In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Monica Lluis, Global Community Lead at Cisco. The Cisco community has evolved from a single support forum to a million-member-strong enterprise community in several international languages in two decades. Monica shares that goal-oriented processes and protocols for community management are more important than the tool you use. Monica also shares that communities can evolve over really long periods of time in all aspects, so don’t worry about getting things right quickly at the start because there’ll always be room for growth. A community in a tech company can help identify specific issues (through customer questions) that can be sent to the product team to fix. Cisco used active feedback sessions with their community to introduce and integrate a background noise cancellation feature in Webex, which has been in high demand since the start of the pandemic. Monica suggests to make events such as “Ask Me Anything” and webinars a part of your community engagement strategy because these events generate a lot of useful support content and can be used to encourage community participation. Who is this episode for?: Community Managers, Enterprise Tech Community, CCP Community, Event Managers 3 key takeaways: 1. How to internationalize your communities: Identify the need for a local community based on the number of questions you have for that language, regional sales, internal feedback, and if there are enough people speaking that language in a community. Provide a space for participants to not only ask questions but also allow them to create their own content. Keep translating the most popular content into the new language for the first few months to keep the community active until they start doing it on their own. Appoint a local community moderator for each language. 2. Cisco Community Reward program: Monthly recognition with member’s choice award, rookie award, the best publication award, the Developer of the Month award, an award for a champion of small businesses, another award for the CCP community, and a WebEx community champion award. Local communities have smaller awards. Cisco VIP is an elite annual program for people who have won many awards across categories who get perks such as t-shirts, conference passes, and Cisco certification vouchers. Event contributors also have their top contributor awards. There’s also a lifetime “Hall of Fame” program. 3. Community metrics used at Cisco: Their community team tracks traffic, contributions to the product, and case deflection. Their marketing team tracks the conversion of community participants into customers. They have reported that active community participants are twice as likely to buy from Cisco when compared to non-participants. Notable Quotes: 1. “You have to be open to that change because if you don't evolve, you die” 2. “The community is a gold mine of data that can be used to [do] many other things” 3. “It is only when you come and see valuable content that you will stay. And you may be able to ask your question in that language, and then we better get those answers quickly because otherwise, people may not wait [for] enough [time]”. 4. “Events are a key aspect of the engagement. There are two reasons for that and it's part of the strategy. It helped us to keep building the intellectual capital in the community because the people that deliver those events.. all the content .. becomes a very valuable resource. The other part of the strategy with the events is we .. promote .. the community implicitly. [If] people want to attend this event, they have to come to the community to register. So it is a way to make awareness campaigns without promoting the community directly” Rapid-fire question answers: 1. What's your favorite book to give as a gift to others? “Drive” by Daniel Pink 2. What advice do you have to new community managers about any key mistake or something that they should aim to avoid? Prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Don't get into the trap of trying to grow very fast. 3. What's a go-to engagement tactic or conversation starter that you like to use in your commute? Always start with praise and acknowledgment and be very grateful for their time because we don't pay them to participate in the conversation. 4. Have you ever worn socks with sandals? Yes, during this pandemic and around the house in the winter. 5. Who in the world of the community would you most like to take out to lunch? Her globally distributed team of community managers. 6. What's the proudest moment of your day? Her Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert certification because it was tougher than her two Master's degrees combined. 7. What is a community product that you wish existed? Seamlessly integrate community content and databases with other digital properties at the click of a button. 