RD Whitney interviews Sarah Hawk COO, Discourse

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 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.