Episoder
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In this episode we welcome Nicole Saunders, the Manager of Community Engagement at Zendesk. She oversees all of its community programs to help set strategy, define policy and promote their support communities to their users. She collaborates with several internal teams on customer support, product development, training, customer education, content marketing, knowledge sharing, social media, and data, with the goal of increasing customer connections, professional development, and relationship with Zendesk.
Previously, Nicole helped grow Jaunt, a VR startup in Silicon Valley, and was also the lead on the launch of Built In Colorado, an aggregator for the tech startup community there, having founded the 'Built-In Brews' networking series.
Together we cover:
- The differences between marketing & community
- How Zendesk approaches community management and Nicole’s day to day work
- Exciting things about going all-in on virtual events
- Thinking strategically about what kind of events are gonna stay relevant for which audiences
- The importance of grouping members based on industry and sector instead of location
- Why giving community members the ability to take leadership and form connections with one another has been a huge success
- Hybrid events and future formats
- What are the most important KPIs and how to understand what really matters when building communities
- How user badges helped grow a team of community moderators with subject matter expertise that other members can trust
- The secret to working cross-function with other teams
- Key pillars of successful communities: helpful content, helpful people, and helpful leadership
- The knowledge capture model
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In this episode we welcome Sarah Shewey, the CEO of Happily - a network of over 50,000 event producers, technologists and creatives who produce world-class virtual and live events. Shewey began her event career in 2002 at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, earning the title of “Best Party of the Year” by the Boston Globe. Her work in creating sustainable weddings and innovative events has been covered by the Associated Press, the BBC, NPR, and Forbes. Sarah is a founding producer of TEDActive and board president of LA’s original Internet radio station dublab.com
Together we cover:
- Sarah’s journey to building Happily
- Bringing diversity in the event space by creating teams of independent individuals and small businesses
- Remote and distributed work
- Carbon neutral and waste free events
- Why it’s important to design friendly and inclusive events
- The power of identity, trust and being visibly there in virtual events
- Treating online events as a new genre of media
- Combining a mixture of movies, memes and movement making
- The difference between marketing and community building
- Innovative ways to engage an audience and cut through the noise
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In this episode we welcome Sara El-Amine - Head of Public Engagement at Lyft, where she oversees driver, passenger, and local non-profit engagement for the company, as well as all Public Affairs and Social Impact programming. She is proudly Lebanese-American and Muslim American, and was raised in the US, Spain, and Lebanon.
Prior to joining Lyft, Sara El-Amine had an extraordinary career in community organizing; ranging from an entry-level role, to an executive director role for the Obama campaign. After reading Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, Sara quit her job, drove to the Iowa headquarters in 2008, and offered to help. It was a bold decision that paid off. With time, Sara rose to the National Director role of Obama’s reelection campaign and served as executive director of Organizing for Action (OFA), leading Obama’s citizen-led movement for change across the U.S.
Today, as Head of Community Engagement at Lyft, Sara has jumped into the business world with the same enthusiasm she had for her organizing work.
Together we cover:
- Sara’s day to day life in her community engagement function at Lyft
- Her definition of success and how to quantify that
- Where do you need maximum favorability and how to spot trends looking at all the layers of data
- How their community initiatives evolved pre and post-pandemic
- Why it’s become so important to stay on the front lines of racial justice locally, while building a dynamic response at a national level
- How Sara’s work in the public sector has translated to what she’s doing now to galvanize communities
- What it’s like to organize and deploy the team at Lyft to serve communities
- How local staff can drive local strategies under an umbrella of company-wide principles
- What other companies she thinks do a great job at community management
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In this episode we welcome Charlene Li, Founder & Senior Fellow at Altimeter, a Prophet Company. For the past two decades, Charlene has been helping people see the future and thrive with disruption. She couples the ability to look beyond the horizon with pragmatic advice on what actions work today, helping executives and boards recognize that companies must be disruptive to compete, not just innovate.
