This is a special episode of the Community Corner podcast as it's the last one for a while for its host, Beth McIntyre. Over the last year and a half, Beth has spoken with almost seventy community professionals from all different kinds of businesses, managing various communities and community programs. In her last episode, Beth reflects on what she has learned from them. First of all, there is no one size fits all. One of the biggest challenges we hear from community professionals is the inability to prove the business value or the ROI. There is no one magic metric that will quantify the value of every community. You should ask what value your community is driving. Once you know that, you will be able to work backward and determine the “how”. Secondly, imposter syndrome will tear you down. Every community leader or manager has a different background. They learn from their life experiences rather than being educated by a degree in community management. As a result, there is a shared feeling among people in the industry that they make it up along the way. Beth describes her mission to end the imposter syndrome in the community industry. Thirdly, community-led is the future of business. The industry is at a point where community has become a buzzword. Beth shares her thoughts on how community professionals can build sustainable communities that will last and outlast community management teams.

In this episode of The Community Corner, Sheldon Maye joins Beth McIntyre to discuss the strategies and processes for building employee resource groups (ERG). He also shares how he ensures a successful ERG at Accenture and some of the metrics he tracks to prove their value. ERGs are basically clubs that support employees' professional development and career growth. Sheldon talks about the right time and approach for starting an ERG. He also reveals how they implemented a new scorecard to measure ERG success and the metrics that they’re tracking. Lastly, Sheldon gives tips and advice for launching and growing an ERG.

Startup Grind is the world's largest startup community of startups, founders, innovators, and creators, with over 600 chapters in 125 countries worldwide, which brings like-minded yet diverse individuals together to connect, learn, teach, help, build, and belong. Phin leads the community and partner success teams. The advantage of operating in the startup world is seeing the different trends as they develop. One of these trends that Startup Grind has been focusing on more recently is Web 3. The goal of community managers is building relationships person by person, city by city, product by product, and so on. Keep in mind the numbers, but focus on the relationships you can build. Managing the community at scale requires you to have community operations, systems, and processes to ensure that you can keep a consistent brand experience.

Zoom is a communications platform that started with video as its foundation. It's known for being intuitive, user-friendly, scalable, and reliable. They launched the Zoom community in August 2021. As the Senior Manager for Global Community, Alexis has the role of strategizing, building, deploying, and growing the community for all zoom users across the globe. Launching the Zoom community included a specific role specialization approach, where someone on the team manages gamification, other user roles, design, analytics, content strategy, etc. They also focus on a consistent user and customer experience. Success metrics can be found differently depending on the purpose of your community, your target goals, and capturing the ROI. The Zoom community aims to deliver a happy experience to customers and provide them with a platform to collaborate and share success stories. When launching a community, strategize and prioritize, think long-term versus short-term, and focus on the end-user experience.

Andreia Tulcidás joins us today to talk about building an advocate program within a community. She takes us through the steps she took to launch the OutSystems' user groups, how they've become an integral part of their community, and how they work together with their leaders to incentivize and reward. OutSystems is a modern application platform that enables organizations to tackle any critical application. Building a champion program from the ground up requires understanding the purpose of the program and the people you want to bring value to and finding ways to collaborate and incentivize.

Today, we’re joined by Howard Gray, Founder of Wavetable. He discusses engagement, creating engaging experiences for audiences and community members, and how to inspire them through edutainment and personal stories. Wavetable is a production studio that integrates a variety of creative experts and educators of learning and live entertainment. The company focuses on learning, discovery, and community-based projects. Wavetable helps brands, influencers, and IP owners uniquely leverage their connection to their fans and followers by developing live, community-driven learning experiences. Edutainment is a portmanteau of the word education and entertainment. The word describes educational resources and methods that also have an entertaining aspect. Recent trends like gamification, Web 3.0, and community may positively impact the spread of edutainment. Keeping your work engaging requires you to use different formats and modes for your activities and to switch between them regularly. To connect with members and their stories without getting too personal, you have to create conditions where people feel that they can enroll in the activity and conversation. Also, find common ground and use inclusive language for the other person.

Jenny Li Fowler, Director of Social Media Strategy at MIT, joins us in the next episode of The Community Corner Podcast. Jenny discusses the specific challenges in building a community at an educational institution. She also shares how her team at MIT thinks about community and social media and how they are adapting to changes in technology and the industry. MIT is one of the leading universities and global leader in science, research, technology, and education. Jenny provides consultation and strategy for any announcements, events, or campaigns at the institute level. She also manages social media channels. Social media management optimizes content for whichever channel it’s being posting on and targets the audience. Community management builds cohesive bonds within people, and it addresses its members. Social media helps the higher education community solidify and speak with it. Technological and innovative trends can engage positively with higher education communities and develop into something bigger. Try to familiarize yourself with the language of these innovations and use them to understand how they can be helpful.

Today, we’re joined by Nivi Achanta, the Founder and CEO of Soapbox Project. Nivi wears almost all hats associated with community engagement, content, and events. Today, she talks about how she built her community from scratch with diversity in mind and how she implements it into every stage of planning and programming. Soapbox is a media company that makes social impact easy for busy people. Keeping a community inclusive without being exclusive requires a set of filters. One of the primary filters is that if you don't understand a community's problem or concept, and if you're not willing to work at these intersections, it may not suit you. Building a diverse community requires a tactical approach to people you follow and interact with, representing a wide range of perspectives. You need the right tools to address different groups in your community. Focus on creating a diverse, inclusive, and safe space.

Today, we’re joined by Triin Ilves, Community Manager at Klaus. While Klaus is a customer success company, community is in everything they do. Triin manages Quality Tribe, their community for people interested in quality and customer success. Triin discusses how they make data-backed decisions to community programming and how they are inspiring their members to become advocates for their community. A community is a great resource when it comes to creating new content, getting partners on board, organising events, and different co-marketing activities. It makes sense to surround yourself and learn from the companies and the people who are acing their skills early on. Working with partners helps you come up with new ideas and can make your initial idea even better. This can lead you to build a better product in the future. Put some effort into spotting trends and what might be important for the community. Try to do things with your community members that could be beneficial, not only for them but for you as well. When it comes down to making sure that you have the right people, or doing events in an up-and-coming field, don't just focus on the buzzwords, but focus on the resources and tools you can use.

Today we have a special episode, Community Manager Appreciation Day, where our guests reveal what they are grateful for and proud of about their communities: Katie Ray, Head of Customer Community at Clari, shares her accomplishments of growth and engagement from her time managing the Saleshacker community. She also discusses her current work, hyper-growth, and engagement growth in the Clari community. Next, Diane Yuen, the new Community Manager at Alation, has extensive organic community experience after building her gaming community for seven years. Diane shares her story of taking on her first full-time community role. Jennifer Serrat, Associate Director of Community Engagement at IE University and Community Moderator at CMX, shares a story about some out-of-the-box thinking that led to the revival of her community in the middle of COVID. Kaleem McGill is the Community Manager at The Better Product Community powered by Innovatemap. He shares how he and his team audited and revamped their onboarding process for new members. And finally... Neha Agarwal, Head Community at Quora India, shares the strategy she and her team used to launch Spaces in Hindi.

Today, we’re joined by Ilker Akansel, Community Manager, Builder, and Strategist at ilkerakansel.com. Ilker details the importance of and differences between developer relations and developer communities. He also shares some of his experiences working in the community space and his predictions for the future. Ilker describes his company, named after himself, as a community strategy and management consultant service. Developer relations are nurturing mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and software developers. It is an organization-centric function, where you make sure that the developers around the organization have the best relationship in the interests of both the developers and the organization. Managing developer communities or a group of developers is much more community-oriented. Technically, they are all specialists in their craft forming a tech community to help each other. Communities are crucial for developers to speak with other developers. They can interact with them in these respects, share their ideas, and act to consult in problem-solving. Developer communities are converging fast into talent communities. Forming and being part of talent communities will give competitive advantages to organizations. Move into developing, curating, and managing talent communities. Look into new technologies and skills your community is interested in. Focus on upskilling, reskilling, and outskilling.

Today, we’re joined by Maxwell Lyons, a Community Manager at Course Hero. Maxwell shares how they drive engagement in their community, and how through a combination of feedback and data, they know what kind of programming their community wants. He also explains how going virtual has had a positive impact on the community. Course Hero is an online learning platform with over sixty million course-specific study resources for students to access worldwide. These resources consist of practice problems, study guides, test prep materials, etc. As a Community Manager, Maxwell manages thirty of their on-campus representatives with the Student Community team. The members of the community get various benefits. The community offers support to each other as they seek ways to grow student engagement and offer support to other students at schools around the world while on their learning journey. To drive engagement in the community, the team uses slack workspaces and advice channels, incentives, bonuses, specific events, and more. Though the community programs change, it's important to get feedback from on-campus reps, listen to their thoughts, be open to further changes, and adapt. Also, get the most out of the virtual experience by engaging with your community.

Today, we’re joined by Jan de Vries, Senior Community Engagement Manager at Mendix, an application development platform in a market called low code. It makes it easy for people to create apps visually instead of having to write code all day. You can just drag and drop, which makes it much more accessible, easier, and faster to build applications. It’s important for people to connect not just digitally but in person as well. Start by organizing the small group of people around you, understand them and their goals, and organize meetups with key people in the community. The eventual goal is to turn into a facilitator where you just share the plans and processes for other people to self-organize and conduct events. Make everything easily accessible so meetups can be done without attachment to specific time zones. Go to these meetups, connect with attendees, understand what they do in the industry and what brings them to the events. Find people or groups of people who can regularly conduct events. Help them adopt a group-learning mindset which is at the heart of building highly engaged communities.

Today, we’re joined by Nikki Thibodeau, Senior Community Operations Manager and Chair of the Women’s Employee Resource Group at Shopify, the powerful eCommerce platform. Addressing gender-diverse or racially-diverse groups is tough because it requires having some difficult and, sometimes, awkward workplace conversations. You want the right people to be there, but that also means you sometimes have to exclude the wrong people. It's really important for the success of our communities that we keep those who are not going to be helpful to those conversations out of those conversations. By having that space created at the very beginning - as Shopify does with “Empower Hour”, enables a real conversation to happen in a caring way. If you're not the right person to have the conversation with, step away and find the right person. Create your conversation safeguards and processes that you can refer to when stuck in difficult conversations.

Today, we’re joined by Willa Tellekson-Flash, Director of Community at Public.com, a platform that helps people become better investors. On Public, members can build a diverse portfolio of stocks, funds, and crypto, and ownership unlocks an experience of content and education, created by a million+ strong community of investors, creators and analysts. Use your community as a product of its own and elevate it as a part of your brand. The conversations in the community can form a great resource to create content. Document and track direct feedback and ideas from the community. You may not be able to implement every idea that comes from them. A community manager’s job is to make community members feel heard while being transparent about the likelihood of implementing their ideas. It’s important to make your members feel welcome in asking for help when they don’t know something. The job of the community team is to set ground rules that help establish trust among members and between individual members and the community itself.

