Integrating Community Across your Org with Scott K. Wilder
May 24, 2021
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Scott K. Wilder, Head of Customer Engagement & Community at Hubspot, shares his community knowledge and strategy for integrating community across organizations. He emphasizes the importance of customer input, data analysis, and proper systems setup. To truly understand the community, bring in all customers, not just champions. The episode explores the role of community in marketing and discusses building great teams and the power of storytelling.
Integrating community across the organization involves moving community around different parts of the organization every 6 months.
Initiating community requires understanding customer needs, analyzing data, and ensuring proper integration of systems and tools for a seamless experience.
To gain a deep understanding of the community, involve customers in strategic discussions, including day-to-day customers, to hear directly from them and gather valuable insights.
Deep dives
Podcast Overview
In this podcast episode, Scott Wilder, the head of customer engagement and community at HubSpot, shares his extensive experience in community and marketing. He discusses the importance of integrating community into different parts of the business and working with other teams. Scott highlights the relationship between marketing and community, the management of community teams, and the career path in community. He emphasizes the value of bringing customers into strategic discussions and shares insights on driving growth and engagement in a community. He also emphasizes the importance of learning from mentors and leaders in the community space.
Transforming Community at HubSpot
Scott Wilder outlines a transformative process he initiated in the HubSpot customer community. He focused on understanding customer goals and identifying areas of friction in the customer journey. By addressing these issues, implementing improvements, and integrating the community into other parts of the company, the community experienced significant growth, including a 120% increase in monthly registrants and a 40% boost in engagement. Scott highlights the value of data-driven decision-making and collaboration with teammates specialized in data analysis.
The Intersection of Marketing, Community, and Customer Engagement
Scott explores the relationship between marketing, community, and customer engagement. He discusses the benefits of moving community around different parts of the organization to avoid silos and foster cross-functional collaboration. He emphasizes the importance of setting editorial guidelines and guardrails to balance the community's objectivity and the business's goals. Scott also discusses the concept of integrating communities into the customer journey and leveraging partnerships to enhance the community experience.
Inviting Customers into Strategic Discussions
Scott highlights the value of inviting customers into strategic discussions. He recommends involving customers who represent different segments of the community and encouraging their input on product development and other initiatives. Scott shares his experience of bringing customers into staff meetings, allowing team members to hear directly from customers and gain valuable insights. He encourages community professionals to prioritize authentic customer interactions to drive engagement and enhance the overall community experience.
Advice for Community Professionals
Scott advises community professionals to seek mentorship from individuals with a data background to enhance their data analysis skills. He suggests collaborating with data analysts or scientists in their organizations to gain insights from community data and make data-driven decisions. Scott also emphasizes the importance of working closely with cross-functional teams and engaging with diverse community members to drive success and create a strong sense of belonging.
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.
Masters of Community is hand crafted by our friends over at: fame.so
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