Business Unusual Interview ft. Beth McIntyre: Build a successful brand community
Hello! My name is Jessa Lux. I am the host of the Business Unusual Interview Series and this exists to bring expertise and guidance to marketers - so many of you all - to help you do the absolute best work of your lives. And I'm also the Community Manager for a digital design agency called Clique Studios, so we build websites, software, and apps for our clients. We're headquartered in Chicago, but we also have offices in Denver, which is where I am, and in Austin. And I am so excited
about this conversation today, not only because it's about building communities as brand strategy, but because it's with Beth McIntyre who, as far as I'm concerned, is the absolute best in the business and I cannot wait to learn from Beth. Beth is the Head of Community at CMX and Bevy. Beth, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us and share your insight today. [Beth] I'm so excited to be here. Fun fact about me: my airpods just died, so I'm just going to quickly change it out. That is so funny because every time I get on one of these interviews, my airpods - I wear them all day every day, and then I'm doing an interview and they're like, it's impossible to keep them in my ears. So while you do that Beth, I'm just going to lay the groundwork a little bit for this conversation. So, it's a live interview, clearly, and it's 30 minutes. Beth and I will talk and then we'll leave time at the end for your questions, and I know there are a lot of them. I kind of opened the
can of worms yesterday - I emailed everyone who is registered and asked them what questions they have and I got so many responses. So our conversation won't be able to hit all of them, but please everyone don't hesitate to put your questions in the Q&A feature and because this is a live interview please also just say hello in the chat tell us where you're coming from Beth, you mentioned a couple of other ideas that can kind of break the ice in the chat yeah i love asking okay your day so far explain it in three emojis in the chat so this is like any emoji you have access to and you're allowed to use it to explain your day and then we kind of have to like decrypt what your day was like through your emoji um symbols okay i absolutely love that and while you are all deciding on your emojis i'm gonna put beth on the spot beth what are your emojis to describe your day so far okay i think my first emoji would be the little cup of here i can actually put them in there so the little cup of coffee definitely um my second one is going to be um a snowy mountain because i'm actually based in jasper alberta in canada and the sun is shining today and i can see all the mountains around me so that's like a really nice part of my day and then let's see if there's like uh headphones because they are causing me a bit of strife this morning totally i love that okay that is a great way to get started everyone else put your emojis in there and beth for anyone who's not familiar will you tell us a little bit about cmx and your role there totally so cmx is the community for community professionals um it began about seven or eight years ago when david spinks the founder got together with a couple of other community builders in new york and they went for a beer and they realized that around the table all these other people knew what problems they were facing and had advice and were sharing the same experiences um and so from that one afternoon beer with community professionals cmx was born um it grew super organically our mission is to give community professionals everything they need in order to succeed so we do that through our online community spaces we do that through training and education we have a huge very robust events program that hosts lots of events every month um and of course our blogs and frameworks and research and uh really there's just a lot that we do and uh want to give back to community professionals so that they know exactly how to succeed in their roles and i as a community professional i'm so appreciative to you all at cmx i was introduced to cmx through you at the cmx connect conference um which is probably about a year ago now and i'm so thankful because i've learned so much from all those resources that you just mentioned um i know that community is something it's kind of like a point of confusion for people especially as a business function and i know that because sometimes when i just i describe my own role i get some blank stares so beth what is community that's so you know i think that that's something all community professionals can for sure connect with is because it's like how many times have you been to a house party before covid and you were meeting strangers and they said what do you do and then you just are like um don't worry about it because like you don't want to explain all of it um so the way that i kind of see community as a brand um especially now that it is kind of becoming more of a buzzword so businesses are building out communities so that their customers voice can be the can be heard can be the most powerful um you know i i always think of community starting with like if i'm going to buy running shoes i don't want to ask nike i don't need nike to tell me which running shoes i should buy i'm going to ask you know my friend who runs marathons or runs every single day has tried a whole bunch of different shoes that's who's that's whose um opinion i'm going to trust when i'm talking about running shoes so then from there i think of community is like the company nike is giving me and this marathon runner a space to have these organic conversations about running shoes and so community is about building and investing in these spaces where users customers you know members of your community can have these conversations organically so these spaces also come in all different shapes and sizes there's online community places there's forums um in-person in-person events virtual events conferences all of these can be kind of under that community umbrella and they all have different purposes sales and marketing and customer success and uh i mean those are kind of throughout the job my head um but it's really about determining what the business goals are and then figuring out how community can drive the success for those goals so community as a definition as a long-winded definition is the space that the company is investing in to bring those people together i love that and i wish i could just take you with me to dinner parties and house parties and be like beth take it away because i think that was such a good summary i think long-winded is kind of the only way to really describe what community is and can be and when you were giving the running example it actually reminded me of a tweet that david spinks shared probably about a week ago and he said community is something about community is less about helping your audience and more about helping your audience help each other which is exactly what you described with asking other runners about the shoes versus asking nike directly totally and that goes into all of the different aspects so i mean like your business audience a business a community business is finding people to help each other same with customer success so customer success as you know it in a traditional sense is your customer is going to your website or calling you and you helping them but a customer success community is you giving your customers the tools to help each other um same with field marketing like field marketing traditionally is i would send one employee to all these different places to host events for my customers or prospects or users field