8. If you were to find yourself on your deathbed today, and you had to condense all of your life lessons into one Twitter-sized piece of advice for the rest of the world on how to live, what would that advice be? instead of just thinking about your worst-case scenario, think about what is your best, worst-case scenario.Masters of Community is hand crafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Beth McIntyre, Head of Community at Bevy, and David Spinks, Co-Founder of CMX and VP of Community at Bevy, give the run-down on CMX Summit Rise: 2021. In this episode, you’ll learn about the origins of CMX, how Summit got started, and the challenges experienced along the way. They share their first CMX Summit experiences and the unique, genuine connections consistently created at this community conference. David and Beth discuss the meaning behind this year’s theme, RISE, and the sub-themes of the Rise of Community-Driven Business, the Community Career Path, and Community Culture and Innovation. Community has taken the business world by storm and this year’s summit will ingrain the community in business for the long run. 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/3vEW76kMasters of Community is hand crafted by our friends over at: fame.so

This week, we have the pleasure of hearing from Evan Hamilton, the Director of Community at Reddit. Evan joined the Reddit team at a time when trust was broken between the moderators and the Reddit team. Evan rebuilt trust in the community by ensuring transparent communication with the moderators, addressing concrete issues, humanizing both the employees and the moderators, and creating small programs and teams to work directly with moderators. The community council became crucial to building trust and was created as a safe space for moderators to share feedback, challenges, questions, and insights with the executive team of Reddit. We talk about the beauty of Reddit’s pseudonymity and how users bring their true selves to the table and talk openly about their low points and experiences, finding a sense of belonging by connecting with ‘their people’. Reddit will continue growing its community programs at scale to enable and support its moderators through any challenges and questions they have. Who is this episode for?: B2C, Online, Scaling 3 key takeaways: - The steps to building community trust include communicating transparently, addressing concrete issues, humanizing everyone, and creating programs to enhance community communication and processes. - The benefit of pseudonymity in the Reddit community is that it gives people a place to be 100% themselves and share vulnerable, real experiences that they have been through. This outlet helps users find ‘their people’ and feel a sense of belonging. - Reddit scaled its large moderator community by creating a Community Council to provide information, receive feedback, and communicate effectively with moderators representing ‘subreddits’. These members would distill information from the council to their moderator teams and ensure everyone was on the same page. Notable Quotes: 1. What did you practically do to make it feel like a safe space? I think some of it is just the access. It's easy to be frustrated when you're talking to a representative, right? It's the, “I want to talk to your manager syndrome.” You feel like the person you're talking to doesn't have power and so you just try and push past them to get to their manager. By actually involving the product managers who are building these products and eventually involving our execs, it was clear that you're not going to get any higher up the chain. This is the person who's building this thing and I think that helps. Having a buffer in between can be good but can also be detrimental because people feel like this representative isn't going to go fight for me. I think the other part was just framing and priming and setting up the conversation as, ‘Hey, we're all here because we're on the same page. We want Reddit to be great. We want moderators to be a big part of that.’ 2. “What we've seen on Reddit is the benefits that pseudonymity brings and that people can really bring. They're their true selves to the table, right? I've seen amazing conversations where, you know, mothers are sharing their experiences with postpartum depression, something that they really may not feel comfortable sharing, attached to their name in a public setting. We have amazing communities for marginalized groups. We have support communities like stop drinking, where people are talking very, very honestly about their low points and because of the pseudonymity combined with a very robust safety team, making sure that regardless of what pseudonym you're using, you're behaving, people are able to be themselves and let this raw part of them loose.” Rapid fire question answers: 1. What’s your favorite book to recommend to others? “Predictably Irrational” OR “Big” 2. Who’s an up and coming community builder you think is going to do big things? Shana Sumers & Carter Gibson 3. What’s your go-to community engagement starter? Food or a bracket system 4. What is your favorite subreddit? ATBGE - Awful Taste But Great Execution 5. One metric to use for the rest of your career to measure communities? Trust Barometer. 