Tag Archives: community management

Why Every Company Attempting Category Creation Should Invest in Community

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Category creation is one of the highest risk/reward plays in business. It can help your business stand out in the crowded software market by avoiding the crowded paths, it can help you create rabid evangelists for whom you’re the first company to truly see them, and it can help you access new budget instead of fighting to get a company to switch software providers.

The challenge, then, is that category creation involves creation. You’re inventing a category from, essentially, nothing. With this comes the risk that nobody buys in and that there’s not enough activity to sustain your business and the category.

This is why community is an essential ingredient for category creators.

The three strengths of community are scale, passion, and perspective. These strengths neatly address two needs for getting traction for your new category:

1) Creating and Building Excitement

It’s much easier to get excited in a group than alone. Putting like-minded people in a room together to discuss their category is a surefire way to get them hyped up and excited to contribute to the ecosystem.

Community can also be a great way to get these early category adopters to collaborate to create content, events, best practices, etc that help promote and legitimize your category. You writing on your blog about a category feels far less legitimate than dozens of community members doing the same.

And empowering your community to go represent the category far and wide gives you scale you cannot normally reach as a small category creator. Only a community-driven meetup program, for example, can regularly reach 15 cities with only one community program manager.

2) Preventing Category Despair

As exciting as a new category can be, it can also be lonely. You’re often the only person at your company with the title or responsibilities. There are few jobs out there. There’s not much content to tell you how to do your job or if you’re doing it right. And all of this can drive loneliness and despair in your early category adopters. Take it from me: I’ve been in the community industry since it was maybe 50 people worldwide, and seen the majority of my original cohort move into other roles. There are many times I questioned if I was on a dead-end path.

Community is the most effective way to create a support network for these members of your newfound category. Meetups help people not feel alone. Forums and chat channels allow them to get instant feedback on their work. And job boards give them a centralized place to see their options and feel optimistic about the industry.

Case Studies

Gainsight

Today, Gainsight serves 20,000+ customer success professionals out of a market of 300,000. But back in 2013, “there were literally a whopping 1000 people in the profession worldwide”, according to CEO Nick Mehta. This presented a problem. “Our business was building software for those people. So we could never build a big company if the job itself didn’t grow.” So they began building community. They started with a meetup series and grew into a conference that now hosts many thousands of this market, which all started with a little human connection. “We would host these like these little happy hours and they would leave these events and say ‘Gosh, like I feel a little less alone. I guess I’m not the only one going through this. I feel more validated.’”

Gainsight CEO on stage at Gainsight Pulse
Gainsight Pulse

Product Hunt

Product Hunt feels obvious today, but 15 years ago the idea that people would hang out on a site upvoting and discussing new startup products and inventions probably seemed…nerdy. Not something that would eventually drive millions of visitors a month. And it all started with community. Founder Ryan Hoover couldn’t do it alone would personally email founders with advice and connect them with other founders, creating a tight-knit group. He would ask founders featured on Product Hunt to create content about their experience, lending the site legitimacy and buzz. And eventually, they gave members ownership over hosting events. The effect? Product Hunt was able to scale and become the centerpiece of the intellectual builder category. “When people ask ‘How did you guys meet?,’ for the rest of their lives, our community members who meet at our events will say ‘Through Product Hunt,’” said member of the founding team Erik Torenberg. “People may forget an email exchange, but they are unlikely to forget meeting like-minded community members in person.”

People chatting at a Product Hunt Meetup
Product Hunt Meetup

Culture Amp

“Culture” is a word that, until a decade ago, tended to be primarily used in academic circles and by TV pundits complaining about the state of our society. But in recent years, the word has come to be closely associated with how a company operates. And that was in no small part due to Culture Amp helping create the culture category. Head of Community Damon Klotz leaned into the fact that culture fanatics were a niche and geeky minority, choosing to name their community “People Geeks” with the goal of “building something that makes Culture Amp part of the conversation on the changing nature of the HR profession and world of work.”. Today their community has over 20,000 active members and they have 95 chapters around the world run by community members. And notably, activity around the phrase “company culture” has grown 150% according to Google Trends.

People chatting in a bar
People Geek Meetup

How Category Creators Should Tackle Community

Hire an Expert Community Strategist

It can be very tempting to try to go cheap and hire an enthusiastic community member to build a community. But enthusiasm does not a community make. There are many highly experienced community builders in the market who know how to quickly and effectively build and scale a community. Spend the money; it’ll be worth it.

Hire Community Members onto the Community Team

That’s not to knock hiring community members! Their passion and connection to the community can be highly valuable in a community engagement specialist role, and they will go faster and farther than someone who is not invested in the category.

