POPULARITY
Hosted by david spinks
17 episodes with david spinks
3 episodes with david spinks
3 episodes with david spinks
2 episodes with david spinks
2 episodes with david spinks
2 episodes with david spinks
2 episodes with david spinks
2 episodes with david spinks
Alberto, Steve and Elissa host the 2025 Birdie Awards, featuring special appearances from winners So Unusual, It's Britney BEEP, Miss Natalie Harlow, Serenity Jenny and David Spinks, John Hansen, David Dugan and Scott Gerling. In honor of this year's ceremony, Alberto goes to Disney World, and Eddie goes missing. Want to see this episode? Watch it on YouTube by following this link: https://youtube.com/TheM25Show Visit www.TheM25Show.com and hit the Show Us Love link Contact us by email at magpiepodcastnetwork@gmail.com or send us a text message at (562) 739-7029. *Disclaimer* Alberto is the one with access to these accounts. Messages for specific members of the show will be forwarded. Messages could also be read/listened to on the show. #PodcastingSomethingMore Natural Wunderz: At Natural Wunderz they create high performance health and wellness products that spring naturally from the seven natural wonders of the world. Be as clean and beautiful as nature intended you to be. You are the Natural Wunder. Visit https://naturalwunderz.com/ and enter the code TheM25Show to get 25% off you order. Michael Seril Fitness: Founded in 2005, MSF has motivated and inspired thousands of clients in Whittier, California over the last 15+ years. They are also a leader in Pay It Forward events that have benefited thousands of families in their community. Visit https://msf-strong.com/ for more information. Tacos Che & More: Be sure to book Tacos Che & More for all your catering needs. What makes them different from most taco catering businesses is that they cook up, at your request, a variety of different types of meals and of course tacos. Call and ask if they are able to prepare the meal of your choice. (951) 442-4587 or visit them on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/tacosche05
You've exited your business or you've left your job. What next?You've gone from being busy and feeling like you had direction to now floating around aimlessly.This is what our guest David Spinks calls the Abyss. In his Substack post, he shared his experience of stepping down from the company that he co-founded and trying to work out what's next.In this conversation with David, you'll hear about his experience of the abyss, what he felt, what he did, and where he's at now. He shares how he navigated the inner journey, which helped him understand how he got to where he got to and what he needs to do differently.Whether you're still floating in the middle of the ocean or have caught a glimpse of the shoreline, this episode will give you some compass headings and the courage to keep on swimming.LinksJoin the conversation liveBecome a member of the Happy Startup SchoolJoin the next Vision 20/20 cohort
This episode was recorded live at the Community Builders and Creators mini-conference in New York in March. You will hear from Terry Rice talking about overcoming setbacks. You will learn how Tawny Lara has expanded her brand over the years as the Sober Sexpert and the author of a book called Dry Humping. You will also learn about David Spinks talk about community emergence and how communities may emerge more than they are built. Excited for you to build and grow your Portfolio Career!Connect with David on InstagramSubscribe to the Portfolio Career Substack
What are the key qualities of a successful community, and how can businesses effectively build and nurture them? In this episode, Daniel interviews David Spinks, a community-building expert, to explore the world of community management. They discuss the importance of organic growth, the qualities to look for in a community manager, and the competitive advantage a strong community can provide for a brand. How can in-person experiences complement online interactions? David shares his thoughts on the significance of online and offline engagement and explains the different types of communities that are vital to your brand game plan. And later, he and Daniel explore how focusing on joy and genuine connection when building a community is more valuable than any metric measurement. 00:00:04 - Expert David Discusses Community Building 00:00:27 - Building Digital Communities: A Personal Journey 00:03:16 - Defining Community in the Marketing World 00:04:38 - The Key Traits of a Successful Community 00:06:05 - The Process of Building Business Community 00:09:31 - The Power of In-Person Experiences 00:13:21 - Building and Growing a Community 00:17:54 - Qualities to Look for in a Community Manager 00:21:40 - The Power of Building Community 00:29:08 - Building Healthy Communities with Intuition 00:33:05 - Refreshing Views on Building Community Follow David: Website: https://davidspinks.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspinks/ Follow Daniel: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@themarketingmillennials/featured Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Dmurr68 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-murray-marketing Sign up for The Marketing Millennials newsletter: www.workweek.com/brand/the-marketing-millennials Daniel is a Workweek friend, working to produce amazing podcasts. To find out more, visit: www.workweek.com Wistia is a complete video marketing platform that helps teams create, host, and measure the impact of their videos—all in one place. To find out more about Wistia, visit WISTIA.COM/MILLENNIALS
In this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, host Dave West is joined by the authors of the new book, Facilitating Professional Scrum Teams - Glaudia Califano, Patricia Kong and David Spinks. In this discussion they cover the very important skill of facilitation and delve into:The need for a book on facilitation practices and their impactThe importance of facilitation in Scrum and knowledge workThe importance of clear facilitation intent and participation in meetingsFacilitating Scrum Teams for improved alignment and outcomesMore!Get your copy of the new book! Use the discount code SCRUMORG or SCRUMTEAMS for 35% off through InformIT.
AI is going to kill so many different brands and level up so many community based brands. Kipp and Kieran are joined by Greg Isenberg (CEO & Co-Founder at Late Checkout) to dive into how to integrate community into your company. Learn more on effective strategies for growing a business through community, the TRIBE framework, why there's a difference between audience and community, how to turn customers into raving fans, and why community equity is more important than brand equity. About Greg Isenberg Greg Isenberg is the Co-Founder of Late Checkout, a web3 and community product studio and agency that designs, creates, and acquires internet communities. He is also a growth advisor at TikTok and a venture partner at Indicator Ventures, a tech venture fund. Previously, Greg was the Head of Product Strategy at WeWork, the founder/CEO of Islands, a messaging/community app acquired by WeWork, and the Founder/CEO of 5by, a leading video discovery app acquired by StumbleUpon. He helps build marketing and web3 strategies, communities, and technology products for brands like TikTok, FedEx, NASCAR, TechCrunch, and WordPress. Connect with Greg! Twitter https://twitter.com/gregisenberg LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-it-happens/id1593424985 Late Checkout https://latecheckout.studio Mentions Squid Game https://www.netflix.com/title/81040344 Soho House https://www.sohohouse.com/ Rapha https://www.rapha.cc/fr/fr/ David Spinks https://davidspinks.com/ Dharmesh Shah https://www.linkedin.com/in/dharmesh/ Ramp https://ramp.com/welcome Brex https://www.brex.com/ We're on Social Media! Follow us for everyday marketing wisdom straight to your feed YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGtXqPiNV8YC0GMUzY-EUFg Twitter: https://twitter.com/matgpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@matgpod Thank you for tuning into Marketing Against The Grain! Don't forget to hit subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts (so you never miss an episode)! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-against-the-grain/id1616700934 If you love this show, please leave us a 5-Star Review https://link.chtbl.com/h9_sjBKH and share your favorite episodes with friends. We really appreciate your support. Host Links: Kipp Bodnar, https://twitter.com/kippbodnar Kieran Flanagan, https://twitter.com/searchbrat ‘Marketing Against The Grain' is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Produced by Darren Clarke.
"For the first time in a decade, I feel free again." That's how one of my earliest blogging friends, longtime community leader David Spinks, was feeling when I caught up with him in-person in the middle of his yearlong sabbatical, after selling his community-based business. David and I discuss best practices for creating and nurturing communities, for engineering serendipity, what it's like to build and run a conference (and later sell it), and the freedom that comes with taking a deliberate sabbatical. More About David: David Spinks is the author of The Business of Belonging and a popular weekly newsletter for community creators. Previously he co-founded CMX, the leading network for community professionals that was later acquired by Bevy.
Greetings and welcome back to the podcast.This is the place where we empower you to build trust, champion adaptability, and cultivate the courage to unlock your DNA Of Purpose. Here, we provide the insights, tools, and mindset shifts essential for sparking conversations, leading teams, rallying communities, and influencing cultural shifts to steer humanity towards the innovative solutions shaping our future today. So, today we're diving into this pressing question: What does it truly take to spark a thriving community? How can you foster that magnetic pull that attracts and nurtures a community's growth? And, importantly, how do you build momentum while maintaining the delicate balance of igniting a community's passion without stifling the very essence that brought these individuals together in the first place? If you identify as an innovative change-maker, a leader fuelled by purpose, or an entrepreneur propelling an idea forward, leading a values-driven team, or managing a business, today holds the potential to transform your approach to rallying individuals around a core mission. I'll let you in on a secret: the key to effective mobilisation is not about a grand and lofty statement of why. Remember, purpose is not just a noun; it's a verb—an action with the potential to bring people together. Meet David Spinks, a passionate expert in the world of communities. He dedicates his time to studying communities and educating others on how they function. David is known for his insightful weekly newsletter, where he delves into community theory. He is also the author of 'The Business of Belonging,' a book that has literally not left my desk. David has personally advised and trained hundreds of organisations in community strategy, including Facebook, Waze, Salesforce, Airbnb, and Google. Previously, David was a co-founder of CMX, the renowned annual conference and community boasting over 20,000 community professionals. In 2019, CMX was acquired by Bevy, a platform specialising in hosting chapter-based community ecosystems. For three years, David served as the VP of Community at Bevy. For two years, David also hosted the podcast 'Masters of Community,' where he interviewed the world's leading community builders and experts. Today some of themes we explore include: The importance of belonging and community, delving into the biological and neurological basis for our need for community with a focus on how we create social health. Discuss how leaders can ignite and strengthen communities, highlighting key elements and avoiding common pitfalls. Outline the SPACES model for community success, exploring the interplay of social identity and meaning-making. David shares strategies for managing behavioural change and guiding communities through transformations. Contemplate the role of Artificial Intelligence in community building and its potential to complement human efforts. And we explore the intersection between remote working, communities and what it takes to nourish our social diets…and that my friends is just the start. With a wealth of experience and a passion for bringing people together, David is here to share his insights and guide us on the journey of building meaningful, thriving communities. So, let's dive in and explore the art and science of community building with David Spinks. Sign Up To David's Newsletter Here: https://davidspinks.com/ Purchase The Business Of Belonging: https://davidspinks.com/book/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this episode David describes his childhood contact with entrepreneurship, and how he was looking for and found community and acceptance in the video game world. We learn how he discovered and almost invented the profession of “community manager” and created the CMX community of community managers. We also hear about the problems that community managers face in making their communities sustainable, and discuss his book: The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage (Wiley, 2021). We also learn about how CMX became part of Bevy and multiple other ups and downs in David's life so far. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee. About our guest David Spinks launched his first online community at 14 years old for his favorite video game, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. Today he's become a prominent leader in the community-driven business movement and has trained and advised community teams at companies like Google, Facebook, Udemy, Waze, and Airbnb. Spinks has long believed that community is the future of business and has made it his life's purpose to help others learn how to build thriving, meaningful communities. He is the cofounder of CMX, where over 20,000 community professionals gather to learn and support each other and is the host of CMX Summit, the largest conference in the community industry. In 2019, CMX was acquired by Bevy, where Spinks now serves as the VP of Community, helping companies launch and scale event-driven community programs. About the NBN The New Books Network was founded in 2007 as a podcast interviewing the authors of academic books, and has grown to the largest author interview podcast in the world publishing 12 podcasts a day in more than 90 specialist areas, with over a million downloads a month. Read about the founder Marshall Poe and the NBN here. In recent years it has expanded beyond its “author interview origins”. Historically NBN only did audio recordings. E&L is the first NBN podcast distributed on Youtube. About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter Linkedin Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here, About Richard Lucas Twitter Linkedin Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/entrepreneurship-and-leadership
This week's episode is a replay of a Community Building episode we did in 2021. LJ and Rob are still bullish on the importance of building a community with your talent and current customers. Rob was joined by Monica Rojas of the Upstream App, Kyle Hagge of Morning Brew, & Vanessa Calas of Ocean's DAO to discuss tips and tricks to build a sustainable and member-focused community. The quartet emphasizes:
Today Greg is joined by David Spinks, the founder of CMX and author of The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community Your Competitive Advantage. In this episode, Greg and David talk about sabbaticals, bots as community managers, and having a personal board of advisors.►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comDavid Spinks:https://davidspinks.comhttps://twitter.com/DavidSpinksSHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro0:50 - Sabbaticals: Why you should take one7:55 - AI community managers23:55 - Ethics around bots in communities31:30 - What's next for David Spinks34:50 - Advice from Seth Godin, Ryan Hoover, Scott Heiferman and others (sort of)
Sustainable Xagility™ - board & executive c-suite agility for the organization's direction of travel
