c2c podcast

Jana Boruta who is the Director of Experiential Marketing at HashiCorp joins us on this episode. Jana has been working with the community at HashiCorp for six years, and has helped build, run, and scale many of their community programs. Today, she talks about the challenges and successes her team had while pivoting their in-person events program to be virtual in 2020, and shares her advice for companies doing the same.

Mike Jewett is our guest on today’s episode, he is Director of Community at Codecademy. The Codecademy Community is super ingrained with the product, and Mike works closely with the product team to integrate ideas, make changes, and build a better space. Today, he shares how the community operates within the org, how he proves the value of the community, and how they successfully launched an events program in the middle of a pandemic.

Diana Morgan is our next guest, she is Regional Community Manager at UiPath. Diana has been in the community space for a while, and has seen the evolution of many community and digital connection platforms. Today she talks about Clubhouse, the audio-only platform that has recently grown in popularity. We talk about how the use of real time events can enhance community engagement, and how something like Clubhouse could change how we interact with online communities.

Lais de Oliveira is our guest today, she recently published her book Hacking Communities. In this episode, Lais explains what Hacking Communities means. We dive into how communities can build belonging in the post-COVID era, and how leading with love is truly at the heart of it all.

Our next guest Jay Clouse is the Creator of Freelancing School. Jay built Freelancing School to be a place for freelancers to learn from each other, connect with their peers, and ultimately become more successful in their work. Today, Jay shares his experience in building communities from scratch, and why quality often beats quantity.

We are joined by a repeat guest and friend of The C2C Podcast... Celina Zamora! She is the Senior Program Manager of Developer Community at MongoDB. Now that she is running Community User Groups at MongoDB and starting that role during COVID we had her break down what it is like to build a new C2C community after having so much success with her last community at Atlassian. We covered other topics as well like how surveys have increased during COVID, making hackathons virtual (and still great), how to approach diversity and inclusivity, and a beautiful story about a community member helping veterans.

Jono Bacon is one of the most notable figures in the community space. He’s helped some of the tech world’s best brands like IBM, Intel, SAP, Mozilla, and others build their community. He also wrote the book The Art of Community and recently published People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams by HarperCollins. We cover community models, why C2C marketing is important in 2020, governing open source communities and more!

Brittany Caldwell joins us on the podcast to chat about her role as Head of Community & Events Marketing at Webflow. She has over 13 years of experience building communities and has previously worked for companies like GitHub and Atlassian. On today’s episode, we cover her top strategies to kickstart a community with little to no budget, why she chooses to look at community like a product, and how she grew her user community over 114% in less than a year.

Nicole Saunders is our guest in this episode, she is 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. Today, we’ll be discussing how to get support internally for your community, how she looks at growth and how she’s adjusting her strategy during COVID-19.

Team RWB knew tracking impact was critical so they created a metric for “enrichment”. This is a 40-question survey used to measure physical health, mental health, supportive relationships, sense of purpose and other valuable information. Team RWB has learned that engagement is the best way to bring people up on the enrichment scale, and it allows them to identify points in the member journey where events would be impactful for the community.

The future of education is becoming more and more remote. Few know that more than our next guest, Kelly Neilson who is a Community Growth Manager at Lambda School. Lambda School teaches people the tech skills they need to launch a new career in just 9 months. The whole program is completely remote. We will talk with Kelly about how she grew their C2C community to over 50 chapters and why bringing your customers together is so important with remote learning. Take a listen!

In this episode, Derek is talking to Elizabeth Kinsey who is the Developer Marketing Manager at Slack. Elizabeth knows how to create communities. She first created the Mobile Growth community at Branch Metrics which became the premier community for app developers and marketers. But her streak didn’t stop there when she joined Slack she helped create the Slack Developer Communities from scratch, which has been a huge success.

Greg Goomishian is a Lead Community Manager at Reddit.com. He’s currently running “Team IRL” and focusing on offline user engagement. He also runs Redditgifts.com, the world's largest online gift exchange community. In our conversation, we are going to dive into what it means to bring your community from online to IRL.

Jono Bacon is one of the most notable figures in the community space. He’s helped some of the tech world’s best brands like IBM, Intel, SAP, Mozilla, and others build their community. He also wrote the book The Art of Community and recently published People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams by HarperCollins. We cover community models, why C2C marketing is important in 2020, governing open source communities and more!

We usually talk with community managers on the show, the boots on the ground that sadly usually aren’t the decision makers on budgets and what programs get greenlit and which don’t. Luckily for us we’ll hear from Sydney Sloan who has not only built community programs from scratch but she is also now the CMO of SalesLoft giving her the unique vantage point of seeing knowing how to build these programs and knowing what is needed to get approval from the C Suite (which we talk about in the episode). Too Long; Didn't Listen Being a CMO, Sydney knows what it takes to get buy-in from the C-Suite to get funding. She shared how when she was at Adobe an executive wanted to take their Java Developer community from 1500 to 1 million developers. The audacious goal was helpful and she backed it up with strategy, she aggressively tackled both online and offline community. She found local ambassadors and made sure the company equipped them with what they needed to run events and spread the word. When it comes to building your in-person community try to go deep with the small handful of your most passionate ambassadors. If you have 2 amabadours in Japan and London meet with them, understand the differences in their culture and their needs. If you get a large group of ambassadors it’s actually good to focus on your top 5 or 10 before scaling up, better to serve a small group deeply then a large group poorly. When it comes to metrics Sydney suggest first looking at users as a good starting point and then going finding metrics around engagement that are meaningful to the company. She referenced a study from EMC that found direct correlation of community engagement and revenue growth, tying revenue to community engagement is crucial to proving the worth of the program.