Community Strategy Foundations: Transform Your Business
Discover how community strategy foundations can revolutionize your business. This guide covers the essential elements needed to build a vibrant and engaged community, driving growth and fostering loyalty. Whether you're looking to enhance customer relationships, boost engagement, or create a supportive network, this resource provides the tools and insights necessary for success. Transform your business with effective community strategies and watch your brand thrive.
What's up everyone?
Sorry about some technical difficulties there.
We've been trying to get things moving, but we finally have it.
We have Brian here.
Brian, thank you so much for joining.
For those that have joined, just some quick housekeeping, on the right hand
side, you
have an engage button.
If you engage, it will bring you to the chat.
On the chat, ask your questions.
Whatever you want to do, if there's Q&A, there's a Q&A section, so feel free to
drop
everything there.
We're going to make this hopefully as interactive as possible.
If you do have those questions, make sure to ask them.
What's up, Kyle?
Good to see you.
We'll just kind of, Brian, I'll let you introduce yourself, I'll let you pull
up your slides
and everything and get things going.
Yeah, sounds good.
Thanks for having me.
Really appreciate it.
Glad to be here.
Hopefully we're going to give some good learning and some good stuff today.
The basic gist on me is I've been helping companies build communities for like
20 some-odd years,
like back to the 90s.
I've worked at community platform vendors.
I have worked at companies building communities and these days I'm on the
consulting side,
sort of helping people, which is pretty topical actually for today's
conversation because I'm
going to talk a little bit about how I think about structuring strategy and
like kind of
a foundational, what are the elements of success of any given community
strategy and that sort
of thing.
I'm going to walk you through a bunch of different things here.
Let me go ahead and share my screen.
We'll get that coming through and we'll do this.
Just make sure I get the right one here.
As always.
All right, so it's not going to let me.
It's not going to let me.
All right, let's do this.
We'll do Chrome tab.
There we go.
So that should be coming through.
You've seen my slides, Nick?
Perfect.
Very cool.
So we're going to talk about foundations.
We already talked about me, so I'll skip all about Brian's stuff.
Let's get right to the stuff here.
Let's talk about objectives of the session today.
First and foremost, I'm going to define community just because we hear this
word a lot.
It's kind of thrown around a lot.
It's applied to a lot of different things.
I'm not going to argue every single bit of that, but I'm going to give you what
I think
the definition is just so we can level set before we go to strategy because I
think your
strategy could be very different, depending on how you sort of define this
thing.
We're going to talk about why communities important?
Why should I even care?
Why are we here?
Why are we talking about this?
Why should I think about it in my business?
I'll drive that home with a couple of examples.
We're going to explore the common components of strategy, at least as I see
them and how
I build community strategies.
Again, this is sort of a -- we have an hour and it's foundational, right?
So I'm going to try to give you as much as I can, but it's certainly not as if
we're
going to build one today.
It's more about just sort of helping you understand how to structure it, how to
think about it.
When a lot of people talk about strategy, what they really mean is like pretty
slides.
I'll teach you how to make some pretty slides, but I also -- when I think about
strategy,
I think of both pretty slides.
And how do we actually operationalize this?
How do we take it from big ideas on the screen to, okay, here's the -- here's
what we got
to do today, here's what we got to do tomorrow, here's what we're doing seven
months from
now.
So we'll talk a little bit about that at a high level.
And then last but not least, I would be remiss if I came to talk about strategy
and didn't
talk about how you're going to actually know if it's working or, you know, what
to measure
or how to measure it, how to think about it.
So, you know, we're going to talk a little bit about those things.
Again, I can't dive super deep in all of them.
But I think by the time we get done here today, you'll have a pretty good sense
of, you know,
all of these things as a starting point.
So that's our objectives.
Let's go ahead and dive in.
And I can't see the chat here.
So, Nick, if you have good questions that are coming in along the way, like,
you know,
feel free to let me know.
>> Absolutely.
>> So defining community, look, I made a post about this the other day.
What I'll say about it is I think we've kind of overbaked this whole thing a
lot over
the years.
I think we've made up a bunch of really complicated, really, like, semantic,
you know, arguments
about community.
And I kind of want to bring us back to the beginning here and just make it
something
elemental.
Let's forget about technology.
Let's forget about volume.
Let's forget about, you know, some of the squabbles of the past of community
and sort
of just break it down in a really elemental way, right?
So, there's sort of three key things here.
Number one, what is a community?
It's a group of people, right?
They're all trying to, they have similar interests.
They're trying to solve problems.
They, you know, trying to use a piece of software.
They're using a product.
Like, they have interests in a, you know, certain type of car, like, or what,
like,
it doesn't matter.
Whatever it is, it's a group of people that have some common, like, reason to
come together,
right?
The second piece here is they're coming together in what I call a shared
experience.
And when I say shared experience, I just simply mean that they're there
together and
they're helping each other and they're experiencing this in ways that they
otherwise would not
if they weren't together, right?
So kind of the basic definition there.
It's the opposite of an individual experience, right?
And last but not least, they're trying to better themselves or they're trying
to better
each other or help each other.
This is important because you'll often see communities that are really what I
call a
room full of mercenaries, which is basically just to say, you see these
communities pop
up, like on Facebook and stuff, right?
It's like, join our community of 100,000 entrepreneurs and get in here.
And then like you go in there and all it is is people just like hawking their
own stuff,
right?
And no one's really interested in helping each other or having an experience or
like building trust or relationships or connections or any of these things that we
talk about
around community.
And so I think that's sort of a key bit here is like, are people just there for
themselves
or are they actually there to kind of help each other?
So I think if you think about these three things as sort of the definition,
that might
help you understand like what a community is, but also what you might want to
build,
right?
Like how do I approach this?