About Glaudia Califano: Glaudia started her Agile journey in a Scrum team. Over the years she enhanced her skills and knowledge by taking on different roles and responsibilities across a variety of disciplines such as Scrum Master, Product Ownership, Business Analysis, Service Delivery Management, Agile & Lean coaching. She has guided organizations along their journeys towards business agility, allowing them to inspect and adapt and focus on customer value. Glaudia has extensive experience in helping organisations break down silos, enabling the creation of a continuous learning environment that encourages communication, collaboration and innovation. About David Spinks: David's professional experience spans roles of; Agile Trainer, Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Kanban Service Delivery Manager, Team Leader and Software Developer in a variety of industries, including finance, eCommerce, social housing and education. David is a Kanban University Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT) and Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP), a Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) and an ICAgile Authorized Instructor. He is also the co-author of the books "Mastering Collaboration in a Product Team" and "Adopting Agile Across Borders" published by Apress. David believes in servant leadership, and value environments where empowerment, autonomy and flexibility enable teams to do the best work possible. He is committed to continuous learning and development in myself and others. David is passionate about getting the best out of teams and seeing people reach their full potential. About John Coleman: John Coleman's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncolemanagilitychef/ John Coleman's website: https://orderlydisruption.com/ Looking to get your Scrum/Agility training? Check out my courses at: https://orderlydisruption.com/collections/courses Thank you for watching. #scrum #agility #managementconsulting #productdevelopment #productowner #leadership --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/xagility/message
Brad Sugars is internationally known as one of the most influential entrepreneurs. Brad is a best-selling author, keynote speaker and the number one business coach in the world. Over the course of his 30 year career as an entrepreneur, Brad has become the CEO of 9 plus companies and is the owner of the multimillion dollar franchise Action Coach. As a husband and father of 5, Brad is equally as passionate about his family as he is about business, that's why Brad is a strong advocate for building a business that works without you so you can spend more time doing what really matters to you. Over the years of starting, scaling and selling many businesses, Brad has earned his fair share of scars. Being an entrepreneur is not an easy road but if you can learn from those who have gone before you, it becomes a lot easier than going at it alone. That's why Brad has created 90 days to revolutionize your life, it's 30 minutes a day for 90 days teaching you his 30 years experience on investing, business and life. Questions Could you share a little bit about how you got to where you are today? In your bio, it mentioned that at the end of the day, you want to be working in a business that can work without you. Like so many people don't understand that concept. Could you explain what that means? And so, maybe could you share with us, let's say 3 to 4 success principles, or just things that will help to make you be more successful as a business owner or an entrepreneur. Could you share with us I would say maybe, let's move it up to five traits that a leader needs to really grow and develop their people. Where do you get to that point where you're starting to attract really quality people? Is it because of the energy that you're giving out, your leadership style, what makes the right people or attracts the right people to come to you? What's your views on marketing? Is it something that still needs to be occurring to keep present in the customers mind? And if so, based on the fact that marketing has changed so much I would say in the last 10 to 20 years as you've mentioned, which platforms do you focus your marketing on? Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business? Could you maybe pick one or two that have had a great impact on you over your lifetime? It could be a book you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago. What has been your experience, I would say, let's narrow it down to the last one to two years of customer experience. And I know it's a very general and a wide question, but we just want to get an idea of how your experiences has been across different industries, like travelling to a hotel, or airline or restaurant, or even just local stores that you may visit in your community where you live. Could you share with us what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people. Where can listeners find you online? Before we wrap our interviews up, we always like to ask our guest, do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge you'll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps get you back on track if for any reason you get derailed. Highlights Brad's Journey Me: Now, even though we read our guest bio, we always like to give the guests an opportunity to share in their own words a little bit about how they got to where they are today. So, could you share a little bit about that with us? Brad shared that he was born and raised in Australia and moved to the United States, married an American girl. So, they have 5 kids. So, he guesses he's stuck in America now, he's an “Aus” American. Being in every type of business, you name it, he's had it, whether it's service or retail or actually manufacturing. He did manufacture in the food space, he's been across the board, he's an entrepreneur, he buys and builds and sells companies, that's what he does. And teaching became a passion and as mentioned his 90x programme. When he hit 50, he thought what is he going to do and he built himself a TV studio and he went in and recorded 30 minutes a day, every day of business and then 30 minutes a day every day for life and success principles. And then the same for wealth and thought, “I'm going to give back” and their main company Action Coach, obviously, they're in 83 countries, he knows that coach Marcia in Jamaica there. And across Africa, they have their coaches all across the Caribbean in fact, in the US, they have about 1100 offices around the world doing that. So, 17 books on the subject of business and wealth. So, he guesses he's a prolific at creating books, kids and businesses. Me: Amazing and for those of our listeners that clearly will not have heard our pre podcast conversation. I met Brad when he came to Jamaica in 2016 and his presentation was amazing. And Coach Marcia, who represents Action Coach in Jamaica, she's also supremely amazing, like everything Brad talks about, she continuously preaches, be, do and have and it's just amazing. The Concept of Working in a Business That Can Work Without You So, Brad, could you share with us, I know that your whole life has been surrounded around building businesses and in your bio, it mentioned that at the end of the day, you want to be working in a business that can work without you. Like so many people don't understand that concept. Could you explain what that means? Brad shared that well, in essence, what they're trying to do is the difference between working for yourself and building a business is two very vastly different things. Working for yourself is building a job for yourself. Building a business is building something that is an investment that makes money whether you show up or not. So, his definition of a business is a commercial profitable enterprise that works without you. He learned this early in his career that he was the hardest working person in his business. In some cases, he even took home less money than a lot of the staff in his business and it just didn't seem right to him to work that way. So, he had to learn how to turn his business into something that worked so he didn't have to. See when the business works, the owner doesn't have to. If the business doesn't work, then the owner is generally the hardest working person in the business. Principles That Will Make You More Successful as a Business Owner or an Entrepreneur Brad stated that if we're going to go with just 3, it's hard when you've written this many books and taught for this long to pick just 3. So, first he would go, you don't build your business, your people do. Your job as the owner or the CEO is to build your people, they build your business for you. So, as you educate them, coach them, mentor them, train them. He still remembers 20 or 21, he forgot how old he was, he went to his dad and he said, “You know what, Dad, I just can't get good people.” And he said to him, “Brad, you get the people you deserve. You're an average manager running an average business, the highest caliber person that wants to work for you is average.” And it's like a big slap in the face. Thanks, dad. But he was right. If I became a great leader, then great people wanted to work for his company. So yeah, he would say that's the first one, build your people, they build your business. The second he would say, you've got to be great at sales and marketing to be great at business, being the rainmaker, bringing in new business is one of the most important aspects and that's why out of his 17 books, actually his newest, his 18th book is all about marketing as well. So, it really is about getting the customer in and keeping them for a lifetime, his definition of marketing is profitably buying lifetime customers. So, if he spends 1000 on an ad, and he gets 10 new customers, will it cost him 100 to buy each new customer. So, marketing is about the profitable buying of customers and when people learn it, every dollar out should bring $2 back in type thing. So, we really have to focus on that. If he could only stick to 3. We will go through a lot more as we get through the day or through the session. But he would say the third is, be really clear on where you're going with the business. He likes to think of business as something that you finish, you build it so that it eventually runs without you. So, by what date will you finish the business? By what date will it run without you and then go to work on the business more than in the business type thing. Gerber said that based on his book. Me: Indeed. So, we have to work on the business and so many business owners, myself included, work in our business and not necessarily on our business. And it kind of goes up and down, sometimes you get it to a point where you are working on the business and then for some reason you get back sucked into the operational activities and you're back in it again. So, it's up and down. But as you mentioned, if you really want to generate wealth, it's to have the business run on its own. Traits a Leader Needs to Grow and Develop Their People Me: Now, you mentioned at the beginning, I loved your first point stating that you need to develop and work on your people. And of course, that's all this podcast is about, navigating the customer experience and I preach constantly about the fact that internal customers are so important in a business. Many times, companies focus on the external, but if you don't get it right internally, it's highly unlikely you're going to be able to master it externally. So could you share with us I would say maybe, let's move it up to five traits that a leader needs to really grow and develop their people. Brad shared that we'll break that into two separate segments. First of all, we'll break it into the difference between management and leadership. Because in a business, you need both management and leadership. Now management is a system and leadership is an art form, the system of management is designed to do two things. Management should build competency and productivity in the people in your organization. So, build better people like build their competency, build so they can do a good job by training, coaching, mentoring, educating, make sure your people are competent at their job. If there's a lack of competency, there's a lack of management or there's bad management going on. Productivity is also management. So, it's really about how do you manage people to get a high level of productivity because if you want to double a business, if you want to double your profits, you either have to double the number of people or double the productivity of the existing people, productivity is always faster and easier. And then the flip side then if you look at leadership. Leadership is also in his opinion about two things. But this is where it's about, if management is sort of the short-term day to day, week to week. Leadership is more than monthly, quarterly, annual and 3 to 5 year type thing where in a leadership scenario, he's looking to create passion and focus. So, the leader's job is really building passion amongst the people and building focus. To be focused, they need to know what they're doing, what are their goals sort of thing. Where are we headed? To be passionate, there has to be more meaning to work than just the paycheck and more meaning to work than just the profitability of the company. As a Leader, What Attracts the Right People to Come to You Me: Indeed, indeed. So, we spoke about management and leadership so important. Now, Brad, let's say for example, you had mentioned that you said, your dad said to you, “You attract the people that you deserve.” Where do you get to that point where you're starting to attract really quality people? Is it because of the energy that you're giving out, your leadership style, what makes the right people or attracts the right people to come to you? Brad stated that all of the above. Plus, recruiting today has to be seen as exactly that recruiting, it's not hiring anymore. Most people don't think of it this way, but what you want to do is you want to be more like a sporting team, they don't go and place an ad and say, “Hey, if you're out of work, apply to come work for us, we really want all of the people that are out of work to apply for us.” No, a sporting team goes and looks for the best player in that position. Now, most of the best people already have a job, the vast majority of the best people are already working. So, how do you get your job advertisement? How do you get the fact that you are recruiting in front of the right people? And that's where marketing has to kick in. How do you actually invest money in marketing for a job? Twenty/thirty years ago, people were like, “I just placed the ad and 100 people apply, and I picked the best one.” Not anymore. The way that we have to look at it these days is we have to go searching for the best of the best people, we have to search for them on LinkedIn, we have to search for them through Google, we have to search for them through Facebook, we have to search for them by going through people who know us like. We often find that the best employees are people that already knew us, they already know our company. So, they might be on our newsletter, or they might be a friend of someone that already works for us. Or they might follow us on social media. So, how are you marketing that position to find the best of the best, and have them at least see that you are recruiting? That's the vital one. Me: Brilliant, I've never heard someone, I would say reposition it the way how you just repositioned it for us. And you are right. If you take that approach that you've just indicated to us, your father is absolutely right, like on target in terms of attracting the people that you deserve. Because you really want to ensure that you're getting the right people, as you mentioned, using the analogy of a sporting team and getting the best player, because then you will really have a totally impactful and efficient and effective team, which is critical if you really want the business to grow. And as you as you mentioned at the beginning, function without you. I love that. Views on Marketing Me: Now, we spoke a little bit about leadership, we spoke a little bit about internal customers. Could you share with us a little bit about marketing? I get a lot of questions sometimes, should we spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising of our business? Shouldn't it be a case where our customers, especially if we're a brand that's already known, we're like a household name. What's your views on marketing? Is it something that still needs to be occurring to keep present in the customers mind? And if so, based on the fact that marketing has changed so much I would say in the last 10 to 20 years as you've mentioned, which platforms do you focus your marketing on? Brad shared that is a lot of questions in one way, let's see what we can get to. First of all, marketing should be something that never stops. Marketing is the lifeblood of a business. Marketing has two jobs, getting new business and keeping business. So, you got to get them in and you got to keep them in. What's the use of building a database of existing customers and that even assumes that businesses are, you must collect the names, emails, phone numbers, etc. of every single prospect, every single customer in your business, that is the most valuable asset of business has its database of existing customers, its database of prospective customers. Now, what you need to