Charlene’s an expert on digital transformation, leadership, customer experience, and the future of work. Her perspectives from advising over 100 global companies such as Aetna, Bose, GE, Philips, and Southwest Airlines provide insights to support a winning strategy for disruptive growth, and a plan to identify and seize an opportunity no one else has the audacity or confidence to reach for.
Charlene is currently a Senior Fellow at Altimeter and her current research there focuses on digital transformation and transformational leadership. She has authored six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership, and the critically acclaimed book, Groundswell. Her book The Engaged Leader is a call to business leaders to adapt to the digital landscape and revolutionize their relationships by connecting directly with their followers. Her latest book, The Disruption Mindset, lays out a blueprint for disruption. Charlene’s next book focuses on new leadership capabilities need to drive transformation change in today’s fast-moving environment.
She is frequently quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USAToday, Reuters, The Associated Press and has shared her insights on 60 Minutes, The McNeil NewsHour, ABC News, CNN and CNBC. Charlene has inspired a wide audience as the keynote at conferences such as the World Business Forum, World Economic Forum, and South by Southwest.
Together we cover:
The disruption mindset and how it relates to growthTactical ways organizations can invest in the future and push down uncertaintyAligning your entire organization around empathy mapsWhy it’s important to gather all your customer-focused people and elevate them so you can hear the voice of customersUnderstanding audiences and why social listening is a gold mineActionable approaches and sequences to digest information coming from your communityFacebook’s innovation cycles explainedHow listening & empathy helped turn Comcast around and ended up elevating their marketing & brandingCharlene’s thoughts on what platforms to look into and how to filter through the multitude of optionsSearching for the needle in the haystack vs. trying to answer one question at a timeHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In this episode, we welcome Richard Millington, the founder of FeverBee, author of Buzzing Communities, and a frequent speaker at online community events around the world. FeverBee uses proven social science to develop successful online and offline communities of customers, fans, and members.
Richard is the sole author of the world's most popular online communities blog and the highly rated book, Buzzing Communities, widely cited as introducing best practices into developing successful online communities.
His unique focus is on cracking the 'social code' behind successful social groups. FeverBee's approach combines cutting-edge social psychology with advanced data insights and a library of repeatable case studies. Over the past 13 years, Richard has helped to develop over 150+ successful communities, including those for Google, The World Bank, Oracle, Amazon, Autodesk, Lego, The United Nations, Novartis, and many more.
Together we cover:
- Why it’s critical for SOME companies to leverage the power of community.
- What organizations do a great job at building their communities.
- The benefits you get by starting small and having a clear strategy to expand beyond that.
- The psychology that keeps people coming back.
- Richard’s fascination with finding a valuable goal for specific communities within the many directions they can develop.
- Finding the right balance between following your community and leading it.
- Ways to shift approaches when an unexpected event happens.
- Online vs offline events and how each can offer unique opportunities.
- Understanding what value & success is in the context of building communities.
- Why communities have to offer value that people can only get there, in order to thrive.
- How communities can be the most cost-effective way to scale a business.
- Concrete examples and actionable advice to get massive wins.
- Richard’s framework for building community strategies.
- Finding the sweet spot to truly become indispensable to your audience.
- Specific tactics and secrets to building trust & long-lasting relationships with members.
- Why it’s so important to do your research.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In this episode we welcome Heather McNair, Chief Community Officer at Higher Logic.
She brings over 20 years of experience in marketing, technology, community management and customer engagement to her role, where she oversees the strategic services and education teams. Heather has been running online communities since 2008, before there was widespread adoption in most business sectors. With few resources available to draw from, she discovered and built techniques that serve as the foundation of many of Higher Logic’s best practices today.
Prior to this current role, Heather was Director of Client Success, then Vice President of Engagement Strategy, where she built and expanded the Managed Services and Education teams.
Previously, she launched and managed two successful communities in her roles as vice president of marketing, membership, and strategic technologies at the American Association of Nurse Assessment Coordination, and senior manager of member engagement at the Medical Group Management Association.
Together we cover:
- Where does community live? Should brands see it as just a marketing channel?
- The importance of UGC for a variety of purposes, including SEO.