marketing as a community is people hosting those events for each other customers getting together with each other um so i mean totally it's it's an absolute extension of your team and i think community is really um what's the word when exponential it's what you get the exponential growth that you wouldn't otherwise get as one or two people on a small team totally it can be such a powerful tool and there are a lot you kind of alluded to it there are a lot of reasons that a company could decide to start a community and i know that cmx has a model around this so can you describe some of the compelling reasons and maybe give us an intro to what that model is like to help people maybe define and decide for themselves what a communi what a community could do for their business totally i'm glad you brought it up jessa um yeah so cmx has the spaces model um a couple of years ago the cmx team created this model it's i would say it's like a framework as well because it's an acronym which we all love and each different component of the acronym is a business value or a goal that your community could provide so i think one of the most important parts and one of the biggest challenges of community is provide like proving the value of what you're doing because it's hard to measure the quantifiable impact of community especially because a lot of the times community is about building relationships solving problems building connections and those are more like qualitative they're not really numbers based so the spaces model kind of aims to solve that challenge for you and i'm gonna do it on my hand so s starts with support um this is that example like customer success communities how your members are answering questions for each other and supporting each other with answers and then you have p which is a product um and this is when community members are giving you product feedback and ideas and helping you basically improve your product or your software a is acquisition i would say acquisition might be the most slept on business goal to drive because sometimes sales communities and acquisition communities can feel a bit like used car salesmen like a little bit um sticky but i think acquisition is like the the biggest possibility for community anyway it's how your community is helping you grow and acquire new members or users um c c uh c i knew i would i would lose track um this is where you have a platform that your community members are contributing to so this would be like a marketplace or a social network where or developer relations programs like this is where your contribution comes from your members and what your platform is like airbnb or uber like these are contributions from your members and then engagement is e and it's when your your goal is retention so customer retention member retention this is when we want to engage with people so they stick around longer and become more loyal maybe to a product maybe to a movement maybe to the identity that your community gives them but that engagement is just like bringing people in and holding them in keeping them in and then the second s is success this is kind of goes hand in hand with support um but this is more helping people become successful so while support is about like the technical side how do i work this thing success is like the strategy behind it how do you become the best you can be while using this product or or um tool so i think with all of those things and maybe we can email everybody after this with like the picture of it so they have a visual um but a community program absolutely aligns with more than one of these outcomes uh i would say that the majority of programs definitely align with multiple and um the spaces model is like the best way to either start a community program or go back if you inherit a community and you're like what is the purpose of this community go back to the spaces model and really dive into which which letter your community coincides with okay i love that that does make it a lot more clear about where to start so if your company doesn't have a community at this point you're embarking on community to use the spaces model you would kind of huddle up say what will this community be used for what is the goal and then identify one or two or whichever are applicable of the spaces and go from there is that right exactly and i i think especially when you're starting a community from scratch and we have a lot of resources about exactly that question like how do you start from the very beginning what's your first step um it's about listening so it's about who are the users of your product or who are the people who might already be in a community that you just aren't really investing in yet um i think it also comes down to talking cross-departmentally if we will allow that to be a term um like what is sales need what is marketing need what does customer success need what is development and product need how could you fit into these spaces um i would say first and foremost though is like what is the company's biggest goal what is the business goal that your company has and then what is that outcome that you're trying to achieve and how can community fit in with that so if your company's biggest goal is sales and acquisition that's the business strategy then from there you can build out the community strategy so which types of programs are you going to implement in order to meet this business outcome and that's where you come with the programs themselves like we need a forum we need a distributed events program we need online communities this is where those kinds of things come into play and then the third step is the tactical level this is when you hire a community manager or this is when you join the cmx community and start researching how to do this but the tactical level is like everyday work what goes into making these programs successful if you have an online community and that's your community strategy how do you keep it engaged how do you welcome members in how do you answer questions how do you solve problems so those are kinds of the three like strategy levels of where to begin okay that's great and i wrote down two things while you were talking um one that i think is really important and it can be a misconception which is i think a lot of people assume that community lives within the marketing department and you just clarified for us that community is a is a means of helping serve those higher level business strategies or goals so it's not necessarily within the marketing department do you want to talk on that um just briefly in terms of like where communities should live is there one right place that it should live should it always be on its own um or if if marketing is the goal the community has brought community exists to serve should live within the marketing department for example um i mean i'm biased i think community should always be on its own um this is a conversation that we're having in the cmx community and the entire industry right now is like the future of the chief community officer and how that like how that's going to be the future soon even now um so i do think that there's space for the chief community officer and like the community department on its own but understanding that when you start with that first business outcome if your business goal is sales maybe the community sits under sales if your community goal is acquisition maybe it's marketing if it's you know customer success maybe you sit under the customer success department i think that when you start to see a community choosing more than one of those goals and actually reaching out to more of the business that's when it sits on its own so a great example is cmx