Today, we’re joined by Laura Galbraith, Director of Community Impact at Vidyard, a video platform to help users create, manage, and optimize their video content with features for personalization and measurable video experiences. We all have an obligation, and we all have the privilege to give back to our communities in a very tangible way. If employees love the companies they work for, they will come forward and volunteer to help in various ways by leveraging their own communities. Having the executive team buy into the benefits of their community lays out the foundation and makes it easier to integrate the community into the rest of the company. Be open and responsive to new ideas from employees and other communities because, at the end of the day, a community that doesn’t respond to what members want is just a marketing forum. Statistically, if you have engaged employees, they're more likely to stay. If an employee volunteers in a leadership capacity, they're more likely to succeed as a leader within your organization. Start small with something you're familiar with - ideas such as product donations and volunteer time - and see where it takes you.

Today, we’re joined by David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX. The CMX Community recently launched its new set of values. These values are: • Be generous • Be ground-breaking • Be actively inclusive Community values are not the same as company values. Company values decide how your company does business. Community values define how community members - not necessarily the founders and managers but users of the company’s products/services - can interact with each other and create a supportive culture with communication as its base. These two sets of values should be aligned, but they do have to be independently defined. Hire a consultant for DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) to help translate your values through the DEI lens and make sure they’re future-ready. Collect ideas for values from your community management team, organize them into themes, take feedback from DEI consultants, and publish them as version one for the community to give you feedback. Take feedback from long-time members, moderators, and superfans in your community for the first round of revisions. Then take the second version of your values document to the rest of the broader collection of community members for their feedback. Your community members will embody the values, create the space, and essentially become the culture, and therefore, their voices must be heard. More of them will feel more invested in the community. Their feedback will improve your values into something that is more widely accepted and more accurate. Lead with these values during community registration, membership confirmation, and community events. Empower your members to report those who don’t comply with these values.

Today, we’re joined by Stephanie Louis, Senior Director, Community and Developer Programs at PegaSystems (Pega), a software company that crushes business complexity through intelligent automation while providing great customer service and experience. It's an open platform that comes with out-of-the-box solutions but also allows clients to expand on it. Communicating technology is a key responsibility of community managers in tech companies. Community is a product of your company, it’s not just a “sidecar”. It needs to be appreciated and managed like a product. Therefore, more team members are needed in individual roles for managing a community. They also need to help connect all internal departments (product, sales, marketing, and other teams) of the company involved in the community efforts. Internal programs help gamify, measure, track, and reward the contribution from the company’s teams to the community. Also consider qualitative metrics of contribution to the community when deciding on rewards for your members.

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 Tuvy Le, Program Manager, Community Content at GitHub, a website and cloud-based service that allows developers to store, manage, and control changes to their code. They’re most commonly known for hosting open source projects. As part of the GitHub Community team, Tuvy is currently focusing on content strategy. Community management efforts should start by building relationships with highly engaged members who consistently contribute to the community in their own way. These members help drive the community culture. This will lay a solid foundation that can then be scaled to further spread culture in the community. Goals and KPIs aside, true empowerment comes from learning what’s important to community members and helping them cultivate a robust community culture. Different types of people in the community have different content needs. The responsibility of figuring out these needs should eventually fall on the most engaged community members. It gives them more direct ownership and lets them take care of the community as more active participants in the process of community management.

Today, we’re joined by Roseli Ilano, Director of Community and Partnerships at Pop-Up Magazine Productions, a live magazine that creates multisensory experience events for stages, screens, and live audiences in theaters where nothing is recorded or ever produced to be played later online. Community events are a great way to create novel experiences for your audience and can lead to professional and personal connections. Organize a time at your event for face-to-face interaction with all contributors (if restrictions allow) so that they can directly address any questions or concerns. When passing on the responsibility to super fans, help them organize their own local version of your events and offer the full support of your teams. Community is also very different from marketing. Marketing is the one-way sharing of messages specific to a brand by the brand itself. A community helps the brand’s audience organize and provides a space for solving problems, finding great connections, and sharing ideas that help raise the profile of the brand’s products/services. A virtual community experience expands your reach and your community globally.

Today, we’re joined by Catherine Martinez, Senior Manager, Community Programs at ThoughtSpot, a modern analytics cloud company with a mission to create a more fact-driven world with easy-to-use analytics. Catherine’s focus this year is to build out programs that will bring a sense of belonging to the community and recognize and reward ThoughSpot’s brand advocates. User group leaders will set the stage for new users in the community and will be responsible for how the community adopts the culture you want them to adopt. Regardless of whether user group leaders come to you or you approach them for recruitment into your community, you need to know their intrinsic motivations and how they like to lead. The goal is to build a partnership during one-on-one sessions by setting expectations beforehand and indicating how you will support them through the process. Transparent communication with user group leaders in your community helps set the stage for achieving your sales goals at community events.

Today, Qaree Dreher, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bevy, turns the tables to interview our host Beth McIntyre to celebrate the first anniversary of The Community Corner Podcast. Bevy is the world's first community event engine to help build, grow, and scale your global community with community-led events. The focus of the industry - and on this podcast - has shifted from theoretical to managing community in practice. Imposter syndrome is rampant in this industry because there's no direct path from school to being a professional in community management. Community professionals have to be emotional to help build relationships and must represent the interests of the members to help drive the ROI of the community to business. Knowing you know more about your community better than anyone else when you walk into a room helps deal with imposter syndrome.

Today, we’re joined by Melanie Bond, Director of Community at Nanit, a high-tech baby monitoring system that makes the lives of new parents more manageable by connecting them to their child's development and well-being. A supportive community of parents who can relate to and/or help solve new parents’ problems can make them feel less alone. The advantage of starting a community from scratch - as opposed to inheriting or scaling an existing community - is that you can spend time talking to your potential members and collecting data to help create a community that users love engaging with. It’s better to launch a community in phases, let the user and/or team’s feedback drive its iterations, and ensure that your team and the rest of the organization have resources to support the community. The focus of a new community team should be to resolve customer tickets quickly (for customer success), spread brand awareness (or collect feedback), and create a smooth customer experience.

Today, we’re joined by two of the most prolific thought leaders in the community space, both working at Venafi. Jeff Hudson is the CEO, and Holly Firestone is their VP of Community. Venafi is the cybersecurity market leader in machine identity management and securing machine-to-machine connections and communications. This episode was recorded as a session during the CMX Summit 2021:Rise. To develop a good, positive foundation for community building, have a clear, well-structured set of values that help community managers invite members to subscribe. The kind of influence the community creates for a company cannot be bought through any amount of ads. It only works if the showrunners at the company truly care about the success of their customers and not about earning millions or making a multi-million-dollar exit. This is why Jeff recommends community leaders not to use charts, graphs, or presentations to secure buy-in from the executive team. Community is much more of a philosophy than it is marketing attribution; it touches everything. The next generation is millennials who want to be known for an identity that is unique to each individual while also being attached to a community. So give them an identity attached to your community and its values, not to your brand. Make internal OKRs (objectives and key results) across all departments visible to the community team. It gives them a chance to play a proactive role in the growth of your business. The community team can also be proactive and take steps to present these reports on their own with the best possible level of detail.

Today, we’re joined by Heather Newman, Principal PM Manager, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Community, DTP Engineering at Microsoft. She is a former Microsoft MVP for office apps and services and has worked in and around Microsoft since 2001 on the SharePoint team. She has produced thousands of events, campaigns, and experiences in the high tech and entertainment industries via her marketing consulting company “Creative Maven”. Heather is also the host of “The Mavens Do it Better” podcast, an interview-style show where she shares the stories of extraordinary experts in their fields. A career in community management can be quite adventurous if you can relate to problems of a specific group, are willing to help them out, and have a “can-do” attitude. Screen fatigue is a real consequence of moving all (or most) events online and people are getting even more burned out by investing their energy into many projects at once. People are getting rid of toxic connections in their community while simultaneously doubling down on connections with people they truly enjoy being with. Building a sustainable community for your business is as simple as asking your community members their opinions, listening to their answers, and making decisions with them (NOT for them!).

Today, we’re joined by Matt Laurenceau, Senior Manager, Online Communities at BMC Software, who help their customers run and reinvent their businesses with open, scalable, and modular solutions to complex IT problems. Customer success is a product of engagement from customers, partners, and your employees. To find out what new programs you can start for your community members, source product ideas from the community and give them complete visibility of the product development journey. If you delay the development of certain ideas of the community, make them feel comfortable with your decision; they value transparency over prompt delivery of their ideas. Make the community the easiest way to do business with your company and watch leads and revenue flow in through referrals from active community members.

Today, Ann-Marie Pawlicki Dinkel, Senior Event Manager at Bevy and CMX, joins us in the final part of a four-part interview series to give us a recap of what happened - and the lessons learned - at the 2021 CMX Summit: Rise. The participation and live engagement at the event made it a roaring success. In-person events in Spain and Nigeria were key highlights of the summit. Participants shared about the event on social media to get their hands on CMX Summit merchandise, which was awarded during a live winner declaration. Branded merchandise giveaway is a great way to get social media attention for your event because people love receiving branded gifts. Seth Godin’s insightful talk with David Spinks was the most popular talk at the summit, and the backyard chicken event was many people’s favorite activity. Everyone loved the chicken emoji so much that it even became an event mascot. To conduct an event at this great of a scale, event professionals must combine great research and meticulous planning with flexibility and self-belief.

Today we’re joined by Nicole Burch, Director of Community Engagement at Athennian, a software that helps to empower modern legal and tax teams so that they do not feel like underdogs in their office. Listening to the voice of your customer is the key to building software that those customers love and want to support. At Athennian, their support team is composed of paralegals to assist their paralegal and tax team customers. Community managers need to represent all aspects of the community. Therefore, they must be exposed to different areas of the business and be willing to collaborate with different teams in the organization. Start small and bring online communities to spaces where your audience seeks the most participation. Personalize (with or without automation) at the individual user level to make customers feel special, and make sure to express your gratitude for them joining the community. Invest in education programs by working with educational institutions to build a whole new generation of fans for your software. Issuing certificates that interns and learners can show off on social media is a great way to build brand exposure.

Today, we’re joined by Mike Rizzo, Founder of the MO Pros, a growing community of wicked smart Marketing Operations Professionals who love to learn and collaborate. When people find a community that they truly identify with, it gives them a feeling of relief that they are not alone. They don’t have to struggle to fit into a different community where nobody understands them. Professionals within a community can come from all walks of life to learn from each other. A community is a people-made product because it’s not directed by one project manager at the top or by a single goal. Your company’s community-led growth model must add nuance to the “community” buzzword by asking members of that community what is valuable to them, what problems need solving, and what problems you can/cannot solve. It’s a symbiotic relationship with your community members. Measure community not by revenue but by the value you create. You can think of a community having its own NPS (Net Promoter Score). Track metrics with specific goals and use your tracking sheets to advise your growth trajectories.

