the business of belonging

In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Dani Weinstein, Senior Director of Customer Community and Growth at Kaltura. Dani is a Community Builder, Strategist, and Advisor that enables customer success. In one of his previous roles before the pandemic layoff, he was the Head of Global Community at Domo, a business cloud that empowers organizations of all sizes with BI leverage at cloud scale in record time. At Domo, he deployed and scaled their community in English and Japanese and cultivated community advocates through gamification to become Domo brand ambassadors. Localized communities are tough to get started but keeping them buzzing with level interactions is an even bigger challenge. In this episode, Dani and David take us through when to start and how to best manage large localized communities. Gamification has been a major contributor of engagement for Dani’s previous communities so his tips and tactics to keep your community members engaged are tried and tested. Who is this episode for? Managers of large global/multilingual communities Three key takeaways: 1. Managing Contribution in Communities: Let superfans talk to your product teams and celebrate their contribution, gamify their contribution so they don’t lose motivation, and then create a private space for them. Start with one space and then as the conversation starts siphoning, create more spaces based on what conversational directions members regularly take. Starting with too many spaces may lead to spreading your community team too thin. 2. Internationalization of Communities: Calibrate the business needs and understand the landscape of potential community users in a new language. An existing and active audience of customers and leads in a new language is necessary before expanding your community to the new language. The more members you have in your community that speak that language, the more dedicated resources and money you will need to manage its complexity. However, the localized community may not need all the bells and whistles of your largest English-speaking community. 3. Managing Multilingual Content in Localized Communities: Great content in English (as judged by managers and superusers in the localized community) needs to be translated into localized languages for language-specific boards. You can use the Google Translate Widget if your company doesn't have enough resources to scale the translation effort. Notable Quotes: 1. “These are your people. And so you want to be able to develop that more intimate relationship with them. They could also provide tremendous insight on what they're seeing because, at the end of the day, they become part of the extended team.” 2. “You really have to start small. And so we really forced at the very beginning, very few boards around conversations. And then over time, you can actually see the customers dictating, not necessarily your support, product, and sales teams.” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would that food be? Pasta Marinara. 2. What's the most impactful book you've ever read or a book that you love to give as a gift to others? “Winning Ugly” by Tennis coach Brad Gilbert. 3, What language do you wish you could speak and why? Russian because his family’s roots go back to Russia. He’s fluent in Hebrew and conversational in Spanish and German and even knows a word or two in French, Dutch, Arabic, and Italian. 4. What's your wildest community story? He gave an award to a brand-new Domo Admin who wore a superman costume that matched his display picture in the community. A brand new customer later, during happy hour, asked Dani about taking a “selfie with superman”. 5. Have you ever worn socks with sandals? Never. 6. Who in the world of the community would you most like to take out for lunch? Holly Firestone of Venafi. 7. What community product do you wish existed in the world? A tailored localized experience so that you can consume your content and engage in the experience you want. 8. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? A community where they traded recorded cassette tapes of concerts by the Grateful Dead rock band. 9. One Tweet-sized life advice you would give to the world on your deathbed? Seize the day, travel, see the world, learn another language, experience another culture, and connect with different types of people.

