c2c podcast

We’re welcoming back Rosemary O’Neill! She is the CMO at Social Strata, Rosemary has been in the community industry for a long time and is a seasoned pro when it comes to member data and security. Today, Rosemary and Beth talk about international and local privacy laws, the importance of transparency, and how to operate as a one-person community team. And as always, we like to keep things actionable, so keep listening to learn how to make your own privacy policy, and how to ask your members for consent.

Our next guest Joe Huber who is the Customer Community Strategist at Sprout Social. Joe builds and manages multiple community spaces for social media marketers and managers. In this episode, Joe talks about metrics and reporting. We not only discuss how to find the right metrics to track, but how to actually report on them to other teams, and how to tell people why those metrics matter.

Next on the show is Kevin Lau who is the Global Head of Customer Advocacy at Adobe. Kevin has made a career in community and customer advocacy. Before he went to Marketo, which was acquired by Adobe, he worked at AOL, Google and NetBase. We are going to go in depth on how to create raving fans out of customers, his strategies for running events, the growth of their Marketo User Groups and much more.

Ben Winn of Catalyst Software joins the podcast to discuss his role as Community & Events Manager at the company. Ben recently joined the Catalyst team and we chatted further about his strategy to start making an impact at a new organization immediately, why you should separate growth and success when measuring the health of your community and how he is approaching event strategy during COVID-19.

Valentina Ruffoni joins the podcast from Madrid. She is the Founder and Host of the CMX Connect Madrid chapter as well as the Founder of Eat Out Madrid, a 7000 member community of foodies. We talk about Valentina’s unique strategies for growing a team of community leaders, how to approach event sponsorships, along with how she has adapted her events during the pandemic.

Tina Roth Eisenberg, the founder and CEO of CreativeMornings, joins us today. She currently oversees a worldwide chapter-based organization that brings creative professionals together monthly for community and learning. We talk about the challenges of adapting creative-based in-person events to a virtual platform, consistently maintaining connection and empathy with community members in a time of stress and how reaching new audiences is now possible.

Todd Connor who is Founder and CEO at Bunker Labs. Bunker Labs is a chapter-based organization that helps military veterans start and grow businesses. In today’s interview with Todd, we will talk about the strategy behind different types of events, metrics for community growth and adapting your in-person events during COVID-19.

Our next guest is Mindy Day who is currently the Senior Community Manager at Patreon. She has worked as a community builder for over 7 years for brands like Imgur. Today we are going to talk about how to actually measure trust in a brand through community, the path of becoming an engaged member and so much more. Take a listen!

Adrian Cohn of Smartling stops by the podcast this week. As the Director of Brand Strategy and Communications at Smartling, a B2B language translation company, Adrian started as an Operations Analyst at Smartling almost 5 years ago. Now he oversees brand and creative for the whole company. We’re going to talk about community’s role in growing a brand, adjusting your community strategy with COVID-19 and much more.

Coronavirus is now a pandemic, how should community professionals respond? If I'm running events for my community what steps can I take? Today's episode is here to try to answer those questions, we sat down with David Spinks, Founder of CMX & VP of Community at Bevy. Even with all the downsides, Derek and David talk about the tangible things we can do around taking events virtual, collaboration with other community professionals and more.

Next on the show is Kevin Lau who is the Global Head of Customer Advocacy at Adobe. Kevin has made a career in community and customer advocacy. Before he went to Marketo, which was acquired by Adobe, he worked at AOL, Google and NetBase. We are going to go in depth on how to create raving fans out of customers, his strategies for running events, the growth of their Marketo User Groups and much more.

Get ready to take some notes because our next guest is Rosemary O'Neill. Rosemary has been in the community space since 1998 when she co-founded Social Strata. Social Strata’s flagship platform, Hoopla, lets you build a branded online community. In this interview, we walk through the process of starting a community and cover topics like getting internal champions, legal buy in, content calendars and more. Take a listen!

Udemy has over 24 million students and over 100,000 courses, James Dunbar who is the Senior Manager of Community Programs & Strategy at Udemy shared with us how they look at community and support their huge base of online instructors. The instructors on Udemy are key to the company’s success, without incredible courses in areas where students want to learn students won’t use Udemy. That’s why they have focused a lot of their community efforts to support the instructors, that’s where James focuses his efforts. What we’ve seen over all the episodes of The C2C Podcast is the most successful (and most funded) community programs do a great job of tying back to business goals. James shared a way of accomplishing this that we hadn’t heard of before which seemed like it could really be powerful. Most will find a way to tie back metrics like revenue, churn, customer support requests in whatever software is used to track those metrics. Of course, there are many variables that go into making those metrics improve so the needs of the sales, support and other departments aren’t always the same. James will get coffee with key people in those departments and ask them “What are some problems you are running into right now?” and see if the community can help. He figured out after talking with the person who is running social that she needed help creating more content, James knew the community could help. He turned to the community to help create user-generated content and it was a huge success. This method is pretty manual but the brilliant part about it is it allows you to change your focus if a larger area of opportunity arises for the community to impact the company. Another tactic that we talked about that we don’t normally cover is appointment content. This is anything that is scheduled like a live webinar or Q&A that is a great way to constantly activate the community. If it was just a video or helpful piece of content there is no urgency, the fact that it’s scheduled makes the community activate. James is someone who has worked at a 2 person startup and a 500 person company, community helps at every stage.