Today we’re joined by Jillian Bejtlich, Director of Community at Zapier, a platform that automates integration between multiple SaaS or non-SaaS platforms. Zapier eliminates the need for users to spend time dealing with code, and platforms having to manage partnerships/integrations with multiple platforms at once. Jillian’s team helps enable access to information for its partners, browsers, and users. They also recently took over Zapier documentation. Community managers can come from various careers, but they must be willing to work in the “happy middle” to enable synergy between the company and its customers. Being a data nerd helps in being an effective community manager who can help focus on narratives and find trends, serve content proactively, and map available data from the community with organizational goals. Customizing narratives according to users is also a crucial part of managing a community.

Today, we’re joined by Corey Andress, Head of Global Community at 2K (a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive), a video game publisher that manages some of the most creative, respected, and premium brands in games today. Modern gaming community management is about going to where the gamers are by using video hubs, video game influencers, and gaming community platforms such as Discord or Twitch. When looking to scale large global communities, use localization so that you have the leverage to create trust in non-English-speaking communities. Use these communities to listen to ALL types of players and not just the “loudest voices”. Export insights from these communities to inform the decision-making of your business and product teams. Make this feedback scalable with the help of social listening tools for both the number and different types of users.

Today, we’re joined by Lauren Clevenger, Senior Manager, Community, and Developer Relations at BigCommerce, who’s on a mission to help merchants and retailers sell more at every stage of their growth. When you have a diverse community, think of them and manage them as sub-communities with dedicated members from your team. Knowing where your community fits into your customer’s journey is crucial to designing programs and discovering the content needs of specific sub-communities. Discover what your community means to your business and where it fits in the organization. Do this by finding allies from different teams that are impacted by your community. Be proactive about generating community management ideas and have your own “north star” for how you drive business goals and communicate them. This way, you can have your own identity as the community management team, outside of serving internal teams.

Today, we’re once again joined by Ann-Marie Pawlicki Dinkel, Event Manager at Bevy and CMX. This is the third of four interviews with Ann-Marie about Hybrid Events. In today’s pandemic situation, where conditions and safety guidelines often fluctuate weekly, you should build hybrid event plans for all possibilities and at different levels so that the most practical plan can get approved. These tricky conditions also present an important opportunity to learn to be patient and learn your limitations as an events organizer. Have a process and believe in it because conditions will keep changing, and we’re far from out of the woods with this pandemic. This year’s CMX Summit: Rise is projected to be the biggest CMX Summit event yet. There will be a whole gamut of speakers, with a 42% diversity goal, across eleven tracks. The hybrid event will feature A global leaderboard and giveaway for the book “Business of Belonging” by CMX Founder David Spinks A post-event happy hour in San Francisco with food, beverages, and fun activities so that attendees can interact with each other and share real-life experiences once again Watch parties worldwide with a strong focus on conducting them safely

Today, we’re joined by Ben Winn, Community and Events Manager at Catalyst, a fast-growing customer success platform. At Catalyst, Ben has laid the foundation of community with a recent push for internal audiences. Brand launch communications with unique ideas that customers can associate with your company to excite those passionate about the product. This makes the idea more shareable. At Catalyst, this means communicating in a more funny and quirky manner, which customers find engaging. You can use marketing leads or other metrics to measure the success of a community, but having the trust of your key stakeholders helps you make long-term decisions that may not have an immediate payoff. Community helps create value for other people, builds social capital, and builds brands. This brand leads to demand, and the community becomes a powerful “demand generation” tool. Start a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) as early as you can with the goal of learning and offer incentives for CAB members to provide their input.

Today, we’re joined by Sam Jacobs, Founder, and CEO at Pavillion. How to approach sales and marketing (or any other job) effectively at the C-level is changing rapidly and becoming more complex every year. Pavilion is a community-based initiative that supports executives in this journey through self-actualization tools/resources and community-powered products/services. Using the same question periodically to record NPS is a great way to track how customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction progresses. Consequently, it can optimize business and revenue by persuading customers to use products/services with high NPS. Train participants around a core set of values to create an inviting atmosphere where lurkers feel free to ask questions and gradually become active participants. However, you must be ready for a churn of participants that don’t fit your values or aren’t coachable into that system.

Today, we’re once again joined by Ann-Marie Pawlicki Dinkel, Event Manager @ Bevy & CMX. This is the second of four interviews with Ann-Marie about Hybrid Events. Attendees of the CMX Summit are playfully called “Summiteers”, which are mountaineers climbing to the summit of a mountain. This event will be a hybrid of both virtual and in-person events. It will include a virtual conference component, global in-person watch parties, virtual networking, and an in-person component in San Francisco or a local area. Post-pandemic pricing quotes given by vendors will be higher than usual as many vendors have huge volumes of orders while trying to recover from pandemic losses. So, while virtual events are cost-effective by nature, hybrid events won’t be easy on the pocket as two events are essentially being planned. This can be quite overwhelming if a single person is managing both. Virtual components of events are here to stay as people now see the use of them. Event managers will use the educational content as promotional clips in their event marketing plans.

Today, we’re joined by Maddie Johannsen, a Senior Podcast Program Manager. In this episode, Maddie discusses the community, how it inspires its members, and how their discussions spark content and product ideas for the company. Recognition of engaged users is important, regardless of their level in the community. Perks can include direct participation in product feedback sessions, keynote and guest speaking opportunities, and community badges. Maddie’s team rewards their superusers with podcast appearances. This way, the superusers get public recognition for their efforts, while members get to know their superusers better. These and other efforts helped her community at Alteryx win the Community of the Year award at the 2021 Community Industry Award ceremony. She also discusses incorporating community voice in company efforts and providing opportunities to advance members’ careers and expand their networks. This better manages the member experience and aligns the company to the needs of the community. Too many features? She suggests making the UI more intuitive, more personalized, and less confusing. Maddie would love to sit down and chat with Sofia Rodriguez Mata of Venafi, a former guest on the podcast.

Today, we’re joined by Ann-Marie Pawlicki Dinkel, Event Manager @ Bevy & CMX. This is the first of four interviews with Ann-Marie about Hybrid Events. For Ann-Marie, hybrid events are bridging the engagement gap with technology, taking the past and the present, and innovating the future. To plan your hybrid event strategy, start by documenting the event brief clearly as a single source of information across all coordinating and participating teams. Develop this brief based on the event’s specific needs, lessons from previous events, and coordinate with contributing teams. Open-mindedness, a determination to host the best hybrid event possible, having a thick skin, and developing patience help event managers manage their stress in these uncertain, rapidly-changing times.

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 Phoebe Shin Venkat, Former Director, Community Strategy at Okta, an online access management platform with over ten thousand B2B customers. Phoebe believes that every community manager has their own style based on their unique experience and how they choose to help and support people. She also advocates a bottom-up approach of stakeholder buy-in that leverages the reach of early internal adopters of the idea of community. Phoebe lists empathy, data-backed storytelling, and flexibility toward plans as great qualities for people to add to your community management team.

Today, we’re joined by David Spinks, Co-Founder at CMX and VP of Community at Bevy who’ll give us the run-down on CMX Summit Rise: 2021. In this episode, you’ll learn about the brave origins of CMX Summit and the pandemic-sized challenges experienced along the way. Community has taken the business world by storm and this year’s summit will ingrain the community in business for the long run. Participants in the CMX summit find a community where they don’t have to explain their job anymore because they’re among other community management professionals. David and Beth discuss the meaning behind this year’s theme RISE, the Community Career Path, and Community Culture and Innovation. CMX Summit Rise will be completely FREE with a 1-day workshop on August 31st and a 2-day conference on September 1st and 2nd. Join community professionals from around the world and register for your free tickets here: https://bit.ly/3vEW76k

Today, we’re joined by Molly Masterson, Senior Program Manager, Community & Product Insights at Okta, an online identity management platform with over ten thousand B2B customers. Molly helped Okta identify the criteria and characteristics of people to nominate into their superusers program, which will invite community-based nominations next year. She also helps the Okta product team monitor customer sentiment and gather feedback based on important criteria which then moves forward to help streamline product workflows. Her contribution to the overhaul of Okta’s customer feedback platform called Okta Ideas helps alleviate customer concerns around not being heard.

Today, we’re joined by Sofia Rodriguez Mata, Director of Community at Venafi, a cybersecurity company that protects machine identity and ensures safe machine-to-machine connections and communication. Sofia talks about her career growth in the community space and how Venafi realizes the power and the energy of their community. Sofia also describes the challenges she has faced in creating the Venafi community and how communication with management can help make things easier for community builders.

Today, we’re joined by Maddie Bertschmann, Senior Customer Marketing Manager, Global SMB at Braze, a fast-growing B2B SaaS platform delivering powerful, relevant, and personalized customer experiences in real-time. She describes how soft launches and internal enablement in the pre-launch phase helped their Slack-based customer community channel, Bonfire, grow to 500 members on its launch day. Maddie describes the tools they use at Braze to drive automated registration and reengagement inside and outside of the Slack channel. She also shares how different types of events helped foster community engagement when people were overloaded with virtual meetings during the pandemic.

Today, we’re joined by Andreia Tulcidás, Community Engagement Manager at OutSystems, an integrated app development platform with AI-powered tools and a cloud-native platform. Andreia talks about how OutSystems nurtures its community and cultivates super users to lead their community. She also shares actionable advice on creating a super user program using a purpose-oriented model focused on achieving business goals. Andreia fondly shares stories about how incentivizing and collaborating with these super users, who naturally love to contribute, helps them feel more included and in turn enriches the community.

Today, we’re joined by Logan Johnston, Community Manager, Community Partnerships Team at Facebook. In this episode, Logan describes how their team at Facebook identifies, trains, and supports community builders to maximize their social impact. He also shares which community metrics Facebook monitors and how they empower group managers with learning resources, tips, and tricks. Whilst an increasingly larger number of brands are beginning to realize the benefit of creating and engaging in communities, Logan shares that the true power of community in the creator economy is yet to be realized. Logan then goes onto cover what community builders can do to keep their communities engaged beyond video calls.

Today, we’re joined by Alyssa Vigil, Community Manager at Code Academy which is a learning platform for coding that enables greater economic opportunity to curious learners and masters of coding. Alyssa uses fun-filled metaphors to describe her team’s “hands-off” approach with their self-managing community of volunteer leaders that share a common goal. While the number of community participants are important, their focus is also on tracking metrics that help them actively support learners of all levels. She also describes challenges to community management on disparate platforms.