How do I think about it?
What are the core components of something that's a good community?
I think this captures that fairly well.
Okay.
So why though, right?
Great.
Sounds good, Brian.
Like awesome.
But like, why do I care about this?
If I'm a founder of a company or I'm running a business or, you know, I want to
start a
community, why do I care, right?
Why would I do this?
I'll talk to a few different things.
Number one, community has a lot of applicability across pretty much any
business type.
Depending on your goals, right?
It can help you do key business things and help you sort of reach your business
outcomes.
So for a lot of businesses, that's like, hey, we need to lower our costs for
support,
right?
We're spending too much money trying to support our customers.
Can we do that in a more scalable way, perhaps or a more efficient way?
In other cases, people say, well, we're doing community because it's a go-to-
market technique,
right?
And we want to drive more leads or drive more revenue or drive upsells or
retain people,
you know, those kinds of things.
Or it might also just be, and I think this happens if you build community
really well
at any company, actually helps us just scale, right?
If you do community right, you should be able to kind of build something that
you otherwise
wouldn't have been able to with whatever your current headcount is or budget.
It's highly scalable, highly efficient.
And so that's why a lot of people like community and why it's become a pretty
important kind
of go-to-market factor for a lot of companies.
Number two, you can build a moat with a better experience, right?
So one thing that we commonly hear across many businesses, many industries,
many verticals,
all those things is, you know, it's crowded, right?
It's a crowded space like whatever your company does, there's probably 10 other
companies
that do something very similar.
They have a similar product, similar service.
So the question becomes, well, how are we going to differentiate ourselves?
And why would people choose us?
And why would they stay with us rather than go to the other guys?
Maybe it's cheaper, you know?
Why would they continue paying our thing when they can cut costs and go
somewhere else?
Oftentimes it's because you've built a better experience and you do that
through community
and you've built relationships with them.
And what you'll find is that customers often will advocate for, hey, we want to
stay with
these folks because we really like them.
They, you know, we're part of this community.
We get a lot of value out of that.
I have seen and witnessed over the years when lost reports from our friends in
sales and
the revenue org where people literally said this when they either bought brand
new or
they renewed where they would say, hey, look, we could have gone to any of your
competitors.
You all do the same thing, but we stayed with you for the expertise and the
community and
the events and the knowledge and all of the sort of tangential success that I'm
getting
through community.
So it can be a really huge way to sort of build a moat and own a space, even if
your product
is not, you know, leagues ahead of the other guys or whatever.
Or even if it is, then you build an even bigger moat.
So it's applicable either way.
You know, engagement, satisfaction, retention, advocacy, I talked about some of
these things
before.
Community can be a way to just engage your customers in ways that you don't
normally in
more kind of authentic ways.
We know from, you know, again, I've been doing this for like 25 odd years.
We know from the data that all of these things can be true if you build
community the right
way, which is what we're going to talk about here today with strategy.
So you know, you can make happier customers.
You can keep them longer.
They'll advocate for you more.
There's a lot of benefits, as you can imagine, you know, across all of those
that are really
interesting for people.
And last but not least, and most people kind of forget about this one, which is
why I like
to bring it up, is we get so focused on the customer experience, which we
should, because
it's the most important thing.
But one thing that often gets left behind people don't think of with community
is that it's
inherently a collaborative, strategic thing to do in your company.
And so what that typically means is one person generally isn't going to do 100%
of the work
and maintenance and driving community.
They're going to need help, right, from other people around the business.
And so ironically, a lot of people bring me in to like, hey, help us build a
community.
And yeah, we'll do that.
What I end up doing is actually getting them talking to each other and working
together
and collaborating.
And so in that way, community can be like this really great forcing function to
get people
inside your company collaborating in ways that they didn't before, which I
think is
just a fantastic outcome, you know, for any business.
So really important one that we don't often talk about there.
Awesome.
And there was actually a question that came in.
So I'm going to pop this up on stage here from Kyle.
So what factors should you consider when deciding between focusing on an owned
or rented community
program, when's the right time to shift to an own space?
I assume by rented, Kyle might mean, you know, subreddits or some like, you
know, other industry
discord or, you know, Slack channel or something.
Yeah, I'll talk about this a little bit later, but the answer to the question
is, the eye
is sort of in the beholder there.
I don't know that there's an exact right time that I could give you.
It's more about, you know, hey, let's do some experiments maybe in those off
domain or rented
areas as you might call them and see if it resonates with people, see what kind
of audience
is there, see if they're hungry for more community, right?
And I think once you've satisfied your need to kind of understand, okay, like
there is
a decent size audience and they have some needs that are being unfulfilled and
we think
we can do that, you know, then that might be a time for you to sort of say, hey
, like,
let's go build our own thing and try to bring people over to those domains.
With all of that said, I actually think you should do both of those things
always, right?
So you should have your, your own on domain, you know, community, whatever that
looks like,
and you should participate in places elsewhere, right?
I don't think it's a zero sum game.
It's not an A versus B. It's actually probably in all of the above, you know,
type of strategy
works best.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
All right.
Very cool.
So I always like to show this slide if you've followed me anywhere before, you
know, you've
seen this before, but I like to talk about, you know, community is a vehicle to
drive
value across the entire customer journey.
This of course is not the entire customer journey, but it's a pretty good
subsection
of it.
It's obviously not always linear like this either, but you kind of get the idea
here
that if you do community correctly and you think about what are all the touch
points,
right?
Where are all the different places that we talk to customers or we connect with
them
or they find us or they're trying to solve a problem or do something and we
start to
think about, okay, you know, how can we leverage what we're building in
community to solve
some of these problems?
You're probably not going to solve all of these, certainly not all right at
once, right?
