Scott K. Wilder, Head of Customer Engagement & Community at Hubspot, joins us in this Masters of Community episode to share his years of community knowledge gained from working at Adobe, Apple, Google, Intuit, and more. We discuss the intersection of community and marketing, and where community truly fits within an organization. Scott shares his community building strategy of determining what the customer wants, diving into the data and outages, and implementing integrations and tools to solve any problems. We wrap up talking about working with partners and integration tools, like Bevy and Khoros, to create a seamless community and events experience.
Who is this episode for?: B2C, In Person & Online, Scaling
3 key takeaways:
1. Move community around to different parts of the organization every 6 months to integrate community into the DNA of every group in your organization.
2. Initiating community in your organization begins with 1. What do the customers want?, 2. Dive into outages and data to see where people are dropping off, 3. Make sure integrations, systems, tools, navigation are set up properly for experience.
2. To truly understand your community, bring in the customers and have them sit at a table so everyone on the team can hear directly from the customer - not just through text-based answers. Don’t just invite the customer champions, bring in the day-to-day customers.
Notable Quotes:
1. “I think of it as a triangle in three parts. So the bottom part are those small fixes you have to do as the outages. In the middle are these things that we think would be successful in the site. And then the top part is like, what are the few big bets that you're going to make?
2. “What we did would move community around to different parts of the organization every six months...but it was a great way of getting community into the DNA of all these different groups. Community became more than just marketing, it became part of product engineering. It is really important to work closely with those that are facing customer facing all the time, like customer success and sales and marketing and support.”
Rapid fire question answers:
1. New York or San Francisco? New York bc obnoxious and tenacious, SF because laid back, outdoorsy, spiritual
2. What’s your favorite book to recommend to others? Organizing Genius by Warren Bennis
3. What’s your go-to community engagement starter? Tell me your story, how you got there, and the challenges you faced.
4. Socks and Sandals? No, I’m a croc guy.
5. What's a tip that you have for somebody who is managing community teams? Bring in customers and have them sit at the table so everybody can hear directly from the customer. Get them in the room, not just text.
6. Who in the world of community would you most like to take to lunch? Howard Rheingold
7. What's a community product you wish existed? Embeddable community widget that you can embed into any site that’s text, audio, video, to indicate what type of person is answering questions, etc.
8. Weirdest community you’ve been a part of? Reddit Group of Counting
9. What post-covid activity are you most excited for? Baseball
10. Who’s a leader that has impacted you? Brad Smith, former CEO and Chairman of Intuit. Have to be a great thinker and a great doer to be successful.
11. If you’re on your deathbed and you could only leave one piece of life advice behind for all the future generations, what would that advice be? The only way to predict the future is to just make it.
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