In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Max Rothery, VP of Community at Finimize, a platform that provides investment education for casual investors in small, digestible bites. Max has a truly wide range of work experiences, from working in a bank to working in the film industry. He even ran a record label. Learning anything new is more effective if, alongside self-learning, you learn from others. This is where having a community of learners plays a big role. The Finimize Community helps casual investors capitalize on tech tools to connect and learn from other people like them. This episode is packed full of insights about community from a person who had no experience in the field when they first started. Listen to the full episode for specific insights on how to use your community for research. Who is this episode for? For community managers who have started in the community field from other fields and casual investors. Three key takeaways: 1. When a community makes sense for service-oriented businesses: Learning content includes several questionable sources online. Creating high-quality content that people love to consume and then creating a paid community around it helps to profitably solve this problem. Talking to your community (free or paid) helps you understand the different types and subtypes of people your content will help and their favorite topics. 2. Researching Community Members: As a first step to your community strategy, start by talking to the most engaged fans and understand their intrinsic motivations in life. Expand this circle in steps until you get credible data on a solid ideal customer profile (ICP). After this, create, grow, and optimize your community to improve the experience of this ICP so that any new members will find something they have in common with existing members. Have a clear business goal (what your company gets out of the community) and a clear community goal (what members get out of being in the community). Be ready to leave out a particular segment that is not well-represented in your data set to focus on your most profitable ICP. 3. Making the best use of community spaces: Create a community space that allows connections and public discussions to flourish. Let your content team find new ideas from these discussions. Your sales team can also use these spaces for competitive research. Make sure you collect data to prove the efficacy of any insights you use from the community. Notable Quotes: 1. “The best thing to do when you lose money is to speak to someone else. That's [how you realize] that's kind of the point of investing. It's like, sometimes you do well, sometimes you don't. I think that that's a really natural way for a natural reason that a community should exist. ” 2. “We're just creating spaces and watching and observing, and then trying to feed that back and give context to the rest of the business” 3. “Our core audience is probably like twenty-seven to forty-year-olds that have got surplus income [and are] working in well-paid jobs and investing on the side… We're saving them time that they can't get anywhere else. If we try to focus on students or even beginner investors, it distracts us from delivering to that core audience.” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would that be? Burgers. 2. What's your favorite book to give as a gift to others or to recommend to others? “Rules for Revolutionaries” by Becky Bond and Zack Exley. 3. A go-to community engagement, tactic, or conversation starter? Reserve time with people to talk more with them about a particular topic. 4. Have you ever worn socks with sandals? Yes, wearing them while recording this interview 5. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? A natural wine community that was associated with a startup but members ended up creating a parallel, more helpful wine community of their own. 6. Tweet-size deathbed advice? Life is always the most rewarding in the deep end.

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.

In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Marius Ciortea, Chief Community Officer at IBM. Marius leads the community strategy of forming an engaging brand presence to interact with their community of existing customers. He will be discussing how to share best practices and use common terminology to expand the experience beyond the company brand and fuel the fireside chat. Who is this episode for? B2B, Successful Brands, Mature Organizations, Scaling, Revitalizing Three key takeaways: 1. IBM’s Community Strategy: Companies should value customers above everything else. IBM's community shift aims to keep the customers satisfied, engaged, and loyal to the brand 2. Developing a Cohesive Community Experience: 1. Companies need to focus more on the end-users that influence the buying decision. 2. Create various points of communication to bring the community closer and to interact directly with individuals. 3. Focus on clearly defining the purpose and the strategy of the organization 3. Showing the Scale and Investing in a Community Brand: Community managers should feel good about the tools available to drive scale and take a more nurturing stance in their role. Companies from the same community influence each other. If different organizations create positive experiences for the users, they will become engaged and active within the community. Notable Quotes: 1. “I never fully understood why communities were relegated to a community manager role in the world of social media. I don't want to knock social media, but you are talking to everyone, and you don't know the impact that you're having. When you're talking in a community, especially a community of customers, you're talking to your customers. I believe smart companies should value the customers above everything else. Therefore, you should not let that conversation live with a junior intern.” 2. “I feel like the real influencers are the guys that actually use your software in and day out. If you get those internal users to be your advocates, signing the check will be a no-brainer for the decision-makers. The true influencers are inside the company that is already using the product. So that is why I think companies need to focus on the users more because they are ultimately making the buying decision.” 3. “The purpose that I have is to create a place where customers can share their thoughts and learn from each other. Ultimately, if they share their experiences and learn from each other, they will do more with the products. And that is right, regardless of technology, language, product, or whatever it is that unifies all together.” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. If you could only have one kind of food for the rest of your life, what would that food be? Spaghetti Carbonara. 2. What's your favorite book to give or to recommend to people? Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. 3. What's a go-to community engagement, tactic, or conversation starter that you like to use in your communities? T-shirts and beer. Anytime people get together, get them a t-shirt, and if you can give them a beer, they will love you forever. 4. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? My kid, who is 15, told me that he is sort of a community manager on a Minecraft community on this court. 5. What advice do you have for community professionals who want to become chief community officers one day? Be clear in what you're trying to achieve for your company. 6. How to break the silos? Interview your customers, ask them questions on how they feel being siloed. 7. How do you evaluate a platform to choose for your community? Be clear on your purpose and then match your or your community's capabilities to that purpose.

