community’s sense of safety and trust.

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Case

Study How FeverBee Tripled A Community’s Retention Rates (with scripts, templates, and examples) Here are two statements that seem oxymoronic but actually complement each other:

1 2

NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO, THE MAJORITY OF YOUR MEMBERS WON’T BECOME MORE ENGAGED THAN THEY ARE TODAY IT’S POSSIBLE TO DOUBLE (EVEN TRIPLE) THE RETENTION RATES OF YOUR COMMUNITY MEMBERS

This revealed:

• The company had no capacity for major technical changes.

These are both true because of the huge gap between ‘a majority’ (51%+) and the retention rates most people see in their communities are getting today (5% to 20%).

What We Learned From Our Research The client sold a fairly popular technology product (but wasn’t a SaaS vendor). The company generated in

excess of $750m annual revenue and had a community that had been around for a couple of years before we were invited to help. We spent 5 weeks evaluating the community and interviewed 26 community members and 17 staff, and collected 279 survey responses.

• Members only visited when they had a problem. • Newcomers didn’t find ‘‘any reason’’ to keep coming back. • Newcomers weren’t aware of many of the benefits the community offered.

Member retention was relatively poor with only 2% of newcomers still posting after 3 months, and only 6% still visiting.

Step One

Reducing The Noise We began with small optimisations. We know members hated receiving countless automated messages (especially those from the gamification system), so we stopped almost all of them. Removing automation rules didn’t significantly increase or decrease participation. Lesson: Automation rules don’t seem to increase participation much at all (probably because most people ignore them)

• Superusers felt increasingly ignored. • Members disliked receiving countless notifications.

Richard Millington will be speaking at CLIX, 4-5 April 2022, Memphis, Tennessee

Where Community Leaders Come Together 10

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Step Two

Improving the First Impression Next we changed the default setting to show the ‘latest posts’ rather than ‘top posts’.

i) Changed default settings to show latest posts

I’ve consistently found when members make a post, they want to see it appear at the top of the page (i.e. not be crowded out by popular posts). We also found in our research most members had already seen the top posts in the community. They wanted fresh questions to answer.

ii) Remove survey pop-up

We removed an irritating survey pop-up asking members to share what they think of the community. Newcomers were being hit with three pop-ups upon visiting, so removing one helped.

iii) Created a list of suggested questions

Because many newcomers reported not knowing what questions to ask, we created a list of suggested questions, shared examples of good questions, and helped them become as familiar as possible with what a good question looks like.

iv) Send direct messages from the community manager’s name

We replaced the generic messages from community@ companyname.com (which were often ignored or found their way into spam filters) with emails from the community

“We know members hated receiving countless automated messages, so we stopped almost all of them – with no impact on participation.” manager’s name. We wanted members to know the community managers’ name and begin a direct discussion with them. A few months ago, we worked with Shuning at Veracode on this message which is both personal and shares the benefits of community.

v) Repositioned the community (and changed its messaging)

Much of the previous messaging focused on people joining a group of peers like themselves. Our research showed members wanted quick responses to long-tail questions first (but might join peer groups later). We changed the messaging from getting personal questions to getting personalised responses to difficult/niche questions. This was reflected in the banner, CTA, etc. At this point we began to see some noticeable improvement. It’s hard to say which changes had the biggest impact, but the metrics were definitely heading in the right direction.

Featured Speakers include:

Majorie Anderson: Community Strategist, Storyteller, People Connector

Ashley Friedlein: Founder of Econsultancy and Guild

Eric Ly: Co-Founder of Linkedin

Venessa Paech: Co-Founder of Australian Community Managers and SWARM

David Spinks: Author of The Business of Belonging, Founder CMX

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Step Three

few standardised messages to help as you can see below.

Personalising The Community Experience i) Created a ‘members to follow’ list

A frequent problem on the Salesforce platform is people were encountering blank feeds as they hadn’t followed any members or topics. We tackled this in two stages. First, we created a list of members to follow. These were verified experts endorsed by us. The second step was to create a more custom onboarding journey. You can see an example using the 7Summits onboarding tool in the image shown below.

Rapid Improvement! This is the point where we began to see huge impact from our work. We saw major increases in each of the metrics we were tracking. This wasn’t a spike either, it was a sustained increase.

ii) Created Personalised Responses To Every Poster

Alongside the onboarding tool, we built out a system to get personalised responses to everyone that contributed a post in the community. This required the use of a Zapier integration to Slack identifying superusers, moderators, and the community team to members who had made a post more than 30 days ago and not participated since. We created the standardised framework below to ensure each of them received a response to their discussion.

Step Four

Support Superusers i) Created Standard Templates

We began working with superusers in this phase to get them engaged in creating standard templates and responses for responding to most members’ queries. We used a similar flow-chart to the one above to give every superuser an easy process they can follow to respond to almost any post. This involved sharing a lot of examples of good and bad. The more examples you can share (and highlight what’s good or bad about them), the better the outcome will be.

ii) Curated the best resources iii) Newcomer meetings and newcomer groups

We knew newcomers wanted to engage with product managers as they were getting started. So we tried to do this in the community. This turned out to be too much work for too little reward. So we replicated this with a newcomer group supported by superusers who could answer most of the common questions in the community.

iv) Used Asset-Based Community Development Approach

We tried to find everyone a unique role in the community. We know when members feel they can make unique, useful, contributions to the community, they tend to stick around and participate. This involved a lot of training and we created a

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A common problem facing newcomers was quickly getting up to speed so they don’t have to ask the same repetitive questions over and over again. If you’ve been in the community a while, you’ve already seen the best resources and participated in the best discussions. But newcomers didn’t have that. So we created a list of curated resources ‘which every newcomer should read’. Aside, the Digital Ocean community does this extremely well.

Step Five

Banner Relaunch and Follow-up Messages i) Redesigned the banner

The previous community banner lacked a clear call to action and didn’t explain what made the community unique. We

revamped this to focus on three actions visitors could take right now within links. This focused specifically on ‘solve problems’, ‘top tips’, and ‘find a group’.

ii) Follow-ups to check progress

Using a Zapier/Slack integration to top members again, we created a list of members for superusers to reach out to after they had been members for 3 months. Around 65% (it wavered a lot) of FTPs (first-time posters) received a follow-up message after 3 months. If they were still highly engaged, they were invited to join a group of veterans.

iii) Automatically assigned members to roles

Finally, we tested something new (similar to the ABCD approach). We sent emails to members assigning them to a role within the community (usually something like ‘topic reporter’ or ‘topic facilitator’) based upon their past contributions. They had a choice about whether or not to accept the role. Acceptance rates varied from 10% to 20% (which is high when emails had an open rate of 20% to 30%.

What Worked And What Didn’t? In an ideal world, we would make one single intervention at a time and measure the impact of each. In the consultancy world, we don’t have the time for that. Instead we make a number of changes at once and assess which worked. However, as you can see below, you can draw your own conclusions about what had the biggest impact.

“A common problem facing newcomers was quickly getting up to speed so they don’t have to ask the same repetitive questions over and over again.” If you want more help increasing retention, I strongly recommend my book, Build Your Community which has lots of advice and examples. You can also reach out to FeverBee about consultancy support.

I suspect the biggest wins were: • Improving the banner design. • Sending personalised messages. • Using the ABCD approach to newcomers can make a unique impact. • Suggested questions

RICHARD MILLINGTON IS THE FOUNDER

Improving Retention Rates Isn’t Easy

CONSULTANCY, WHOSE 300+ CLIENTS

The best thing you can do is deep research of your target audience (like, really go through the community site with them), embrace best practices in the community design, identify and prioritise the highest impact activities and build from there.

Resources These resources might help: • Some basic member engagement scripts. • Personalised response framework. • Template introduction message. • 7Summits Onboarding Tool (Salesforce only). • Download the presentation slides. • Watch the webinar.