Let Go, and Empower Your Community

The more freedom you give your community, the more they’ll do. An empowered community can host events, create content, do interviews, organize projects, write code, and more. A highly-controlled community will have more consistent results, but a whole lot less passion. It’s a spectrum (you certainly don’t want your community members out spraypainting cop cars with your category slogan), but you should err on the side of empowering them and getting out of their way.

Measure Business Outcomes, But Also Enthusiasm and Adoption

I am the first community builder in the room to say “what is the business outcome?”, and that certainly applies here as well. Just because communities are about feelings doesn’t mean you can’t measure the leads they bring in the door, the retention they drive, and the costs they defray. But with category creation, you’re trying to build and grow a vibe, so I also recommend measuring softer indicators, like enthusiasm within the category and adoption of category terms in resumes, job descriptions, conferences, etc.

Category creation is a bold endeavor to take on, but with a community hyping it up, you’ll give yourself a distinct advantage.

The Future of Remote Work (and why companies need to start hiring more community professionals NOW)

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Slack just released some fascinating research on remote work in the age of COVID-19. There are some important takeaways every company should think deeply on.

People lean towards a hybrid workplace

Despite all the claims of “remote is the future”, the majority of Americans surveyed said that, post-COVID, they’d like to spend some time in the office and some time at home. Very few want to spend 5 days a week in the office, and they appreciate saving time and money working from home.

I suspect many more would have been excited about fully remote, save for one major pain point cited in the research: human connection. People are feeling less connected to their coworkers, and this seems to be one of the main things driving them to think about a hybrid workplace.

The office is not necessary – opportunities to connect as humans are

It’s clear from these results that the office as a workplace is unnecessary, but the office is an easy (if not cheap) way to drive some human connection. That said, it’s uneven, biased towards those who naturally connect with others, and frustrating for truly remote workers.

The future is much more likely about creating structured opportunities for people to connect, both online and in-person. With the focus on connection, these interactions can intentionally drive inclusivity and, frankly, spend more money on peak experiences rather than office perks that become less novel over time. (Hell, even just from a COVID-19 standpoint, safety at one big in-person event is much more doable than safety in an office open to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people every day.)

People Ops teams need to start carving out roles that focus on creating connections and belonging

In other words, they need to hire community professionals. Connection and belonging has become a big focus for People Ops teams in recent years, but it will need to be a top priority for hybrid and remote-first companies. Employee engagement is heavily affected by connection, so someone needs to be dedicated to not just building that into the day-to-day, but building intentional spaces for people to connect. This might look like:

  • Programs that connect employees over coffee
  • Career development buddies
  • Interest/hobby groups
  • Identity groups
  • Team offsites/onsites
  • Big internal summits
  • Onboarding processes geared towards building connection
  • Etc

This will certainly involve events, but won’t work if it’s simply an event planner hire. Experienced community professionals know that the logistics of the event are secondary to driving the desired human connection.

It also requires thinking through how you foster conversation and connection around touchy, emotional issues, something many tech companies are struggling with. These are community-building and moderation issues. Luckily there are a bunch of us who are very experienced at tackling these challenges and opportunities. Rather than learn these skills from scratch, People Ops should look towards the experts.

—

This stuff is work. My team’s engagement score has actually improved during the pandemic, but that’s due to hours and hours of work and experimentation on the part of me and my lieutenants. If we leave these things to chance, we’re going to see this get worse.

My Community Manager Appreciation Day Challenge

Community, ,

I actually thought last Monday was Community Manager Appreciation Day, because the CMAD website hadn’t been updated since 2017. Back then they were doing all-day streams, giving out awards, and trending on Twitter.

I highlight this not to shame anyone, but to point out that this is exactly what community manager burnout looks like: going from something huge and engaging and impressive to nothing. You bust your ass, you do about 5 jobs at once, you make amazing things happen…and then you hit a wall. You don’t have the resources you need, you’re exhausted, your value gets questioned, and you stop.

That sucks, and I feel bad for the CMAD organizers because they really did so much cool stuff for several years.

So here’s my challenge to you this CMAD: take care of yourself. Don’t worry about hanging out checking out the CMAD hashtag all day or sending supportive messages to your peers. Take care of YOU.