understand if he goes back to what he said earlier about marketing is it's the job of marketing is to buy customers, to buy new business, to buy new customers is a consistent thing. So, we're getting them in and we're keeping them in, we're looking at lifetime value of a customer, meaning how much are they worth to us over years of buying from us and that's where most businesses don't invest the time and energy because they don't even think about that. When he was in the dog food business, their average customer stayed with them for 3 years, which meant they spent over $3,000 with them and they made over $800 in profit from them. You think about that. If you just thought of your customer as a one off sale, you don't actually make a lot of money from that person, you don't think of it that way. But if you keep them for their lifetime, you'll make a fortune out of that customer. Now, in order for marketing to really work in this day and age, he thinks the biggest thing we have to understand is that historically, marketing was almost like asking to get married on a first date, we ran an ad, and we asked you to buy straight from the advertisement. In this day and age, it seems stupid to go up to like, “Yanique, if you and I met in a bar, and I walked up and said, You look like a very smart, attentive, wonderful woman, I think you'd be a great mother, why don't we get married?” That is the dumbest thing you could ever think of, but that's what most marketing is. You've got to actually ask people, “Why don't we have a coffee first? Why don't we get to know each other type thing.” And so, what we call that as you've got to ask prospects to raise their hand, you got to say, “Hey, if you're interested in this, then raise your hand.” And he'll give you a simple example of that. So, at Action Coach, one of the things they do is a lot of sales training. So, they have a sales training programme for companies. He just did a webinar yesterday on sales training for companies with 20 or more salespeople, so the whole thing was, how do you manage your salespeople? How do you get great results from your salespeople? So, 84 people showed up to their webinar saying, “I have 20, or more salespeople, I'd like to learn how to manage my salespeople.” By the end of that webinar, out of the 84, 60 of them said, “I would be interested in finding out about the sales training programme.” So not only does he then do the webinar and get 60 people that are interested, but now today on all of his social media will run a post that says, “Just finished my webinar on how you manage a great sales team, how you get your sales team to perform. If you're interested in the recording of the webinar, please type the word webinar below.” So, he'll probably over the next month or two, get another 200, 300, 400, 1000 people that will type the word webinar. And then you'll have another 1000 people that are interested in their sales training, does that make sense? So, his goal is to start conversations. He teaches conversion rate, because that's important, out of every 10 people that call, how many did you convert? But marketing really needs to look at conversation rate, what is the rate of conversation, so he doesn't care how many likes, how many comments you get, what he cares about on your social media, on your emails, on everything you do is how many conversations were started by that post. Me: Indeed, indeed, that makes a great amount of sense. And I guess it doesn't matter the platform, whether it's LinkedIn, or Instagram, or Tik Tok, as long as the conversation is happening, and it's being generated, and there's some buzz and word of mouth around it and there's interest. Yeah. Brad agreed, 100%. App, Website or Tool that Brad Absolutely Can't Live Without in His Business When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Brad stated that he's was going to say his phone, or Zoom. He's a believer in better levels of communication. He's a believer in high quality conversations more over low quality conversations. People like email, they like their texting, he personally thinks that a phone call or a Zoom call, obviously the highest form of communication is face to face. But he would rather have a phone call than a text message or an email, he would rather do that. And he knows that his kids, having 5 kids, he always end up in this debate. His kids text him and he's like, “Stop texting me. I don't answer your texts. You call me I'm your dad.” But if he wants a great relationship with a customer, it's not going to happen via email, it's not going to happen via texting, it's going to happen by communication at a high level, which is face to face or at least voice to voice. Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Brad Me: So, you mentioned that you are on your 18th book, but outside of the books that you've written, I'm sure you have read 1000s of books. So, could you maybe pick one or two that have had a great impact on you over your lifetime? It could be a book you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago. When asked about books that have a great impact on him, Brad shared that he could list off the last set that he just finished reading. The last seven that he just finished reading Marcus Sheridan, They Ask, You Answer, amazing marketing book. Marcus is phenomenal around it. They asked, You Answer. Subscribed, Subscribed is a phenomenal book, his name is Tien Tzuo, a phenomenal book about marketing and the future of it. And then Oversubscribed. So, there's two books, they're both on the words on subscription. So, you can imagine what he's learning about. Daniel wrote a great book on that one. Blitzscaling, another phenomenal one by Reid Hoffman, he really enjoyed that. The Membership Economy by Robbie Baxter, she's phenomenal. Just loved the work she does. The Business of Belonging, David Spinks, really cool book, really, really cool. And Building Brand Communities, that one there, Charles Vogel with Carrie Jones. So yeah, that's the last 7 books he read. Out of those, he would probably say Marcus's book They Asked, You Answer would be the top of the 7 that he just read. He reads a books a week, so he raced through a lot of books. How Has Your Experiences Been Across Different Industries Me: Now, you do travel, I imagine quite a bit, Brad, and you interface with many different organizations across different industries, across different cultures. What has been your experience, I would say, let's narrow it down to the last one to two years of customer experience. And I know it's a very general and a wide question, but we just want to get an idea of how your experiences has been across different industries, like travelling to a hotel, or airline or restaurant, or even just local stores that you may visit in your community where you live. Brad shared that what's happened is, obviously, COVID changed a lot of the way we perceive the world, it virtualized the world in a way that we would never have thought possible. And that to him, has been a phenomenal thing, the level of virtual nature of the world. He thinks that we have seen a lot of the customer service experience move to more virtualized and that doesn't make it more positive by the way, that just means it's more virtualized. The average consumer, he thinks has a little more patience at this point, not a lot more but a little more patience at this point. He lives in Las Vegas, he's in the epicentre of sort of customer service mentality, because it's a city based around tourism and Yanique's in Jamaica, in a country where tourism is very high on the agenda sort of thing. And so, in these markets, we must be customer related. And he'll give you an example of how Vegas is different. People come here to watch a sporting event, or come to a football game or a hockey game, or whatever it might be. And normally, they're used to going to other cities where the local fans hate on the new fans coming to town type thing. Well, in Vegas, they love it when other people come to town, like, “Oh, you're visiting our city. Thanks for doing that. We appreciate you paying our taxes.” They are a hospitality-based city. So, he thinks the customer service experience in Vegas. Now that being said, where he sees the customer service experience moving to is a lot of the removal of humans, if you want to scale a business, you need to remove humans from a lot of the things now, that's because in two ways. You need to remove humans where they didn't add value. So, for instance, Uber, all Uber really did was remove humans from the hiring a taxi, you remember the days when to get a taxi, you actually had to call a number, that person then gave the address to the dispatcher, the dispatcher then called all the taxis and said, who's in this area. And it took three people to get a taxi to your house, so they just removed the humans. There's a lot of areas where having a human actually detracts from the experience, it doesn't add to the experience, if that makes sense. And so, we're seeing a lot of the customer service experience removing humans where they don't add value. Me: That does make sense. And I'm so happy that when you started talking about removing humans, I was actually going to ask if you actually think there's no use for humans in customer interactions anymore, but I'm glad you gave the example of Uber and you specifically stated if the human experience or the human being there is not adding value because I do believe that people genuinely still want human to human interaction, but it depends on what service or what value as you had mentioned that human is providing. So, if you think about it, technology should be there to assist us in delivering the service. But I don't think as a society even globally, we're ever going to get to the point where humans are going to be completely eliminated from all interactions. Brad shared that no, people need people, we saw that through COVID. People at the end of COVID thought, “Oh, I'll never want to go back to an office, I want to stay working from home." And then the immediacy, immediately when we could go back to an office people like, “Oh, thank God, I could get out of my house.” It's like, “Oh, I love my spouse, but not that much. Two years locked up together was enough.” He remembers during the middle of COVID, they came down and actually spent two weeks in Jamaica, Discovery Bay and sat on the beach there and they rented a big house and just sat on the beach and had a great time. And some of his friends, he was like, “Well, if you want to come and visit us, you can, but if you feel uncomfortable, that's okay.” Everyone's like, “We're coming. We're coming.” Like, humans need human interaction. And it's interesting to see though, people going back to the workforce now the number of them who have requested cubicles as raised dramatically, because whilst they're happy to go back and be with people, they do want more privacy, because they liked the privacy of working from home too. So that's been an interesting change. What Brad is Really Excited About Now! When asked about something that he's really excited about, Brad shared that he'll give you two things. Actually. One, their charities, he has the Action Coach Foundation, they take a lot of young people through YES programme (Young Entrepreneurs Smart Start). So, they actually teach 12 to 22 year olds how to not leave school and get a job, but how to leave school and give people a job. So, rather than being an employee, being an employer. The world doesn't need more employees, it needs more entrepreneurs who give people jobs. And so, they're taking a lot of young people and helping them through that process. So that's super exciting for him. From a business side, probably because he buys into companies all the time, he's very excited, their commercial cleaning business and people like, “You're excited about a cleaning business.” Yes, he loves their cleaning business. When he originally purchased to share, it's based in Australia. And now they're opening in the US and the UK. And so, he loves watching his companies go global, he loves his businesses, geography shouldn't limit your business, especially now, especially after we've gone through this whole phase of people can do business virtually, well, they can buy from anywhere in the world right now. And so, watching that business expand into a global phenomenon is going to be a lot of fun for him. Me: Amazing. Now, you mentioned that you have a programme for young people between the ages of 12 and 22. If we do have listeners that are interested in that programme, how can they connect? And maybe sign up or be part of that process? Brad shared their Action Coach Foundation website: Website – actioncoachfoundation.org Where Can We Find Brad Online LinkedIn – Brad Sugars Facebook – Brad Sugars Website – www.bradsugars.com Website – www.actioncoach.com Me: Amazing. You mean you're really easy to find. Brad shared, could you imagine being a marketer and not having someone being able to find you on every single platform there is, jump on Amazon. Amazon has all 17 of his books available. So, Audible has his books on Audible. So, you can find him pretty much everywhere. When asked if he was on Tik Tok, Brad shared that he is, but he doesn't dance. His team asked him to do that. And he told them the story. If you think about marketing, and being true to your brand, because it's really important to be true to your brand. He had an advisor who was taking them through Pinterest, and she said, “You need to appeal to a more female audience because that's who's on Pinterest” and she kept telling him how he needed to wear certain things. And he said, “That's not who I am. That's not the way I want to be. And I'm not going to do that.” So, he told his team the story of Adele, Adele was in a marketing meeting and a young person came in and said, “Well, we need to write a song that's going to go viral on Tik Tok that people can do a dance to.” Adele left the meeting and said, “If that young person is at another meeting ever, I will fire this company as my representation.” Being truly your brand is important. So yes, he uses Tik Tok, but he doesn't do things that are not him. Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Brad Uses When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Brad shared that he'll give 2, both are from the same gentleman, his name was James Rohn. Mr. Rohn said to him, he was 16 years of age, sitting in Rizman City Town Hall listening to him speak, him and about 1500 other people. And he said he things that he wrote down that he believes changed the course of his life. The first thing he said was, “Never wish your life were easier, or wish that you were better.” And it struck him because a 16 year old, you're sort of sitting there saying “Oh, I want this, I want that.” And it all about what you want. Mr. Rohn made him recognize the fact that his goal is not to want things, his goal is to get better. And he backed it up with the second statement that was, “Work harder on yourself than you do on your job.” And he remembers running down to him at the end of the event asking him to sign his notes, which unfortunately he lost in a move one time, because he had him signed them, he signed his notes and he said, “Mr. Rohn, what's one thing I can do as a 16 year old boy to make certain I'm successful in life?” and he said, “Son, it's really simple, read a book a week for the rest of your life. Not a month, not every 2 weeks, read a book a week for the rest of your life.” Today Audible reads to him, so he's very lucky. Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners Links They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future – and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue by Robbie Baxter The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community Your Competitive Advantage by David Spinks Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succeed by Creating Belonging by Carrie Jones and Charles Vogl The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience.” The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Great Scrum Teams are self-managing, cross-functional and have the ability and skills necessary to drive to successful outcomes. However, team interactions don't always go as expected and can cause conflict or roadblocks. Effective facilitation can help the Scrum Team move forward toward their desired outcomes. Within the Scrum events and beyond there are a lot of opportunities where good facilitation can help teams work better together.In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer moderated by Patricia Kong, PSTs Simon Flossmann and David Spinks answer your burning questions about Scrum and the challenges you or your teams may be facing when using Scrum, particularly within the Scrum events and other scenarios when it may be difficult to reach a decision on things, that could be resolved with good facilitation techniques and skills.