OF FEVERBEE, A COMMUNITY HAVE INCLUDED APPLE, FACEBOOK, GOOGLE, SAP, SEPHORA, HP, AND THE WORLD BANK. FEVERBEE HELPS ORGANIZATIONS USE POWERFUL PSYCHOLOGY TO BUILD THRIVING ONLINE COMMUNITIES WHICH SCALE SUPPORT CHANNELS, GENERATE POWERFUL INSIGHTS, AND IMPROVE THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. RICHARD IS SPEAKING AT CLIX, MEMPHIS ON 4-5 APRIL 2022

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Community is future of VoC: How communities are changing the innovation game Feedback drives innovation Let’s start with the obvious: when your customers experience friction with your brand, they want to tell you about it. That’s incredibly valuable feedback for you — so if you’re not using it, you’re missing out. Now, the less obvious: the old approach to gathering this feedback — meetings, surveys, focus groups, and feedback sessions — is inefficient and outdated. And while surveys are undoubtedly important, they don’t capture every pain point your customers want to tell you about. There are two main issues with the old approach:

1. The old approach can’t give you context When you have context, you can focus on the problems that people have, not the problems that your products have. Focus groups and feedback sessions tend not to give you this context, because they too often focus on ways to improve the product or specific design decisions. This takes the solution out of context from the problem, i.e. the situation where the product is being used. Even feedback that gets repeated again and again, when it doesn’t have context, won’t help you drive real innovation.

37%

of respondants say they’ve ignored a survey request because they had already given feedback somewhere else.

2. The old approach can’t give you real-time speed Surveys and other traditional feedback mechanisms don’t capture people’s feedback about pain points while the pain is happening. When we take the time and resources to set up a fabricated situation, we miss out on the realtime frustration that so often drives invention. If you can capture that spontaneous invention right when it’s happening and give a way for that person to show you exactly what they are going through, you can harness that frustration at scale across every customer and potential customer. That’s when real innovation starts flowing.

So, how can brands capture that power? Brand-owned communities The solution is to give people a space to innovate whenever inspiration strikes — and incentivize them to share those insights. The top 25 social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Reddit, Quora, WeChat, YouTube, and more have over 17.5 billion daily active users around the world. People spend billions of hours every day on these sites venting and sharing frustrations with little to no hope of anyone hearing them or doing anything about — and they know it. The key isn’t to get your customers to stop complaining. Rather, it’s to create a space where they feel they’re being heard to impact change. This is what communities do!

1. Harness the power of frustrated masses

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Rules* Engine

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Feedback* Mechanism

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Behavior date – Behavior reporting, dashboards, and analytics Rules engine – Gamification management system Feedback mechanism – Points, badges, leaderboards, ranks, etc.

Adobe’s crowdsourcing superpowers Adobe, a leader in this space, uses their community as a major source of ideas. The Experience League connects customers with their peers and gives a place for the customer voice to be heard through ideas and voting. A new leader board for the community provides another area for members to highlight their achievements and contributions. By encouraging more engagement, any member can make it to the top 10!

Building a winning community One of the most amazing things about online communities is how quickly they can scale. Unlike in-person or over-thephone brainstorming, which set limits on the number of people who can contribute, asynchronous online groups can include any number of people without worrying about interruptions or time limits. The bottom line here is that when brands use asynchronous, democratic, incentivized communities to source ideas, they can reduce the costs of innovation while increasing the outputs.

Tips to level up your gamification Read how

Once you’ve created a space for people to share ideas, the next step is to maximize creativity and productivity within the community. You can incentivize people with non-monetary rewards, but many brands go a step further, offering contributors early access to new products, executives, discounts, and indirect payments.

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User Behavior

2. Accelerate ideation and innovation with gamification

Behavior* Date

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The problem? Brands sometimes can’t participate in — or even find — these conversations on public communities. A brand-owned community harnesses the power of frustrated customers and gives them the power to impact change.

Gamiﬁcation Platform

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Public social networks, unsurprisingly, gather people to share their common frustrations. When your brand is on the hot seat, it creates a huge wealth of information that you can use to improve customer experience and products, services.

Why social media algorithms are ruining your community Building your community on social media? Then you may have come to the conclusion that social media algorithms are ruining your community By Michelle Goodall, CMO, Guild Community strategists have long debated whether it makes sense to build a community on social media or not. On the plus side, social media allows you to meet members in platforms where they’re already engaging at scale. On the negative side, most community strategists don’t recommend building a community on social media if you respect member data, want sustainability, longevity and value...and certainly not if you want community content and discussion to be visible rather than battling daily with social media algorithms. What are social media algorithms? Quite simply, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and all ad-funded social media platforms determine which content to deliver to people in their ‘feed’ based on their behaviour. Many years ago, you’d see something in your feed based on its publishing time, usually the newest posts first. But today, most social media, with the exception of TikTok, use a connection graph to determine what an individual sees in their Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook feed. They all use algorithms to make a selection of what users get to see on the social media platform app by using data that has been collected by the platforms, based on a user’s past use, and also data that users voluntarily give to platforms. There are countless articles advising brands and creators how to ‘beat the algorithm’. Some brands are successful at this, some are not. The rules change with each new feature or content format, but the simple truth is that the social media giants fully control what individual users see and experience on their platforms.

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“A shift towards prioritising and promoting ‘high performing’ content that games the system forces brands to behave in certain ways to get visibility.” Diminishing visibility of brand content in social media Brands are increasingly feeling the struggle to get their content seen by the people they’re connected with on social media without resorting to ‘engagement bait’. A shift towards prioritising and promoting ‘high performing’ content that games the system forces brands to behave in certain ways to get visibility. “More and more brands are having to rely on engagement bait tactics such as collaborations, trend jacking and memes to be seen.” explains Nexus’ Head of Social Harry Gardiner. “The most engaged brands online are the funny ones - so suddenly every business is rushing to develop a quirky personality for fear of becoming irrelevant, or ignored. The irony is that by the time social media teams get sign off to react to trends, the memes are usually long overcooked.” Restless Comms Founder Chris Reed highlights the constant battle that those running communities in Facebook or LinkedIn face, whether they are using Groups or Pages: “The ‘old’ social platforms which seemed to be well set up for groups just aren’t catering for them now - I’m an admin for a couple of Facebook groups and we’ve seen a noticeable decline in reach and engagement within both. It feels like there’s been a number of significant changes to algorithms to suppress brand content visibility to those who have followed or joined. Either way we’re actively looking at moving across to other platforms. Both to maximise reach amongst a keen and opted-in audience, but also for better visibility of activity on the platform.” Browser Media Account Director Vic Spall highlights the continual tweaks to the algorithm that specialist digital marketing agencies have to stay on top of on behalf of their clients: “Social media platforms are constantly evolving, making it difficult to stay on top of every single change and tweak to the algorithm. Platforms are constantly pushing suggested content in a bid to show users posts they’re more likely to

interact with based on their behaviour, the behaviour of their friends, and similar accounts a user follows. And because feeds are no longer chronological, trying to predict the best times of day or day of the week to post has become almost impossible.”

occasionally with something magical, something not based on their behaviours/likes and something completely left-field. These are interesting considerations for brands, businesses and organisations who wish to target young adults.

That’s the algorithm at work.

An equal share of voice is important in online communities Online communities are built on trust. Belonging to a safe space with people joined together by a common interest or expertise is an important part of both our professional and personal lives. Building relationships, sharing ideas, getting honest feedback, and supporting one another is hugely valuable. People often feel empowered to be more open and candid if they are given a community space that doesn’t reward the loudest, or those who know how to beat the algorithm. Communities, not algorithmic social media, give an equal platform for the quiet ones. The interesting ones. The ones who may not have much to say, but when they do, it’s gold dust. However, if you take away that equal share of voice it only benefits certain parties.