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.

In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Howard Rheingold, a veteran of the art of community, a writer, and a teacher known for his insights on the cultural, social, and political implications of technology. Howard pioneered the term “virtual community” by first speaking and educating students at Harvard University about the issues of using social media at scale. This episode is all about lessons from the origins of community, back when the internet barely existed. Howard takes us back to the good-ol’ days of in-person-only communities. We examine why communities form in real life and how businesses can help sustain communities around their products and customers. Lastly, we talk about what the future of community looks like. Who is this episode for? Community professionals (beginners and experienced) and community historians. Three key takeaways: 1. The common thread of community: Long before the internet arrived, people gathered in groups to support each other during difficult times and to party. All the feelings of mutual aid, love, hate, and companionship have always been a part of our society in different ways. When online communities - such as Facebook, Twitter, or Clubhouse - evolved, it initially made people uncomfortable because “talking to strangers online” was considered weird. Online groups have now become synonymous with the idea of community and our social identity. 2. Why communities form: People coalesce into communities to gain knowledge capital, social capital, and communion. Every piece of knowledge shared could give you ten times more knowledge in return. If you are there for people in need, they will be there for you when you need them. This persists outside of formal frameworks like laws, families, and professional teams. Finding people with whom you share an innate emotional bond is also a major driver and indeed a true indicator of community. 3. Turning transactional conversations into business communities: Start by answering basic insight questions about members, the reasons behind forming the community, and a plan behind managing it. Pay experienced moderators/hosts to ensure that they are not the only ones maintaining decorum and that the first-time participants come back to engage repeatedly. Notable Quotes: 1. “My really simple definition of a community is a group of people who share something in common who communicate regularly. So that could be face-to-face or it could be [online].” 2. “Long before dating apps, how did people find dates? They went to bars and talked to strangers. How different it is to say ‘I'm interested in butterfly collecting. Who else is interested in butterfly collecting?” 3. “Social capital does not automatically happen. It's something that you have to build. You have to give out to others before others will give to you and you have to knit something together.” 4. “Facebook groups [are good in that there are] groups for parents of children with rare diseases and other kinds of mutual aid. But I think you are also exposed to a lot of misinformation, disinformation, and hate through the same platform.” 5. “In good communities, it's not just the professionals who are paid to do so. They cultivate an atmosphere where people want to have a more diverse community and the larger community enlarges their prospects as well. So everybody should be a welcomer and a helper.” 6. “You're not going to have a community unless you can convince the people who first come to not only continue, but to invite their friends.” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. If you could only eat one kind of food for the rest of your life, what would it be? Apricots and avocados. 2. What's your favorite book to give as a gift to others? One of Ursula K. Le Guin’s books. 3. The wildest community story? Bringing back a sick member of the Wells community from Nepal back to the US by jumping through bureaucratic hoops and using social capital to find assistance. 4. Have you ever worn socks with sandals? Must have worn it at some point in the past. 5. What's your go-to community engagement, tactic, or conversation starter? Finding what people are interested in and how many people are interested in the same thing. 6. Who in the world of the community would you most like to take out to lunch? Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg out to lunch to tell them what a horrible, horrible thing they’re doing to the world. 7. What's a community product or technology that you wish existed? Identify people who would be a good community if they only knew of each other. 8. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? On the Well, there was a conference called Weird where people could come up with fun stuff and be irresponsible. 9. What's a question I didn't ask you that I should have? The question is “Would we be better off if social media had never happened?”

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”.