Category Archives: Community Manager Breakfast

The Top 10 Links from Community Manager Breakfast 2022

December 19, 2022Community, Community Manager BreakfastEvan Hamilton

Picture of a coffee cup with the text "Community Manager Breakfast" over the top

Nearly every week, I curate three of the best links about community building for my newsletter, Community Manager Breakfast. I scour the web, reading sometimes dozens of articles a week to find the cream of the crop. For the end of the year, I thought I’d take that curation even further and take a look at which of the roughly 140 links I’ve shared this year got the most clicks. Here are your favorites for the year!

10: What are the Indicators of a Successful Online Community?

In this piece, my amazing friend Carrie Melissa Jones walks us through the five key elements for a community to succeed.

9: Offensive and Defensive Community Onboarding

Ian Vanagas, one of my favorite new community writers of the last few years, provides a great framing for two approaches to consider for onboarding your community members.

8: Community Discovery Framework

This framework from the folks at Burb falls into the “I wish I had written it” category for me. They provide a clear way of thinking about how to explore and discover the right community for your organization. It maps extremely well to how I think about the topic!

7: Community Strategy Planning for 2023

Jenny Weigle, one of Community Manager Breakfast’s biggest cheerleaders, blessed us all with a five-part series on yearly strategy planning. (Scroll down to the bottom to find the other entries.) In-depth, thoughtful, and immediately actionable.

6: A Big List of Community Advocacy Program Incentives

Sometimes you just need a list. Jenny Weigle lands two spots in a row here, this time with her inspiration-provoking list of methods to reward advocates.

5: What it takes to scale

Many of the links above focus on how to launch a community and achieve success…but how do you achieve scale, and what challenges do you face once you hit it? Gareth Wilson has some answers.

4: The Community-Led Growth Report

Common Room took advantage of their massive dataset to give us all an early holiday present, covering a plethora of topics including: does the initial surge of chat community activity drop off? Do communities contribute to lead generation and conversion? How responsive are community members? Great stuff.

3: Building Campfires and Community

Carrie Melissa Jones returns to the list, this time using a campfire analogy to help us think about how we create crucial intimacy in community experiences, even at scale.

2: How To Improve The Community Member Experience

Georgi Todorov, who also frequently showed up in the runner-up links, takes member experience back to fundamentals by reminding us to think through who we’re serving and why they’re present, then building from there.

1: How to Deal with Low Engagement in a Community

And coming in at #1 is Martha Essien not with a cheat sheet of engagement tactics, but with sage advice to take a breath, assess the situation, and get to work. Good advice for all of us.

If you found any of these links useful, why not get them in your inbox every Monday? Subscribe to Community Manager Breakfast below to get 3 curated links and a dose of inspiration from me delivered directly to you every week.

Looking back on 5 years of Community Manager Breakfast

January 25, 2016Community, Community Manager Breakfastcommunity manager appreciation dayEvan Hamilton

According to my records, I’ve been hosting Community Manager Breakfast for five years. Wow. That’s a long time, especially in the world of startups! With that in mind, and in honor of today’s Community Manager Appreciation Day celebration, I decided to mull over the changes I’ve seen since I first launched this little meetup back in 2011.

1) We’re less focused on social media.

That’s huge. When I first started in community management, it was clear that social media was going to be “a thing”. And we all wanted to be part of it. But it wasn’t 100% clear how it fit in with community management. For a moment, we seemed to toy with being content creators, garnering likes and retweets. We had a lot of big discussions around social media during those early breakfasts. But gradually something became clear: social media was a great tool for engaging an audience, but not always a great tool for connecting people to each other. And as many of those channels become increasingly noisy and broadcast-focused, I am glad we didn’t hitch our success to them.

2) Individual specializations are starting to develop within community management.

Five years ago, community managers did a lot of things…but not in a good way. We often were the first marketer, the website copy writer, the office manager, the customer support rep, etc. These days we’re increasingly being actually hired to do what we do: bring people together. And this means we can start to specialize within that general focus. Now we see developer evangelists, event organizers, open source facilitators, support community managers, and more. This gives our discipline more depth and more directions for practitioners to grow in.

3) We’re formalizing our practice.

While five years ago we were merely seeking to bring some sense and definition to community management, now we’re focusing on formalizing, documenting, and improving it. While it’ll forever develop and change and improve, we now are starting to see things like the commitment curve providing repeatable structures that we can build off of, rather than always starting from scratch.

4) Community managers were and are great people.

I’m so lucky to have met every single person who has come to breakfast and for all the support you’ve given me over the years. I’ve met so many of you that, to my great embarrassment, I can’t always remember everyone’s name! But please know next time you see me: I think you’re great, I thank you for coming, and remind me of your name and we’ll have an awesome conversation. 🙂

Here’s to another five years of breakfasts! Hope to see you at one if you’re in SF or NYC!