But you could start to tackle one of these and then tackle another one.
And then, you know, in a few years, it's you come back to a slide like this and
it's
like, hey, we're actually doing most of these things pretty well, right?
And so you kind of get a sense of throughout Amy's journey here, you know, how
we might
sort of impact her journey and help her out and leverage community across these
different
things.
And then as you also see, you get value as well, right?
So there's a lot of stuff.
I'm not going to go through this whole thing.
This is a great one to take a screenshot of or get the slides after, which I'll
give
you the link to do.
But it's a good example of, you know, if we actually turn our focus to helping
customers
succeed and giving them what they need, then we will also get some business
value out of
it and you can kind of see how those are mapped there.
Okay.
So I've said a lot.
We're about 20 minutes in here.
Let's talk about how to actually do that.
So you kind of know how to frame it.
You kind of know the goal of like, okay, you know, how are we going to do this?
But how do you start to build a strategy, right?
Now, this is how I build strategy.
I'm sure there's a bunch of different ways.
I'm sure other people do it.
However, they do it.
That's totally fine.
Listen, you know, take what's good, leave the rest.
You do you.
But this has worked really well for me over the years.
I've probably helped like 200 plus companies do this.
So it is rooted in some, you know, key learnings and that sort of thing.
So we'll start kind of high level and then I'll break each one down.
First and foremost, community is about people, right?
So it's about the people that we're trying to attract.
It's about the people that come and become our super users.
It's about us internally at a company and how we orchestrate, as I was saying
before,
with collaboration and all of that.
Fundamentally, communities are about people.
And so that's sort of the first pillar of how I think about strategy, which is,
okay,
let's figure out who's coming here, what they need, all this kind of stuff.
And I'll dig deeper into that in each of these in a minute.
The second one is content.
I always say content is queen.
As you might have heard, you know, people say, come for the content, stay for
the community.
That's absolutely true.
We'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.
The third one is programs, meaning what are all of the things we're doing on
this platform,
right?
What kind of events are we running?
What kind of experiences are we building?
I'll give you some examples of some of those in a minute.
Fourth is technology.
Now most people have this in the number one position, right?
We all want to go out.
We want to buy platforms.
We want to launch a community.
We want to do technical stuff.
We want to do integrations, all that.
There's a reason why it's kind of further down the list here because I want you
to think
about people, content, and programs before we start thinking about platforms
and technology
and that sort of stuff.
A lot of people kind of do that backwards and it really shows in both their
strategy
and then in sort of the delivery of the community itself.
And last but certainly not least, very connected to technology.
Usually I kind of lump them together actually is designed.
And when I say design, I don't mean just how it looks but it's also how does it
work?
What's the experience?
How do people navigate this stuff?
So this is how I think about strategy.
This is how I break it down for people.
Let's kind of jump into each one of these now and I'll talk a little bit more
about how
they all kind of work.
So for people, number one, you have to become customer focused.
I see people launch communities all the time and they still have this inward
view of the
world of what do I need and what are our goals and how are we going to get
people to do
this for us and how can I measure it?
And those things are important.
I'm not saying they're not.
But what I found is that the best communities in the world are the ones who
cater to the
customer first.
How are we solving their problems?
How are we helping them achieve their goals?
And if we do that first and we do it well, I promise you, you will get the
business stuff
on the back end.
But if you lead with yourself and you and what you need and what department you
're in and
I need them to do this, it's probably not going to be a very compelling
experience.
And I don't know too many people who want to kind of hang around in a community
like
that.
So this is as much a cultural thing that is anything else, right?
It's helping your company understand, hey, we're going to be a little bit more
open and
focused on our customers to start.
The second bit is we have to understand their motivations, goals and what
outcomes they
want.
Everybody says they're customer focused or they care about customers.
This is where you kind of find out that maybe people aren't or they're not as
much as they
think they are when you start asking about personas, right?
What do we know about these people?
What are they trying to do in their careers or their lives?
What motivates them?
What doesn't motivate them?
What does success look like to them if they're going to come to this community?
All of those kinds of questions that we then sort of put into very specific
personas that
we design the community around.
And the third part of this, which is very related, is a lot of people just
guess at this.
You'd be surprised companies spend so much time and money guessing, right?
Oh, well, we think they want this or we think they're going to want that or we
know better
than they do.
And the reality is people actually have a pretty good handle on what they like
and don't
like and what their needs are.
And I tell people, just ask them, you know, use surveys, have a call with them,
understand
kind of back to Kyle's point before.
These are some of the things you can do before you invest and shift to like an
owned community
on your own domain.
Go talk to these people and figure out what they want first, right?
Understand if they want your on domain community before you go build it.
So that's a good call out there.
And then as I said, you're going to parse these into personas.
Most communities have two to five.
You know, I've seen up to like 10 and 12 that those are communities that are
very mature
and have, you know, a huge product suite and a bunch of stuff like that.
But generally speaking, you're going to have like two to three core personas.
And they may be similar or have overlap with like your product or your go to
market personas,
but they may be a little bit different on the community side in terms of what
are they
looking for from a community perspective.
So just understand it's not always the same thing as maybe what you've already
done for
product and whatnot.
So that is people.
And before I move on, I'll pause and ask if there were any other, I guess,
questions
that can.
Yeah, no questions as of right now yet.
Okay.
Let's talk about content.
As I said before, people come for the content and they stay for the community.
A lot of people miss this or don't fundamentally understand that the core
driver of like, why
do people show up at a community in the first place, right?
It's not usually, and I say not usually sometimes it is, but not usually like,
oh, I'm seeking
belonging and connection and, you know, feelings and that sort of stuff.
Maybe some communities are that way.
But the vast majority of, you know, communities, it's like, I came here to
solve a problem first.