Do social media algorithms encourage the wrong behaviours? The problem with social media algorithms is that they favour certain styles of content and posts; incendiary Tweets designed to cause disagreement and division; LinkedIn posts with existential angst or pleas for help - the fabulous Twitter account The State of LinkedIn frequently features some of the very worst (anonymised) algorithm offenders. In LinkedIn, valuable and informative professional content gets lost in a sea of marketing messages and long, broetry style posts with thousands of likes. Those with something valuable to say or share fail to cut through the noise and get their posts seen. That’s the algorithm at work. This pressures others to attempt to

“When we begin to make decisions that favour algorithms over interesting concepts, ideas or user experience, it’s clear something is wrong on social media.” mimic these patterns and types of post to stay visible on the platform. Whilst some would suggest that algorithms are there to keep us coming back to social media platforms and they are a necessity, it has to be acknowledged that algorithms encourage and reward the wrong kind of behaviours, not just in what we’re actively posting, but in what we interact with too. Many make a conscious effort to engage with this style of post that they wouldn’t ordinarily have an interest in, to try and manipulate their own visibility on the platform. It’s also becoming more common for people to avoid linking out from the platform they’re in, in a bid to gain more impressions – even if doing so would provide their audience with useful information or context. And that’s why social media platforms aren’t always the best homes for communities. They have the benefit of being recognisable, but they incentivise the wrong actions. Social media algorithms create ‘filter bubbles’ Social Media algorithms encouraging filter bubbles is not a new idea. I was lucky enough to speak to a group of 17-18 year olds about their use of TikTok, Instagram and Spotify. It seems that I’m not alone in feeling jaded by the constant stream of content in social media that has defined who I am. The way these young adults described what they see in their feeds, what music or products are recommended to them and how they know their apps are profiling them was revealing. They used the words and phrases ‘fattened’, ‘seen’, ‘designed to keep you addicted’, ‘reinforces who I am’ etc. This Filter Bubble concept isn’t new thinking. Author Eli Parser wrote ‘The Filter Bubble - How The New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read And How We Think’ in 2012, explaining that because news we dislike or disagree with is automatically filtered out, it can have the effect of narrowing what we know. Whilst no-one used the word ‘serendipity’, it does feel like some of the younger generation might rebel / opt out against the behavioural targeting/profiling that they know is happening if they are not surprised

There are more suitable online platforms for your community than social media Choosing community platforms without algorithms and ad-funded models allows you to create experiences and discussions your community wants, but also respects and protects their data. Non algorithmic community platforms, like Guild, are less about gaming systems and are more geared towards building longer-term meaningful relationships. These are much better suited to creating and growing an online community of value. As well as respecting member data by using non-social platforms for your communities, it’s important to nurture the right habits, such as helping others and sharing content/links that will benefit members, and not just posting to appear prominently in a newsfeed. Guild is different to LinkedIn or Facebook Groups. It’s a mobile-first platform for professional communities and networking. Guild is ad-free and provides an ideal space to connect, communicate, collaborate by creating or joining communities. The Professional Community Leaders community on Guild is an example of a Community of Practice thriving on a non-social media and non-algorithmic community platform Social media expert and host of the Charity and Nonprofit Trailblazers community on Guild Fay Schofield believes that it’s not an “either or choice” with social media and community platforms: “There’s a place for social media in marketing, comms and fundraising strategies that community platforms like Guild can sit alongside. We’re still stuck on the hamster wheel of ‘how to beat the algorithm’, ‘how to get our content trending’. What we need to do is take a step back and realise that online communities - the ones which are driven by passionate people - could be and should be the beating hearts of our online presence, both personal or professional. So as a collective, let’s not fall down the rabbit hole of trying to make algorithms work. Let’s instead pump our time, energy and money into making social media social again and building connections and running communities which can bring people closer together.” Sue Llewellyn, founder of Ultra Social gets the last word on why she values Guild communities such as Digital Marketing Pioneers and Comms & PR Pioneers over LinkedIn Groups. “In terms of time-saving and relevance – and no ads – this is where Guild comes in. And the group discussions there are far more useful than LinkedIn Groups, in fact I’ve been on a quest to find a really good LinkedIn group – although there are some – but generally I’ve found they’re often overwhelmed by low quality, self-aggrandising or salesy content. The Guild groups are genuinely helpful.” Michelle Goodall is the CMO at Guild, a platform purpose-built for professional groups

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Building Your Community Technology Stack to Ensure Enduring Community Investment Author: Steven Yum, Community Lead, Common Room At Common Room we’re serving over 2 million community members and have unique insight into how organizations successfully build communities, including what makes an effective community technology stack. Our customers follow a community maturity curve across 3 phases: seeding the community (phase 1), facilitating growth and sustained engagement (phase 2), and showing community impact on the business (phase 3). To mature from one phase to the next requires the adoption of multiple platforms and an integration of community and business tools and internal company data. As a community manager, you play a critical role in advocating for investment in additional platforms and tools to not only do great community engagement work, but to also bring your whole organization closer to your community and drive business impact. These dual goals are likely reflected in conversations you have with leaders and counterparts in marketing, customer success, and community operations when trying to answer questions such as “How do I better prove the value of our community work to our business objectives?” and “What combination of tools are others using to achieve this?” We’ve previously covered the technical considerations you should work through when building your community technology stack. In this article, we’re going to share a roadmap for how to start measuring community impact against business objectives. We’ll highlight the additional tools and data sources you should include in your community technology stack - and connect to your community intelligence platform to both support your community through its stages of growth and demonstrate its positive impact on your business. 18

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Community technology stack by maturity curve The tools in your community technology stack enable you to build and engage your community through each phase of the community maturity curve. Investing in the right mix of tools will help you support your community and achieve your business goals, which should reflect your community’s goals - a better experience delivered faster - in each phase. Phase 1: Seeding your community In the first phase, you’re focused on building a vibrant community, typically with a chat and/or social media platform like Slack, Discord, or Twitter. You want a space to provide product support, offer hands-on demo opportunities, and facilitate connections between community members. Your efforts will be on trying to increase membership and the number of interactions or engagements within your community. If you start seeing community responsiveness - community questions being answered by other community members - increasing, that’s a sign that you’re building a self-sustaining and healthy space. Phase 2: Facilitating growth and sustained engagement As your community continues to grow, you’re looking to support and manage more ways for members to interact with your company, your product, and each other. At this phase, we typically see customers adding a forum (like Discourse or Stack Overflow) to offer a searchable knowledge base, a code repository (like GitHub) for pull and feature requests and feedback, and/or a customer support platform (like Intercom) to manage support tickets. Investing in these additional sources of engagement and communication allows you to identify key contributors, champions, and advocates - members with top activity across multiple sources - to amplify their work and elevate their expertise. You can partner together with your most active and knowledgeable community members to do things like launch workshops and training programs that educate the next generation of product champions, co-create blogs and tutorials, and speak at events. Putting it all together, with a growing

“As a community manager, you play a critical role in advocating for investment in additional platforms and tools to not only do great community engagement work, but to also bring your whole organization closer to your community and drive business impact”

and more engaged community, you can begin to analyze the reach and effectiveness of product education, and understand if increased peer-topeer knowledge sharing correlates to a reduction in required internal support resources (like fewer tickets or shorter resolution times). Phase 3: Showing community impact on the business In this phase, you’re ready to measure and report on direct attribution of community activity against your company’s business goals (typically product adoption and revenue). This means being able to answer questions like, “Does revenue increase as members spend more time contributing to and engaging with the community?”, “How many leads came in through the community?” and “How long does it take them to convert to a paying customer vs. leads from other channels?” This is where we see our more sophisticated community-led customers connect their business tools and internal company data into their community technology stack. This is usually customer data - such as Salesforce or HubSpot - and product usage - stored in a data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift. Now you’re able to create an end-to-end link from when, how, and why a member joined your community, what their activity is like, and their progression through your sales process to becoming a paying customer. In other words, you’ll be able to qualify leads as originating from the community and track their journey from when they start using your product through to how much revenue is attributable to them. From a product adoption perspective,

“Integrating information across your tools and systems is critical in scaling your community efforts, regardless of the maturity phase your community is in”

frequently they engage - to understand where you might be able to improve your community programs and better meet the needs of your members and customers. Now that we’ve covered the tools you should have in your community technology stack as your community grows - and thrives - across the community maturity curve, it’s time to talk about how to get a holistic view of all the data these tools provide.