- How community members feel about being watched or sold to.
- Segmentation & moving people along the funnel in a meaningful way, breaking everything down into interactions at a very granular level.
- Insights into how an engagement ladder works and recognizing where someone is in their journey.
- Why it’s important to start smaller asks and build towards nurturing brand evangelists.
- Tactical steps to create the domino effect that leads to someone becoming an evangelist.
- The importance of proper onboarding.
- How much time a community member needs to hang around before posting, and how to use data to distinguish between behaviors & engage appropriately.
- User dropout rates and how to nurture community members and grow retention.
- How they transformed Broadcom by aligning internal & external stakeholders around building sustainable communities.
- Why true customer loyalty happens at the confluence of customer satisfaction & attraction.
- Heather drops some valuable insights on how to build customer relationships at scale.
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In this episode we welcome Phil Ranta!
He is a pioneer of the digital media revolution, working as a pre-YouTube professional web video producer in 2005, video content app creator before the smartphone revolution in 2007, an early exec in the MCN boom with two successful exits, and as the Head Gaming Creators at Facebook and Mobcrush, driving the live streaming and the creator-driven media paradigm shift.
Previously, Phil was the Head of Gaming Creators, North America at Facebook, and the Head of Creators at Mobcrush. In both roles, the departments saw significant growth working with top game streaming talent including Ronda Rousey, Disguised Toast, Corinna Kopf, Shroud, and Nate Hill, to name a few.
He was the COO of Studio71, one of the world's largest MCNs, growing the network from 1 billion to over 8 billion monthly views in 3 years, with over 1,000 creators.
Before S71, Phil joined Fullscreen as the Head of Channel Partnerships, completing his tenure as the VP of Networks. He grew the network to the largest MCN in the world (on comScore) in less than 1 year. He was the recipient of Fullscreen's first "Founders Award" for his role in building the industry-leading company.
Currently, as COO of Wormhole Labs, he is helping to build a live simulation of the real world, generated by the power of the crowd, where users navigate the world as avatars to 'Wormhole', or teleport, to locations around the world to meet, chat, shop, and play.
Together we cover:
- The future post-feed social environments and how Wormhole is building a thriving social community in the metaverse.
- Finding the right niche for top streamers, esports, and lifestyle influencers that enables them to develop hyper-premium experiences and transition from creator to business.
- What it takes to unlock serious growth, build trust, and the importance of always keeping a personal touch.
- Actionable advice for creators on developing their own brand and growing scalable Youtube communities.
- Phil’s take on finding the right community-oriented streamers that want to take it to the next level.
- Deep dive into how they managed to bring together and grow Randa Rowsie’s very diverse communities while staying true to her personality.
- Core elements of community growth.
- The importance of knowing your brand and understanding it’s not what your brand wants to be, but what your brand is.
- Common pitfalls in building brands.
- Growth hacking vs fandom growth.
- Why producing valuable content can galvanize communities at scale, while only obsessing about the metrics is not really sustainable.
- Phil’s choice of brands that are doing a great job at digital strategies.
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In this episode we welcome Lauren Hagerty, a passionate community builder looking to forge meaningful connections between humans and brands making a difference. As the Director of Marketing and Community at PowerToFly, a platform that connects Fortune 500 companies and fast growing startups with women who are looking to work for companies that value gender diversity and inclusion, Lauren helps bridge the gap between her brand and people.
Before her impact at PowerToFly, she worked as the community marketing manager at Wink Ink, a platform that brings hundreds of products from the best brands together in an easy-to-use mobile app. There, she recreated and revitalized the company’s voice through various public platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and others by creating over 300 original graphics and driving over 5 million views to wink.com
Together we cover:
- If marketers really understand the value of community building
- Checkpoints for success at extracting value from a two-sided marketplace
- Discovering the world of virtual events and how their Chat & Learn program was born
- Making people comfortable about uncomfortable topics in both B2B and B2C spaces
- Why events are a make or break tool in understanding who your customers are finding the issues that matter to them
- Actionable advice & successful tactics for event promotion
- The importance of bringing new voices to the community
- Insights into tracking & measuring the success of community growth efforts
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In this episode we welcome Chase Caprio, Marketing Associate at Impact Theory, a mission-based studio focusing on the development of empowering fiction and nonfiction content.