6. Weirdest community you've been a part of? Theater (extraverted actors and introverted tech people) 7. If you’re on your death bed and you could only leave one piece of life advice behind for all the future generations, what would that advice be? Listen to People. We spend way too much time thinking about ourselves and not listening to others.Masters of Community is hand crafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Rarely do we see a community leader make a difference in so many diverse departments and programs, but Erik Martin is one of a kind. He’s currently the Chief Community Officer at Teal, but over the past 20 years he has worked in the film industry, Reddit, DePop, WeWork, Airtime, and Nike! In this episode, we discuss why the community industry is blowing up and how community stands out from traditional marketing. Erik discusses his role as a Chief Community Officer and shares the vision for Community becoming its own department in businesses. We talk about the benchmark metrics needed to truly understand community health and the complexities of community conversions and analytics. Erik shares valuable nuggets of wisdom about adapting to the needs of the community you’re growing and teaches that the community is always smarter than you and will lead you in the right direction. Who is this episode for?: B2C, In person & Online, Revitalizing 3 key takeaways: 1. Community is always smarter than you are and will lead you in the right direction. They are the ones invested in the product or community and will give you a look into what people actually want and need. 2. The Chief Community Officer Role signals that community is a central pillar to the organization and not just an aspect of another department, such as marketing, sales, or operations. 3. Benchmark metrics is the goal for understanding community health. Having a relative baseline to compare the community metrics to will provide a much more comprehensive, holistic view of the impact on community. Notable Quotes: “I've been reminded over and over again, that the community is always smarter than you are. Meaning myself, the individual, but also the company in a sense, and that if you're really building products, not just for users, not just for community, but with the community, they'll really lead you in the right direction, especially in early stage startups or when you're launching something new. Collectively the group of people is going to be smarter than any one individual or even small group of people.” “I'm the chief community officer but we have a relatively small team, but what it means and the reason why I think it's important... is because what it signals is that community is a central element, it's a central pillar, it's a part of our DNA. It reports to the CEO and I think that's important. The titles themselves are more for external usage, but internally it's like, okay, community is not just a part of marketing or just a part of support or just a part of operations or just a part of a product. It's its own thing that has its own scope, its own metrics, its own contribution to the business.” Rapid fire question answers: 1. What’s your favorite book to recommend to others? Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman 2. Who’s an up and coming community builder you think is going to do big things? Jocelyn Hsu at Picsart and Sanmaya Mohanty (creator of the Community Manager Guide) 3. What’s your wildest community story? ACL Subreddit for people with ligament problems. It’s become a place for people to talk about ACL surgery and post-op recovery, etc. Asked the community on Reddit what was going on with his ACL and found out he had a screw loose in his knee. 4. What’s your go-to community engagement tactic? Challenge -30,90,10 day challenges. Very social and gives accountability. Ex: new vocab word of the day challenge, career challenge, 5. What’s a community building technology App people should be using: Spatial communities or asynchronous real life (ex: Pokemon Go, Augmented Reality, Randonautica, AYA) 6. Weirdest community you’ve been a part of? A Virtual Cult of traditional Chinese medicine with the leader Master Sha 7. If you’re on your death bed and you could only leave one piece of life advice behind for all the future generations, what would that advice be? We are the stories we tell ourselves. If we aren’t happy with who we are and what we are, we need to tell better stories. Links: Teal- https://www.tealhq.com Community Manager Guide- https://guide.cmgr.page/community-manager-page/ Twitter: @Hueypriest Reddit: @hueypriestMasters of Community is hand crafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Lauren Hagerty, Director of Marketing & Community at Power to Fly, discusses hosting virtual events, diversity initiatives, and community-building. Power to Fly employs a 3-prong approach, implements DEI metrics, and allows community members to self-organize events. They emphasize diversity in speakers, content, and images. The episode also covers the challenges of balancing enjoyment and impact, creating unique communities, and tracking community efforts. Lauren shares their journey from genetic counseling to community management and highlights the importance of gratitude in the community industry.

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.

Mia Birdsong, social activist and author, explores the hurdles of self-reliance and oppression in forming community. They discuss how asking for help is seen as a transaction, finding community during struggle and joy, and removing systemic oppression for more human connections.