David Spinks has been building communities for decades in many areas of his life. He's a natural at it. You put him at a dinner and he will find those who need to connect and make it happen. At his heart, he loves humanity and strives to make a positive impact on us all each and every day. At least, that's how I would describe David. When I asked David how he would answer the question “who are you”, we chatted about why he fell down at an ice skating rink to propose to his wife, what he learned from his dad selling stuffed animals, and the surprising role becoming a father has played in his own life. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts to help others find this show. Check out all our episodes at http://wereonlyhumanpodcast.com/ (wereonlyhumanpodcast.com)
In this episode of the You Own the Experience Podcast, we are sharing a live panel discussion Rob had last year with 3 community marketing experts. Community is one of 2022's corporate buzzwords of the year so we wanted to define what it means, provide resources to learn more, & provide tips and tricks from our panel. The panel discusses: Finding your wolf pack how to sustain a community platforms and tools to build your community on This episode is brought to you by Leap Consulting Solutions and Kyloe Partners Books referenced: David Spinks and his SPACES model are defined in his book The Business of Belonging. Reid Hoffman's Master of Scale Please remember to rate, review and subscribe to the podcast wherever you tune in from.
Per creare una community non basta invitare tante persone. Bisogna alimentare l'engagement con le tecniche giuste. La community è uno strumento eccellente per scalare il marketing e creare unicità per un business. Ma non basta il carisma o il giusto mix tecnologico. David Spinks è un community manager professionista di fama mondiale. Nel suo libro "The business of belonging" elenca una sfilza di framework, tattiche e pratiche per creare community di successo. Te le riassumo in questo video. Per acquistare il libro "The business of belonging", clicca qui: https://amzn.to/3La7n39 #community #businessonline #socialmedia Indice: 00:00 - Come creare e sviluppare una community 00:47 - Perché la community è importante nel business? 01:57 - Il ciclo dell'identità sociale 04:13 - Come fissare le regole per una community 05:05 - Accogliere i nuovi arrivati (onboarding) 06:07 - Progettare esperienze efficaci per la community 08:44 - Creare incontri dal vivo che funzionano 11:09 - Ispirare vulnerabilità 13:37 - Premiare l'attività (gamification) 16:05 - Misurare il coinvolgimento RISORSE PER PRODUTTORI DI CONOSCENZA Raggiungici nella nostra community gratuita per produttori di conoscenza: [https://italianindie.com/covo/](https://italianindie.com/covo/)
In this episode of Masters of Community, our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, hosts a solo episode where he discusses why he is stepping down from CMX and Bevy, his future plans, and what he thinks will happen with the CMX community. Who is this episode for? CMX community, Bevy community, community builders, community managers, community leaders, and community members. Timestamps: (00:48) - I'm stepping down... (03:35) - I'll still be present in the CMX community (05:01) - Pausing the Masters of Community podcast (07:06) - My feelings and thoughts about CMX (11:21) - What's next? (14:35) - Leave me feedback about the podcast (18:03) - Why should you take pauses in your life? (22:44) - Thank you all for your love and support, and see you soon Notable Quotes: “I'm really excited for the first time in my career to take a real step back, to take a breath, to see what the universe has to offer, and just learn more about myself” “I think that's the hope for a lot of community builders that it becomes sustainable, you build a great community, and it will live on without you needing to pour your energy into it” “I believe that CMX is set up to continue to grow and be really successful without me. And I can still play a role, just in a different way.” “I just think it's important to be able to take pauses in your life”
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Sarah Jane Morris, Senior Manager, Developer Community at HubSpot. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. For the past fifteen years, Sarah has been growing and nurturing developer communities at various stages of growth, like Context IO, Keen IO, Shopify, Intel, and Mailchimp. Now, she leads Hubspot's broader developer community strategies. Today, Sarah shares what she's learned from working with these brands and the differences between the different kinds of developer communities that she's built. She also talks about how to get started in a community role, DEIB in building developer communities, and the balance of community capitalism. Who is this episode for? Community builders, community managers, community leaders, developers, and developers advocates. Timestamps: (00:49) - Intro to Sarah and her experience with developer communities (12:31) - Building a community from the ground up versus managing an existing one (16:55) - The difference between a developer community program and a developer advocacy program (19:06) - Setting up a healthy developer community based on context and the company (24:28) - How the developer community program at HubSpot stands out (28:18) - Why the community team should be the guiding light (35:00) - Auditing and improving a developer community program (48:33) - Working in a community in the world of capitalism (52:46) - Investing in DEIB in developer ecosystems (59:03) - Rapid-fire questions Notable Quotes: “The first question you need to ask is: does the developer community even make sense for this company?" “I feel like the community strategy is more about enabling developers to connect with each other, creating the spaces and clear pathways for that to happen. But, also understand what are the actions that you want to see developers taking in your community to get them more value and to bring more value back to the company.” “When the customer is the driver of the narrative, it's very hard to plug developers into that. But I think once you find that sweet spot and start to tell stories about how developers are impacting our customer's businesses, they love that too.” “I think community plays a big role in making things more equitable across the company because you're representing a good experience and a good journey for anyone in the community” Answers to rapid-fire questions: What's your favorite book to gift or recommend to others? The Business Value of Developer Relations by Mary Thengvall What's a community product you wish existed? Slack for communities. Who in the world of the community would you most like to take to lunch? Evan Hamilton, Director, Community and Customer Experience at Reddit What habit has had the most positive impact on your life? I think the habit of knowing when I'm done for maybe not the day, but at least for the hour. And just like slapping that laptop closed, stepping away, getting a break, drinking a glass of water. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? So, I don't know if this is weird, but the way I kind of went about it was weird. So this is like 2002. I had been in love with pugs my whole life and I never had one. So I established the Montreal pug meetup group. What's one community engagement, tactic, or conversation starter that you like to use in your communities? “Where are you from?” If you could condense all of your life lessons into one Twitter-sized piece of advice to the rest of the world on how to live, what would that advice be? Care less about the things that you don't need to care about as much. Care about what matters because you only live once.
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Jason Hitchcock, Founder, and GP at 4 Moons. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. Jason is known as a "crypto sensei" and was among the few to be early to Ethereum, Helium, CryptoPunks, and Alchemix. Today, we talk about crypto, Web 3, and DeFi, so that you can understand them, how they work, and how you might be able to get more involved. Also, Jason shares how he built Yieldopolis, a DeFi and NFT community, and how you might be able to find a community like that for yourself. Who is this episode for? Community builders, community managers, community leaders, DeFi, crypto, and Web 3 enthusiasts. Timestamps: (00:48) - Intro to Jason and his experience with crypto and DeFi (08:22) - How the Yieldopolis community can teach you about DeFi and NFT (17:08) - Why you should be an active stakeholder to understand a community (21:26) - What is DeFi (26:14) - Top 3 blockchain tools and applications (41:54) - What are the DeFi community dynamics (44:06) - Rapid-fire questions Notable Quotes: “I also think one reason why Yieldopolis is successful, it has always been self-serving for me. Like, I need this to be useful for me a hundred percent. And making it useful to me, it became useful to everybody.” “When I'm referring to DeFi and like NFT investing, I think there's just a more nuanced, practical, realistic conversation. It doesn't feel like hype.” “I don't think you can understand communities without being a stakeholder yourself” Answers to rapid-fire questions: What's your favorite book to gift or recommend to others? All Star Superman by Grant Morrison What's a community product you wish existed? We need a directory of some sort that populates easily and is rich with information so that people in a chat that's growing big or a discord that's growing big can have more context on who's there. What habit has had the most positive impact on your life? I think just showing up for things like bringing my passion along with me on things I'm passionate about. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? There is a Facebook group I'm in where everyone pretends to be ants. What's one community engagement, tactic, or conversation starter that you like to use in your communities? Sometimes I will have a really interesting thought, and it's completely isolated on its own. And I don't know how to talk about this or even have a conversation about it. And so I will sort of say, I've noticed that people like this on Twitter or Discord, I will put my complete thought that is standalone. And then I'll tell people the thought that led to me thinking that, and then I'll ask them, like, what would you think about this? If you could condense all of your life lessons into one Twitter sized piece of advice to the rest of the world on how to live, what would that advice be? Being a snob will not benefit you. And if a lot of people are excited about something, you should check it out.
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Austin Robey, the co-founder of MetaLabel and Ampled. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. Austin shares what co-ops and DAOs can learn from each other and the pros and cons of co-ops and DAOs. He details the background of co-ops and their roots in civil rights and agriculture. Austin also talks about his work in going from co-ops and experiencing the challenge of fundraising for a co-op and making it financially sustainable. Who is this episode for? Community builders, community managers, community leaders, and co-ops and DAOs enthusiasts. Timestamps: (00:49) - Intro to Austin and his experience with FWB (08:55) - What is a cooperative and how you can start one (19:30) - 5 examples of successful co-ops (22:26) - When co-ops meet DAOs (31:49) - Solving co-ops problems from a DAO perspective (38:28) - What are some effective DAO models? (41:09) - Understanding the role of community managers in DAOs (43:49) - Setting up a practical co-op or DAO strategy (47:56) - Rapid-fire questions Notable Quotes: “I think a cooperative model is flexible, but it's also very simple. One of the key defining characteristics of a cooperative is one member, one vote.” “At a core level, the reason for starting a cooperative is different from a traditional company.” “Ownership drives the interest, and interest of an investor who owns a startup is very different from a community using a product or service. And ownership is what drives incentives, which drives behaviors.” Answers to rapid-fire questions: What's your favorite book to gift or recommend to others? Ours to Hack and to Own by Trebor Scholz What's a community product you wish existed? Tools like the Mirror and XSplit What habit has had the most positive impact on your personal life? I adopted a dog, which I like and there are many habits associated with it. What's one community engagement, tactic, or conversation starter that you like to use in your communities? What I did with Ampled was to give everyone my phone number and tell them to call whenever they want. If you could condense all of your life lessons into one Twitter sized piece of advice to the rest of the world on how to live, what would that advice be? Having the guts to do cool stuff results in cool stuff happening.
Learn more about Austin:Austin's LinkedInAustin's TwitterEpisode resources:Austin's Article for FWBMetaLabel LinkedInAmpled LinkedInAmpled WebsiteThe Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive AdvantageSend your stories and feedback on this episode to pod@cmxhub.comIf you enjoyed this episode, then please either:Subscribe, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow on Spotify
Learn more about Hope:Hope's LinkedInHope's TwitterEpisode resources:Georgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund LinkedInGeorgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund WebsiteIn Her Hands ProgramThe Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive AdvantageSend your stories and feedback on this episode to pod@cmxhub.comIf you enjoyed this episode, then please either:Subscribe, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow on Spotify
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Hope Wollensack, Executive Director of Georgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. In addition to her role at Georgia Resilience and Opportunity fund, Hope leads a program called In Her Hands, which aims to help black women rise out of poverty and empower them in personal and professional decision-making. She describes how her team developed the program, its purpose, and its impact on the community it serves. We also dive into building more diverse, inclusive, and equitable communities. Who is this episode for? Community builders, community managers, community leaders, community facilitators, and black women communities Timestamps: (00:48) - About Hope and her community building experience (07:18) - In Her Hands: helping black women thrive and grow supportive communities (13:49) - How to identify the right solution for your community (19:37) - How to determine the success of a community program (24:13) - Start defining and developing your program (31:31) - Making a community more inclusive (38:16) - How to set up and manage the task force (47:10) - Next steps, plans, and goals (48:56) - Rapid-fire questions Notable Quotes: “What are the root causes of economic insecurities, and what can we do about them?” “So many times, decision-makers are the ones farthest from the problem. What if the ones closest to the problem would become the decision-makers?” “When people have additional cash, they can explore saving and investing tools, homeownership, and job opportunities much better. So we view cash as the ultimate choice mechanism.” Answers to rapid-fire questions: What's your favorite book to gift or recommend to others? All About Love: New Visions by Bell Hooks What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? Flashmob dancing crew What did education teach you about community? The process is just as important as the outcome. There is no problem that we collectively can't solve. What's a community product you wish existed? A tool that would enable people to talk about what's happening in their community. What habit has had the most positive impact on your personal life? Adaptability What's one community engagement, tactic, or conversation starter that you like to use in your groups? “What is the meaning behind your name?” If you could condense all of your life lessons into one Twitter sized piece of advice to the rest of the world on how to live, what would that advice be? What we can do is done if we're committed to doing the work it requires.