And then I solved my problem.
And as I was solving it, maybe I clicked around or I saw recommended content or
, you know,
there was an onboarding flow that I went through that introduced me to other
stuff in the community.
So this is kind of common.
You need to understand this and that, you know, community is a numbers game, as
I like
to say, meaning, you know, it's all about fractions of fractions and
percentages.
And there's kind of a funnel type of a situation of how people come in and
engage in community.
And so what you need to understand is that first and foremost, you need to
build great
content.
You need to build things that are going to help people solve their problems
back to those
personas, right?
What are the problems they have?
How do we solve them?
And then you might be able to capture them and have them stay for more of the
community
activities.
So content is just crazy, crazy important.
I can't stress it enough.
If it weren't for people, content would definitely be number one.
I think this is the big thing that most people need to focus on and build
programs around.
And then they'll build a much more successful community.
It's a bit ironic, I guess, in that case, because you think, well, wait, we're
building
a community, what are you talking about?
But that's sort of the nature of how this works.
Number two, you probably have some people in your company with a ton of subject
matter
knowledge, expertise, but it's locked in their head, right?
You maybe have a support team that has a huge, like they have Salesforce or Z
endask or any
of these support ticketing systems.
But all that knowledge is locked in there, right?
How do I Google that?
How do I get access to it?
So one thing you need to think about is like, how do I get all of this
knowledge out of
these systems, out of people's heads and into a community where people can self
-serve, again,
back to the efficiency and the scale, right?
Stop answering questions one to one, answer them one time in community, and
then have people
self-serve on that same answer for the rest of time.
This is where the cost part comes in, and from a support perspective, at least,
whatever
costs you $80, $100 to solve in your traditional support channels probably
costs you pennies.
And those pennies only get smaller infractions of those pennies as more people
self-serve
on it.
So there's a big advantage cost-wise there.
It's not set it and forget it.
You can't just like do a big blast of content in the beginning and say, "We did
it, we're
done, we're out of here, peace."
You actually have to continue doing that as a long-term program, building more
content
and more content and more content.
So understand that it's a long game, and if you want to keep community vibrant,
you
also have to keep your content program vibrant as well.
So how do we start though?
This probably feels kind of daunting, especially if you're a smaller company or
a founder or
something.
What I always tell people the very simple answer is, just start with the
questions that
everybody's tired of answering internally, right?
Can I talk to your customer-facing teams and say, "What are the top five
questions?
What are the top 10 questions we get asked all the time that we're so sick of
answering
or copying and pasting into the reply?"
Those are great candidates to start your content program on and say, "Okay, can
we build 10
knowledge articles or can we seed those questions in community and answer them
so that they're
answered there?"
Start with the basic stuff and then figure it out from there.
But most companies I find don't actually have a problem with the volume of
content they
have access to.
It's usually the reverse.
It's usually, "Hey, we have a ton of content.
Every group in the company is building all kinds of stuff.
We've just never organized it."
We've never put it into some sort of program and tried to channel it somewhere.
That may or may not be the case at your company, but I think if you start
digging around, you
probably find there's more than you think.
You can start small and then kind of scale it from there.
Yeah, I love that.
There was actually another question that came in.
It says, "What are some common mistakes you've seen folks make when planning
and developing
content for their communities?"
I feel like this is talking to Mark and we have this whole people-first content
and some
other stuff launching and putting out exclusive content.
It's definitely validating our thought there.
What are some of those common mistakes that you're seeing?
I'd go back to the focus of the content, meaning a lot of times when people
start their content
program, they're like, "What are our goals?
What should we document?"
That sort of thing.
It's really, again, number one, it's about what do these customers actually
need from
their perspective.
I think that's important.
Then just not having enough of it, honestly, no one ever showed up to a
community and said,
"Boy, I wish there was less content here."
They might say, "I wish I could search it better.
I wish I could navigate it.
I wish I could find what I'm looking for."
That's a little bit of a different problem, perhaps.
No one is like, "Oh, I wish there was less answers.
There's almost too much help here."
I think that's the biggest thing is being relentless about it and saying, "Okay
, what
can we build that's going to be useful and helpful to people?"
If we do that pretty consistently over a long period of time, a bunch of little
ones makes
a big one.
We're going to end up with a very large quantity of content and knowledge and
discussions and
video recordings from events and all these different things that we're doing
that produce
content.
I would say just not being aggressive enough would be a common error there.
Fantastic.
Thank you.
Oftentimes, I'll just follow up with one thing and it'll move on is that people
say, "Oh,
my God, I didn't realize that this was so important and I don't know if we have
time
for this.
It seems like a lot of work.
We don't have enough people in the company to do it."
Then you're just not going to have a great community.
I don't know what to tell people other than, "This is part of the investment."
You need to wrap your head around that and accept it.
You're not going to just put up a community and people are going to show up and
it's going
to be amazing.
Just like anything else, any other program that we would do or go to market
thing that
we would do at a company, this is just one of the requirements to have a
successful and
ongoing and vibrant community.
Over time, what you hope is that the folks there are building more of the
content than
you are.
It becomes more scalable.
You're doing less of the overall work.
That's the goal, but upfront, you're definitely going to have to invest in this
aspect of
it until you reach that point of critical mass where your customers and
partners and
employees are in there talking to each other and just generating content.
Just understand that that's a core bit.
Programs.
What do I mean by programs?
Basically anything that's built on top of the community platform.
If you think of the community as a platform, the question becomes, "Okay, what
are we doing
there?"
Content is one of them, but some of the others we'll talk about.
I tend to break down the flow of community into acquisition, conversion,
onboarding,
engagement, and then long-term retention.
We'll talk about each one of those.
When we think about programs, acquisition is a program.
What's our acquisition program for a community?