Today, we’re joined by Emilie Dellecker, Co-Founder and Community Builder at FoodHack. Emilie shares FoodHack’s journey from a single chapter community in Switzerland into a community that empowers food tech entrepreneurs globally. Emilie also shares how FoodHack overcomes language barriers and how they protect their brand’s values. She stresses on empowering local community chapters to have their identity & autonomy while simultaneously ensuring uniform brand identity for FoodHack across all chapters.

Today we’re joined by Whitney Raver, Director at EnrollBoom. On the show today, Whitney shares the biggest challenges she experienced whilst monetizing her community, the intersection between community and marketing and why she personally interviews each new community member. Whitney also shares how she limits churn, who in the community world she would love to take for lunch (not who you would expect!) and how Whitney uses a free Facebook community to build relationships with members.

Today we’re joined by Stephen van der Heijden, VP of Growth at OfferZen. On the show today, Stephen shares the nuances he faces whilst building a community for developers, how he proves that value of this community and who in the world of community he would love to take for lunch. Stephen also shares how the OfferZen community helps them build trust with external parties, putting developers (their community members) first and why we’ve lost our ability to have horizontal, peer to peer conversations.

Today we’re joined by Victoria Cumberbatch, Community Manager at Osmosis.org. On the show today, Victoria shares how she is currently managing her community of students, the metrics monitored and how community churn is managed. Victoria also shares the difference between micro and high-growth communities, the power of delegation to community members and why she doesn’t take meetings on Wednesday’s. Finally, Victoria shares how she incorporates balance into her life to avoid burnout.

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’re joined by Erin Halper, CEO of The Upside: a community for consultants. On the show today, Erin shares with us the origin story of The Upside, how she was able to build a business from this community and what to focus on in order to scale. Erin left the 9 to 5 when she was around 30 years old and practiced as a consultant for seven years. Erin noticed an increasing number of professionals also leaving their corporate jobs. She decided to build a community to support these people and turned that into The Upside!

Viki Cumberbatch is our guest today, she is the Community Manager at Osmosis. On today’s episode, we will cover how she runs a community of medical professionals and the changes she’s had to make during COVID, protecting your mental health as a community manager and how they found events their community loved and scaled them virtually while still keeping a very personal touch.

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.

Kelsey Bourque is the senior customer marketing manager at Adobe and runs their user group programs. Kelsey began working at Marketo, which was acquired by Adobe in 2018. In this episode, she talks about how the acquisition affected her community programs, how they continue to drive positive impact and share some of the metrics she's tracking to prove the value of her community.

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.

Today we have Michele Heyward on the show, she founded PositiveHire, a community for women of colour in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Today, we talk about what it’s like building a space for Only’s, and how to instill hope and a sense of community among a diverse group of people.

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.

Ann-Marie Pawlicki Dinkel is our next guest, she is the Event Manager at CMX! She truly is the wizard behind the scenes when it comes to all our HQ events at CMX. If you attended CMX Global in April, or CMX Summit in October, or the CMX Winter Soiree in December, then you’ve felt the magic! Today, we talk about the planning process when it comes to virtual events - how to create an event, how to make it engaging, and how to make an impact on your community.

I’m excited to have our next guest Chris Anderson who is Director of Community Learning & Love at Guru. We cover a lot of ground on this episode, we talk about how they turned there conference into an event series that lasted all summer, how he chose which business metric to prove community success with and how they are taking their C2C events virtual until they can bring them back to local cities post COVID. Who is this episode great for? B2B, starting and scaling, C2C community builders What’s the biggest takeaway? Right now many things are canceled because of COVID, especially large in-person conferences. Chris showed that you can take that content and break it down into an event series that can last for weeks. This is a great option for any community that had a large conference to actually utilize the content they prepared and not make people sit through a multi-day online conference.

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 Rachael McBrearty who is the Chief Customer Officer at Lean Data. In today’s interview, we talk about why she has advocated so much for community as a C-Level Executive. We’ll cover how she aligns the community mission with the company’s purpose, their large conference they are taking online and how to utilize your community to help create an entirely new category. Who is this episode great for? In-person community events (going virtual), early-stage community leaders, B2B communities What’s the biggest takeaway? Use a community to start your own category and movement. C-Level executives are now seeing community as a way to completely build and own their own category that other companies will now be able to encroach upon because of the new category being tied to the brand.

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.

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.

Chris Massey, Product Lead at Mind the Product, runs their product community. It’s a space that helps to facilitate questions and connections between product managers. In this episode, Chris shares his go to models, and failsafe ways to figure out which metrics to measure, in order to track the successes and challenges of his community.

Tessa Kriesel who is Head of Developer Community at Twitter is our guest on today’s episode. Tessa is tasked with engaging with a community of developers, which comes with its own set of challenges. Luckily, Tessa uses what she calls the 3 step model to building trust! In today’s episode, she shares what this process looks like and why building trust is so important in any community.

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.

Bridget Sauer who is the Senior Content & Customer Programs Manager at Atlassian is our guest today. In her interview, we talk about User Generated Content! She speaks about the UGC programs she’s created, the strategies she has implemented, and how these programs meet both Atlassian’s business goals and their user’s needs.

We've been doing this podcast for over 2 years, we've interviewed many of the people who have created the largest C2C Communities on the planet. Today we are welcoming a new host! Curious to hear who it is, play to find out!

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.

Welcome to our 50th episode! Since this is our 50th episode we wanted to do something special, this interview from Startup Grind Global 2020 is with the cofounder and CEO of Reddit Steven Huffman. We dove into some really unique perspectives we haven’t talked about before like what is the soul of community, and trying to figure out what a “healthy” community is beyond basic metrics and of course how the largest online community looks at building C2C communities. Too Long; Didn’t Listen 2:28m- The way Steve looks at community today is a group of people with a soul. Instead of approaching it with the view of a product builder he approaches it as an anthropologist and trying to understand the people that make up that community rather than optimize for vanity metrics. 8:24m- Reddit now has 100,000 active communities and Steve talks about what other metrics are actually meaningful for a healthy community. He has looked at time on site, votes, comments, length of comments but they are constantly evaluating what a “healthy, interesting community” is internally so they aren’t just chasing a number and can actually achieve that. 21:10m- When he watched other platforms that are also roughly “community” based in being social networks blow past Reddit, he realized they are based on different values. Whereas instagram is looking at monthly active users through vehicles like influencers, Reddit is based around quality discussion which inherently lends itself to less growth. So focus on their on values not growing as fast made sense and that focus also kept users happy.

Viki Cumberbatch is our guest today, she is the Community Manager at Osmosis. On today’s episode, we will cover how she runs a community of medical professionals and the changes she’s had to make during COVID, protecting your mental health as a community manager and how they found events their community loved and scaled them virtually while still keeping a very personal touch.

There’s nothing that brings a community together like a shared language, our next guest Hugo Macedo helps run a global community around language and translation. Hugo is the VP of Community at Unbabel. In today’s episode, we will talk about how he implemented a community NPS score, improving product and marketing with community and how he proves the business case for community through reduced acquisition cost and churn. Who is this episode great for? B2B, starting and scaling, online community builders What’s the biggest takeaway? Being able to create a community from the beginning with the intention of actually fostering a loving environment and also making the work tie back to business goals are both extremely important. You can create a place where people can actually grow together and succeed in business goals without hurting either of those endeavors.

Our guest Erin Wayne is Director of Community and Creator Marketing at Twitch. She has worked at Twitch for over 6 years, she started off managing their partnership with Minecraft and is now Head of Community. We explore how a company with such an extremely active and passionate online community was able to bring that to real life with their C2C program!

I’m excited to have our next guest Chris Anderson who is Director of Community Learning & Love at Guru. We cover a lot of ground on this episode, we talk about how they turned there conference into an event series that lasted all summer, how he chose which business metric to prove community success with and how they are taking their C2C events virtual until they can bring them back to local cities post COVID. Who is this episode great for? B2B, starting and scaling, C2C community builders What’s the biggest takeaway? Right now many things are canceled because of COVID, especially large in-person conferences. Chris showed that you can take that content and break it down into an event series that can last for weeks. This is a great option for any community that had a large conference to actually utilize the content they prepared and not make people sit through a multi-day online conference.

Emily Fang joins us on the show today, she is the Community & Growth Lead at KrASIA. Previously, She worked in community for Google and was the Community & Events Manager for OmniSci. On today’s episode, starting a community from scratch and taking C2C events virtual, and how to build relationships. Who is this episode great for? Online community, early-stage community leaders, Media companies What’s the biggest takeaway? There are different rules both culturally and otherwise in different areas of the world. Right now, several countries in Asia like Singapore have been able to keep COVID-19 under control and can now have small meetings with a few people. Being able to take advantage of that now and adding the virtual event component could make for big wins long term for C2C communities operating in Asia.

Our next guest Rachael McBrearty who is the Chief Customer Officer at Lean Data. In today’s interview, we talk about why she has advocated so much for community as a C-Level Executive. We’ll cover how she aligns the community mission with the company’s purpose, their large conference they are taking online and how to utilize your community to help create an entirely new category. Who is this episode great for? In-person community events (going virtual), early-stage community leaders, B2B communities What’s the biggest takeaway? Use a community to start your own category and movement. C-Level executives are now seeing community as a way to completely build and own their own category that other companies will now be able to encroach upon because of the new category being tied to the brand.

I’m excited to have our next guest Nora Johnson who is Events & Community Manager at Modern Sales Pros. On today’s episode, we will dive deep into how to prove your community events are successful by tying back to business goals, adapting your C2C events with COVID and how they grew to almost 19k members despite being invite only. Who is this episode great for? In-person community events (going virtual), mid-stage community leaders, B2B communities What’s the biggest takeaway? Being extremely intentional with who you bring into your community and making it invite-only as well as restricting people outside of the field could actually be a major catalyst for growth. In Modern Sales Pros, they do not let SDR’s or AE’s join the community to maintain the safe space and

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!

Coworking spaces were one of the communities hit hardest by COVID-19 leaving them to completely reinvent almost everything about their business and community. Our guest today, Sal Lucatero, was put to the test when it came to finding ways to still add value to members who could no longer attend their in-person C2C events. He adapted their NPLH festival to be completely virtual with creative workarounds like sending food from vendors, having a dance party virtually, adding in interaction that possible online. These things actually ADDED to the experience instead of taking it strictly online, making the event a huge success. Who is this episode great for? In-person community events, mid-stage community leaders, B2B communities What’s the biggest takeaway? Don’t just put your existing C2C events online, how can you add to the experience? Is there a way to send food or other items to attendees? Can you involve more engagement through things like polls and breakout rooms? Can you invite a DJ or other musician? Re-think every aspect of your event to find ways to make it stand out in a sea of zoom events.