you can start comparing the health of accounts with community members vs. those without, and its impact on expansion and retention. You can identify which users are highly active in the product but aren’t participating in the community, and dig into why that is. You can also identify members who are inactive in both the product and in the community, and try to provide more individualized outreach to these at-risk members. All of these engagement trends can be broken down even further by region, plan or role type, and any other customer or product-specific filters that are tracked in your business tools. From a revenue perspective, now you can analyze the relationship between community activity and revenue at a more granular level. For example, you can calculate what percent of your revenue is from users from the community and use this metric as a measure of how impactful your community program is. You can also start to identify key behavioral characteristics common across high revenue customers - such as how many community platforms they participate in, what kind of posts they share, and how

A single source of truth for community, customer, and product data Integrating information across your tools and systems is critical in scaling your community efforts, regardless of the maturity phase your community is in. Without it, your impact is limited by the manual time you have to spend tying data together without adequate visibility into the true impact of your programs. We built Common Room to solve this. Common Room is a community intelligence platform that brings together community engagement, product usage, and customer data into a single place. It was designed to surface insights from across your entire community and provide ways to act on those insights directly from the app. This allows you to discover what’s most important, nurture key personas, measure the impact of your programs, and collaborate across your organization. Ultimately, we want you to build better products, deepen relationships, and grow faster, and your ability to do that accelerates when you can advocate for enduring and deep community investment. Request access to Common Room today.

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The future of professional services:

community-powered market networks

Market forces, shifts in how we work, and emerging business models are starting to shape the future of professional services - which have been slow to digitally transform. Ashley Friedlein, CEO of Guild asks - is a storm about to hit? I have written before about what the passion economy means for the future of professional services but it isn’t just the passion economy that is a force for change. The gig economy impacts knowledge workers too, as does the shift to recurring revenue models in the subscription economy. The knowledge economy that underpins professional services is at the confluence of all these macro trends:

Economic shifts impacting the knowledge economy 1. What are ‘market networks’ and why are they the future for professional services? NfX wrote an excellent piece on why the next 10 years will be about market networks and predict that “market networks will produce a new class of unicorn companies and impact how millions of service professionals will work and earn their living.” They visualise how networks, marketplaces and workflow come together to create ‘market networks’:

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marketing channels - social, email, content marketing, webinars, white papers etc have been the staple digital marketing channels for marketing professional services. But they have become increasingly noisy, saturated, expensive and engagement rates are falling. Communities offer a way to cut through this and create more meaningful connections and conversations. We have a written a free guide on community-based marketing if you want more detail on this approach. Recent trends: •

Impact of Coronavirus - this has made digital forms of communication and connection a necessity rather than a nice to have. It also means we have a strong need to connect, to belong, to counter the distancing and alienation we have to live with. And digital communities can help make up for lost networking and conversations that might otherwise have happened at in-person events.

3. It’s still about who you know in professional services NfX explain market networks as the combination of marketplaces, networks and workflow Also worth reading on this topic is Li Jin’s What’s next for marketplace startups? Reinventing the $10 trillion service economy. Li is famous for coining the term ‘passion economy’ and explains how the passion economy will impact the future of work - all of this is highly relevant to professional services which is delivered in an increasingly digital and global manner. Expertise will be ‘on-demand’ globally and discoverable via market networks and specialist communities. 2. Why will they be community-powered? The (re)rise of digital communities is due to many factors: Ongoing macro trends: •

Digital transformation - our ways of working are clearly shifting to digital channels and this includes how professionals will market themselves, find new clients, nurture existing relationships, and deliver work. The in-person communities and networking of the past will inevitably shift online.

•

Gig economy, remote working, portfolio roles, microbusinesses, global connectivity, passive income, working later in life... all these trends necessitate digital ways to connect and collaborate with others and digital communities of expertise are the obvious way to do so.

•

Trust has moved away from institutions, including brands, to people & peers - this is well-evidenced in market research, like Edelman’s Trust Barometer, and it applies to professional services also. Organisational brands are carrying less importance and professionals are turning to peers for advice and support just as consumers are turning to friends and family via social media. Professional communities of expertise are places to which trust is migrating.

•

Customers and employees seeking a more emotional engagement with brands - research shows this to be true particularly with younger generations of professionals for whom things like purpose, authenticity etc are important in deciding who they want to work with. Once again the emotional nature of communities, to which one can feel a genuine sense of belonging, fits well with this macro trend. Waning engagement due to saturation in existing digital

Professional services was always about ‘who you know’ and your networks were very important for access to the right people to maximise your chances of success. This had its downsides - elitism, favouritism, exclusiveness, privilege etc. The world has become more connected and there are many exciting new business models emerging in professional services and new ways to connect with other professionals all around the world. But... professional services is still about people, about relationships, about trust. It’s just that the way you can build trust and nurture valuable relationships is changing - and digital professional communities of expertise are at the core of this. Add in a means to trade (i.e. sell / monetize) your expertise, rather than merely share it, and you have a community-powered market network - these will enable all sorts of new ways of working and earning a living, from anywhere in the world, that are truly exciting and empowering for experts and knowledge workers!

Join Guild See for yourself how the Guild experience is different to WhatsApp, Slack, LinkedIn or Facebook Groups. Guild is a safe space to connect, communicate and collaborate with others. Join us on a platform that is purpose-built for professionals and businesses. • •

Just want to join some groups? Simply join Guild and then look through the discoverable groups and communities to find relevant ones to join Thinking of running your own community? With an elegant and simple to use, mobile-first UX you’ve got everything you need to start a community - custom branding, analytics, group and user management and support. Get started with your own community here with our free and enterprise options

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CREATING AN ONLINE CHALLENGE

Community Models – The Rise of the “Pop Up” Community By Emily Brounger In the last 6 months we’ve seen a rapid rise in the amount of entrepreneurs and businesses creating communities to bolster their value and engagement and to act as a marketing vehicle. This is particularly true of coaches, consultancies and membership businesses who are charging members a subscription and feel pressure to add a community element to increase engagement and stickiness of their offer and add value to members. But 6 months after launching the community component of their offer, they’ve often found the peer-to-peer connectivity is relatively limited and they’re exhausted from constantly trying to “make” members return and maintain the energy of the community. This is particularly true of facebook groups in recent months, where facebook’s algorithm shows the content to less and less people as engagement drops off.

Enter: “Pop-up communities” or “Online Challenges”

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“The advantage of an Online Challenge is that it’s time-limited which means it’s much easier to create immediate impact because everyone joins within a short period of time and are engaged and excited to get started” A pop-up community is one established for a time-limited or goal-specific purpose. They’re growing in popularity as both a networking area which sits alongside a time-limited virtual or physical event, giving attendees the opportunity to connect and get to know each other, and perhaps arrange IRL meet-ups, and also in the form of an “Online Challenge”. An online challenge is an experience where you challenge your audience to do something each day, with the intention of helping them achieve a goal, get better at something or solve a problem – which often in turn builds value, authority and goodwill and leads members to a specific product or service you offer. The advantage of an Online Challenge is that it’s time-limited so it’s much easier to create immediate impact because everyone joins within a short period of time and are engaged and excited to get started. It can also be easier to manage because of the short but intensely active time-frame

Design your own online challenge

Follow our 3 step guide to designing an online challenge for your community

1 1

CHOOSING A CHALLENGE TOPIC

Choosing a challenge topic

Challenges need to be worthy of your ideal audience’s time. Your challenge needs to be a PRAT!

• Solves a Problem • Delivers Results – progress or clarity or completion of a specific piece of work • Be in Alignment (ie lead naturally to your offer, products or services) • Be achievable within the Time-frame you’ve set

People often dream up a challenge idea without thinking carefully about the end goal, which means the challenge lacks alignment and doesn’t drive participants toward an action which returns value to you. Successful challenges reverse engineer the process and start with the action you want people to take at the end of the challenge. Take your end action and brainstorm ideas on some of the components, the questions and challenges people face around the issue your product or service is solving, to come up with a challenge that gives them value and progress whilst showcasing your expertise and credibility to help them further.