We're putting a link on our.com.
We're doing things to make sure that our community content shows up in Google.
We're sending email notifications or newsletters.
If we're a software product, for example, maybe we have a link to community in
the help
menu or maybe when people search, community results are there.
That's the in-app part of it.
What are we doing at our conference?
Are we talking about community?
Are we telling people it exists?
All of these different ways of figuring out how do we get people to know about
the community
and then come to it?
This is a big mistake.
People on the theme of what mistakes do people make.
This is a big one.
People launch a community and they're like, "Where is everybody?"
You ask, "What kind of acquisition have you done?
What kind of promotion of the community have you done?"
They're like, "Oh, well, we just put a link on the website and that was it.
We're shocked that nobody showed up to this thing."
If people don't know about it, they're not going to visit.
Having a set of programs around acquisition, how do we get people to know it
exists and
to come here is really, really important.
You can imagine what all of those are because most people are doing this in
other ways for
other things.
Conversion becomes about the call to action side of it.
Once people come to your community, they land on it and it's like, "Okay, great
I'm here."
How do we entice them to become members?
There's usually a set of programs around this where we build certain calls to
action.
We gate certain content behind permissions where we say, "Hey, if you want to
see this,
you have to sign in.
You have to sign up."
That's particularly effective, although I want you to balance that out because
you put
too much behind then people don't know it exists either.
There's a little bit of a balance.
But ultimately, it's just showing them the value of like, "Here's what members
get.
Here's the benefit of being a member and here's what other people are getting
is benefits
of being a member."
You have a set of programs around conversion and getting them to become an
active member.
What about onboarding?
They sign up and then what?
We just dump them back into the community and say, "Good luck."
There's a set of programs around onboarding.
How do we welcome them to this community?
How do we help them understand how to use it?
Do we put them in some sort of drip campaign where for the next six weeks we're
sending
them, "Hey, did you see this article in community?
It seems like it's relevant to your interests."
Then of course, gamification.
How do I earn badges and ranks and enter into a contest to get a shirt and a
hat or a mug?
All these different things.
You can imagine the programs around that.
Then last but certainly not least, and again, everybody usually skips here and
skips the
first three, which is why I put it at the end, is the engagement side of it.
We've got these people here, their members, they're properly onboarded.
Now what?
Well, we want them to engage on a more long-term way and we want to retain them
as a member
through that engagement.
What kind of programs are we going to build?
Well, maybe they're answering questions depending on your type of community.
They're doing Q&A.
Maybe we have ongoing contests.
Maybe we do regular challenges.
We have events, virtual and in-person like we're doing here.
You have even more gamification that is geared towards engagement retention
programs.
Maybe if you have top users, you build a program around them that's a formal
program to reward
them.
There's so much more.
I could spend hours and hours and hours talking about programs.
This is the way to think about it and the types of things that fit in each
bucket that
you're going to want to build on top of.
Now again, do you have to do all of these all at once?
Of course not.
There's actually no real way to do that.
You need to think about it in this format.
As we get to measurement, you start to look at it this way too where it's like,
"Okay,
where are we falling down?"
Maybe we're doing a good job of getting people to the community, but we're not
converting
them.
Maybe we are converting them.
We do a great job on that, but then we don't onboard them and we get low
engagement.
There's a linear effect here where most communities are saying, "Oh, we don't
have enough engagement.
We have an engagement problem."
Then I go look at the data in this type of a format and what you realize is, "
No, you
actually have an onboarding problem or you actually have an acquisition problem
."
You want to build programs to make sure you're keeping people flowing properly
through here.
Love that.
There was actually another question that came in around.
Some of the common assumptions people make when planning their community
strategy and
program that's false or otherwise.
Yeah, I think trying to think of what those would be.
Typically, it's not enough investment.
People don't realize that this is an investment like anything else.
You see that a lot around community actually where it's like, "Can't we just
stand up
a insert name of platform here and just be done and we'll get someone from the
company
to spend three hours a week on it as part of their fraction of their hours?"
It's going to be great.
When you think about any other really important thing that you do at a company,
you'd never
do that.
If I said, "Hey, we're going to launch this events series and I want you to do
six events
across the world in the next year."
If I said to you, "Yeah, we'll give you $10,000 and half of one employee's time
," you'd
be like, "You're crazy.
We can't do a 10 event global series for 10K and half of someone's time."
Communities no different.
That's a common mistake is underestimating the overall investment or what the
needs are
to do it.
I think too, there's just a lot of misinformation about communities and how
they work.
On one hand, during the COVID times when everybody was locked up, a community
became this really
valuable, important conversation.
On one hand, it was great that all of a sudden it came to the forefront.
You wanted to know about it and that sort of thing.
You also just had a bunch of people talking about it that frankly didn't
understand community
to the level that all of you do now seeing stuff like this.
I think you have to weed through all of that and realize what's actually a good
strategy
or not, which is why we're doing this.
Hopefully, we help you cut through some of the noise there.
Fantastic advice.
Thank you.
Let's talk about tech.
Like I said, everybody always skips to this one.
Everybody wants to buy a platform and community is going to happen.
Not really.
You have to do all these other things really well.
The platform on which you reside is very important, but it's not the whole ball
game.
I've seen very, very skilled community professionals build wonderful
communities on the crappiest
tech of all time and vice versa.
Some people go out and they spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars on
the Ferraris
of community platforms and then it sucks.
It's like everybody loves to blame the vendor in that scenario.
It's like, "Oh, well, a community didn't work and the vendor didn't help us and
whatever."
What I just want to say is a hot take here is that 99.9999% of the time when I
show up
in a company and we're blaming the vendor for why community isn't working, I
take a look
at people's strategy and you find out that it's typically more an execution or
strategic
problem than it is the platform.
