Welcome to the latest issue of Uncommunity - the newsletter that helps you become a better community builder. We bring you community experts’ interviews, content on communities, tools to scale community or events, and jobs to be applied.
Ok. What’s one of the best way to learn and know what you do is appreciated in a community? I’m sure it’s not retweets and likes. If there’s something cooking in your genius mind then hit us up. ;)
Now on to the regular stuff.
This week’s guest is Sofía Rodríguez, Director of Community at Venafi. Previosuly she was at Salesforce and Course Hero where she led various community initiatives. Sofia talks about creating strategy for B2B communities, designing meaningful initiatives and gamification in a community.
Let’s begin. 🖖
What are some of your best kept secrets to launch a B2B community in the best way possible
I often use a party analogy when speaking to teammates about the importance of seeding content in the community. If you walk into a party that is empty, you are likely going to walk out (unless you’re the supportive friend to the host, shout out to those special friends!). We use verbal and non-verbal cues to figure out how to interact with our environment. When someone joins your community, you want them to participate. One tactic you can take is to seed content prior to your community’s launch. If you have somewhere to pull from, import the top performing content from your previous platform or curate the most viewed solutions. Have opened ended questions ready for members to engage with.
How can community managers design meaningful surprise and delight initiatives within the community?
The keyword, “meaningful”, is truly meaningfulin this context (I had to say it! Sorry readers). Each individual has their own understanding of what is meaningful to them. Identifying what is surprising or delightful to a community member will take trial and error on the community manager's part. There are approaches one can take based on resources and bandwidth, and I recommend that you assess capacity before moving forward. It is better to start small and the scale to larger initiatives, as the inverse could have negative consequences (imagine you get your favorite snack delivered at your doorstep every Friday and suddenly it stops. Would you feel ‘hangry’?).
As you experiment to find what is meaningful for individuals and in your community, keep a record of your findings– the method doesn’t matter as much as building the habit of doing so. When you start small, your initiative can be sending personalized messages to a community member based off their community persona or something they mentioned in their introduction post. I made a meme for a community member who was describing a project and quoted a famous movie line– I didn’t know if they would appreciate it, but they ended up sharing it with their team and getting one of their team members to join the community.
As your initiatives get larger, you can incorporate anniversaries, celebrating life achievements, or condolences as ongoing surprise and delight campaigns. I had taken note of a community member who mentioned in passing at a conference years ago that their favorite flowers were purple tulips. A year later when they were celebrating a milestone, I sent purple tulips instead of the standard bouquet. They were so surprised I had remembered this detail in passing! It seemed like the impact of remembering that detail was even greater than the flowers themselves.
One of the communities I was a part of was obsessed with stickers (I really think the design team is to thank for creating those characters!). As an organization, we kept printing more and more stickers, which was not ideal because of the environmental impact. I thought, “What if instead of making more, we organized an experience?”. And thus sticker swap meetups became a surprising and delightful initiative at events. This is by no means a new concept (hello collectible pin trading!) and would not work for every community, which is why as a community manager you need to observe and experiment to find the ideal surprise and delight initiative.
Stakeholder buy-ins are so important for a community manager, how should a community manager approach this? What has been your experience in this department?
So important! I have found that using the same language and coming to conversations with stakeholders with a community story or metric that relates to and directly impacts their work to be good tools. We have to remember that we live and breathe community, but the rest of our teammates don’t. Due to this, your buy-in conversation is going to be a buy-in journey.
What should we try to avoid doing while scaling a community program?
Consider scale when evaluating the future implications of launching a community program. For example, one of the perks of your ambassador program may be free tickets to your company’s annual conference. At the start, 10 tickets do not impact the event budget. However, if your ambassador program has no member capacity, you might have just locked yourself into offering hundreds of free tickets. You will end up in a lose-lose situation if you don’t consider scale.
Why, according to you, do people join a community and stay in the community?
I operate with the understanding that people don’t stay in a community forever and they don’t necessarily leave after they’ve made it through every stage of the community member persona. Historically people have formed relationships based on proximity and need. When an individual joins a community, proximity and need can be variables in that decision, but another variable is purpose. I think people are more likely to stay in a community if the value they see from purpose is greater than that of proximity or need.
What are your tips for those who are trying to overhaul a gamification strategy?
Go through the exercise of mapping your community’s personas and their journeys. This will help you understand the motivators to design an effective gamification strategy. Additionally, consider the purpose of the components of the gamification strategy. Are points accumulated to compete or to exchange for goods or perks? How does competition motivate or demotivate more collaborative personalities?
*INTERMISSION*
There you have it. Sofia has done extraordinary work leading community efforts at Salesforce, Course Hero and now Venafi. You can connect and follow Sofía Rodríguez on Twitter. And wait! Sofia is looking to hire Community Manager for her team based out of U.S with remote flexbility. Check out the job details and apply right away.
Feel free to take a break. Stretch, breathe, get some water, etc. Then come back.
There are only a few sections left now: What else we’re reading including few tweets.
You good? Ok! Let’s dive back in 😅
What else we’re reading?
The Role of a Community Advocate. In the world of community, there are no hard and fast rules to what titles we should use or how a community team should be structured. These guidelines are still being developed. As we're developing these guidelines, it's important to take pause in what's important to us. This is really important piece on the state of titles & positions in a community industry by Erin Mikail Staples of Orbit. Check out the full article here. We know a few things for certain:
Management doesn’t always have the best connotation — community members like to be empowered, advocated for, loved, and supported
Community is rapidly growing as an industry, requiring more specialized roles.
Community teams require a diverse skill set to succeed. This skill set may differ from organization to organization.
No two community builders are alike. Everyone brings a different set of skills to the table — and this is a wonderful thing.
Budgeting to Build Your Community. One of the most misunderstood and *shrug, idk, do whatever* roles in the games industry may be the job of a community manager. As a subset of marketing and especially in the indie space, it can be difficult to understand how to budget for it - whether that’s time, money, or even what tasks to expect. Victoria Tran, Director Community of Innersloth (team behind the game Among Us) shares overview of marketing cost, marketing vs community and community management budgeting. Check out the full breakdown here.
A community manager’s job is to connect people to each other in a way that’s beneficial to them. Meanwhile, marketing can be seen as a more one-directional approach, where the aim is to connect a message to people in a way that’s beneficial to them. One of these is not more “superior” to the other, merely different ways of work.
How To Get Experts To Contribute To Your Community. In the good old days of community building, it was pretty common for top industry experts to share their best knowledge in hosted brand communities. They published blog posts, detailed guides, videos, and photos. But that doesn’t happen as much anymore. There are too many other platforms where people can share knowledge and build their audience. Richard Millington of Feverbee shares example of successful tactics to engage experts. Read the full article here.
If your current tactics aren’t successful, it’s usually either:
1) What you’re asking experts to do requires too much effort.
2) The perceived rewards are too low to justify the effort.
Introducing Gravity - the Field Guide for Product Communities. Gravity is a print and web magazine that explores the theories and practices of establishing and scaling product communities. It’s a new initiative by Orbit Model. You can learn more about the magazine here.
Community Building 101 for brands launching community.
Please train my “neural net” and click the “Like & Comment” button at the bottom!(This is no vanity exercise—the only purpose it serves is to create a feedback loop, so I can make Uncommunity better for you!)
Thanks for having me! This was a fun AMA 😃