Next on the show is Claire Smith who is the Senior Community Manager at the world’s largest online learning platform for higher education, Coursera. She previously led community experience at e-Commerce platform, Storenvy, but she started building her first community - a World of Warcraft Guild - back in 2006. We discuss why Coursera has been focusing on retention over acquisition in light of COVID-19, how she pivoted when an initial program launch didn’t work out as planned, and how community works in tandem with customer success when it comes to an education product. Take a listen!

Dino Kuckovic, Director of Community & Events at Falcon.io, stopped by this week to discuss his events strategy working at the social media SaaS platform. He shared with us how he organically built a community from scratch, how he makes community a company-wide focus with marketing and sales, and how he keeps his event attendees coming back for more.

Emma Irwin joins us on the podcast from Mozilla Corporation. She is an Open Source and Community Strategist there and heads up diversity and inclusion strategy development for their open source projects and their communities. Prior to her role at Mozilla, she worked at Benetech as a Developer Community Manager. On today’s episode, we discuss Emma’s strategies for maintaining diversity and inclusion in the open source community and specifically why it’s so important in the tech industry.

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.

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.

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.

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Our next guest Scott Dodds is a Customer Enablement Leader and Community Strategist! He’s had a historic career in the community industry, starting off launching Khoros’ first community, the Lithosphere and then went on to build community and engagement at Zenefits, LivePerson and Box. In today’s episode, we will cover why SaaS is driving community growth, getting early adopters, measuring ROI and so much more!

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.

This has been a tumultuous time for community builders, especially C2C community builders. Everyone has had to turn on a dime and adapt to this new world and figure out how we can still give people the community experiences they know and love. Bevy has not only raised a $15M Series B round but has also built out an entirely new virtual experience that goes beyond the basic webinars. Just like in person C2C events the new tools will allow your brands biggest ambassadors to host potentially thousands of evens a year, not just one big conference. Even better, this interview was recorded on Bevy's new tool! We are joined by Ryan Smith from Qualtrics and Ryan Sweeney from Accel who have both led this round, they will share why they believe in Bevy's concept of community and how they see Bevy helping community builders everywhere create world-class communities.

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!

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.

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.

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!

Former VP of Community at Salesforce Erica Kuhl joins us on this episode, Erica started the Trailblazer at Salesforce which has become the gold standard of both online and offline community. This is one of those episodes that you need to relisten to with a notepad because there are that many strategies we covered. We will talk about the key to growing an in-person community, building a community team, the best metrics for community and so much more. Take a listen!

Welcome to our 50th episode! Since this is our 50th episode we wanted to do something special, this interview from Startup Grind Global 2020 is with the cofounder and CEO of Reddit Steven Huffman. We dove into some really unique perspectives we haven’t talked about before like what is the soul of community, and trying to figure out what a “healthy” community is beyond basic metrics and of course how the largest online community looks at building C2C communities.

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.

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.

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.

Our guest Erin Wayne is Director of Community and Creator Marketing at Twitch. She has worked at Twitch for over 6 years, she started off managing their partnership with Minecraft and is now Head of Community. We explore how a company with such an extremely active and passionate online community was able to bring that to real life with their C2C program!

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 had a chat with Celina Zamora, who is the Senior Community Manager at Atlassian. Atlassian is known for its products like Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence. Today, Atlassian is serving over 135,000 customers across the globe.

Our next guest is Jeff Roe who is an Associate Strategist at Khoros. Prior to that Jeff built his social media and community skills working for brands like 2U, graze.com and Sirius XM. On today’s episode, we will cover what a C2C program looks like from the volunteer’s perspective, launching a community, metrics for SaaS communities and so much 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.

Today WordPress is powering over 60 million websites, and it is the most popular CMS in the world. It is being used by one third of the internet. This has created a global community that includes business owners, developers, digital marketers, students and more, who are all contributing to its Open source project. What is both impressive and astonishing is that this community is closely knitted together and connects through locally organized, in-person community events known as WordCamp. Here participants mingle with each other over one thing – their shared love of WordPress and open source. We are lucky to have with us Andrea Middleton from Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Andrea is part of a team that includes fourteen individuals who help WordPress community organizers. They are offering these organizers planning support for events, connect the community and contribute to the WordPress project. Her role is specifically focused on these in-person community events, meaning she is the best person to share with us how this all works. With Andrea, we will get a complete walkthrough of how WordPress has today 700 groups across the world since their first community event back in 2006 which was Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic. Together, we will trace back how Automattic ensured these communities were fostered by offering them support from full-time professionals dedicated towards these community events and gatherings. The biggest challenge here is obvious: how do you bring together so many diverse communities together and ensure the events are engaging and interesting? Andrea shares with us how at WordPress.com and Automattic the goal is to offer guidance, training and freedom for anyone that wants to host these events in their local community, creating events expressive of their localities. It’s a classic “bottoms up” approach where organizers are supported by WordPress while given freedom to do what they want to do: to bring WordPress enthusiasts together, inspire people to contribute to the Open source project and encourage participants to do more with WordPress. With over 2,000 volunteers and organizers all working independently, in coherence with Andrea’s team, WordPress has truly achieved something wonderful: a community of individuals that not only love WordPress but are working to make it better.

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!

Our next guest Scott Dodds is a Customer Enablement Leader and Community Strategist! He’s had a historic career in the community industry, starting off launching Khoros’ first community, the Lithosphere and then went on to build community and engagement at Zenefits, LivePerson and Box. In today’s episode, we will cover why SaaS is driving community growth, getting early adopters, measuring ROI and so much more!

Our next guest is Max Rothery, the VP of Community at Finimize. Previously, he lead Innovation and Transformation at the private bank SocGen which gave him a deep understanding of how the financial system works. In today’s episode, we are going to cover how to tell your community’s story, leveraging your user base for your events, metrics for success and much more.

Tessa Krissel is the Developer Outreach Manager at Pantheon and is incredible at creating normal users into passionate advocates. We broke down how she is building, scaling and measuring the growth of her community while making sure she is giving value back to that community. Tessa took a standalone slack group and transformed it into the “Pantheon Heroes” which focus on giving back to and lifting up Pantheon’s community. She explained it’s all about relationships when it comes to developer outreach but building the platform for having that relationship is key since you can’t personally chat with 1000’s of people a day. Here is a breakdown of some of the most effective methods that Tessa used in her program to grow the community:  User Missions- Each user decides how they want to contribute with “missions”, each “mission” is based around a certain area and members can suggest new ones that don’t exist yet. This gives each member a “role” essentially, whereas before you might not know what to post about you now have a topic to help take the mental load off of contributing. Points- They have gamified their contributions by offering points to people who contribute to that community. The community can then use these points to buy things like shirts, pantheon sites, access to the team and more. In terms of metrics, Tessa keeps a close eye on the Users, Missions, and Influence. More specifically she looks at For Users they look at both retention and participation in the Pantheon Heroes platform. Within the missions metric, they track the points-based system. Behind the scenes, they have values that associate to specific mission categories that help them better understand when missions are helping to grow revenue & retention on the Pantheon platform. And the final metric for the Heroes program is Influence. This metric digs into their influence outside of their communities. They work to break down how valuable it is to Pantheon is a user posts on a blog, social media or elsewhere about them. They don’t care how many followers you have, per se, they care more about the engagement of your followers & audience.

Serena Snoad is today’s guest, she is the Online Community Manager at Alzheimer's Society. She has been a community professional for 11 years and she helps run the CMX Connect Chapter in London!. Serena shares how she runs a huge community team, gets budget, creates scalable systems and tells a heartwarming story about a woman with Alzheimer’s finding a support network.

Get ready for our next guest Emily Snowdon who is the Head of Operations at Product Hunt, which was acquired by AngelList! Emily’s story is interesting, she started off as a consultant but was brought onto the community team full time to ultimately be promoted to Head of Operations. We will talk about her rise to Head of Operations, how they keep a massive community growing and so much more.

Erick Linares got his start working for FitBit where he helped manage a community of over 800,000 users. Now Erick is at Pandora and had the unique case of launching Pandora’s entire community program in September of 2019. We will talk about what he learned launching a community for a well-established company, how to create superuser programs, increasing engagement, tracking success and so much more. Take a listen!

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!

Today's guest is Mike Porath, Founder and CEO of The Mighty. The Mighty is the largest digital health community in the world and this recording is from his talk at CMX Summit. Not only does Mike share how The Mighty grew to 3 million members with zero marketing spend, he also tells one of the most inspiring stories we’ve ever heard about starting a community.

Sarah Leary, the Cofounder of NextDoor, joins us for today's episode. NextDoor is a social network for neighborhoods. This recording is from her talk with David Spinks at CMX Summit. Sarah will share NextDoor’s story and the tactics behind how they launched a community in 94% of US neighborhoods. Yes you heard that right, 94%. She talks about how they got their first users on the ground, recruited extremely committed local leaders, and how they scaled the community.

IndieHackers is a community that helps developers by sharing the strategies and even revenue numbers behind successful software projects. Courtland Allens is the founder of IndieHackers and joins us on today’s episode on how he built a community with tens of thousands of people from scratch. To start Courtland got inspiration looking through the popular site Hacker News, a site run by startup incubator Y Combinator. He found a community called Nomad List that served as an inspiration, instead of showing you where to live Courtland’s community showed you how to build successful software projects. Courtland built the site himself, he knew that having a unique site and a great user experience would stand out. Even before he finished building everything he had brilliant ways of testing what features people would want. For example, before he built a forum he put a tab that said “forum” and then had an email subscribe option to join the forum when it was live. That got enough traction for him to prioritize him building it out. There were lots of things that didn’t scale but helped, when he was interviewing people for his blog he would send hundreds of cold emails every week to try get people to share how they built their business, with revenue numbers! For people that are just starting their community, he shared that the work might seem daunting at first but once you get in and actually begin it’s not as hard as you think. Also, while it might seem like a lot of manual work that could be automated or outsourced the depth of understanding you will gain from being so in the weeds of the community, at least at the beginning, will help you, in the long run, know how to build and care for your community.

Former VP of Community at Salesforce Erica Kuhl joins us on this episode, Erica started the Trailblazer at Salesforce which has become the gold standard of both online and offline community. This is one of those episodes that you need to relisten to with a notepad because there are that many strategies we covered. We will talk about the key to growing an in-person community, building a community team, the best metrics for community and so much more. Take a listen!

Jennifer Dulski has had a legendary career, she has worked in senior positions for Yahoo, Google, Change.org and was previously the Head of Groups & Community at Facebook . Not to mention founding DealMaps which was acquired by Google. She recently launched her new book “Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter” which breaks down how to build a movement around your cause and community. In this interview we talk about just that and her favorite example of people and brands that have created a movement, how it applies to community professionals and so much more. Take a listen!