That said, it's important.
Let's talk about it.
Kyle actually preempted this one before.
What I wanted to say is you can build and you should build both on domain and
off domain.
That could be subreddits, stack overflow, Twitter in some cases, all kinds of
different
GitHubs of popular one where people are building community in different ways.
There's a lot of off domain stuff that you can do.
I think you also want to explore how do we build our own community that we own
that's
not subject to the policy changes and whims of, frankly, billionaires and
people who have
different goals than you do for your community.
We see that time and time again.
Everybody's like, "Oh, I'm going to build my community on insert name of social
media
platform here."
And overnight they like, "Well, we're going to change completely the policies
or the
APIs or whatever and these people's communities get destroyed overnight."
There is some balance of the convenience of doing that, the cost of doing that
relative
to owning your own.
You can see why it's attractive that in the end a lot of people end up swinging
back to
kind of my own my own just because there's a lot of brand value in doing that
too.
You want to consider both.
There's a bunch of stuff that goes around this.
You don't just necessarily buy a community platform and say, "Cool, we're done
."
Typically you have to, "How are these people authenticating?
Do we have an IDP, an SSO?
How are they connecting into it?
How are people signing up?"
The other integration types that you can imagine, like, "How do we integrate
this with
Salesforce for our CRM or HubSpot or whatever it is you're using?
What about support systems like Zendesk and those kinds of things?"
Think about all of the other tech that goes around it and understand that whole
pie.
Sometimes I call these appliances like federated search, SSO or IDPs sometimes
are also an appliance.
These days there's all these other platforms.
There's common room and talk base and orbit and stuff like that where they're
really focused
on community data and automation.
That's another thing you could go buy and plug into this.
A lot of people do Zapier.
They get Zaps and they plug those into community to automate certain things.
It's not just the one platform itself, especially if you're doing both on and
off domain.
Some of these data and automation platforms are great because you can plug all
of them
in and then get a picture of your community across many different things.
That brings you to the last piece here, which is how are we getting data?
How are we analyzing this stuff?
How do we know if what we're doing is working or not?
Some of those will be community specific.
Some of those will be things like Google Analytics.
If you want to plug that into your community, how are you going to build dash
boards and reporting?
You don't got to do all this stuff, right?
Especially not up front, but it is nice along the way.
We'll talk a little bit about measurement here more in a few minutes.
Cool.
There was actually two more questions that came in.
One was around, "Do you have any gamification software wrecks?"
Those community platforms have some semblance of gamification built in, usually
in the form
of ranks, reputation, badges, leaderboards, that kind of basic stuff that you
're going
to find.
Those will get you pretty far, typically, depending on what you're trying to
build.
But if you're looking at gamification more holistically across not just like
your on-domain
community, but what about events?
What about advocacy things that they're doing, different activities?
That's when you may go look at something a little bit more comprehensive.
I wouldn't say that there's one platform I could name and say, "Just go buy
that and
you're going to be good."
Like we're talking about here, there's a universe of them.
You might go get credly, for example, for certifications and badges and stuff.
You might go get a different platform for missions and other things.
Influative is one of those, although it's geared more towards advocacy.
There's a whole bunch of those and it really comes down to what's your strategy
, right?
What do you need to successfully execute that?
Fantastic.
Then the other one is, "In your experience, what have you found as one of the
greatest
obstacles faced by B2B community initiatives?"
Usually internal company culture.
It's not the tech, it's not the content, it's usually like, "Are you ready as a
company
to become customer centric?"
is the first thing.
It's a philosophical thing that a lot of companies, again, if you listen to any
CEO
at any company in the world, on any call they do or talk they do at their
conference or
whatever, everybody's going to say, "Oh, we love our customers, right?
We're customer focused.
We're all about the customer."
But look at their behavior, right?
Look at their actions.
I think sometimes you'll find that what comes out of their mouth and what they
actually
do are two different things.
I understand why, right?
Becoming truly customer and community focused is hard.
If it was easy, everybody would do it.
That's what, when I talked about building a moat before, that's the difference.
If I have five companies, we're all doing the same thing, we all have a similar
product
or service.
If I do the hard work at my company to become customer focused, community cent
ric, build
a great community, really focus on helping people achieve their dreams and
goals, then
all of a sudden, I'm leaps and bounds ahead of the other four guys.
I think that's probably the biggest obstacle is, are people ready for that
philosophically?
And then the last piece, which is kind of true across anything at any company,
is are
people willing to collaborate on it, right?
Because a lot of companies, again, oh, yeah, we love working together and we're
collaborative
company, blah, blah, blah.
I think we all know, we've all worked at companies that you show up in some
places and it's like
none of these people know each other.
They're all working in silos.
They don't want to work together.
They're actually combative.
That's a hard place to build a great community.
Fantastic.
Thank you.
Last and certainly not least, and then we'll get to some other stuff and answer
more questions,
although I love the questions coming in.
This is great.
Let's talk about design, right?
It's how it looks and how it works.
Everybody thinks just the first part, right?
Let's make it beautiful.
Let's get marketing in here and design, whatever.
And it's like, no, no, no, it's like, what is the information architecture
underneath
all of this, right?
What structure have we built for the content and the discussions and the events
How do people navigate that, right?
What does the navigation look like?
Where's the search?
Like how do we position all of this stuff?
I could talk about this one for days and days and days and days.
There's so many different facets of it, but it's both how it looks and how it
works.
And ultimately, what I would just say here is like, I'm a golden rule guy,
meaning like,
you know, I never want to build something that I myself would not want to use
or I'm
not proud of.
And I think this second part here, the how it works, we kind of fail that
regularly in
things that we do where we build stuff and we're like, oh, you know, I don't
really
like it.