Designing your challenge

Answer these questions to define the objectives and outline of your challenge 1. What measurable results are you hoping to achieve (number of challenge par-

ticipants, number of conversions to your offer at the end of the challenge)

2. What is the theme/goal of your challenge (e.g. teach people to build their community in 10 days)

3. What is the offer you’re making at the end of the challenge – and how neatly does it align with the goal of the challenge itself? 4. How long will your challenge be?

(5 days is popular but drop off occurs after 3. 30

DESIGNING YOUR CHALLENGE

Day and 90 Day challenges can also be a good fit if your offer is helping create habitual change – but you’re more likely to want to charge for this length of challenge)

5. Who is your challenge for?

(e.g. Piano players, new entrepreneurs, parents to newborn babies)

6. What problem does your challenge help solve?

CREATING YOUR CHALLENGE

Our top challenge tips

• Make your challenge stand out – in name and design. It should be immediately recognisable and easy to find at a glance.

•

Set a realistic goal within the time period set.

• Be clear about the structure and

Creating your challenge

timetable – and repeat it across all channels.

Now you know the topic and the who, what and how of your challenge, you need to consider the best way to deliver it. The most common format is a pop-up FB group specifically for the challenge, with live sessions where you set a daily task and follow-up with Q&As or Ask-me-Anythings to help participants progress. But here’s the secret - less is more when it comes to content. Nothing turns people away from challenges more than a feeling of overwhelm and failure. If they miss a day, and feel like there’s no hope of catching up, they won’t attempt to. Each day should consist of one single task that can be completed by your participant in 20 minutes. Draw a table with each of your challenge days down one side, add a column for Lesson and a column for Homework. Now plot out your challenge and decide what each daily lesson will deliver and the piece of homework you will ask them to complete. Keep it simple, don’t overwhelm – this is why so many challenges are 5 rather than 3 days, because – when chunking up the work appropriately - it can be difficult to complete enough “action” in 3 days to add value and create that sense of achievement and progress that makes your challenge so valuable. As you plot out your daily lesson and homework, think about how it connects to the offer, product or service you’re promoting through the challenge, and weave that in accordingly.

• Collect emails (challenges are a pow-

erful lead magnet) and notify participants when the challenge is starting AND before any live daily sessions

• Create accountability - set participants a progress task each day

• Create incentives –you can incentivize members for completing homework, inviting a friend, showing up each day, to keep the energy of the group

• Keep content available for a few days post-challenge for people from different time-zones

• Plug your product or service

throughout – lightly in day 1 and 2 and in more detail on subsequent days (but be respectful of people’s time, short and sweet is best)

If you found this article useful, you’ll love the Guide to Creating an Online Challenge, which also contains details on how to promote your challenge and how to talk about your offer during the challenge – coming soon to the Resources section of www.communityleadersinstitute.com. Sign up to be notified when it’s available

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COMMUNITY MONETIZATION STRATEGIES

HOW A NEW GENERATION OF “COMMUNITY ENTREPRENEURS” CAN MONETIZE THEIR COMMUNITIES In the first of our series on monetizing community, Gali Meiri, Founder of Comonetize shares how her platform can help community builders add an invaluable resource – and generate revenue

IRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) is a powerful motivator behind the “Great Resignation”. Over a very short period of time, our lifestyle and work habits were turned upside down and inside out, revealing the unique experience of working from home, managing our own time, being around the people we love, and even increasing our profits. Millions of people suddenly realized that the only unrenewable resource is their time, and they want to make the best of it by leaving low-paid unrewarding jobs and seeking a remote or hybrid alternative that will allow them to manage their time and income better. The gig economy, on an upward trajectory for the last decade, got a steroid booster shot from the post-COVID working class. The Great Resignation leaves the economy with a workforce of people who still need to make a living but insist on working on their own terms, giving rise to a new generation of entrepreneurs. In my work, mentoring and advising community builders, I’ve come to realize these entrepreneurs split into two broad categories; The creators and the community entrepreneurs. Let’s talk about creators: Creators are opinion leaders or influencers, with a devoted audience of fans, readers or followers, who are willing to pay for the content they create, share, or teach. Creator economy is exploding, and it seems every kid has a profitable YouTube channel with a million subscribers, or has

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just sold their GIF as an NFT for north of $15,000. There are hundreds of platforms that allow creators to connect with their fanbase and translate this connection into cash. Patreon, which started as a kind of “tip jar” for artists became one of the leading digital platforms, recently valued at $4B. Creators and influencers can now profit from an audience of any type or size, but — and there is a but — the audience has to be there specifically for them. They must be interested in what they have to offer. It needs to be an audience that wants to connect with the creators, consume their content, learn from them, or be part of their specific network. As a creator, there are almost endless ways to monetize an audience, most of which end up with the follower paying the creator a monthly subscription fee. But what happens if you have a great audience, but without the guru status? What can a community leader who doesn’t shine like a rockstar do when they know they can still provide great value for their community and profit from it? Enter, the community entrepreneur. The community entrepreneur Community entrepreneurs identify the needs of their community members and the business opportunities that present themselves in that particular audience. They develop solutions that benefit the community while they profit from them - a win-win situation. Community entrepreneurs think of

their community as a trusting, devoted audience, whose needs they are fulfilling by building a startup. Some inspiring examples are NomadList, which brings together a community of 25K nomads and gives them tools to network and work remote easily ; “Freelancing Females” community, which recently launched a job board and a directory site and BIG Festival community of game developers, which launched a career site. My point is, you don’t have to be gurulevel to create and monetize a community – you just need to open up your mind and seek a solution outside the “creator” product pool. Creators are generally quick to monetize their communities, whilst community entrepreneurs, whose primary motive has often been to help their members help each other sometimes fail to recognise the value they’ve created in bringing their tribe together. If that resonates with you, I can help you understand how valuable your audience is for recruiters, companies and businesses in the ecosystem and establish efficient ways to convert this demand to income. We’ve created career sites for over 200 community leaders, delivering value for members and recruiters, and- of courseprofit for the community leader. ______________________________________ Gali Meiri is the founder of Comonetize – community career site builder. She’s a community manager and a community monetization expert.

Your meeting video just got a lot more useful... CLIPr extracts the key moments from recorded meetings based on your preferences https://www.clipr.ai/ Supported On

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Humphrey Chen of CLIPr explores the untapped opportunities of video in communities Heidi Williams spoke with Humphrey Chen, CEO of CLIPr, about how their powerful new tool is transforming video into a time-efficient powerhouse of repurposable content

HW: What’s the purpose of CLIPr? HC: At CLIPr, we want to make re-engagement around video as effortless and as efficient as possible. We think that not all minutes or moments in video are created equally nor are they equally relevant to everyone. So CLIPr uses machine learning to index every minute of video and make it searchable. We generate an automated table of contents and if only 5% of that content matters to you, or is relevant to you, we want you to be able to find that immediately

audience, but their audience is often varied. So, for us, we’re all about getting the maximum utility out of that video and getting it in front of the people that need to hear it. When you transition into a 365 world, that means that the content can keep living and keep evolving throughout the year, and keep adding value. Those memories that would normally have been trapped in our head can be repurposed. The tools that we’ve been focused on now not only help you to find those moments but also mean you can bookmark and save those moments. We want you to share those moments.

“Not all minutes or moments in video are created equally. We want to make re-engagement around video as effortless and efficient as possible.”

CLIPr uses AI and machine learning to index video into Moments that are searchable, shareable, and actionable There are occasions where there is content you didn’t know you needed to know so we also want to provide you with the tools to find that as well. If you get 10% utility out of the recorded video that’s mission accomplished because you didn’t have to wade through the other 90% to find it. When you think about recorded video and all the power that’s trapped within, the tools to actually more efficiently consume the video haven’t really existed until now. Part of this is because historically there hasn’t been a need to more efficiently consume videos. Entertainment video, like Netflix, is very different from everyday video because there’s a story arc -you can’t just pick and choose parts you want to watch because you won’t be able to follow the story.