Kim Scott has changed not just the entire tech industry but work culture globally. She is the author of the best selling book “Radical Candor” which pioneered a new way to communicate by caring personally but also challenging directly. She’s had a legendary career which inspired the book. At Google she led the AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick Online Sales efforts, then she went to Apple to develop their leadership seminar. In this interview we break down how to use Radical Candor to get resources for community, the art of storytelling, her own community around Radical Candor and so much more.

We have an exciting announcement for the month of October, tune in to hear what it is!

Continuing our streak of having decision-makers on our podcast, with us today is Max Altschuler. Max is the founder of SalesHacker which was acquired by Outreach, where he is now the VP of Marketing. Max was also the cofounder of CMX which was acquired by Bevy. Max has a deep knowledge and background in creating communities. We are going to talk about the growing trend of communities getting acquired, how can you start a community from scratch, what to focus on when creating value in a community to have an impact on a company’s core product and much more.

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.

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.

Joining us in this episode of C2C Podcast is Julie Perino, the Senior Director of Customer Marketing at Marketo and Adobe. Marketo is one of the foremost marketing automation software and was acquired by Adobe back in 2018. 1. Julie loves the idea of companies engaging with their users both online and offline. While there has been an upward trend in engagement online, she believes in meeting customers wherever they are because nobody can deny the value of face-to-face connections. So when Marketo’s customers meet together through Marketo User Groups or “MUGs”, it becomes a community where everyone has something to share and learn from others. 2. She also describes the “Fearless 50” program. This program celebrates marketers from across the globe that are using bold, fearless marketing, out of the box thinking and driving innovation at their companies. Through this program, Marketo helps the chosen 50 individuals because of their marketing efforts, offering them opportunities to learn and grow their career. 3. It’s hard for community managers to prove that their work impacts revenue. For Julie, she has done it with customer adoption scores. It’s interesting to learn how they are connecting the dots with their community work with how customers are adopting Marketo at their work.

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. Here’s a rundown of what we will talk about.   Elizabeth will share with us how two things are most crucial to creating a successful community: tools, and resources. Tools that allow you to monitor your community leaders, help answer their queries and manage your community. And with resources, she refers to the “how-to” guides that have all the information that helps in fostering communities.   Elizabeth will talk about the biggest mistake people make: assuming they will be able to measure ROI as soon as they start the community.. It’s better, in her opinion, that community managers focus on impacting one area of the business first and then move to the next area of impact and so on.   An interesting part of the episode will be around the choosing chapter leaders, who are integral to spread the community. We learn how at Slack she is recruiting new leaders and what characteristics appeal to her most when selecting new ones. Enjoy!

Joining us on this episode of the C2C Podcast is Cesar Manara, Community Manager at Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers.    Cesar believes in creating long-lasting and meaningful relationships between customers and companies. With him joining us, we are going to deep dive into different facets of creating online communities and learn from him what it takes to create one.    So how do you build a community? Cesar shares that it’s important to nail down why you are creating a community. What purpose is it going to serve? What are your business goals? And once you know this, then you have to focus on what your members want. What are their needs? Consider Stack Overflow where they are focusing on providing tools, resources, and knowledge to programmers so they can do a better job. And that’s not all, the job board on Stack Overflow today is better than LinkedIn. 2. Online trolls and the negativity that spreads easily in communities is a menace that many community managers have to deal with. For Cesar, the answers lie in changing the culture of the community. He will talk about why it is important to change what your peers think is right or wrong. And this can be changed through rewards and punishment. You reward those that act in a way that you want them to be and punish bad actors. While Cesar knows how to create an online community, he also knows that he needs data. Data that will help him make decisions and drive his community forward. 3. With data, he believes you can figure out what your community members want? What activities do they want to spend their time on? Why are they spending time on your website and so much more? You can then see how those activities can be translated into business needs. Find the sweet spot in between these two and create something awesome.

So many metrics, so little time! Luckily on this episode Jess Burnham from Unbounce breaks down for us what some of the key metrics and areas of impact community has. If you are in any way trying to show how valuable all the community work you do is this episode is a must!   Jess shares that while sign ups and total number of community members is good what you really want to track are ACTIVE members. For example, you have 10k community members but many are attendees at your events? You can easily get lost in the big vanity metrics and end up with almost no one actually engaging so focusing on those metrics makes sure you actually move the needle. In Jess’s case, she tracks the weekly active users (aka return visitors) on her forum.   She also mentions that product development is a huge area of impact that the community contributes to the company. Her top community members get direct access to alpha and beta features and give it thorough testing and share the positive and negative feedback that Jess relays back to the product team.   She also has created a group for the top 1%-3% of community members called “Unbounce Experts”. These are the people who are sharing feedback, helping other community members, sharing the product with potential customers and sharing on social. Jess knows it’s extremely important to engage and reward the “Unbounce Experts” so she gives them perks like a private slack channel, free tickets to their CTA Conference, access to the early features (mentioned above) and much more.   While she has made sure to track metrics and scale to 16k members she also knows that some parts of community are unscalable. She still has regular conversations with the “Unbounce Experts” and remembers fun facts about them that they appreciate. That’s the art of community, creating a system where the community can scale and grow itself while still engaging deeply and meaningfully.

Derek is joined by Tara Eudy from 99Designs where she is the senior manager of designer experience. At 99Designs, Tara is at the forefront of managing client-designer relationships and representing the designers whenever business decisions are being made at 99Designs. 99Designs is a global creative platform that helps bring clients and designers together so they can create designs they want and love. It’s a global community that spans from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and offers designers an online platform where they can not only share their designs with potential clients but also learn from others. The folks behind 99Designs can happily brag that they have more than a million designers from all over the world. One brilliant way they keep their massive community engaged is through their awards program, 99Awards. It celebrates the best designers on the platform.  At 99Designs, the key performance indicator that Tara relies on is how much designers are earning and how 99Designs can increase that.  While she started her career in radio today she's managing a community of more than a million designers, she's seen a lot of success growing and fostering the 99Designs community which we break down in the full episode. Take a listen!

How did Moovit create and incentivize a community that provides maps for 500M users?!? That will be answered on today's episode with Leo Chanea. We talk with Leo about how he built and grew the community of "Mooviters" that provide transit map data and how the "Mooviters" contribute that data for their entire user base. 

Derek sat down with 3 of the best community builders in the world to talk about how they built their communities. The guests were Elizabeth Kinsey (Developer Marketing Manager at Slack), Leslie Lee (Senior Director, Customer Engagement at Atlassian) and Erica Kuhl (VP of Community at Salesforce). They talked about how they got started and got the initial buy-in to create the program, what strategy they used to gain traction and get people to their events and how they were able to measure their success for themselves and to prove value to the C-Suite. Here are some of the top tidbits from each of our guests.   Elizabeth Kinsey (Developer Marketing Manager at Slack) (starts at 15:21) Not only did Elizabeth build community with the people attending her events at Branch Metrics but also she did that with the panelists who spoke. She focused on the speakers being extremely knowledgeable in the space to provide a lot of value and being very diverse to show the attendees that the community was like them. That went a long way in both building the brand and setting the expectation that the events would always provide value and that they really cared about showing that anyone no matter their background could attend the events.   Leslie Lee (Senior Director, Customer Engagement at Atlassian) (start at 12:24) Atlassian is invested in getting feedback from their users and get NPS (net promoter scores) from their users, knowing this Leslie and her team measured NPS on customers who attended community events and didn’t. They found strong correlation with that showed NPS was higher when customers attended community events.   Erica Kuhl (VP of Community at Salesforce) (starts at 10:30) Instead of assuming what the community what Erica asked the community “What do you want?”. The answer she got was that they wanted to get connected to each other and get connected and become apart of the brand. The ability to put Salesforce on Linkedin, featuring them at their Dreamforce conference was extremely meaningful and motivating for them.   (starts at 18:18) Erica knew that the future of community would be data-driven so she decided to attach the community metrics with the top 4 business metrics that Salesforce had which were: Pipeline, ACV (Average Contract Value), Adoption and Attrition. By doing that she was able to prove that the already beloved community was irreplaceable to the business.

Gina Bianchini is a strong believer of in-person communities. This shouldn’t surprise anyone as she created Ning, an online platform where you can create your own communities on your custom social networks. She then created Mighty Networks, where anyone can create community powered businesses easily. For her, niche communities have always been fascinating which is why since the early days of social media, she has been observing how people have been coming together online. And with Mighty Networks, she is kicking ass as she brings entrepreneurs, businessmen, creators and brands together, on a space where they can create communities and share content directly with them. But that’s not all. With Mighty Networks she is empowering community leaders by helping them monetize their passion projects. Gina brings an interesting perspective on the table that we usually don’t think about - community building and social media are polar opposites of each other. Why? Because people like to interact and work with those that are interested in the same things and want to learn more about it together. Just like in video games where gamers from across the globe come together, form communities, share tips and tricks with other and do much more. What’s interesting about Mighty Networks is how they are measuring the success of these communities. Unlike other platforms, Mighty Networks focuses on knowing whether the communities are actually supporting the idea that they are trying to master together and not just focus on blunt performance indicators. This one is for the books as Gina is the person you need to talk to if it’s about building online communities.

We had a chat with Celina Zamora, who is the Senior Community Manager at Atlassian. Atlassian is known for its products like Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence. Today, Atlassian is serving over 135,000 customers across the globe.  Celina’s job is all about building communities. She manages and supports Atlassian in-person communities within the Americas by working with community leaders, offering support and steer them. Her work involves engaging the online community by creating avenues for customers to easily connect with others like them.  With Celina onboard with us, we are going to learn how Atlassian built an online community where developers, content managers, project managers and others came together where they collaborate, connect and share valuable insights with each other.  It’s not easy to explain the value of having a community and Celina understands this all too well since she saw how everyone was apprehensive towards the idea of having them.  But today, Atlassian product teams see great value in these communities where they get to enjoy actual face time with users, learn about their problems, offers them real time feedback and hear customer stories.  We will also be inquiring about the metrics they are using at Atlassians to gauge the effectiveness of these community events. Also, Celina shared with us how they are scaling their communities by building everything with heart and balance. They do this by focusing on where their customer is in terms of the platform they are using and how they are using it.