But anyway, ship it to our customers, right?
I think you want to spend some time, especially in community because trust and
authenticity
is so important, really making sure you nail the experience part of it.
So again, architecture, structure, navigation, discovery, like all of these
things are part
and parcel of the design itself.
Some of that's how those look, but a lot of it's how they, you know, where they
position,
how do they work?
Is it feeding the right information at the right time?
Is it, you know, helping me as a consumer or a member of this community find
stuff?
And then you can go look at, okay, what's the visuals?
What's the UI and UX?
You know, is it beautiful?
Do we have, you know, all of our badges with our colors and our fonts and we've
uploaded
our custom font into the community platform and blah, blah, blah, blah, like
all those
different things.
It's super important.
I'm not saying it's not.
I just want people to understand there's a balance here.
And what I often see is people way over index towards the looks part of it.
And then they wonder why, again, back to those programs we talked about, right?
They wonder why, like, how come people aren't staying around and how come they
're having
a hard time finding what they're looking for?
And it's like, because we designed a beautiful website and not a community
experience, which
are two very different things, right?
So there's got to be a balance of this.
And what I would say is that in most communities, utility is actually more
important than beauty.
You want to have a little bit of both, right?
But I was at a conference years ago.
I always tell this story.
So forgive me if you've followed me and you've heard this before, but I think
it's a useful
thing is years ago, as a conference, and I was showing a screenshot of a really
, what
a community that I was proud of that we designed.
And it was pretty heavily, like the front page of the community was kind of a
lot of dense
links and navigation and whatever.
Some guy raised his hand and said, man, it's just a list of links.
And I said, yeah, so is Google, right?
And so I think as much as we want to make this stuff beautiful, you realize the
things
that people use every day and get a lot of value out of are a little bit more
utilitarian
than you would think.
And I think Google is like the ultimate example of it's literally a list of
blue links, right?
So there's that.
Last but not least, are we efficiently driving members to specific outcomes?
So we'll talk about measurement here in a minute.
But if you think back to the goals and the programs and all that stuff, it's
like, what
do we actually want them to do?
Or what do they want to do?
And are we using the way that we've designed this to properly drive them in
that direction?
So that's really what design is about at the end of the day and what we want to
do as community
builders.
OK, I know we just have a few minutes left here, and then we'll leave some time
for Q&A.
Let me talk about how you operationalize all this.
So I just threw a lot at you, talked about a lot of different things, right?
There's a lot in your brain probably rattling around if you've never done this
before.
What I always say though is like at the end of the day, we have to execute this
stuff.
I can talk about it.
I can make pretty slides.
I can tell you you got to do A, B, and C and XYZ, whatever.
The real question is, how do we go about doing that?
So I want to show you this.
Looks a little overwhelming at first, but I'll sort of break it down for you.
This is kind of the high level roadmap of an operational plan, right?
So typically you'd probably have a spreadsheet or something or a project plan
that undergirds
this with dates and names and dependencies and risks and all that kind of stuff
But at a high level, what I want you to understand is like everything that we
just talked about
can be put into a format like this where it greatly sort of simplifies it and
makes it
visual, where it's like, OK, we have our people, we have our content, we have
our technology,
and then I sort of lumped design and experience into one bucket there.
But you have these tracks, and in each track, they're sort of, OK, here's the
personas we're
working on first.
Here's, we've got to build some content, we've got to go get a platform and
implement
it, right?
You can kind of follow this along.
Again, I'll give you this slide at the end here.
You can just go download it, take a screenshot, whatever.
But you sort of get the idea of like, just like anything else we would do, you
're going
to build a plan of here's the things we need to do when we need to do them,
some level
of prioritization and importance, and then you roll through it, right?
And of course, you have to have the people and the investment to do all these
things.
But just like anything else, there's got to be a plan.
It can't just be pretty slides and, you know, inspiration.
I want to help you translate that into an actionable plan that you can then
take and
go.
So does yours look like this?
I have no idea, right?
But whatever it is, translate your strategy into a plan and then execute it and
make sure
you're kind of tracking along with all those things.
All right.
Last but not least, certainly not least measurement.
Let me go through a couple of frameworks.
I'm going to gloss over these pretty quick.
You can go download these because there's too much probably to talk about here.
But what I want you to understand is how do you translate sort of strategic
goals into
actual measurements around your business?
So if we look at a couple of examples like customer success, a lot of people
these days
are like, hey, why are we building community?
Because we want to increase our retention rates, right?
Particularly relevant in our current high interest rate environment.
We need to retain the customers we have.
Okay, great.
You have this business goal.
What are we going to do about it?
Well, our strategy is we're going to build robust learning and enablement focus
content
in a community somewhere, right?
Okay, great.
That's our strategy.
There's probably 20 slides of that strategy, but that's the boiled down version
How are we going to know that's working?
Well, as a KPI, we're going to try to understand how much of that learning and
enablement focus
content is actually influencing retention rates, right?
And we may do that through some cohort analysis where we take data from the
community and
data from Salesforce or RevR like revenue data is, and we try to understand,
you know,
are people in community retained at a higher rate than those who aren't or at a
rate that's
higher or they, you know, stick around longer or whatever the case is, right?
So it's kind of a simplistic example.
You have to build all of the, you know, mechanisms around it.
But this is how you translate a business goal or outcome through community, but
then
understand like, okay, what kind of data do I actually need to make that happen
And what's the KPI?
I'm going to build out support.
This is probably the most basic one of all.
We want to reduce costs.
We're going to build the self-service support community.
This is what like the vast majority of communities in the world are about, at
least at first
before they explore other things.
And so we want to measure the value of that, right?
Like if people are self-serving over there and they're not calling our support
team, we're
saving a bunch of money.