Chase graduated from college with little to no prospect of who and what he wanted to become/do. He underwent his own personal path of growth, frantically searching for how he could create the person he wanted to become.
In his journey, Chase found the passion for connecting other people to their path of self-fulfillment, working at Impact Theory.
Their mission is to pull people out of the Matrix, at scale, by giving them an empowering mindset.
Together we cover:
The importance of blowing people away with value for free.Important areas that a brand builder should focus on in terms of building a community right now.What metrics are important to reach your end goal and why you should always keep an eye on the data.Actionable insights in how to test the waters and figure out what works/doesn’t workHis experience in choosing the right platforms, testing and adapting to new mediums.Is going with a high production value worth it right now?The best ways to nurture & engage your community.The challenges of moving from community growth to increasing revenue in order to stay sustainable.Exclusive insights into Impact Theory’s efforts to get into the narrative market by developing fiction content.Facilitating interaction between fans and supporting the community to chat about the lessons they’ve learned and the struggles they are having.Distribution tactics and why being uber-consistent is so important.Thanks again to Chase for offering 10% off your first Month to Impact Theory University.
You can visit here and use the code ITU10 upon checkout:
university.impacttheory.com/?el=brandcommunity
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In this episode we welcome Mike Porath, founder and CEO of The Mighty, the world's largest health community. As an award-winning journalist and executive at ABC News, NBC News, The New York Times, and AOL, he used his expertise in storytelling to build an online community. The platform creates a space for over 3 million people to tell their stories and exchange ideas for coping with health challenges.
Mike has served on several non-profit boards including Dup15q Alliance and the National Organization for Rare Disorders. He was also named one of the world’s top 50 philanthropists by Town and Country in 2017.
Together we cover:
- His personal challenges leading to real stories, conversations, and ultimately a strong community.
- Mike’s insights into starting communities and how technology can be a tool but not the ultimate goal.
- Using gamification & thoughtful little gestures to jumpstart community building.
- How being specific in your CTAs can boost engagement.
- Actionable advice and focused ways that make it easier for people to engage and share their perspectives.
- Using data & analytics to understand online communities, and how focusing content creation can bring value to conversations people deeply care about.
- Building a balance between old & new content formats to scale communities.
- Managing resources & partnerships to drive awareness through value exchange.
- Mike’s perspective on media organizations and how this space can evolve in the future.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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In this episode we welcome Alison Flood, a culture marketing savant, as we like to call her.
Originally Alison cut her teeth over at Gawker, producing original content & events around pop culture and web trends. She then jumped over to Recognition Media where she produced Internet Week Europe, US, The Webby Awards, and Lovie Awards. Went on to start her own experiential agency, ROOD Studios, where she worked with a variety of clients like Diageo and Cheil.
Most recently, she’s been VP of Experiential over at BuzzFeed working with a range of clients like Band of America, Petco, Amazon, and more.
In the episode we cover:
Why knowing your brand is critical in building communities and targeted experiences for your audience.Finding fun ways to create engagement within the community and beyond, operating outside of traditional marketing channels.Alison details her approaches for feeling the pulse of culture and how she translates trends into brand stories, with truth and joy as core principles.How sometimes you just need to come up with a great idea and hack growth, getting out of your creative comfort zone to build unlikely and informal communities that fulfill the brand purpose.IRL experiences pivoting to the new normal and how this translates to online events. What are the better strategies to merge online & offline, and most importantly: can you measure feeling?How ROI metrics changed as we move online and how this can evolve in the future.What are the toughest things to crack when producing online events and why keeping the human connection in online activations is so important to keep consumers engaged.*This was recorded before the news about Marilyn Manson was made public
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In this episode we welcome Andrew Losowsky, Head of Coral by Vox, a tech platform that helps improve communities on websites.