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Douglas Ferguson, President at Voltage Control, a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. They discuss the structure and various kinds of meetings, how to facilitate effective meetings, and what people are doing wrong when they run them. This will be useful for those who manage people or run meetings within a company or community. Who is this episode for? Community builders, community managers, community leaders, community facilitators Timestamps: (03:04) - Douglas' intro (07:02) - What is a meeting? (10:39) - How to build a practical meeting artifact (19:40) - Start reviewing your calendar and prioritizing meetings (25:49) - How to drive collaboration across different teams (33:37) - How to effectively run various facilitated meetings (43:20) - Why should every meeting begin with a clear purpose? (54:50) - Rapid-fire questions Notable Quotes: “A meeting can be when we're gathering to accomplish something or solve a problem” “Do not be a slave to your calendar. You are a sentient human being, and you should be the boss of your calendar.” “You need to have a solid vision and purpose of why there should be a community and how people are going to benefit from it. And so meetings are no different.” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. What's your favorite book to gift or recommend to others? A More Beautiful Question 2. What's the most obscure group you've ever facilitated a workshop for? Noise rock 3. Should people be on or off mute in their meetings on Zoom? We need a culture for people to feel vulnerable and have psychological safety to unmute and speak at any time. And a facilitator should have the freedom to mute everyone and not have anyone get upset or feel uncomfortable. 4. What habit has had the most positive impact on your personal life? Consistency 5. What's one community engagement, tactic, or conversation starter that you like to use in your groups? Asking people to tell stories about stuff that resonate with them from a place of appreciation. If you could condense all of your life lessons into one Twitter sized piece of advice to the rest of the world on how to live, what would that advice be? Stay curious
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with David Siegel, CEO of Meetup, Author of Decide & Conquer, and Host of the Keep Connected podcast. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. They discuss the best practices and values for CEO and community leaders in decision-making. Who is this episode for? Community builders, community managers, community leaders, and CEOs. Timestamps: (05:43) - David's intro and his current role at Meetup (09:27) - The Meetup experience (17:57) - Changing the game (26:00) - Decide and Conquer book (36:00) - What is a decision framework (45:12) - Going with an imperfect plan over a perfect plan (49:31) - Building trust when entering a new company (54:15) - Empowering versus micromanaging people (58:01) - The future of Meetup (01:00:05) - Rapid-fire question round Notable Quotes: “I happen to have grown up with an extremely strong sense of community” “Building a community is about building a quality experience” “And I consider one of my most important jobs as a community leader is to be as transparent as possible so that other people around me are not surprised” “Trying to fit a narrative into principles is much less interesting than creating the principles after you already know what's meaningful and less meaningful” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. What's your favorite book to gift or recommend to others? How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie 2. If you were to find yourself on your deathbed today, and you had to condense all of your life lessons into one piece of advice to the rest of the world on how to live, what would that advice be? Find joy in your day-to-day life as that joy can help set you off for longer-term success. 3. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would that food be? Sardines 4. Who in the world of community would you like to take out for lunch? Angela Duckworth, author of GRIT 5. What is the most important metric that you look at when looking at the health of a meetup? The number of connections that we create between people. 6. What's the weirdest Meetup group? Hugging groups 7. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? Fantasy baseball
In this episode of Masters of Community, our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, hosts a solo episode where he talks about how he got fired from his first community job. David admits that it was one of the lowest points of his career and life. He was discouraged, and it took him some time to get back on his feet. Having dealt with these moments, he now shares what he learned from them and how it might help others deal with the hardships of getting fired. Who is this episode for? Community builders, community managers, community leaders, community members, employees, and employers. Key takeaways: (00:49) - Overview about today's episode (02:59) - The context of how David got fired (06:52) - Shifting towards community and Zaarly (12:45) - Facing challenges and problems (21:00) - Getting fired (23:34) - The lowest point of the career (28:00) - Help and hope: meeting Thomas Knoll (29:56) - Starting a new job (31:45) - Getting over being fired (38:56) - David's lessons and bits of advice Notable Quotes: 1. “I think there's a lot of stigma around getting fired” 2. “If you are drowning, if you are overwhelmed, if you're not in a healthy place, it becomes hard, if not impossible, to support other people, to take care of them, and to see what they need” 3. “I started burning out, feeling depressed, I had no idea what to do, I couldn't perform, and I couldn't get results” 4. “If you are in a position of leadership, when you think someone did a great job, tell them cause you never know how it could impact their life” 5. “If you're depressed at work, take a step back, gain perspective, pause, take a breath, take space, take time off, take care of yourself so that you can take care of others, turn to communities”
In this episode, we're joined by Kevin Huynh, cofounder and partner at People & Company and coauthor of "Get Together." Kevin shares insights on three core questions you need to ask before starting a community, the responsibility of community builders to take a stand against racial injustice, and how to be successful as a community consultant working with incredible brands like Nike and Porsche.
Today's guest is Marjorie Anderson. She's the manager of digital communities at Project Management Institute and is also the founder of Community by Association. In this conversation, we talk about how PMI approaches its programming to serve its million-plus community of project management professionals. Marjorie also dives into their virtual events, which they've been running since 2014, and shares insights into how community teams can make sure their work is driving measurable impact.
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Cadran Cowansage, CEO and Founder of Elpha. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. Cadran was an engineering lead at Y Combinator, where she started a community for female employees. Eventually, they opened it up to other entrepreneurs and created Elpha, a community of over 60,000 women who work in tech. Cadran shares the entire story of how she built the Elpha community and why she thinks it's important to create your own platform as a community builder. Who is this episode for? Community builders, community managers, women in tech, women entrepreneurs. Three key takeaways: 1. From engineering to a community builder: Cadran worked as a software engineer in various organizations. She started learning about community building at Y Combination, which eventually led to building the Elpha community. Elpha is a professional network focused on helping women succeed at work. To manage it, Cadran built its software from scratch. 2. Built by women for women: Building a community for women requires creating a safe, welcoming, and well-moderated space where women can speak openly. Thus, a great focus of the Elpha community is anonymity, effective moderation, and facilitating engagement. The community offers various office hours with featured guests, long-form editorial articles, monthly lives on Zoom where members can meet, and other types of events. 3. Elpha's monetization strategy: Cardan started working on revenue-generating early after they spun out. They monetized their creation of a high-quality and valuable service for their community members. Through this service, members get a talent profile on the Elpha platform, where companies can find and contact candidates about jobs. When building a community, think about monetizing it early. Notable Quotes: 1. “I'm introverted, so I never thought of myself as a community builder” 2. “You evolve with the community and learn how to manage it as you go” 3. “I believe that software built by women for women will inherently be different. You have all sorts of biases and opinions, like going into software subtly without even realizing it.” 4. “Make sure that you're happy and fulfilled building your community” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. What's the book that had the biggest impact on your life? What's your favorite book to gift to others? And what book are you reading right now? The Parable Books by Octavia Butler Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood 2. Who in the world of community would you most like to take out for lunch or interview on your podcast? Lenny Rachitsky 3. What makes Elpha weird? It's our members that are unique and they say so many different and interesting things. 4. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would that food be? Japanese sweet potatoes
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst and Founding Partner of Kaleido Insights. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. Jeremiah is an advisor to many different companies and web-sharing communities. He has been analyzing the community space and understands how businesses invest in communities. Jeremiah previously worked at Forester as an analyst of the community industry. He then got involved in the collaborative consumption movement and now works closely with Web 3.0 communities and platforms. The purpose of this interview was to give a clear understanding of what it means for a community to invest in web three blockchain and crypto. Who is this episode for? Community builders, community managers, entrepreneurs, digital leaders, blockchain, and crypto enthusiasts. Three key takeaways: 1. What is Web 3.0: Web 3.0 companies are decentralized autonomous organizations that have communities at their core and work on blockchain and token-based economies. Web 3.0 comes with the premise that users will own their identities, data, and equity. It creates opportunities to gain ownership through contribution and content. 2. Web 3.0 ups and downs for communities: Web 3.0 turns communities into economies. Tokenization requires complex legal, administrative, technological, and process changes. Not all organizations or platforms are ready for this to be mainstream. It also puts the social motivations within a community at risk. In terms of advantages, the community members get digital asset rewards like tokens and NFTs. They also have access to premium community experiences and activities. 3. Launching a community token: Bringing a personalized token into a community starts by defining the goals you have with your community members. Once set up, you can create and distribute it into the community. The mass majority of the tokens should be for community members. But they have to hold them and support the community. Notable Quotes: 1. “When there's a new technology, I love to run towards it, especially if it helps organizations connect to their customers and community leaders connect to their community members” 2. “Web 3.0 comes to the promise that the Internet should be owned by the participants, by the community members“ “I'm very sure that once you tokenize, the relationship between the community members changes, and the relationship with you as the community leader changes” 3. “Reward your amazing folks who have been here with you, let people engage by earning, and three, you could sell on the open market” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. How do you define community? A group of people with a common cause. 2. What's a food that makes you think of home? Mom's spaghetti. 3. What book had an impact on your life? The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine: https://amzn.to/3twTWV0 4. What's one piece of advice you have for new community builders? It's not about you, it's about serving them. 5. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? Second Life Community. 6. If you were to find yourself on your deathbed today, and you had to condense all of your life lessons into one piece of advice for the rest of the world, what would that advice be? Find a purpose. 7. Who in the world of community would you most like to take out for lunch or interview on your podcast and your context? Mark Zuckerberg.