Well, how do we know that?
Well, we need to get a bunch of data and put it all together, right?
So I'm kind of going over this quickly.
I have entire presentations on the same page where this deck is going to be.
So when I give you the link here in a minute, you'll see it.
I have entire presentations, entire talks, entire everything about how to do
this more.
So I won't go into it too much deeper.
But just to give you a sense of like, what does the framework look like?
Let me build out a couple others here and then we'll take some questions.
So marketing, you know, they're typically like, we want to do community because
we want
to do thought leadership.
We want to like get new leads.
We want to discover people we've never met before.
Okay, great.
Here's your content program and like education and stuff like that.
And then of course they're going to try to measure, you know, where are these
coming from?
Are these net new people?
Did they come from community?
Product is typically about ideation and adoption, right?
It's like, can we source ideas from our community?
Can we turn those into meaningful product updates or feature sets?
All that kind of good stuff.
So again, I'll kind of gloss over that and we'll get to the ask me anything
part.
But if you go to this Brian Oblinger dot com slides, these slides are there and
you can
just take them, no form fills, you know, no BS.
And then there's also all the other presentations, you know, that I've kind of
done so you can
spelunk in those as well.
That's fantastic.
Yeah.
Thank you so much, Brian.
It was, I learned a ton.
You validated a ton for me.
So I've been also building communities, mostly in B2B tech companies for about
five or six
years now.
But I mean, it's what you talked about is that at the core of a lot of the
things that
I'm a big believer in as well.
So thank you for that.
There is a few questions that came in here.
Going back to that roadmap piece.
So it's there's quite lengthy.
How pragmatic slash possible is it to launch a community in one or two quarters
versus
a year?
Totally depends on your goals, your resources.
So you're right that this is an example from like an enterprise B2B company,
right?
So I should have set that expectation.
I apologize for not doing that when I showed this before, which is that like
this is kind
of the highest level of, you know, I'm working with a fortune 500.
You're going pretty fast and doing a lot of stuff.
When you say, you know, can I build a community in a couple of months versus
quarters versus
years versus whatever, the answer to all of those is yes, right?
It totally depends on what your goals are, you know, how fast you can go, what
kind of
resources you want.
You certainly do not have to do what I'm showing here.
Most communities probably start out much, much simpler than this, right?
With a minimum kind of investment and it's more of an experimental thing up
front just
to see if it works before we do more.
So yeah, I wish I could like say, oh, yeah, like it's going to be this much
money in this
many months and whatever, but it's so dependent on what you're trying to do
strategically,
right?
And so you see communities that both ends that spectrum from like, we're going
to spend
a year building this thing before we ever launch it all the way to like, I don
't know,
let's just throw something up and do an experiment and see if it's worthwhile
and then everything
in between.
So it's a very personal, you know, personalized thing from a strategic
perspective, depending
on a myriad of factors at your organization.
Awesome.
And then there was another one around what's the most effective way to
communicate community
attributed, attributed outcomes to leadership?
How do you refine simple correlation outcomes into compelling business cases?
Yeah.
Yeah, if you look at the, you know, if you look at the strategy and the KPIs on
these types
of slides, this could be a long answer.
I'll try to keep it short.
I think the biggest thing is converting the language of community and what you
're doing
to whatever language already exists in your business.
Like one of the things that we've done a little bit too much of over the years
in community
is try to like, press our language on people and, you know, try to teach them
about how
we think about community.
And I just don't think it works that well, right?
I think you need to do what we're showing in these kinds of slides where it's
like, from
a business perspective, if I walk into a meeting with the CEO or the executive
team or whatever,
and I say, hey, did you know that communities helping us retain our customers
longer or
we're generating more leads through community or, you know, our product is
better because
the product team's gathering feedback directly from it.
Like, those are things they already understand and they talk about every day
and like goals
they probably already all have.
So it's really about how do we take what we do as community builders and
translate that
into the language of the business we're in.
And I think you just break down so many barriers by doing that.
But to do that, you have to do some work.
And that's what these slides are all about, right?
It's like, how do you sort of put in that effort and get access to the data and
do the
work to have concrete things that you can say?
It's hard, right?
There's a reason why not everybody does it.
But again, it's hard, but it'll differentiate you if you can do that and it's
going to lead
to more investment and understanding in your company as a whole around
community.
Fantastic.
Yeah, no, completely agree with you.
I know we only have like a minute or so less.
So where can people go to find you?
What if they want to continue that conversation with you?
Yeah, a couple of things.
Go check out the slides, brianablinger.com.
Of course, you know, you can find me on LinkedIn.
I post a lot of events and content and stuff there.
I did want to tell you all about this too.
So I recently launched the strategy academy where I'm basically taking
everything I've
ever learned about community and dumping it into really high quality courses.
They're priced really well, but I'll go ahead and give you a code here you can
take and,
you know, grab a course or a membership or whatever it is.
You can just use club PF there for 15% off.
There's like 16 or 17 courses there today.
The roadmap has over 50.
So it's only going to get more valuable as time goes on, especially for people
who have
memberships.
So if you want to learn more about this, but you're like, hey, you know, I'd
love to engage
someone like Brian as a consultant, but we're just not ready for that yet.
I'd rather spend 50 bucks or 100 bucks or whatever and go learn some of this
stuff.
I totally get it.
Like that's cool.
Go to the go to the academy, pop in the code, you know, you can get in there
for pretty cheap
and like learn a lot pretty deeply about all this stuff.
Fantastic.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for joining us.
This was fantastic for everyone that is still out there.
Make sure to go follow Brian.
Check out the website.
Use the club PF code and we'll catch you all next time on the next event.
Have a great rest of your day, everyone.
Thanks, everybody.
See you.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
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