Andrew was Coral’s first hire when it started as a very unusual collab between the New York Times, Washington Post and Mozilla, tasked to figure out how to build software that helps readers engage with journalists, with a focus on sustainable community growth.
We cover:
How to empower & enable communities to be supportive of each-other and the journalists, how to look for what audiences genuinely need and what it takes to properly scale communities.Using AI in a creative & responsible manner, while still keeping the human connection, learning how strategy & a tactical approach are important to improve your audiences’ lives through software.Where are the gaps in design & organizational culture that need to be filled in order to make marginalized communities feel welcome?How to measure success in community moderation at scale and understanding how much people value the community.What pitfalls to avoid when growing communities as a startup, with actionable advice.Great reads referenced in the podcast:
Brand Community by Albert M. Muñiz, Jr. & Thomas O'GuinnBuilding Successful Online Communities by Paul Resnick and Robert E. KrautHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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To pre-order David’s book releasing next week, go here: http://bit.ly/biz-of-belonging
David is a 3x startup founder, an experienced community leader, and has personally advised and trained hundreds of organizations in community strategy over the past decade.
David is the Founder of CMX, the world's largest and most passionate network for community professionals. Thousands of community professionals come to CMX for support and education in community strategy. The community industry's largest event, CMX Summit, brings together thousands of attendees each year, and 50+ local CMX Connect chapters gather regularly around the world.
In 2019, CMX was acquired by Bevy where David serves as the VP of Community. Bevy is a leading provider of community software, powering live community events and experiences for companies like Slack, Twitch, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Duolingo.
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For our first episode we welcome Andy Krainak, the EVP of Team Gary Vee. Andy is responsible for developing and executing upon the content and strategies that have helped Gary turn into one of the most impactful and famous entrepreneurs in the world, and helped grow VaynerMedia from a startup agency to over 800 employees in 10 years. In the episode we cover: Creative ways to listen to your audience online and use that to inform your strategy, how they’ve structured their team and the core principles of their approach that’s enabled such incredible growth in Gary’s brand, how to come up with good content ideas that will build community amongst your brand’s target audience and much more.
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In this episode we dive into our co-host, Sam Hysell. Sam is the Co-Founder/Partner of NOX where he helps artists, brands and entrepreneurs grow and convert communities online. Prior to NOX, he was a Brand Strategist @ VaynerTalent where he worked with Gary Vee to help super charge community & business growth for around personal brands for industry titans (Tom Bilyeu & Ray Dalio) and musicians like Black Coffee. Prior to that he was a Community Champion at Moves the Needle - a company that helped Fortune 500 companies create a culture of innovation through developing customer empathy, and running experiments to validate different business ideas.
In the episode we discuss:
Why do you think growing a community is so vital to driving business growth?What are some examples of communities you’ve helped build throughout the years?What are some of the biggest takeaways in building those communities?How has your approach to building communities changed as a result of COVID?What are some examples of great communities that you’re a part of?What do you think are the most important things to focus on when trying to build impactful communities that can ultimately drive business results?To learn more about NOX Media, visit wearenox.co
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In this episode speak with Chris Whitman, the Chief Growth Officer. Chris has a great track record building communities... He's currently the Co-Founder/Chief Growth Officer @ CRONY Creative and helps bring brands and consumers together through brand experience. Prior to CRONY he was a sales executive in adtech @ Giant Media and worked with brands to help make their content go viral on the web. He also has experience as an online video strategist for J&J @ Universal McCann and is the former co-founder of underground music collectives We In Cloudz and Replay Ceviche.
In the episode we cover some of the following topics:
What are you currently working onWhy do you think building community is so important for driving growth for brandsHow do you think the current climate has impacted community growth and engagement effortsIn the absence of IRL events, how have you seen brands effectively activate and engage their audiences?How have you participated in and helped develop/champion communities over the yearsWhat are some of the biggest pitfalls you’ve seen in community development?What are some of the biggest areas of opportunity you’ve seen in community development?To learn more about Chris and CRONY, visit cronycreative.com
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