In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Maurice Woods, Principal Design Lead at Microsoft and Founder and Executive Director of the Inneract Project. The Inneract Project is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing free design education to underrepresented minority youth, from middle school to high school, to college. Maurice shares his journey using design to ‘change the world’ and how he scaled the Inneract Project to reach thousands of students today. We dive into creating truly diverse and inclusive communities and companies by planning and preparing for the upcoming generation, not just the current pool of candidates. Learn how you can get involved in the Inneract Project and provide opportunities for underrepresented youth in this episode and on www.inneractproject.org Who is this episode for?: Non-Profit, In-Person & Online, Scaling 3 key takeaways: 1. Inneract Project was designed to educate and create opportunities to explore design in career and life for underrepresented youth. 2. Expand more broadly to the bigger issue of inclusivity and diversity. It goes beyond recruiting a diverse workplace and transcends to supporting the upcoming generation of youth and going to the environments where people of color are to see those barriers and work through them. 3. Designer Analogy: The contractor builds your home whereas the architect draws up the plans - they look and try to understand what the terrain is, who the people are, what materials are needed, etc. That is the difference between a designer and a product engineer. Notable Quotes: “That's what Inneract Project is trying to do, and that's what we're working on, and until companies really invest more broadly, they're going to be swimming in two feet of water. They're going to just be getting only a small segment of the potential opportunity that they could be getting if they reach more broadly and get more people of color into that business.” “Design plays a huge role in architecting and developing and helping all parties understand how something should be built and how do you build something that people can actually use and find the value out of.” Rapid fire question answers: 1. What’s your current go-to pump-up song? Disappear by Foreign Exchange 2. One concrete piece of advice that you would give to community builders in how to design communities intentionally? Start small and think scale. 3. What’s your favorite book to gift to others? Small Teaching by James M. Lang 4. What is your proudest mentoring moment? The student went through middle school, high school, and got accepted into design school - lots of retention and work. 5. Have you ever worn socks with sandals? No to flip-flops, yes to slip-on 6. Who in the world of the community would you like to take to lunch? Barack Obama 7. What advice would you give for others who are looking to have a similar impact on their work? Have passion. Care about the people you’re doing it for - that’s all that matters. 8. What is a community product or app you wish existed? Communities across the nation are able to connect with opportunities for their kids - especially with design. 9. What’s the weirdest community you’ve been a part of? A breakdancing community where they would go to parties and practice their dancing and represent. 10. How do we identify and misappropriate people of color through visual representation? We have a prejudice that informs how we interact with other groups outside of our own. Images and portrayals haven’t been communicated by people of color but by whites for years. 7. If you’re on your death bed and you could only leave one piece of life advice behind for all the future generations, what would that advice be? The measurement of success is helping others.Masters of Community is hand crafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Today we sit down with the one and only, Jon Levy, behavioral scientist and author of “You’re Invited: The Art and Science of Cultivating Influence”. In this episode, we discuss the SOAR Model, how to engage influential people and the three different types of networker. Jon shares the results of years of research from his various different studies of human behaviour… he touches upon the results of a study of 431 matches from the dating app Hinge, why you are 45% more likely to be obese if you have an obese friend and why the shortcut to changing your behaviour is to simply get around those with the behaviour your strive for. Check out the full episode to learn more about how you… can have more influence over influential people. Who is this episode for? People that want more influence 3 key takeaways: 1. Model for creating a sense of belonging and community: Generosity - give without expectation of return Novelty - unique & make sure you enjoy the activity Curation - diverse, unique backgrounds with zero competition - humbling - sense of accomplishment “Aha” moment - breakthrough moment to change opinion or experience 2. Steps to transitioning from novelty to belonging Discovery - people hear about you (Novelty gets people in the door) Engagement - people show up and interact Membership - gives feeling of belonging and creates true community 3. What makes for an effective invitation and experience: The Ikea Effect - People want to assemble it, earn it themselves, or feel like they’re adding value. Information Gap - this gap between your knowledge and what you're being presented with sparks curiosity and intrigue into attending the event/experience. Provide connection and a sense of influence Notable Quotes: “So initially it wasn't even about becoming more influential. That was kind of an end result. For me, it was just about like, how do I get out of debt? How do I lose weight? How do I like meet somebody? I really like, and hold on to that relationship rather than break up after a few weeks. And I figured