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Andrew Warner, the founder, and CEO of Mixergy. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. Mixergy is a platform where the ambitious learn from a mix of experienced mentors through interviews and courses. Andrew invites well-known startup founders to teach others how they built their companies. He has interviewed over 2,000 of the world's best entrepreneurs, including the founders of Wikipedia, Sun, Groupon, LivingSocial, and LinkedIn. Andrew is also the author of the book “Stop Asking Questions: How to Lead High-Impact Interviews and Learn Anything from Anyone,” where he shares bits of advice on how to lead meaningful conversations with people you admire. Who is this episode for? Podcasters, interviewers, community builders, community managers, entrepreneurs, and mentors. Three key takeaways: 1. Driving meaningful conversations: Andrew started Mixergy to help ambitious people who love business learn from a mix of experienced mentors. He interviews entrepreneurs to tell their stories and share their lessons. Andrew focuses on meaningful conversations for his audience from which people can learn how to be better and more successful 2. Sharing knowledge more openly: Talking with people and opening up the conversation requires a set of techniques. Firstly, be open, honest, and vulnerable with people. Secondly, join the resistance by aligning with them. Thirdly, give people a higher purpose or share your goal upfront. Fourthly, look for shove facts, bring them up, and talk about them 3. Stop asking questions: Andrew wrote the book "Stop Asking Questions: How to Lead High-Impact Interviews and Learn Anything from Anyone," with the intent to help people effectively lead a conversation with another person. We think that discussions and interviews are great when we ask many questions. But it can become tiring and disrespectful towards the other person. Start by addressing guiding statements instead of questions. Notable Quotes: 1. “I never saw myself as a podcaster for life. It was more like I enjoyed these conversations.” 2. “I started the podcast because I'd failed with this one software company, and I didn't want to fail again. And I want to learn from the best.” 3. “I think the podcasting and conversations, in general, are more interesting when the person in the conversation has a deep need and curiosity for something that's when it goes to somewhere meaningful.” 4. “If we see people as emotional creatures with egos, needs, bruises, and successes, and they want to talk, even though logically it makes no sense to talk to clear things out, but if we understand that's still true, we have better conversations.” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would that food be? Pizza 2. What books had an impact on your life? How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie - https://amzn.to/3F6r5sN The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie - https://amzn.to/3f50zFV 3. What's the most memorable founder you ever interviewed? Emmett Shear, the CEO of Twitch - https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmettshear 4. What's your favorite conversation starter or interview question that you'd like to use? I really look for the personal questions. So when did you lose your virginity? When I do my interviews, I ask people what their revenue is at the beginning. When I had a kid, I would ask the fathers, are you still sleeping with your wife? 5. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? The Ananda community 6. If you were to find yourself on your deathbed today, and you had to condense all of your life lessons into one piece of advice for the rest of the world, what would that advice be? Suffer for what matters. 7. Who in the world of community would you most like to take out for lunch or interview on your podcast and your context? Nick ONeal, Freelance Cryptocurrency Consultant, and Marketer/CM - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-oneal
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Wes Kao, Co-founder of Maven and Mentor at Backstage Capital. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. Before Maven, Wes co-founded altMBA alongside bestselling author Seth Godin. By founding Maven, she wanted to democratize education by improving the online experience for instructors and students. Wes is a thought leader in building cohort-based courses and frequently writes on her blog about marketing, online courses, and rigorous thinking. She unfolds the concept of cohort-based courses and ways of building and managing them effectively. Who is this episode for? Community builders, community managers, and course instructors Three key takeaways: 1. Understanding cohort based courses: Maven is the first platform for cohort-based courses, which are courses that take place during a period with a group of other people. As community organizers, make sure you find the right balance in teaching your students. Create an environment of making sure that your students contribute to the community, support each other, and learn from one another. 2. Building cohort based courses: Firstly, market the course upfront. Secondly, design your curriculum and establish the frameworks, exercises, breakouts, and discussions. Thirdly, find the right instructors. Finally, think about your sales and marketing funnel. 3. Forming communities within cohort based courses: Lean into debatable topics where your students have a chance to share their thoughts and learn from each other. Empower community members to connect without you jumping in all the time to answer. Create a culture where the students feel comfortable giving direct and genuine feedback. Notable Quotes: 1. “Cohort based courses are more engaging and active in learning versus passive content consumption” 2. “With the cohort based course, once you realize that you don't have to do it all yourself, that's where the sky parts and new opportunities open up” 3. “Course based courses allow students to connect without you as an instructor needing to be the center of that. Acknowledging that letting go of the reins results in better outcomes, more connections, deeper bonds, and relationships amongst yours.” 4. “So I think one of the most exciting things about cohort-based courses is that there's the flexibility for you to make it what you want it to be” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would that food be? Zucchini 2. What's your favorite book to give as a gift or recommend to others? It's Not Personal by Alice Katz 3. What is your favorite course that you've ever been a part of? Alive OS by Suzy Batiz 4. Who in the world of community would you most like to take out? Mister Rogers 5. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? A plant shaming group on Facebook 6. If you were to find yourself on your deathbed today, and you had to condense all of your life lessons into one piece of advice for the rest of the world, what would that advice be? Worry less
In this episode, David Spinks, the VP of Community at Bevy and the Co-Founder of CMX, joins the Seed Club DAO Podcast. They discuss consumer empowerment and how the role of a community has evolved as consumers have grown in power. Later, they dive into the specifics of community building, the infrastructure required to deliver a sense of belonging over the long-term, and how to effectively onboard new members into a community. Who is this episode for? Community managers and business executives Three key takeaways: 1. Interconnecting business and community: The community becomes the core of a company. David points to this idea by revealing the historical context of how business has been evolving. Recently, with the advent of the internet and our ability to review products and talk about them, companies have started to care about customer service more and more. Besides, it's efficient and practical to let the community own and build a business. 2. Building better and more resilient communities: Building a community requires constant work and engagement. First, you need to think about how you'll attract people in a thoughtful and meaningful way. Secondly, continue working to build that engagement and facilitate and bring that energy into the community. 3. The core roles and responsibilities for building a community: If you want to put a community team together, you need a higher specialization of roles. There are community moderators that engage and respond to people. But it's also crucial to have a strategic leader who has a seat at the table at the highest level of the company. The team itself will usually be a combination of community engagement managers. They will focus on facilitating engagement, driving growth, and experimenting with different formats. There also must be community operations, which measure the data and analytics. Eventually, more roles will appear, and people within the community will specialize in them. Notable Quotes: 1. “And now in web three, what I see now is the ultimate culmination of this trend towards community-driven business, which is like the community is owning, creating, and building the business” 2. “Web three can bring to the concept of community-driven business, create a more equitable ecosystem, and give the people creating value and the opportunity to capture that value as well” 3. “I think that community-building work is one of the most important jobs in the world”
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Joy Dettorre, Global Leader for Diversity and Inclusion, and Stephanie Galera, Global Diversity and Inclusion Leader, at IBM. Our host, David Spinks, the VP of Community at Bevy and the Co-Founder of CMX, moderates the conversation. The business resource group program plays a central part in successfully managing IBM's 250+ employee groups across fifty countries that touch approximately 50,000 employees. Joy and Stephanie will reveal how BRGs create a space for diverse, inclusive, equitable purpose-driven workplaces, like IBM's eight communities, and why businesses need to invest in ERGs and BRGs. Who is this episode for? HR specialists, company leaders, and executive managers. Three key takeaways: 1. Unfolding the business resource group program at IBM: IBM focuses on delivering employee-centric programs and initiatives by creating communities of like-minded people and offering a space for diverse, inclusive, equitable purpose-driven workplaces. HR at IBM manages the BRG program, which focuses on intersectionality and allyship. BRG serves as a platform for employees who want to launch a program or campaign for these different communities. From a strategy standpoint, HR provides the structure or template that BRGs can be successful. IBM has three global communities: the LGBT+ community, The Women's community, and the People With Diverse Abilities community. In the United States, there are five other communities: the Black community, the Hispanic community, the Indigenous community, the Pan-Asian Community, and the Veterans community. 2. Why does IBM invest in ERGs and BRGs?: The business resource groups enable values like compassion, kindness, justice, dignity, and unity. They also create a sense of belonging and inclusion for the employees. The second part of that equation is about organization trust, companionship, and offering employees the opportunity to do something good. 3. Measuring the success of the employee resource groups: There are two ways IBM measures the success of an employee resource group. One is the annual employee engagement survey. IBM also experiments with something called "mini-pulse surveys," which are topical and spontaneous. They are anonymous and include a small number of questions. When measuring the employee engagement data, HR looks at two metrics: engagement and inclusion. They also break down these metrics by community. HR identifies challenges, sentiments, and the needs of the community. Furthermore, they look at the societal impact. All of the measurements influence bigger goals, like attention, retention, engagement, and representation. Notable Quotes: 1. “By nature and by blood, you're probably part of a community. But if I want to do something more, a BRG becomes the vehicle that I would use to create more impact, recognized and funded by the corporation.” - Stephanie Galera 2. “We all have one client that we serve. That's the IBM employee. That's why we exist. We need to create environments where these employees can feel safe, included, valued, appreciated, and an environment where they can thrive.” - Joy Dettorre 3. “These business resource groups create a sense of belonging and community, organizing employees around a common cause of driving passion.” - Joy Dettorre Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would that food be? Joy: Pasta and meatballs. Stephanie: Mushroom omelet. 2. What's your go-to community engagement tactic or conversation starter? Joy: If someone comes to me for help, I ask, "how can I help you?" But if I need help from somebody else, I tend to say, "will you help me?" Stephanie: The trip that my spouse and I had in the US, which talks about the benefits of actually joining a BRG meeting 3. If you could distill all of your experience as community builders and as community professionals into one bite-sized piece of advice for other community professionals, what would that advice be? Joy: Can we all commit to leaving every conversation and every interaction a little bit better than we found it, just based on how we behave. Stephanie: When you're in doubt about anything that you'd like to do, ask yourself, what's the worst that can happen. And most of the time, you'll find that things can be manageable. 4. What does the organizational structure of the groups look like? Are there any leads, and are they compensated for their work? There is absolutely a governance around our business resource groups. They constantly evolve and get better. But one thing in that governance model is an executive sponsor. There are also co-chairs, which are volunteer positions. They receive blue points, with which they can go into IBM's internal shopping store and purchase something. There are also some financial gifts and digital thank you cards. The company writes blogs to recognize their effort, and leaders make personal calls to them and offer specialty digital badges they can post on LinkedIn. 5. Do people need to fill out some form to specify how they contributed, or do you have it automated somehow? In terms of recognition, we do have a 360 feedback that's called a checkpoint where people can put in their goal, and it's visible to their managers so that if they achieve that goal, that becomes part of their appraisal for the year. Volunteers at IBM can also convert spent hours into grants. 6. Do BRG leaders have weekly or monthly hours carved out for the work honored within management rather than a volunteer expectation on top of their job? We know that some managers carve out a portion of some person's time to do this, especially if it's for a business unit or geographic location. Sometimes we ask managers to carve out time for this person as a leadership development activity. And other times, they balance it as a work of passion. 7. Is there a step-by-step playbook to help us launch an ERG? We have a playbook that we're writing, but I don't know if it will be available outside IBM. 8. When an organization is committed to DEI, there will be several instances where you have to engage in uncomfortable conversations around discrimination and unconscious biases. How do you start and manage those conversations successfully? It's about creating a culture across the entire ecosystem where allyship, diversity, equity, and inclusion are a part of all of those processes.
Today, we're joined by David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX. The CMX Community recently launched its new set of values. These values are: • Be generous • Be ground-breaking • Be actively inclusive Community values are not the same as company values. Company values decide how your company does business. Community values define how community members - not necessarily the founders and managers but users of the company's products/services - can interact with each other and create a supportive culture with communication as its base. These two sets of values should be aligned, but they do have to be independently defined. Hire a consultant for DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) to help translate your values through the DEI lens and make sure they're future-ready. Collect ideas for values from your community management team, organize them into themes, take feedback from DEI consultants, and publish them as version one for the community to give you feedback. Take feedback from long-time members, moderators, and superfans in your community for the first round of revisions. Then take the second version of your values document to the rest of the broader collection of community members for their feedback. Your community members will embody the values, create the space, and essentially become the culture, and therefore, their voices must be heard. More of them will feel more invested in the community. Their feedback will improve your values into something that is more widely accepted and more accurate. Lead with these values during community registration, membership confirmation, and community events. Empower your members to report those who don't comply with these values.
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Wesley Faulkner, Head of Community at SingleStore, and PJ Hagerty, Head of Developer Relations at Mattermost, and Founder/Chief Community Officer of DevRelate.io. Wesley and PJ are also Co-hosts of Community Pulse. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and the Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. David talks with Wesley and PJ about developer relations, developer evangelism, developer engagement, developer community, and the developer relations role of connecting, serving, and supporting developer ecosystems. They also uncover the differences between those terms and how the role of developer relations has evolved. Who is this episode for? Developers, heads of developer relations, software community managers, and developer evangelists. Three key takeaways: 1. Defining developer relations: Developer relations is a term that describes the specialists or teams whose responsibilities include building and developing both online and offline communities. There are many names for developer relations, like developer advocacy, developer community, developer marketing, or developer evangelist. 2. Building developer communities: Companies need to have developer relation teams to provide support and growth to their members. There should be a few dev advocates who can go out and speak to different communities. It's crucial to balance everything and have efficient communication within the community to meet people's needs. The team members need to focus on various aspects of the community. But, the end goal is to incorporate all of those people together as one team. The mission of a Dev Rel is building, understanding, and engaging, and bringing that back into the business to guide the roadmap to get more buy-in and trust. 3. Engaging developers within communities: There is much demand for developers' attention. Many companies offer attention-seeking content for developers, trying to bring them into their communities. Meanwhile, developers are looking for ways to engage with like-minded people and become a part of a supportive community. Dev rels working in the industry know how to communicate, engage, and understand what developers want. Thus, they can satisfy their needs and adapt their form of communication, either by writing blog posts, creating podcasts, workshops, or whatever developers like. Notable Quotes: 1. “Every company now should have a dev rel team. They should have advocates or evangelists helping to talk to people who work in technology.”
