the community corner

Today, we’re joined by Lauren Uyeno, National Director of SEC and SOX Professional Groups at Workiva, a computer software product that brings together everything you need—teammates, datasets, and data sources—so you can work better in the cloud. Lauren builds the SEC and SOX Professional Groups, which are member-driven, community-led events programs. These communities currently have forty chapters and are helping drive acquisition, contribution, and engagement for the business. Communities help professionals in industries find other people with whom they can share their problems and find a sense of belonging. On the events side, Lauren is tracking attendance percentage (how many of those who RSVP'd attend the event). Workiva also has their key tools all synced on the backend with the help of On24, which integrates smoothly with Marketo and Salesforce to track lead generation. On the community side, the key stats Lauren is tracking are unique visitors, the number of visits, and the percentage of activated users from posts and comments. Not everything that you track needs to be entered in reports. When inheriting a community, it’s important to introduce yourself to user groups, talk to them, and listen closely to get a read on the community.

Today, we’re joined by John Todd, Director, Community Experience at Fandom, a global entertainment media platform powered by passionate communities of fans of everything related to pop culture. John helps Fandom to optimize its fan experience to improve engagement and retention metrics. At Fandom, growth metrics are focused on community creation, exploration, engagement, and fan retention. Engagement in UGC communities, such as fandom, is not churn-free but because there are virtually endless community options for people to engage in simultaneously. A focus on inclusion helps build and grow global communities because there’s no other criteria except love for a show.

Today we’re joined by Matt Lawson, an experienced Online Community Manager. On the show today, Matt shares his journey to become an online community manager and the skills and experience he built to get to where he is today. Matt then shares how to recruit and stand out as an applicant for a community manager role and his thoughts on the emerging role of the Chief Community Officer. Matt is of the opinion that if a business generates revenue directly from their community, then they should have a CCO, but for a SaaS business? Matt says, “maybe not”. Finally, Matt shares who in the world of community he would most like to take for lunch…

Today we have someone working on one of, if not the largest, B2B community in the world. Our guest is Tiffany Oda who is Senior Program Manager at Salesforce. Tiffany specializes in community infrastructure, processes, automation, and operations, and she is super passionate about it. In this episode, she talks about how operations fit into a community strategy, how to balance manual work with automation, and shares her advice for Community Professionals who are just beginning their automation journey.

Celina Zamora is our guest on this episode, she is the Senior Program Manager, Developer Community at MongoDB. Celina works with the MongoDB User Groups, and was tasked with relaunching the program during the pandemic. Today, she shares how she broke down silos to build a global program, and how she and her team are measuring their success.

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.