that the answer was with people... not with just another self-help book title, or I don't know, another personal development course.” “Let's look at Davos, right? Davos is that event where world leaders come together, there is nothing novel about that experience. It is the same old same design, same old experiences, but when you're standing in the snow with Bill Gates and Angela Merkel, that curation is good enough, right?” Rapid fire question answers: 1. What’s your favorite book to recommend to others? The Little Prince 2. Who’s an up and coming community builder you think is going to do big things? Tina Roth Eisenberg 3. What’s your wildest community story? Guessing what people do and she asked if she was a lifesaver - that ended up being the women who saved her life when she was dying of cancer - her song came in the radio and brought her back 4. What’s your go-to community engagement starter? A catalyst question. Ex: ‘If you could break any Guinness book of world record, which would it be?’ OR ‘When was the last time you acknowledged yourself for being proud of yourself, like you actually said, or thought, ‘I'm really proud of myself’ and what was it for?’ 5. Who is someone or a few people that you'd like to invite to one of your dinners that you haven't reached yet? Peter Cullen, the voice of optimus prime from transformers; Michelle Obama; Oprah; or Richard Branson. 6. What’s a community building technology or app that more people should be using? recommendations are one use a news feature - set follow-ups with people that you like for three months later to send them a note that you’re thinking of them and you’re a big fan. 7. Weirdest community you’ve been a part of? Cutco Cutlery - schedule appointments with people to sell them knives. 8. If you’re on your death bed and you could only leave one piece of life advice behind for all the future generations, what would that advice be? The greatest predictor of anything we care about is who we’re connected to, how much they trust us, and the sense of belonging that we share.Masters of Community is hand crafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Today we welcome Alex Blanton, Senior Community Program Manager at Microsoft to the Masters of Community podcast. Alex studied at the Middlebury College, and had a stint as an Editorial Assistant at the Yale University Press, and has now spent 23 years working at Microsoft. In this episode, we discuss what drew Adam to journalism and then the world of community, the different types of communities Alex has been building at Microsoft, and the business impact of his work. We wrap up by talking about the metrics that can be used to track effective community-building activities, the mistakes Alex has made that he would like you to know about and the tactics he uses to drive engagement. Listen to the full episode to level up your community-building game... Who is this episode for?: Community Managers 3 key takeaways: When connecting community members: think win: win not zero-sum Simple things to make virtual events more effective: get your speakers online 30 minutes early, be a present host and be clear about how to attend the event When tracking community metrics, don’t be to concerned with the raw number, be more concerned with its trajectory Notable Quotes: “And then I read this report that was titled something like “the emerging role of the community manager”. That was about 2010 or 2011. And it was like a light bulb went off in my mind. Cause I thought, this is what I'm doing. Someone has defined what this job is, you know, and that was, I think, where I really started to feel like community management is my calling.” “You are going to need to have someone who's driving that community. Personally in my context, I think like there's very few organic, completely organic communities where Hey, someone just has a great idea and there's a bunch of people in the organically get together and somehow things happen and it keeps happening and just goes on. It's not that those don't ever happen. It's just, they're quite rare. They're the exception. They Def I think they definitely are. You need someone who's the community lead or the community manager. They could be part-time or full-time, it could be official part of their job or an unofficial. Part of their job, but they've taken ownership of it, but you just need someone to kind of turn the crank.” Rapid fire question answers: 1. What's your go-to pump up song? We Will Rock You by Queen 2. What’s your proudest ultimate frisbee moment? Took the disappointment of being cut from a Master’s level team into re-invigorating his career 3. What's your favorite book to give as a gift to others? Watership Down by Richard Adams 4. What did being an editor teach you about community? Publishers understand what the audience wants and then creates that content, Alex is doing this now but for his community! 5. Have you ever worn socks with sandals? In my backyard, yes 6. Who in the world of community would you most like to take for lunch? Alison Michaels, ex. Microsoft 7. What's a go-to community engagement tactic, or conversation starter, that you like to use in your communities? “Tell me something I don’t know about this?” 8. What's a community product you wish existed? A true complete event management tool 9. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? The Ultimate Frisby Community 10. What's a question I didn’t ask you that I should have? “What is your Twitter bio? People are the most interesting technology” 11. If you were to find yourself on your deathbed, and you had to condense all of your life lessons into one tweet-sized piece of advice for the rest of the world for how to live, what would that advice be? Honour your own experiences but still see the world through other people’s eyesMasters of Community is hand crafted by our friends over at: fame.so