HW: Where does it fit, in relation to video hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo? HC: We host and manage your video in the cloud, like YouTube and Vimeo and then provide you with the tools that determine who you want to have access to it. At the most foundational level, CLIPr is the player and so you can use it instead of the Vimeo or YouTube player. It also means you can stream to CLIPr and watch live events through it, react with emojis and have that be part of the metadata after the event is finished too. With CLIPr’s live capabilities we can actually receive and ingest during the live event. As soon as it’s finished, we transition to the post event experience and the topics will show up, helping watchers shortcut to relevant points in the video.

CLIPr SimuLive invites reactions and comments during the livestreamed session, and delivers indexed video and analytics immediately afterwards.

But in everyday videos you can say ‘hey this part might be really useful for my work’, ‘this part might be useful for colleague X’ and ‘this thing might be really useful for my community’. When someone is speaking, they’re aiming at serving their

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Previous engagement from emojis also show up, helping prioritize which information people end up seeing when they actually get caught up afterwards or when they want to remind themselves what they had experienced. The emojis actually really help you understand what people are engaging with in terms of content marketing and also in

terms of what else to push to them. They end up being your feedback. We have also gone one step further in reducing the friction, so we can ingest any existing content into Clipr from other platforms and formats. If you tell us how you want it presented, we work with you to get it perfect so you can send it back to your audience. We eliminate the step that requires someone to have to upload, so we’ve made uploading and ingesting free because we don’t want to charge for that part of the experience. There might be charges associated with the customization around how it gets delivered, but we don’t want to provide a reason for someone not to try it out. There is the default free experience and a modifiable enhanced paid-for experience. The other area where we monetize is when you want advanced analytics around what people are doing with the video. In that case you’re only paying for the part you value and nothing else. In a way we are really designing it to make it as easy as possible for you to figure out what people value and what they need. HW: Monetizing can be a big challenge for events and communities, how does CLIPr help with that? HC: From a monetization standpoint it’s more useful to think about it as a subscription, as an all-round thing rather than a one-off. If you think about passes and access to content throughout the year, that becomes a premium level where the CLIPr components of that content end up being all year-round content that people can actually access. This allows for the collaboration and discussion to continue in between events. In the time between the events there’s also sponsorships and real estate, because when people are re-engaging with the video, you have extra eyeballs, you have extra impressions, you have all these extra things where you can actually populate the relevant advertisers throughout our experiences. Event organizers can also sell leads to their customers based on what people have done with it, if someone has shared it, bookmarked it, or saved it, those are signs of higher value around what that user cares about.

Sponsorships can be persistent branding, traditional banners, or pre-roll video

In some cases, people want ads or sponsors and we’re able to integrate that in there as well. CLIPr is much more around having it your way, rather than being subject to the ads on other platforms. If you wanted it to be an integrated experience inside of your platform or if you wanted it inside your own website, we can accommodate that as well. HW: How is CLIPr being used in Communities? HC: Content is a key asset for many communities but, as time goes on and more content is created, it can overwhelm or great content simply gets lost in the volume. Just because a video ended, doesn’t mean it’s no longer

valuable – it just needs to be accessed efficiently to allow for re-engagement to occur. Then, you find the specific moments your audience engaged with and can amplify that to your wider audience. It’s a powerful way to unleash the potential of libraries of content.

”Inside Ideas” - a community of environmental thought-leaders and activists built around a podcast by global activist Marc Buckley

Helping community owners to index, bookmark and search community content is a game-changer in helping users shortcut right to the heart of what’s important to them. The content is always on, is searchable, so it’s easier for people to react to a specific moment in a video. YouTube comments are on the whole video, not on a specific moment in time, whereas our comments align with the moment-in-time it relates to, so if someone has an ah-ha moment, others can see exactly what prompted that response. We’ve been working with Grip, a supplier to event and media companies and they’re looking at multi-year arrangements to gain insight around the engagement of the data. It’s good for us but it’s also good for the platform that ends up getting powered and enriched by CLIPr. It also says that the client values it enough that they can already anticipate needing it that far into the future. They are also looking retroactively about previous years content that they’d like indexed by CLIPr too. We think clipr could be an incredible value-add for community platform owners to offer their customers. HW: What about customer to customer? Can somebody with a CLIPr account watch and share video with their network? HC: Yes absolutely, that is the power of CLIPr. It doesn’t really matter what video it is - it can be stored in a drive, a zoom video, on YouTube – it’s all ingestible into CLIPr. At that point you can view it through our platform or you can make it public and just have it be a URL and it can be embedded into your platform. We recently just launched CLIPr for Microsoft Teams, so for any enterprise that has all-hands meetings, CLIPr will index that completely for free. This speaks to the fact that we can make videos easier and more efficient to consume, which reduces video fatigue – if you’re at an event or in a meeting, if you’re not essential to that meeting, the ability to spend your time where you need to and be able to catch up and get what you need when you need from watching it back on clipr is incredibly powerful. Our analytics tools then help organisers understand what people watched, and for events or for communities that’s really powerful data – where it gets bookmarked, what gets saved, where people are reacting, all creates incredible feedback which is so much more powerful than surveys. CLIPr makes community engagement effortless and powerful with its powerful video capabilities – sign up for a free trial here.

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Web 3.0 and Community Management Heidi Williams talked to Daniel Ospina about Web 3.0, blockchain, DAOs and what they mean for community management

CAN YOU GIVE US A POTTED HISTORY OF WEB 3.0 The advent of Web 3.0 is as much a cultural movement as a technological revolution and the two are happening in tandem. 2012 saw the birth of Bitcoin which was the first application of Blockchain to create a currency. Blockchain works through blocks and those blocks are essentially data packages which are synchronized across databases. If you lose one of the files or your laptop goes down the other files have another copy which makes it transparent and secure. The whole movement was revolutionary and in reaction to a parasitic financial system. The first wave of applications on blockchain were around currencies but things have quickly evolved to more complex applications and the question becomes; how do we manage these protocols and who is governing these tools? Unlike a traditional programme in your own laptop or server, you deploy the code in a decentralised database, it’s out in the open so anyone can see it. The code deployed in the blockchain can encode things like ‘if someone sends some tokens to this thing, then those tokens are going to come to me’. You can add parameters and rules Thats when governance and the idea of decentralised, autonomous organisations (DAOs) started to appear. They are autonomous because there’s this set of rules in the blockchain. It’s an organisation because there’s a group of people using it to coordinate different things, to create a company, to manage assets. Fast forward to last year, and we have the ability to create these organisations in the blockchain and non-coder people like me could use and deploy. They’re still clumsy and there are a lot of things I cannot do unless I can read the code and interact with it but it’s becoming a lot friendlier. So we have the ability to create a token which only has as much value as you give to it, these can be inter-changeable or all different (tokens with differential values are called NFTs, non-fungible tokens). The code might say the owner of this piece of code owns a jpeg, or file or asset at this URL. And you can add utility – so only owners of this jpeg get access to this members club. 28

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HOW DOES THAT THEN “GET OUT” OF WEB 3.0 TO BECOME TRADITIONAL CURRENCY In the same way everything becomes hard cash, if people accept it as valuable. When there is enough trading in the market for you to have a market price which means that you know how much to transact it for. That’s how shells became currency at some point, they were rare so it’s not like you could create them out of thin air and people agreed together that they had a certain value and essentially they could trade it all around. You had that market price. You can then trade across any sort of assets so instead of trading shells for rabbit skins you can transact tokens for dollars. Suddenly it starts to connect to the rest of the ecosystem and people start to build software applications to make this easier.