Matthew Kobach is the Director of Content Marketing at Fast, a PhD dropout, and former social media manager at NYSE. Matthew joins us in this episode to share how he used community building lessons to create gripping content, grow social media channels, and communicate more effectively. Matthew shares his three steps to building a social media brand, which consist of being unbelievably niche, being consistent, and compounding tweets. He teaches how to become a lighthouse on social media and his routine for planning and ideating social posts. We wrap up talking about the necessity for passion in what you do and letting what you're good at become a passion. Check out this episode to improve your social media presence and become an effective communicator. Who is this episode for?: B2B & B2C, Online, Revitalizing 3 key takeaways: - Three ways to build your social media brand: Be Unbelievably Niche, Be Consistent, Compound Tweets. - Be the lighthouse for topics you're interested in. 90% of people don't post, they just read. Get this 90% to look at your content. - Need to be passionate about and enjoy what you're doing. Being good at something makes you passionate about it. No matter what you do, there will be aspects you don't love - but make sure it's something you're curious about. Notable Quotes: “You need to be passionate about it. You need to actually enjoy it. So being good at something makes you passionate about it. You know, so if you're, if you're able to, uh, tap into something, you've got this really active community and, and you're, you know, you're the one kind of heading it, you're going to be passionate about it. So it's probably going to work out, but for you to go through that kind of the muck and mire of it when it's not really going that well, that's when it should be something that you're actually interested in.” “90% of people don't really post on social media, 9% post, a medium amount, and 1% of post most of it. So those 90% of people, they have interests, they want to participate. Maybe they'll reply once in a while, but for the most part, they just want to read interesting thoughts. So that's the lighthouse - you're trying to get those 90% of the people, and they're looking for topics that interest them. The only way for them to find you is if you turn your light on and you start talking about the things that interest you, and you've just got to hope that they're actually attracted to what you have to say.” Rapid fire question answers: 1. What's your favorite book to recommend to others? How to win friends and influence people 2. What's your most memorable story? When at the stock exchange, Snapchat had just started and he needed to enlist Snapchat in the stock exchange. His goal was to make his snapchat really good. Recognized in NYC as the “New York Stock Exchange Snapchat Guy”. 3. What's a Community tool or platform that you love to use? None, doesn't like using them. 4. If you could only follow 3 people on Twitter, who would they be? Danye Taylor, David Parrell, OrangeBook 5. What's your ultimate tip for someone who wants to improve their reputation online? Get better at communicating exactly what it is you mean. 6. Weirdest community you've been a part of? Traded and burned CD's with others from the band ‘Fish'. 7. If you're on your death bed and you could only leave one piece of life advice behind for all the future generations, what would that advice be? Say what you mean to say, say what you want to say. So much in life is about not communicating what we feel because we can't or are scared to articulate it.
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Gabrielle Dolan, Founder of Jargon Free Fridays and Speaker and Author at Gabrielle Dolan Consulting. Gabrielle realized the power of storytelling toward the end of her corporate career. This motivated her to learn about storytelling and led her to grow her skills into a full-fledged coaching business. After leaving her job at the National Australia Bank, she went into communication coaching for corporations, where she helped them use storytelling to communicate effectively with employees and customers. Seventeen years later, she's a highly sought-after storytelling coach and keynote speaker. This podcast is full of stories and anecdotes about how powerful stories can be. Gabrielle draws from her wealth of experience to share tips and strategies that businesses can use to tell their own stories. These stories are generally a branding activity, but they do need to be told well. So, Gabrielle also shares some simple tips to structure your stories for maximum impact. Who is this episode for? Community managers for brand-new communities or business owners who want to build a community with a soul. Three key takeaways: 1. Storytelling for Community Building: Corporates can use stories to increase membership numbers and generate excitement among members so they engage naturally and frequently in their community (onboarding). Ongoing stories can be rooted in the values and behavior of your company and are also the social glue that keeps propagating outside your community. They keep your brand relevant among the larger cohort of your business partners, employees, customers, and well-wishers. 2. Storytelling to Communicate Values of Your Community: Instead of listing DOs and DON'Ts as rules of your community, try communicating them through stories. Stories are a fun way to learn, they add more context, and they also enable easier retention of those messages. Get major stakeholders on video telling stories to share the values of your organization and your community. This is a great way to realize the superpowers of storytelling for your community. 3. Roadblocks to Unlocking the Power of Storytelling: Most people who say they don't have a story to tell are underselling themselves because they think of “the hero's journey” as the only type of story that would interest somebody. A good way to break this mindset is to realize that you are not writing a Hollywood blockbuster and that you can let go of this weird “performance anxiety”. Start by defining the message/value/behavior that you want to communicate with the story you want to tell, and then spend enough time finding high-quality stories from your core group. Keep your stories specific and succinct, so you grab your audience's attention and maintain it throughout the length of the story. Notable Quotes: 1. “You probably don't need storytelling if every time you communicate people understand what you're saying and can remember it. So if you're doing that really well, then you probably don't need it. And they go, oh, well, you know, that's not always the case. And then I go, if you can influence people all the time, where you get people on board whether it's buying your stuff or buying into an idea and they're fully engaged in it, then you probably don't need storytelling either.” 2. “The real power of the story is they will be able to retell the story, which means really good stories can have this ripple effect. So it's not only you just recruiting - for want of a better word - people into your community. It's actually your members that can share the stories and recruit people into your communities.” 3. “The story explains the “why” and if you're not explaining the “why,” then it's not really making an impact” 4. “Whether it's a company or a community, everyone has a story, and it comes back to why did they start? Like if you just fundamentally ask someone to say, why does this community exist? Why does this company exist? You'll find a story. You'll find someone passionate about something. You'll find someone solving a problem around.” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be? Vegemite toast. 2. What's your favorite book to give as a gift to others or to recommend to others? “The Cheetah That Cannot Run” - a book Gabrielle's daughter wrote and illustrated at the age of fourteen as a school project. 3. What's a great conversation starter that you like to use in groups or in communities? Asking people “What's your superpower?” 4. Have you ever worn socks with Sandals? No. 5. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? Thought Leaders' Business School - what's weird in a good way about this community is that everyone openly talks about money and what they're working on in a supportive, non-competitive way. 6. One Tweet-sized piece of advice for the rest of the world on how to live? “Be yourself. Everybody else is taken”. It's a quote from Oscar Wilde.
Today, Ann-Marie Pawlicki Dinkel, Senior Event Manager at Bevy and CMX, joins us in the final part of a four-part interview series to give us a recap of what happened - and the lessons learned - at the 2021 CMX Summit: Rise. The participation and live engagement at the event made it a roaring success. In-person events in Spain and Nigeria were key highlights of the summit. Participants shared about the event on social media to get their hands on CMX Summit merchandise, which was awarded during a live winner declaration. Branded merchandise giveaway is a great way to get social media attention for your event because people love receiving branded gifts. Seth Godin's insightful talk with David Spinks was the most popular talk at the summit, and the backyard chicken event was many people's favorite activity. Everyone loved the chicken emoji so much that it even became an event mascot. To conduct an event at this great of a scale, event professionals must combine great research and meticulous planning with flexibility and self-belief.
This week we have a different type of episode. This episode is a crosspost of my (David Spinks') talk in an episode of the Community Experience (CX) podcast with hosts Jillian Benbow and Tony Bacigalupo. You'll learn about the number one mistake to avoid when measuring your community impact, identifying and engaging super members in an authentic way, and how a kid with a passion for a Tony Hawk video game became one of the leading voices in the digital community movement. Who is this episode for? First-time community managers and managers of brand new business communities. Three key takeaways: 1. Evolution of the identity of community professionals: In the early days, a community professional was someone who ran a Facebook page, and the community management function was not well understood by organizations. Larger companies found - and often still find - it operationally challenging to build and manage their communities because of their sheer size. Now, professionals in the community space have used their experience in creating communities and conferences like CMX Summit to carve out a unique identity for their profession. 2. How community became a tool for business growth: The lack of directly monetizable assets in the community means they are more likely to divert their profit away from the community towards other initiatives with higher ROI. Community professionals have to navigate the intersection of social norms of connection and business norms of profit to bring out the value of communities for the businesses that commission them. The most powerful way to convey the value of a brand is to convey the value and social benefits of the brand's community. 3. Easy wins for starter communities: Start with the business objective and use that as a constraint to define what kind of community programs and platforms you invest in. Every objective will have its own set of experts, platforms/tools, protocols, and a customized budget with expected outcomes. Starter communities would find it more efficient to measure business impact if they only focus on one or two parts of the “SPACES model” that David talks about in his book “The Business of Belonging”. Focus on building one-on-one relationships by focusing on conversations centered around the participants' goals. Notable Quotes: 1. “You find a group of people who are isolated, who don't have a place to express an identity that they have, and you give them that space where their identity is accepted, it's made into the default, it's made into the norm, it's even celebrated. It can be life-changing for people.” 2. “There's no greater way to motivate someone to trust you as a brand than to give them a true sense of belonging, and to say, don't just trust us, we're creating a network, a community, a space where now you can form relationships, you can get support, you can grow your career here. That's, to me, the ultimate form of trust, and that's where the massive opportunity lies for businesses to invest in the community.” 3. “The beauty of community is that there are countless ways that you can build community... At the end of the day, all [that] the community is connecting people to each other so they can help each other and form relationships. There are countless ways you can do that” 4. “Orienting around a business outcome just makes it inherently easier to know exactly what success looks like because it's baked in right from the start” 5. “You don't want to open up a new forum and expect people to just show up and start creating value for each other if you don't have a starting point. In fact, you could end up doing a lot of damage because those people are going to start talking to each other about you and you won't be able to control it, and you might not like what they have to say.” 6. “Relationships are the atomic unit of community. If you break down a community into its atomic units, it's just a bunch of relationships of people with each other.” 7. “You can never force people to engage or to do something they're not intrinsically motivated to do. But what you can do is find the people who are intrinsically motivated, put them in a position where they have influence... now you're showing other people an example of what being a leader in this community can be.” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? A doctor or a lawyer. He picked up a passion for entrepreneurship after he saw a girl in his high school create a wallet for blind people. 2. How do you define community? It is a group of people who are willing to make your problems into their problems. 3. What is something that is on your bucket list that you have done? He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. 4. What is something on your bucket list that you would like to do? He wants to live in a van for an extended period of time with his family. 5. What is a book that you are loving right now? Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters 6. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would that be? Tel Aviv city, Israel. 7. How do you want to be remembered? As someone who just showed up when people needed it.
#003 How do you reconcile community-building with the metric-driven goals of CEOs or shareholders? Even if you're building a community that's not tied to a business, how do you make that community financially sustainable?David Spinks has been at the forefront of the community movement since he was 14, and he's here with a wealth of advice for community-builders everywhere who want to design successful communities holistically.How do you approach community building the right way? What platform should you use? We talk through these questions, common mistakes community-builders make off the bat, effective strategies like identifying "super members" early on, the importance of ritual in modern community settings, and how some companies are able to run massive communities with only a few people at the helm. Show notes and more at SmartPassiveIncome.com/cx003See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Greg Isenberg is an online community builder that is dedicated to finding what people are passionate about and building communities for them. He is the Co-Founder of Late Checkout, a company that designs, creates, and acquires online communities that are off of the big social media platforms. Greg shares how he identifies business opportunities with communities that he knows can be monetized and scaled, and what he does to turn this potential into a reality. Greg is a community builder that finds what people are passionate about and creates spaces for them to share their enthusiasm while also making a profit. Greg and David discuss the future of social media and what this means for community builders that want to build a “true community” in 2020 and beyond. Greg knows what it takes to build and scale a community and he shares what he knows to be the key to leading a successful community as an individual. Who is this episode for?: Online communities in all stages (starting, scaling and revitalizing) 3 key takeaways: - The benefits of a community existing on a platform that was created specifically for their community and tailored to its mission - The truth about venture capital funding in the community industry - The impact of showing up for your community consistently and with deep commitment to its purpose
In this episode of Masters of Community, we have an exciting and intense debate between David Spinks and Richard Millington. Rich is the Founder and MD at FeverBee, a community consultancy that has helped over 290 organizations develop thriving communities. He believes that the core purpose of a community is to give people the right information, while David argues that the purpose of a community is to receive and offer help to others they share problems with. Other points in between these extremes are also discussed. The debate will help clarify what community means to your business, how to create a community outside of the “information sharing” purpose, and the correct stats to optimize your community operations. The best part? Our moderator Jen balances the otherwise intense debate with her funny audio effects. Who is this episode for?: Business and nonprofit community managers and analysts. 3 key takeaways: 1. Why do people join a community?: Having a sense of belonging is a great consequence of finding high-quality information in a community. While both are important, they don't have equal importance. Therefore, you must focus on great information first through customer journeys in their business community, as initiatives to build a sense of community only last while there are budgets for them. A sense of belonging comes from having your problems heard, finding people who have the same challenges as you, and feeling like you are a part of the product-building process. While people don't actively look to belong in business communities, businesses that provide that feeling will have an upper hand. 2. How to measure a sense of belonging?: Ask simple questions about value, safety, and relationships in the community to help understand the ethos of the community. Understand that the role of creating a sense of belonging is only one of the roles that the community will play in members' lives. 3. How do you build a community outside the information exchange paradigm?: Relentlessly providing high-quality information quickly helps make your business community a welcoming place where members feel included. Beyond that, to sustain engagement, a sense of purpose in the community is important and will help them see it as a place to receive and create value for others. Understand the different types of communities that can exist and use that to clarify the purpose of your community. What other things should your users be able to take away besides information? Notable Quotes: 1. “A community is never going to be homogenous..as we know, a lot of the time people come for information at first, and then they start coming back more because this starts to become a place where some percentage are going to become more and more invested. Very engaged in the community” 2. “You might use [customer] journeys to make sense, especially at the newcomer phase, but as a full model, I don't think the data supports [the commitment curve model] in a predictive way. I think people jump around all over the place. And it's far messier than what we think”. 3. “I don't think you can build community without investing at the core of really making sure that the people who are creating value feel connected, feel connected to the purpose, feel connected to each other. That's what's going to motivate them to show up every day and create that value for all the other members who are just there to consume information”.