Today WordPress is powering over 60 million websites, and it is the most popular CMS in the world. It is being used by one third of the internet. This has created a global community that includes business owners, developers, digital marketers, students and more, who are all contributing to its Open source project. What is both impressive and astonishing is that this community is closely knitted together and connects through locally organized, in-person community events known as WordCamp. Here participants mingle with each other over one thing – their shared love of WordPress and open source. We are lucky to have with us Andrea Middleton from Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Andrea is part of a team that includes fourteen individuals who help WordPress community organizers.  They are offering these organizers planning support for events, connect the community and contribute to the WordPress project. Her role is specifically focused on these in-person community events, meaning she is the best person to share with us how this all works. With Andrea, we will get a complete walkthrough of how WordPress has today 700 groups across the world since their first community event back in 2006 which was Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic. Together, we will trace back how Automattic ensured these communities were fostered by offering them support from full-time professionals dedicated towards these community events and gatherings. The biggest challenge here is obvious: how do you bring together so many diverse communities together and ensure the events are engaging and interesting? Andrea shares with us how at WordPress.com and Automattic the goal is to offer guidance, training and freedom for anyone that wants to host these events in their local community, creating events expressive of their localities. It’s a classic “bottoms up” approach where organizers are supported by WordPress while given freedom to do what they want to do: to bring WordPress enthusiasts together, inspire people to contribute to the Open source project and encourage participants to do more with WordPress. With over 2,000 volunteers and organizers all working independently, in coherence with Andrea’s team, WordPress has truly achieved something wonderful: a community of individuals that not only love WordPress but are working to make it better.

With us is Josh Zerkel, Head of Global Community and the brains behind “Asana Together”. “Asana Together” is a success with over 33 countries represented through customers, leaders and certified experts, coming together to learn and connect with each other. We will take a deep dive with Josh who will share with us how he kick-started the program by talking to different stakeholders on how he wants to create a community that has become “Asana Together” today.

Today on the show, we welcome the “Dalai Lama of community,” David Spinks. David is the Founder and CEO of CMX – the world’s premier community for community professionals. David consults with top innovative companies on building community, such as SalesForce and Facebook, and is super passionate about seeing his own community succeed.

Tessa Krissel is the Developer Outreach Manager at Pantheon and is incredible at creating normal users into passionate advocates. We broke down how she is building, scaling and measuring the growth of her community while making sure she is giving value back to that community. Tessa took a standalone slack group and transformed it into the “Pantheon Heroes” which focus on giving back to and lifting up Pantheon’s community. She explained it’s all about relationships when it comes to developer outreach but building the platform for having that relationship is key since you can’t personally chat with 1000’s of people a day. Here is a breakdown of some of the most effective methods that Tessa used in her program to grow the community:  User Missions- Each user decides how they want to contribute with “missions”, each “mission” is based around a certain area and members can suggest new ones that don’t exist yet. This gives each member a “role” essentially, whereas before you might not know what to post about you now have a topic to help take the mental load off of contributing. Points- They have gamified their contributions by offering points to people who contribute to that community. The community can then use these points to buy things like shirts, pantheon sites, access to the team and more. In terms of metrics, Tessa keeps a close eye on the Users, Missions, and Influence. More specifically she looks at For Users they look at both retention and participation in the Pantheon Heroes platform. Within the missions metric, they track the points-based system. Behind the scenes, they have values that associate to specific mission categories that help them better understand when missions are helping to grow revenue & retention on the Pantheon platform. And the final metric for the Heroes program is Influence. This metric digs into their influence outside of their communities. They work to break down how valuable it is to Pantheon is a user posts on a blog, social media or elsewhere about them. They don’t care how many followers you have, per se, they care more about the engagement of your followers & audience.

Customer to Customer marketing is still new, many are still breaking into this budding industry. That’s why we talked with Justina Fenberg who is a Community Manager at Digital Marketer. Justina herself recently broke into the Community Manager role so we got her take on how she got in. Those who have “Community” in their title come from many places but one place is customer service. Justina was incredible in her role in customer service but found out that the “Community Manager” was a role and realized she could help customers at scale but still in a personalized way. She was then able to find Suzi Nelson who helped her realize she could break into community. Justina’s suggestion was to find a mentor in the space and get to know the community team or even community-minded people at your company. Since she has gotten into the role one of the most powerful things she has found that community can do can turn a negative experience into a positive one. She shared how they had some marketing campaigns that were more general or going to people that it might not have been as relevant for. Being a marketing company the community asked why they didn’t have more segmentation in their emails. Then, a VP at Digital Marketer hopped in to address with honesty and transparency saying that they too are experimenting and learning the community was right in their suggested improvements. This really humanized the company and showed people that everyone has room to improve, Justina saw that people really appreciated the company responded inside the community the way they did. Justina also shared the values that Digital Marketer has as a company and how they shape the community and create a great space for customers to learn. Their first core value is “Loving, Protecting and Respecting the Customer”. That leads to them realizing they needed a space not to sell more but to help, provide value and foster customer to customer connections.

We talked with a community member to hear how he believes a company should build a community for developers instead of the community builder like we usually do. We wanted to hear from the source what he loves about communities so we talked to Karan Malhi who is Head of Product and Marketing at Datacoral. He has been a member of the Apache community for a long time, he loves community because you are able to connect with people that do what he is doing and build on technologies he works on. The ability to give back and to learn is something that Karan loves about being a part of the Apache community and others like it. One mistake he warned companies who want to build community is not to make it strictly about the product, sales and recruiting. The idea is to provide a space to connect and learn about how to become a better developer and help the ecosystem as a whole. He mentioned that you don’t even want to censor talk about other tools in the area because not only is that the natural conversation but the fact that there is no restriction on the content will lead developers to trust your brand. Overall, Karan’s message is to make sure you are building a community that encourages the developers to work together and learn and they will naturally grow to discover your product and build a relationship with your brand.

IndieHackers is a community that helps developers by sharing the strategies and even revenue numbers behind successful software projects. Courtland Allens is the founder of IndieHackers and joins us on today’s episode on how he built a community with tens of thousands of people from scratch. To start Courtland got inspiration looking through the popular site Hacker News, a site run by startup incubator Y Combinator. He found a community called Nomad List that served as an inspiration, instead of showing you where to live Courtland’s community showed you how to build successful software projects. Courtland built the site himself, he knew that having a unique site and a great user experience would stand out. Even before he finished building everything he had brilliant ways of testing what features people would want. For example, before he built a forum he put a tab that said “forum” and then had an email subscribe option to join the forum when it was live. That got enough traction for him to prioritize him building it out. There were lots of things that didn’t scale but helped, when he was interviewing people for his blog he would send hundreds of cold emails every week to try get people to share how they built their business, with revenue numbers! For people that are just starting their community, he shared that the work might seem daunting at first but once you get in and actually begin it’s not as hard as you think. Also, while it might seem like a lot of manual work that could be automated or outsourced the depth of understanding you will gain from being so in the weeds of the community, at least at the beginning, will help you, in the long run, know how to build and care for your community.

With a decade in the game and an extremely sharp and strategic approach, Suzi Nelson is one of the best in the community industry. The main topic of conversation is something that not all community professionals love to talk about but can dramatically increase the resources your community program gets and help everyone at your company realize the value of your community, tying community back to sales.   The first step if you are starting a community from scratch and to help people realize the value is to find what part of the funnel needs the most help. What does that mean? Since the basic components of any sales funnel are awareness, consideration, closed/sale and retention/renewal those are the places you want to focus on. Once you have identified which part of the funnel figure out the metric that matters for that, you can talk with the sales and marketing department to find a better idea of that. For example, your company might want to keep customers longer so you can pick renewal rate and lifetime customer value as two metrics to affect. While tying back to metrics directly is always tricky you can tie into your companies CRM or at a minimum make sure you have those metrics before the community started so you can show a before and after.   Another key point she touched on was how to get community members to become your biggest advocates. The vast majority of people in your community are passive so the key is to help guide them on a journey to get them active. Suzi references the “Commitment Curve” famously created by Douglas Atkins which, put simply, says you need a series of tasks that get them more engaged until they are ready to help

Today on the show we welcome Laura Nestler. We refer to Laura as the “community unicorn” as she is the Global Head of Community at Duolingo and spoke at Startup Grind’s Bevy summit earlier this year. If you haven’t already heard of DuoLingo, it is the world’s most popular place to learn a language – for free, from your phone. DuoLingo is currently reaching over 200 million users and one year ago, Laura did something that we have never seen done before. She decided that she wanted to get all of these DuoLingo users together… in person. 

At the end of the day, the community is about culture. Webster defines community as “the people with common interests living in a particular area”. People come together because they have common interests and values which all combine to define the culture of that community. Our guest for this episode, Kim Han, is the Global Head of Community at Consciousness Hacking which is a global community of people get together to become more mentally, emotionally and spiritually whole and build a future that helps us instead of harming us. Kim starts off by sharing her description of what Consciousness Hacking is and that each member has their own definition but they are brought together by their mission and values.  She started running the San Francisco events and got a strong understanding of how the events are run and then iterated to start having other cities host events. When looking at whether or not to take someone on as a chapter director her number 1 criteria is if they are aligned as a person with their values and mission.  Now that she has 50 cities and continues to organically grow she has and continues to put together a playbook of how local chapter directors should run their events. Kim shared that it’s important to keep that playbook iterative and not stagnant. As the community grows and changes the way chapter directors host events will evolve as well. Making sure that your playbook evolves with the community is crucial to making sure you continue to grow and serve the ambassadors who are hosting events for your brand.

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.

So many successful companies found their success through their community like eBay, Airbnb and many more. Plato also relies on their community, Plato helps developing tech managers become better leaders, they do that through connecting members to mentors and providing continuous calls, AMA’s and feedback to make sure they are growing as a leader. They conducted lots of user research to see what the community would want, what they found was that developing tech leaders wanted to connect with other tech leaders offline and online in a structured way. The format that works best for them is events that interview experts in the field and also had networking and breakout sessions where they could dive into deeper discussions. They call this the “Elevate Series”, while they are flying out to all the events currently they plan to build a playbook from what they learn and use that to scale the program with their community. They look at several metrics from the product and the community that help drive their decisions. For every call that their members have with mentors, they ask for feedback to both improve their product and see what the community needs are. For their events specifically, they track both NPS (Net Promoter Score) of the events and the number of attendees to gauge the success of their events.