The next challenge

May 15, 2015Community, Community Manager Breakfast, LifeEvan Hamilton

In community management, we often reference Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

First and foremost, it states, humans focus on the need for food, shelter, safety, etc. (Not much of a surprise there.) It’s only once these are met that they can—and will—move up the hierarchy. We’re never content, us humans. It’s what makes us great, and leads to moon landings and the Mona Lisa and Third Eye Blind’s self-titled album.

I’m lucky enough that I frequently have achieved the “esteem” level of the hierarchy. I feel my work is valuable—I help people connect and accomplish things.

But like many of the lucky people in the first world, I’m always chasing self-actualization. I want my actions to mean something more than a good day’s work, or a promotion, or an award. I want to be changing the world for the better.

I chased this with UserVoice, helping companies treat customers better. I chased this with ZOZI, helping people live more active lives. And I’m very excited about my next attempt: Starting in June, I will be taking the role of Community Lead at Coursera, helping them achieve their lofty goal of providing universal access to the world’s best education. They—soon to be “we”—are truly trying to change the world for the better.

As always, this transition is not without sadness. I’ve learned an incredibly amount at ZOZI from my manager, my coworkers, and my employees. We created some great things—moving our customer satisfaction from sub-80% to 100%, launching the ZOZI Journal—and we’ve helped many people get out in the world. Leaving was not an easy decision, but I believe it was the right one. Regardless, as with UserVoice, I wish the ZOZI team all the best and will be closely following their progress (and using their product).

At Coursera, I am going to be working with some of the most brilliant people of my career on some very juicy challenges. Community is an integral part of Coursera, and they already have some great community programs. I won’t lie; my excitement sits right next to a very talkative fear, sure I won’t accomplish my goals. But truly, isn’t fear the path to self-actualization?

Thank you to everyone who has ever helped me, from my bosses to coworkers to many community managers I’ve interacted with. I’ll need you now more than ever—expect some emails and coffee dates. 🙂 And yes, I will continue to see you at Community Manager Breakfast.

Wish me luck!

-Evan

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

I’m speaking at CMX Summit East!

May 6, 2015Community, Community Manager BreakfastpresentationsEvan Hamilton

Audience at CMX Summit — CMX San Francisco 2014 – I’m in that audience somewhere!

I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at the fantastic CMX Summit in NYC this month!

This will be the third CMX Summit I’ve attended. I can’t recommend the event enough: This is one of the few places where you can actually learn insightful, proven community management strategies and tactics from the pros. And the smattering of speakers from other fields—like this year’s former nuclear submarine captain—bring useful tools and experiences that make them a perfectly compliment to the community professionals.

I’ll be speaking about the massive importance of measuring the ROI of community management efforts efforts. No matter how scary or difficult you find it, it’s time to make ROI a priority. I’ll walk through the things you need to accomplish this mighty goal, provide some examples, and hopefully leave you with some useful info and a good chunk of courage.

I’ll also be hosting my Community Manager Breakfast in the morning before the official talks start…which should be very different with hundreds of attendees instead of a dozen. 🙂

Hope to see you there!

Community Manager Breakfast March Notes – Ambassador Programs

April 17, 2015Community, Community Manager Breakfastambassador programs, ambassadors, forumsEvan Hamilton

At last month’s Community Manager Breakfast, the group chose to focus on a juicy discussion topic: Ambassador Programs. The fantastic Meredith Black (Who is looking for a community role, FYI!) took notes. Check out the high-level bullet points below, and join us at the next breakfast to get the full experience!

What is an ambassador?

Users who are active, engaged, show up offline, spread the word (evangelists).

How do you build an ambassador program?

DO:

Have a strategy and plan
- (Do you want ambassadors to be pre-beta-testers? Are you looking to recruit? Etc.)
ID the ambassadors, then reach out with money/resources/support
Show tons of love to early participants
Have barriers to entry for selecting ambassadors (see NextDoor)

DON’T:

Make too many rules – instead, let the users have some say
Build the relationship around money – instead, make it authentic
Ramp it up too early – instead, determine ambassador milestones before the call-to-action

How do you develop a sticky ambassador program for a product/service with a 1-time use case? (Example: a site where you research which grad school you want to go to)

Top issues:

Users have unequal experience (novice vs. expert)
Users aren’t motivated/interested to stay engaged
Product/service is hedged by legal/compliance issues

DO:

Have tools in place: community blog, great platform, user profiles, following capability
Prioritize motivating and retaining key segments that disengage
Bucket and grow different segments BEFORE merging them
Customize attention to build real relationships
- Get 1-on-1 = Hangouts, 15-min phone calls scheduled by users, etc
Source content from users
Research successes in similar programs