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Tiffany Oda, Director of Community Operations at Venafi. Her passion for organization and project management began in school, which she later chose to pursue as a career. With roles in customer support with community engagement, she realized her strengths and weaknesses. As the Senior Programs Manager at Salesforce for the Trailblazer program, she used her organization and process management skills to work internally with community operations. This way, she wasn't dealing with actual community members. In this podcast episode, she defines this relatively new community operations manager role, such as what the role entails and the line of communication. She also discusses how building a business case to hire an additional Salesforce developer helped her. With this extra pair of hands, she created and implemented a complex reimbursement process and community leader application program at Salesforce. Now that the pandemic is beginning to ease, Tiffany touches upon the need and thought-process behind creating a mixed community that brings people who actively participate in the online community into the real world. Apart from this, there are great tips and discussions in the episode about setting goals as a community ops manager and creating cohesive community experiences across multiple platforms. Tiffany also shares her advice on planning a community roadmap from a community operations perspective. Who is this episode for?: Community Managers who want to strengthen their operations management and project management skills. 3 key takeaways: 1. Community Operation Management: The community ops manager finds gaps in community management processes and develops plans to improve or fix these identified issues. They use comprehensively planned workflows, templates, and tools to empower enterprise-scale community processes. 2. Setting Goals as a Community Ops Manager: Time and money savings goals are the most important for making a business case stronger. On-time delivery, delays, and subjective/objective feedback from community managers and members are also taken into account to set community ops goals. Your processes should enable your community team to spend their extra time performing community management tasks rather than managing these tools. These goals will change depending on what stage your community is at. 3. Creating a more cohesive community experience: Having platform-specific metrics for a multi-platform community helps the community ops manager understand the most popular platforms. If and when the need arises they are then able to direct members to those platforms. Creating and communicating solid, well-documented community setup processes helps integrate unofficial communities into the fold. Create a business case to request additional resources in a function that you are not great or efficient in. Document process metrics, community feedback, and other data as you execute the current “stripped down” version of your plan. Use it to draw future projections that will help make your business case for process optimization stronger. Notable Quotes: 1. “They think at the end of the day with leadership, … they don't necessarily either understand the potential benefit from it or because the community is still nascent, a lot of people still don't quite understand, creating that business case to justify the value and presenting that was actually how I got my resource and it wound up being so good because we build so many tools together” 2. “Also from my standpoint, it was. looking at things that are not necessarily community management driven. So - for example - with reimbursements, spotting trends of maybe some suspicious activity going or, oh, this group is actually just submitting a reimbursement for the top dollar amount, that's possible every single time, why are they spending so much money every month or something like that, where it might not be super apparent” 3. “If, for example, there's an unofficial group, not only do you not necessarily have control [of] what happens in there, but you don't know if they're not officially onboarded to them. They could go years of being in the community without even realizing,..that's not what you want to hear. So yeah, that's a challenge“ Rapid-fire question answers: 1. What's your favorite book to recommend to others? “Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier” by Robert A Emmons. 2. What's the go-to community engagement, tactic, or conversation starter that you like to use in your communities? Simply talking and being curious about their work. 3. Have you ever worn socks with sandals? Only as a means to an end but not an intentional fashion. 4. Who in the world of the community would you most like to take out for lunch? David Spinks, Rich Millington, and Elizabeth Kinsey (from Slack). 5. If you could give one piece of advice to all new community managers, what would it be? Think about community members and their experience first, since they will be directly impacted by your work as Community Operations Manager. 6. What's the proudest moment of your career? Getting a job at Salesforce and living in San Francisco. 7. Weirdest community you've been a part of? A World of Warcraft Community in college. 8. What's the question I didn't ask you that I should have? My pet peeve. I hate the word automagically because it doesn't convey the amount of effort it takes behind planning automation. 9. If you were to find yourself on your deathbed today, and you had to condense all of your life lessons into one Twitter size piece of advice on how to live, what would that advice be? A combination of “Hakuna Matata” and “embrace the chaos.”
Beth McIntyre, Head of Community at Bevy, and David Spinks, Co-Founder of CMX and VP of Community at Bevy, give the run-down on CMX Summit Rise: 2021. In this episode, you'll learn about the origins of CMX, how Summit got started, and the challenges experienced along the way. They share their first CMX Summit experiences and the unique, genuine connections consistently created at this community conference. David and Beth discuss the meaning behind this year's theme, RISE, and the sub-themes of the Rise of Community-Driven Business, the Community Career Path, and Community Culture and Innovation. Community has taken the business world by storm and this year's summit will ingrain the community in business for the long run. CMX Summit Rise will be completely FREE with a 1-day workshop on August 31st and a 2-day conference on September 1st and 2nd. Join community professionals from around the world and register for your free tickets here: https://bit.ly/3vEW76k
This week, we have the pleasure of hearing from Evan Hamilton, the Director of Community at Reddit. Evan joined the Reddit team at a time when trust was broken between the moderators and the Reddit team. Evan rebuilt trust in the community by ensuring transparent communication with the moderators, addressing concrete issues, humanizing both the employees and the moderators, and creating small programs and teams to work directly with moderators. The community council became crucial to building trust and was created as a safe space for moderators to share feedback, challenges, questions, and insights with the executive team of Reddit. We talk about the beauty of Reddit's pseudonymity and how users bring their true selves to the table and talk openly about their low points and experiences, finding a sense of belonging by connecting with ‘their people'. Reddit will continue growing its community programs at scale to enable and support its moderators through any challenges and questions they have. Who is this episode for?: B2C, Online, Scaling 3 key takeaways: - The steps to building community trust include communicating transparently, addressing concrete issues, humanizing everyone, and creating programs to enhance community communication and processes. - The benefit of pseudonymity in the Reddit community is that it gives people a place to be 100% themselves and share vulnerable, real experiences that they have been through. This outlet helps users find ‘their people' and feel a sense of belonging. - Reddit scaled its large moderator community by creating a Community Council to provide information, receive feedback, and communicate effectively with moderators representing ‘subreddits'. These members would distill information from the council to their moderator teams and ensure everyone was on the same page. Notable Quotes: 1. What did you practically do to make it feel like a safe space? I think some of it is just the access. It's easy to be frustrated when you're talking to a representative, right? It's the, “I want to talk to your manager syndrome.” You feel like the person you're talking to doesn't have power and so you just try and push past them to get to their manager. By actually involving the product managers who are building these products and eventually involving our execs, it was clear that you're not going to get any higher up the chain. This is the person who's building this thing and I think that helps. Having a buffer in between can be good but can also be detrimental because people feel like this representative isn't going to go fight for me. I think the other part was just framing and priming and setting up the conversation as, ‘Hey, we're all here because we're on the same page. We want Reddit to be great. We want moderators to be a big part of that.' 2. “What we've seen on Reddit is the benefits that pseudonymity brings and that people can really bring. They're their true selves to the table, right? I've seen amazing conversations where, you know, mothers are sharing their experiences with postpartum depression, something that they really may not feel comfortable sharing, attached to their name in a public setting. We have amazing communities for marginalized groups. We have support communities like stop drinking, where people are talking very, very honestly about their low points and because of the pseudonymity combined with a very robust safety team, making sure that regardless of what pseudonym you're using, you're behaving, people are able to be themselves and let this raw part of them loose.” Rapid fire question answers: 1. What's your favorite book to recommend to others? “Predictably Irrational” OR “Big” 2. Who's an up and coming community builder you think is going to do big things? Shana Sumers & Carter Gibson 3. What's your go-to community engagement starter? Food or a bracket system 4. What is your favorite subreddit? ATBGE - Awful Taste But Great Execution 5. One metric to use for the rest of your career to measure communities? Trust Barometer. 6. Weirdest community you've been a part of? Theater (extraverted actors and introverted tech people) 7. If you're on your death bed and you could only leave one piece of life advice behind for all the future generations, what would that advice be? Listen to People. We spend way too much time thinking about ourselves and not listening to others.
Rarely do we see a community leader make a difference in so many diverse departments and programs, but Erik Martin is one of a kind. He's currently the Chief Community Officer at Teal, but over the past 20 years he has worked in the film industry, Reddit, DePop, WeWork, Airtime, and Nike! In this episode, we discuss why the community industry is blowing up and how community stands out from traditional marketing. Erik discusses his role as a Chief Community Officer and shares the vision for Community becoming its own department in businesses. We talk about the benchmark metrics needed to truly understand community health and the complexities of community conversions and analytics. Erik shares valuable nuggets of wisdom about adapting to the needs of the community you're growing and teaches that the community is always smarter than you and will lead you in the right direction. Who is this episode for?: B2C, In person & Online, Revitalizing 3 key takeaways: 1. Community is always smarter than you are and will lead you in the right direction. They are the ones invested in the product or community and will give you a look into what people actually want and need. 2. The Chief Community Officer Role signals that community is a central pillar to the organization and not just an aspect of another department, such as marketing, sales, or operations. 3. Benchmark metrics is the goal for understanding community health. Having a relative baseline to compare the community metrics to will provide a much more comprehensive, holistic view of the impact on community. Notable Quotes: “I've been reminded over and over again, that the community is always smarter than you are. Meaning myself, the individual, but also the company in a sense, and that if you're really building products, not just for users, not just for community, but with the community, they'll really lead you in the right direction, especially in early stage startups or when you're launching something new. Collectively the group of people is going to be smarter than any one individual or even small group of people.” “I'm the chief community officer but we have a relatively small team, but what it means and the reason why I think it's important... is because what it signals is that community is a central element, it's a central pillar, it's a part of our DNA. It reports to the CEO and I think that's important. The titles themselves are more for external usage, but internally it's like, okay, community is not just a part of marketing or just a part of support or just a part of operations or just a part of a product. It's its own thing that has its own scope, its own metrics, its own contribution to the business.” Rapid fire question answers: 1. What's your favorite book to recommend to others? Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman 2. Who's an up and coming community builder you think is going to do big things? Jocelyn Hsu at Picsart and Sanmaya Mohanty (creator of the Community Manager Guide) 3. What's your wildest community story? ACL Subreddit for people with ligament problems. It's become a place for people to talk about ACL surgery and post-op recovery, etc. Asked the community on Reddit what was going on with his ACL and found out he had a screw loose in his knee. 4. What's your go-to community engagement tactic? Challenge -30,90,10 day challenges. Very social and gives accountability. Ex: new vocab word of the day challenge, career challenge, 5. What's a community building technology App people should be using: Spatial communities or asynchronous real life (ex: Pokemon Go, Augmented Reality, Randonautica, AYA) 6. Weirdest community you've been a part of? A Virtual Cult of traditional Chinese medicine with the leader Master Sha 7. If you're on your death bed and you could only leave one piece of life advice behind for all the future generations, what would that advice be? We are the stories we tell ourselves. If we aren't happy with who we are and what we are, we need to tell better stories. Links: Teal- https://www.tealhq.com Community Manager Guide- https://guide.cmgr.page/community-manager-page/ Twitter: @Hueypriest Reddit: @hueypriest
Community has the power to change lives. It also has the power to change businesses. In this interview with David Spinks, a seasoned community manager, co-founder of CMX, and author of The Business of Belonging, you'll hear why more and more companies are investing in community. David shares the seven Ps of community building and how to find community-market fit. By the end of the episode, you'll know more about how to make community your business's competitive advantage, no matter your industry. For more details on this and other episodes, visit http://www.meetup.com/blog/category/keep-connected-podcast/We hope you'll keep connected with us. Drop us a line at podcast@meetup.com. If you like the podcast, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating!
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