Richard Millington is the Founder of FeverBee, FeverBee is a community consultancy company that has helped companies like Facebook, SAP, Lego and many more. He started his first online community in 1999 and is the author of Buzzing Communities and The Indispensable Community. Needless to say, he knows a thing or two about community!   Richard dove right into what communities should be doing today and what communities serve as a good example of what to do. He shared that since the industry has had some years to mature companies are now generally doing a good job of getting engagement in their communities but not a very good job of getting the value out of their communities.    Two examples he shared were FitBit and Alteryx which are both doing a great job having the community support multiple goals within the company. There are so many areas the community can touch and improve like support, recruitment, product feedback, time to resolution, case studies, testimonials and so many more.    Richard also touched on the fact that most brands overestimate just how much their community members want to be apart of the community. If you think about yourself how many branded communities are you apart of? Keeping that in mind, you want to build a community around a practical need, something that fulfills a need of the community. Just because you love a product that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will join a branded community, solve a problem they have and they will be more likely to join and participate.    In the last section, we went into several social psychology strategies that Richard has used building communities. The first was the theory of self-determination which basically means the more you can get what you want out of the community of your own volition, not being sold, the more they will feel a sense of community. Richard also mentioned the “Sense of Community”, a research paper that outlines how to cultivate a sense of belonging that builds a community. Using all the strategies, metrics and material above has helped Richard and the FeverBee team grow some of the best online communities in the world. 

eBay is one of the longest-running communities born out of the digital age. Luckily we got the chance to sit down with Alan Aisbitt who has been at eBay for over 9 years and has been a community manager since 2013.   Community is everything for eBay, it’s a pure marketplace that relies on their buyers and sellers which are the community members. Their C2C community has grown very organically because passionate sellers who want to meet other sellers in their area will host events in their city to help support the local community.   eBay knows that support the power members of your community is a smart thing to do so they keep tabs on cities that are gaining traction with their events and reach out to support them. They support them by providing content, news on product updates, swag or even eBay staff going on the road to meet the sellers.   As far as what they measure for success they look at a few metrics including unique visitors, overall growth of users, posts and levels of activity. One of the metrics that's unique to them is their “accepted solutions” and “kudos”, an “accepted solution” is when a user marks their question as solved and “kudos” is similar to likes on social media. With those metrics, they are able to see not just quantity but the quality of the activity that their community is putting out.   Of course, it’s always good to prove the worth of the community from as many angles and perspectives as possible. One way that eBay does this is through their “voice of the customer” report. They take an incredible story every week from one of the customers in their community and then turn that into a report that they send to senior leaders. Sharing these helps create meaningful change that the community team can then bring back to the community and show that their voices actually matters. Alan strongly suggested any community team create a report like this because it’s a great touchpoint from inside the company and great for the community as well.

Karin Wolok is an expert at activating her community, she has a deep knowledge of what they need and what makes them tick. Graphs. Yes, graphs. Neo4j is a graph databasing company and work with eager community members all around the world who want to be apart of the community Karin has helped build. There is something that Karin did that we have seen with many other communities like Docker and Startup Grind that have worked very well to activate your community. When you are running events with local volunteers you will never have 100% hosting events every month (we’ve seen 75% as a high mark for Startup Grind). It’s also seasonal as there are vacations, busy times for different industries ect. All that being said there is a very effective method for activating them in one month that Karin touches upon very creatively. She realized that Leonhard Euler had a birthday in April and decided to build a campaign around it called Global Graph Celebration Day. She was able to activate 50+ cities to host events just by announcing it. She knows the Leonhard Euler is revered in her space and ignited her community into action!

So many metrics, so little time! Luckily on this episode Jess Burnham from Unbounce breaks down for us what some of the key metrics and areas of impact community has. If you are in any way trying to show how valuable all the community work you do is this episode is a must!   Jess shares that while sign ups and total number of community members is good what you really want to track are ACTIVE members. For example, you have 10k community members but many are attendees at your events? You can easily get lost in the big vanity metrics and end up with almost no one actually engaging so focusing on those metrics makes sure you actually move the needle. In Jess’s case, she tracks the weekly active users (aka return visitors) on her forum.   She also mentions that product development is a huge area of impact that the community contributes to the company. Her top community members get direct access to alpha and beta features and give it thorough testing and share the positive and negative feedback that Jess relays back to the product team.   She also has created a group for the top 1%-3% of community members called “Unbounce Experts”. These are the people who are sharing feedback, helping other community members, sharing the product with potential customers and sharing on social. Jess knows it’s extremely important to engage and reward the “Unbounce Experts” so she gives them perks like a private slack channel, free tickets to their CTA Conference, access to the early features (mentioned above) and much more.   While she has made sure to track metrics and scale to 16k members she also knows that some parts of community are unscalable. She still has regular conversations with the “Unbounce Experts” and remembers fun facts about them that they appreciate. That’s the art of community, creating a system where the community can scale and grow itself while still engaging deeply and meaningfully.

Creating a community with a focus on quality over quantity isn’t something all communities do but Underscore VC focuses on. We talked with Jenni Goodman on the show to hear how they have built a carefully curated community for their VC firm that serves the Boston area. It's called the “Core Community” which is made up of investors, advisors, and founders that Underscore connects together to so they can support each other. She makes a great point in the episode that by focusing on getting quality over quantity she has members who refer each other to the community. They have tried many different types of events and have found that the best format for them have been roundtable dinners. They found that this lead to the best conversations with around 8-12 attendees at the event. They also have an extremely strong incentive for their “Core Partners”- giving them shares in the companies they work with. That a great way for them to keep people engaged, finding new community members as well as helping companies in their portfolio. The most powerful thing about their community is that while they have a small staff, roughly 70%-80% of their portfolio members have come from their community. Even if you have a large firm people only have so many people in their networks but a community never has to stop growing!    

Today on the show, we welcome Brent Messenger, the Global Head of Community for Fiverr. If you haven’t already heard of Fiver, it is the world’s largest marketplace for creative and digital services. Brent has also worked for the 2008 Obama for America presidential campaign and has consulted with some of the most innovative companies in the world, such as Lyft, AirBnb and SolarCity.

Derek sat down with 3 of the best community builders in the world to talk about how they built their communities. The guests were Elizabeth Kinsey (Developer Marketing Manager at Slack), Leslie Lee (Senior Director, Customer Engagement at Atlassian) and Erica Kuhl (VP of Community at Salesforce). They talked about how they got started and got the initial buy-in to create the program, what strategy they used to gain traction and get people to their events and how they were able to measure their success for themselves and to prove value to the C-Suite. Here are some of the top tidbits from each of our guests.   Elizabeth Kinsey (Developer Marketing Manager at Slack) (starts at 15:21) Not only did Elizabeth build community with the people attending her events at Branch Metrics but also she did that with the panelists who spoke. She focused on the speakers being extremely knowledgeable in the space to provide a lot of value and being very diverse to show the attendees that the community was like them. That went a long way in both building the brand and setting the expectation that the events would always provide value and that they really cared about showing that anyone no matter their background could attend the events.   Leslie Lee (Senior Director, Customer Engagement at Atlassian) (start at 12:24) Atlassian is invested in getting feedback from their users and get NPS (net promoter scores) from their users, knowing this Leslie and her team measured NPS on customers who attended community events and didn’t. They found strong correlation with that showed NPS was higher when customers attended community events.   Erica Kuhl (VP of Community at Salesforce) (starts at 10:30) Instead of assuming what the community what Erica asked the community “What do you want?”. The answer she got was that they wanted to get connected to each other and get connected and become apart of the brand. The ability to put Salesforce on Linkedin, featuring them at their Dreamforce conference was extremely meaningful and motivating for them.   (starts at 18:18) Erica knew that the future of community would be data-driven so she decided to attach the community metrics with the top 4 business metrics that Salesforce had which were: Pipeline, ACV (Average Contract Value), Adoption and Attrition. By doing that she was able to prove that the already beloved community was irreplaceable to the business.

Today’s episode is short and sweet! We have announced that Bevy Labs has acquired CMX, which is the premier community for community professionals. Bevy and CMX have been working together for a couple of years now, and have worked together on a lot of projects in the community industry. In today’s episode, CEO, Derek Anderson, will be talking with the CMX CEO, David Spinks, about what the acquisition means for both companies, how Bevy is going to support the CMX community, and how Bevy and CMX are going to be partnering together to help build this incredible new industry.

Welcome back to the C2C Podcast. Our guest today it Brian Brannon, who is currently a Corporate Marketing Manager over at Gainsight, the leading customer success platform. In his role, Brian develops the Gainsight brand's narrative in order to better connect with their customers, investors, and the public.

Today on the show, we welcome Patrick Hill, a Community Manager at Sketch. If you haven’t already heard of Sketch, it has skyrocketed to become a staple in the creative community. They doubled down and invested in their in-person communities. In this episode, Patrick shares how building a community is a great way to create a space for yourself within your market and differentiate yourself.

On today’s episode, we hear from Kobie Fuller, who is a general partner at Upfront Ventures, the largest venture fund in Los Angeles that focuses on investing in software and consumer product companies. Previously, Kobie worked at Accel Ventures and was CMO at REVOLVE, one of the largest fashion e­commerce companies in Los Angeles.

Today on the show we welcome Elizabeth Kinsey, the Marketing Director at Branch Metrics. Branch Metrics is the mobile marketing and linking platform that powers companies like AirBnb, Target and many others.

Today on the show, we welcome the “Dalai Lama of community,” David Spinks. David is the Founder and CEO of CMX – the world’s premier community for community professionals. David consults with top innovative companies on building community, such as SalesForce and Facebook, and is super passionate about seeing his own community succeed.

Today on the show we welcome your very own host, Derek Anderson. Derek is the CEO and Cofounder of Startup Grind, which is one of the largest communities for entrepreneurs in the world, with over 400 chapters in 100 countries.

Today on the show, we welcome Brent Messenger, the Global Head of Community for Fiverr. If you haven’t already heard of Fiver, it is the world’s largest marketplace for creative and digital services. Brent has also worked for the 2008 Obama for America presidential campaign and has consulted with some of the most innovative companies in the world, such as Lyft, AirBnb and SolarCity.

Today on the show we welcome Laura Nestler. We refer to Laura as the “community unicorn” as she is the Global Head of Community at DuoLingo and spoke at Startup Grind’s Bevy summit earlier this year. If you haven’t already heard of DuoLingo, it is the world’s most popular place to learn a language – for free, from your phone. DuoLingo is currently reaching over 200 million users and one year ago, Laura did something that we have never seen done before. She decided that she wanted to get all of these DuoLingo users together… in person. 

Welcome to the C2C Podcast, a podcast dedicated to sharing from the best the world has to offer on all of the great opportunities inside customer to customer marketing. Tune in as host, Derek Anderson, explains what this is all about and how they learned that the most powerful marketing tool of all time is your customers! Essentially, customer to customer marketing is using your biggest advocates, giving them a platform, and empowering them to be successful. In 2010, Derek held his first event and that one event turned into Startup Grind, a global community for entrepreneurs that has now held over 7,000 events for over 250,000 people! They went on to build an internal tool to run those events and build an incredible community, in the end solving a huge problem for amazing companies like Fiverr, Duolingo, and many more. Inside the coming episodes of this show you will get the chance to hear from these companies because they are running some of the biggest communities in the world today. This space is still so new, and there is so much left to learn! That is where the C2C Podcast comes it. So tune in for all this and more!   Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Startup Grind Website – https://www.startupgrind.com/ Startup Grind Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/startup/ Startup Grind Twitter – https://twitter.com/StartupGrind/ Startup Grind Facebook – https://web.facebook.com/StartupGrind Bevy Labs – https://www.bevylabs.com/ Duolingo – https://www.duolingo.com/ Fiverr – https://www.fiverr.com/