A few ideas:

  • Schedule a legit vacation right now. Line up backup so you can be truly offline. Know that it won’t be the same as you doing it, but it’ll be ok.
  • Rejigger your schedule to make uninterrupted time for deep work.
  • Find some time for exercise, even a tiny bit. (I’m about to walk the 20m from Transbay Terminal to work instead of take a bus. It’s something.)
  • Set up your phone to limit your time on apps you don’t need, or to go to grayscale after 6p, or to pop an alarm warning you to take a break.
  • Give more responsibility to your community members. Know that it’ll be hard to let go but that they’ll do things you never expected.
  • Stop working on something. Cut your losses on your least successful project, let someone who foisted a task on you know that you’re too swamped, take a break from your Friday wrap-up post. (I did this once and the community stepped up and did it for me!)
  • Ask for help. Make sure your boss really understands how much you’re working. Ask a fellow community manager for advice, or another set of eyes. Find a coworker who believes in your mission and see if they’ll help with a big project.
  • Build time into your day – even literally 5 minutes – for mindfulness. Take a class or download an app and learn how just taking a moment to be present can make a huge difference.
  • Know that you can’t do everything, that you’re doing a great job, and that you’re not an imposter. And burnout will not help you succeed.

Good luck – I believe in you!

Trolling isn’t outlier behavior, and we can stop it

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Large troll standing over a house

For years the picture painted of trolls was pretty straightforward: while most members of online communities are good people, there are a few horrible, unchangeable, malicious people called “trolls” who live to make everyone’s life terrible. Our job was to try to keep them out, ban them when they showed up, and sigh and accept that they were an inevitable part of any online community.

What has become clear is that we were wrong; most trolls are regular people.

Two recently released studies have shown that the majority of “troll” behavior is actually generated by normal people who have been triggered into acting negatively, usually through a combination of their own mental state (i.e. having a bad day) and social norms (e.g. seeing other people troll and get away with it).

  1. The famously toxic League of Legends found that only about 1% of their players were consistently toxic, and those produced only about 5% of the toxicity. “The vast majority was from the average person just having a bad day.”
  2. Scientists from Cornell and Stanford found that people are more likely to troll if they were in a negative mood, late at night, and if the first comment on a thread was a “troll comment”.

This is a game-changer for several reasons.

One, it means we may have been banning or punishing a large number of normal people who were just doing what they saw others doing. It’s likely that we only reinforced their negative behavior, rather than helping them adjust it.

Two, it means there’s a lot more we can do to prevent trolling. A recent experiment on Reddit found that rule posts stuck to the top of a thread increased rule following by 7.3 percentage points and increased newcomer participation by 38.1%. League of Legends found that some simple priming “reduced negative attitudes by 8.3%, verbal abuse by 6.2% and offensive language by 11%”. Some people are further down the rabbit hole of negativity, but even they may be saved. We are not helpless to decrease trolling, and continuing to act like we are is irresponsible.

(You can find my much longer post on ways to create positive online spaces here.)

Three, it means community managers are even more important in any organization that has an interactive online space. We are no longer just reactive janitors, apologizing for the mess. We can be proactive social designers. (Be sure to go seek out some behavioral psychology books and classes, folks.)

To me, this is extremely exciting. It means our online communities can become more positive, safe places. And it means that our work is far from done. Complacency happens in every industry. The community industry has finally started pushing through our complacency about ROI. Next, let’s tackle trolling.

It’s important that I note that these findings don’t mean there aren’t real, horrible people on the internet. It doesn’t mean we need to put up with harassment just because someone had a bad day. I’m not condoning bad behavior – I’m just optimistic that we can change much of it.

Troll photo courtesy of EE Shawn

What we learned (about ourselves) at CMX Summit

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David Spinks‘s CMX Summit did something rare yesterday. It gave us the usual community management tips and cheerleading, which are always appreciated…but it also gave us perspective. We learned from seasoned veterans and psychologists. We talked to people from every type of company and every size role. And we discussed community management as a real career, not a novelty.

From Robin Dreeke we learned that empathy, which many of us have considered a cornerstone of community management for years, is not only a powerful way to accomplish goals but so important that it can get you a “head of” title at the FBI!

David McMillan taught is that for a true sense of community there are a lot of elements necessary : shared experiences, complimentary skills, risk, and the much-maligned turnover…a lot more than you’re going to get from simply tweeting cute stuff to your audience a few times a day!

Emily Castor showed how very intentional – and often very tiny – elements can help set the whole culture of a community.

Ligaya Tichy showed us how communities and community management must evolve with a company.

Josh Miller reiterated what even Buzzfeed has admitted: clicks aren’t engagement.

Nir Eyal showed us that getting folks to regularly contribute to a community is not just about good intentions, it’s about carefully building habits.

And Ellen Leanse showed us that none of this is new, that permeability is better than bottlenecking, and that we must persevere.

Who knows what the #%*& Dave McClure taught us.

What I came away with was a much better look at how our skills are more crucial than they’ve ever been…but also a keen sense that we need to step up to our potential and actually hone these skills, use these frameworks, do and read research, push for the right things instead of accepting the status quo, and go kick some ass. We are in such a position to help companies succeed and stay on top…but we need to put on our big person pants. We have the power. Let’s use it.