SO IT CREATES A NEW ECONOMY, A SECOND HAND MARKET ALMOST - HOW DOES THAT FIT INTO THE CAPITALIST MODEL, HOW IS IT SUSTAINABLE? One of the many innovations in this space has been a mechanism so that every time an NFT is sold part of the profits go back to the creator. Essentially you create say, a content asset, like training and people need a token to access it. I buy it for $100 and then I am going to resell it to someone else but you only created a 100 passes for this course. At the beginning no one wanted it now everyone wants it because it has become very popular. I have so many people want to buy that I can sell it for $1000 instead of $100. In the code itself it says every time it is transacted you get a commission. That is one of the possibilities. But there is now a whole range of other applications that essentially talk about how you can have a prize yourself. You as the source can have a prize in whether you create new tokens which can be fungible or non-fungible tokens, they don’t have to be NFT’s. Algorithms program that, depending on how much demand there is, the price

increases. You sell you first token for $100 you sell your second one for $105. Then there is a second-hand market and you get all sorts of market dynamics that you can design and there is now a whole profession who specialise in doing computer simulations of these market dynamics and advising you how to design them for your own application. Coming back to communities, why I find this really revolutionary, is because of governance. You can give access to your chat which is the platform for your community where people meet each other and chat, or you can have events where you need a token to access, for example. In the past centralised companies that governed those groups. If you created the group you decide what happens in the group and if someone doesn’t like it they can leave. However, there is also the option that people can make decisions democratically. In a traditional company, trying to make decisions like this is very clumsy and hasn’t been experimented with much. In communities where people see each other more as equals, it’s more appropriate to operate like a nation state of equals rather than a private company monarchy or dictatorship. This is possible because you can create a voting system to make decisions to elect people or make decisions and you can play around with different structures. Now the people are not consumers, they are citizens, they are owners. If they can make decisions it’s like being an owner of this community.

THE BELONGING OF COMMUNITY – AND BEING INVESTED IS POWERFUL – BUT COULDN’T THIS ALSO BE QUITE ANARCHIC? You need rules and processes for it to work – some programmed into the blockchain, some through community management. You find ways to communicate effectively. We’ve experimented very little with governance historically. To really work on governance, you need systems and processes. It is very easy when everyone agrees but when people disagree what stops them from breaking the rules? Nation states have so much at stake, there is so much to win or lose by being in power that no one was really thinking, what is the best form of governance? People were thinking how do I gain power for my political party and my interests.

“In communities where people see each other more as equals, it’s more appropriate to operate like a nation state of equals… now the people are not consumers, they are citizens, they are owners” Experimentation has been slow and limited because it takes forever to change the constitution. Here in the Blockchain the rules are automatically enforced, they are a piece of code, they’re objective. It isn’t perfect but there is a lot that they can do automatically and objectively. This other mechanism enforces the rules, creates rules, test rules and groups of people to play around with it and see what works and what doesn’t.

WHAT PLATFORMS ARE THEY CONGREGATING ON? WHERE ARE THESE THINGS HAPPENING? Usually you need a place for people to talk and that most frequently is Discord or Telegram. Quite often they also set up a forum, chats are very disposable, you want a place where you can keep documentation.

There’s a lot of platforms for this, Discourse, Notion and then there are a whole range of new ones that are purposely built for this purpose that are emerging. Then you need to have a sort of treasury if you want to hold and manage your assets and a way to make decisions. One of the most popular is Snapshot because it captures what people are saying and feeling. Then comes the complexity of how you actually design your governance, at the most basic you can say one person one vote, or one token one share.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR COMMUNITY MANAGERS TO GET INVOLVED WITH DAOS? Community is a group of people with a shared identity, with the added benefits of trust and wanting to help one another. Community managers have often had very little to do with any of that and instead they were trying to market and promote a brand. Now there is the opportunity to go back to the roots of community management and say, ‘how do we create a sense of community’? As well as how do we think about conflict resolution which becomes super important in Web 3.0. You end up having a huge need for the skills of creating and managing the social tissue, that is the role of the community manager. Anyone who is now thinking about a career in community management needs to understand Web 3.0. You don’t need to read the code you just need to understand the dynamics, the language, who is who in the ecosystem and become part of that community rather than an outsider.

WHERE CAN THEY DO THAT? WHO IS TEACHING THAT? There’s a fundamental skill in that you need to know how to research information and if someone can’t do that they are really going to struggle because every week you become outdated and you need to keep on learning. Web 3 is happening at a different pace than the traditional world because everybody is open, so many more people have a voice and a vote, because ideas travel more freely and there is more innovation so it just evolves exponentially faster than the normal start-up world. I would suggest googling community management Web 3.0, go on twitter and find people that you find interesting in the space, look at the conversations, see who they are following and tweeting.

WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN TO IMPROVE THE WEB 3.0 ENVIRONMENT FOR COMMUNITY MANAGERS? A real focus on personal development, every community manager should go to therapy! For real. If we don’t deal with our traumas we can end up behaving in ways that aren’t helpful. If you want to be a good community manager go to coaching, go to therapy, learn about yourself. Also learn about conflict resolution and learning when to stop, you can spend 24/7 in the noise so it’s important to have clear boundaries.

If you’re interested in learning more about Web 3.0, we’re putting together a Masterclass which will be available soon – to get on the waitlist, please click here. WWW.COMMUNITYLEADERSINSTITUTE.COM

CONVERSATION IS THE...

CORE OF COMMUNITY By Barry Tonoff, Credspark If you ask community leaders what they think is the basis of a thriving online community, you’ll often get the response: “Common Interest.” And it’s true; common interest often draws people together. Tightly focused communities around highly targeted content can drive deep audience engagement and impressive business results. However, there is one key risk that even the most active communities face: How do you avoid hitting the wall? And by that, I mean the wall of repetitive content, the exhaustion of key topics, and the subsequent decline in engagement, activity, and traffic. In short, how do you avoid community flameout? We’ve been grappling with this existential issue at CredSpark and have kept coming back to the same question: Is “Common Interest” the foundation of successful community building? Or is “the Discovery of Common Interest” the foundation of successful community building? Are successful communities built in a focused way around a common interest from the top down? Or are they the result of a continuous back-and-forth between audience members where shifting common interests and topics emerge and drive activity and engagement? No, we’re not talking about replicating a Facebook free-for-all food fight. However, even communities that are highly focused on a particular subject

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or domain can benefit and thrive from bottom up, audience-driven activity. But how do you create that?

THE PROMISE OF CONVERSATION Think about it: What’s the secret sauce of a really great party (besides free flowing booze)? It’s great conversation. And how is great conversation fostered? People ask interesting and probative questions of each other and in the process, learn more about one another; find common interests; and make deeper connections. We think that “process”— enabled through interactive content— can be an underlying driver of audience engagement, audience development, and community building. Let’s dig deeper by starting with a question...

WHAT’S THE IMPACT OF CONVERSATION ON A COMMUNITY? Incorporating interactive content into your community can foster audience conversations and tangibly improve business results. In our client work, we see positive impact in six key areas: 1. Audience Activity & Engagement Interactive content experiences crush industry standard metrics for engage-

ment. Whether your key KPIs are clicks, page views, user-generated content, or time on site, interactive content consistently outperforms static content and even video because it’s active engagement, not passive. 2. Learning Conversation is all about learning. In fact, it’s one of the most powerful learning tools around. Interactive content experiences provide opportunities for audience members to test their knowledge on key topics, discover new information, expose knowledge gaps, see how they stack up to others in the community, and foster conversations with other audience members. Learning and discovery are engagement wildfires. They keep your audience coming back for more and position your brand and community as a place to seek knowledge, which is incredibly powerful. 3. User Experience Incorporating interactive engagements into your user experience not only dramatically improves site metrics, but also deepens your relationships with community members. It provides another outlet of expression and adds another dimension of engagement, creating super-sticky experiences that audiences crave.

4. Transactions When you think about it, every customer transaction is the result of a journey of discovery where you learn information, explore options, weigh differences, and get the opinions of others. Interactive content can harness audience conversations and guide them through an experience that leads to transactions (membership, product sales, subscriptions, and more). It’s a powerfully effective way to turn audience engagement into revenue. 5. Data & Audience Development Every question answered, every opinion given in interactive content experiences generates valuable audience data. With the move away from cookies, first- and zero-party data will be crucial to understanding your audience needs and interests, delivering value for sponsors, and maintaining the health and growth of your community. We regularly see interactive experiences generate tens of thousands of data points. They provide breadth and depth to your audience data and provide you with a richer—and more actionable—understanding of your community. 6. Sponsorship & Advertising All that chatter and activity generate data that can help you more effectively connect the right audience members with the right sponsors or advertisers. Interactive content experiences not only generate new leads, they qualify them in the process. Trust me: Your sponsors will be knocking down your door for this. And you can charge them a premium to do it.

“interactive content consistently outperforms static content and even video because it’s active engagement, not passive.’’ GET THOSE CONVERSATIONS GOING! Want to create real impact for your community in 2022? Use interactive content to spark conversations within your audience. And then, watch the magic happen. Need a little inspiration? Explore CredSpark’s Experience Gallery.

Explore examples of interactive content and discover new ideas for your community at credspark.com.

credspark.com

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INTERVIEW

THE RISE OF COMMUNITY LEADERS RD Whitney interviewed Sarah Hawk, COO of Discourse about how she got into community and her thoughts on the future of the profession RD Whitney: Tell us about your background and how you got into community Sarah Hawk: I started out studying architecture at university, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, community didn’t exist as a career option at the time. I was working part time at Xerox while studying, so I could use their reprographic gear for my projects. They needed someone to build an internal CRM I taught myself to programme and became a software engineer at Xerox for almost 15 years. During that time I came across SitePoint which is one of the biggest online tech communities out there, and it gave me the community bug. I became a volunteer moderator and moved up the ranks from there. I ended up as the forum administrator, which we’d now call a Community Manager. At that point I left to have my kids and I knew then I was never going back to software development. I was fortunate that when the kids had just turned one (I have twins), SitePoint decided that community management was actually a role in itself, so they asked me to take it on. It was a remote job I did 20 hours a week while the kids were in bed. That really started this part of my journey. The community was on vBulletin and we needed to migrate as the technology was hindering the user experience. Discourse was in beta then and we became one of the first in a handful of Discourse communities. After SitePoint I worked for a couple of years in an agency. That put me in front of big brands like Gatwick Airport and HSBC. It was really more of a social media management role and that flavor of Community Management wasn’t for me. I wanted to be a strategist. I realized that I needed to find a niche that would make me stand out if I wanted longevity. For me that niche was the convergence of community technology and social science. At that time Rich Millington (FeverBee) proposed that I took over the management of his Experts community. He wanted somebody to migrate it onto new technology and to start to scale it. We migrated to Discourse. I got three big things from working with Rich; his knowledge, my reputation and the autonomy to do what I wanted in terms of the technology. When I decided to move, I realized that every 32

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community I had ever worked on, I’d migrated to Discourse, so I hit Jeff (Atwood) up and he offered me a role. RD: So you really understood the product before you joined it? SH: Totally. I knew the product intimately and what it was missing at the time was what I brought to the table; they were all engineers and there was nobody that wasn’t writing the product. I brought that Community understanding, I understood community managers and what problems they were trying to solve. It was this beautiful convergence of all these parts of my life. I spent the next three years scaling up the support structures in the company. The series A last year was a big time of change for us and at that point I moved into the COO role. We had three founders that had a very strong understanding of product and of technology, but no one had much experience running and scaling a business, including me. What I did have was a deep understanding of every single part of our business, as well as extensive experience with our product as an end user which was invaluable. RD: I mentioned that headline from TechCrunch where they said the chief community officer is the new CMO, do you agree with that, do you think that marketing is evolving towards community? SH: I think that TechCrunch is talking about a very specific kind of community, they’re talking about a brand or a customer community and that’s a very narrow view of the ecosystem. In that overarching sense the answer is no. I don’t think the CCO is the new CMO if you’re talking about community in general. If we’re purely talking branded communities then yes there is more cross over. Community is increasingly a form of brand marketing, brand loyalty but it’s so hard to measure – no-one is really nailing that whereas direct marketing is incredibly measurable and as such, marketing professionals have different targets, goals and skillsets. It’s a question a lot of businesses are asking – where does marketing cross over with community management, who’s

responsible for which part of the puzzle and when everything in marketing is so inherently measurable and community isn’t, how does that fit together. I think marketing professionals have different targets, goals and skillsets. Community practitioners have specific skills that focus on building relationships and managing community psychology. Would you expect your CMO to be able to run a community? If the answer is no then why are you expecting your CCO to be able to run a marketing department? If you drew a Venn diagram, there would be lots of cross over but in my opinion it is a naive view to say that one will become the other because they are vastly different roles with vastly different skillsets.

“You need to be the first person people think of when they need an expert in X” RD: Is this a growing profession in your opinion? SH: Yes, I follow the CMX jobs board and there are so many different and diverse roles coming through. Some of them are in a greyer area than others in terms of how pure Community management they are but I think we need to put away the pure community management idea now and view community as part of a wider ecosystem. I am seeing a lot of dialogue within the community space to try and standardize titles and responsibilities a bit more. We’ve spent the last 10 years trying to get people to recognize community management as a profession, a specific thing

– that needs to change. What we are is social scientists. Business people. We need more focus on how those things fit together and what that brings to the business, as opposed to how much engagement are we getting in the community RD: Any advice for community managers in terms of career progression? SH: I think a thing to remember is that the role you end up doing may not even exist yet, so it’s important to nurture your areas of passion, even if they’re not directly attributable to your current work. I got to where I am because I found that niche early on and I worked in quite a focused way in that direction so I was able to build my reputation in the space. So I think networking, reputation building, finding the area you’ve got something big to offer is really important. You need to be the first person people think of when they need an expert in X. I think there is a wider acceptance now of transferring between roles and having flexibility. In Discourse we heavily encourage internal promotion and not necessarily through one career path. Now, institutional knowledge and industry knowledge is probably as big of a piece of the puzzle as recognized specific job knowledge. So I do think now is a great time for people to start to look at Community in a more holistic way. RD: Do you think people will end up going to college for this? SH: I don’t know, I cannot envision a pure community career path. I envisage community papers in part of a wider deal. Social science and psychology is a huge part of it. I do think that there is a place for

formal education but in the same way would I encourage anyone to invest in a three year degree in community? No. I say to my kids, if you don’t know what you want to do that’s cool, do a law degree or a business degree or a psychology degree, all of those are going to give you core skills that mean you’ll be able to do any kind of role you want in the future. Yes, I think formal education is important but I would employ someone that didn’t have formal education as quickly as I would employ someone that did if they had the right attitude, communication skills and the right philosophy. RD: What are your predictions for the future? SH: 2 things stand out. From a product/ platform perspective, we’re seeing a big requirement for the convergence of ephemeral discussions - so your chat function – but also, a source of truth - a forum. People want both. That connection, that immediate feeling that you’re in the room with someone is missing now more than it used to. There’s much more of a gelling of community as that deep social connection as well as where they get their knowledge from. Secondly, on a more holistic level I think community is becoming a fundamental pillar of most businesses now. There’s a need for community within organizations, which I think will spill out in a positive way for the community profession. The convergence of businesses using community and asynchronous communication to support and act as a backbone of their organization – both for business continuity but also for corporate wellbeing and mental health, I think is massive.

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CONTENTS

Build powerful professional communities with Guild Mobile-first and purpose-built for professional groups, networks and communities. The Power of Professional Community™

Request a demo and apply to join Professional Community Leaders on Guild: guild.co/contact

Why Guild? For those who believe in The Power of Professional Community™ – connecting people to do good things together Elegant user experience – simple to set up, clean design, mobile-first, custom branding

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Community Leaders Magazine - Issue 3

Articles inside

Community Leaders Magazine - Issue 3

How Feverbee Tripled A Community's Retention Rates (with scripts, templates and examples)

CONVERSATION IS THE CORE OF COMMUNITY

RD Whitney interviews Sarah Hawk COO, Discourse

The untapped opportunities of video in communities

MONETIZING YOUR COMMUNITY

Creating an online challenge

Building your community technology stack

Community-powered market networks by Ashley Friedlein

Community & Measuring SaaS Goals

Driving Cross-Team Collaboration in Online communities

HOW TRUSTWORTHY IS YOUR ONLINE COMMUNITY?

Why social media algorithms are ruining your community

COMMUNITY IS FUTURE OF VOC