cmx is actually acquired by a company called bevi bevi is a software company that builds a distributed events and virtual conference software for any company who's looking to have a conference and then build a community so within bevy cmx is the community department we help sales we help marketing we help product um you know our distributed events community is hosted by volunteers who use our product and we ask them for feedback all the time so it it really depends on the organization i wish that we could all just be chief community officers and work in a community department but understanding that it really does depend on the organization totally and it might be an evolution maybe you start working with marketing or sales and then um community grows and it can sit on its own but um i think that is an important distinction to help people get their head around community as a concept the other thing i wrote down while you were talking which is you specified that you have to start with that goal or that vision of what you're trying to achieve with community and then choose the tools you're going to use whether that be an event or a slack community or facebook group um i think sometimes people want to build a community and they just you know start having events to meet people and help them but there's not really like a clear north star you know that's true but i think that's okay in some ways and the reason why is because when you're starting to build a community the thing that a lot of people forget is that it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of love to build a community um you don't really launch a community because you have to have put that groundwork in to give people the reason to join you're probably going to be manufacturing the conversations in the beginning and like personally inviting people to take part in them so when you're in that space at the very beginning i really would say like focus on controlling what you can control and scaling comes later so in the beginning yeah have an event meet people ask them what they're interested in ask them what would you do you want more events would you rather have an online place like asking customers asking your members who are already there and who are already invested in what you're doing get them to weigh in i think that it's that's also a very slipped-on technique it's like ask the community what they want because they'll tell you um and being totally transparent that you're gonna try your best to give it to them but anyway so you know you host that event you now know what's gone into hosting an event you know how hard it can be to get people involved you know how to ask a speaker you know what platform you're going to use so from there now you know all of the hard work that goes into it so now you know how to automate that how to scale it up and i think that comes from all of them especially in the beginning when we talk about online communities a lot of communities you would talk to a lot of community managers they start because their community made a facebook group on their own or people were hosting events on their own like just because they love the product or they love the things so much so then the company was like well we should be involved in these events we should be giving them more resources so that they can meet and talk and maybe we'll send them some swag and then these people get really excited to receive t-shirts um so it's i think the community can be super organic and it will grow organically but you have to put that work in in the beginning to ask people what they want and to put in that manual work so it can scale later totally and one thing that's been fun for me with that is hearing what people have to say and then demonstrating that i heard them because i actually make the change and i follow up and say like so you mentioned last time this was a little rusty or didn't work perfectly for you and that sort of communication and like demonstration of hearing my community members is just like build such good will and those people become like super community members i know you have a better name is it a power member is that what a top tier of members power member super user like there's all sort advocate there's all sorts of different um i call them my favorites there's all sorts of different names um but you're right and i think always the key is transparency so um you know when we talk about platforms how do you choose a platform well ask the people i mean are they on facebook already maybe you just take over the facebook group um will people like to move to another platform after facebook i don't know maybe ask them um and then i i said it earlier that like you don't launch a community on the same note i feel like you can't surprise your community like there should never be a big reveal in your community because they should be with you every step of the deciding process how things are going to happen they should agree with you on the values and the mission and like what are we here for what is the purpose of this um i i really feel like a community should be built with its members not for its members i really really really love that um and i would like to keep the mic for this whole time but i'm not going to so i'm going to ask you a couple of just rapid fire questions and then we can go to the q a so anybody who's listening right now please put your questions in the q a um beth one question i really wanted to ask you um i love learning from my own mistakes but i also would prefer to learn from somebody else's mistakes so what is a common mistake that you see in community building um especially when people are kind of like getting started with their community building uh i think the idea that it's gonna be easy um you know the idea that that you're gonna launch this thing and oftentimes it's not the community manager who makes the mistake it's the executive who orders you to do this huge thing right off the bat um and that's just a mistake right away i would also say the biggest mistake is thinking that you're going to get the right metrics right out of the gate um you're probably not you're probably going to measure a whole bunch of different things about your community new members comments you know retention all of these different things you're going to start measuring until you find the perfect metric um and then i would also say just like you're allowed to be inspired by other communities and look at other communities and think wow this is amazing but don't compare yourself to other communities because every community is different and i think that's what i mean that's what makes community so special is that it's the one thing that someone can't copy from your business they could probably copy your product they could copy a lot of what you're doing but your community is totally uncopyable um and so don't compare yourself to anyone else just in general don't compare yourself that's just good life advice totally um it is so tempting and it's such human nature to compare yourself and i just had a conversation last week with one of my community members and she's like do you know the xyz group they have this really robust slack group and my response was well should we have a slack group she's like no that's not what you're doing like you're facilitating more intimate relationships with people and i needed that reminder um and that was just like you know falling victim to comparing myself to this other community that is also great um okay looks like we just got a question from amanda she said how do you best get other employees involved in your communities i feel like community will fall in marketing in my company but i'd love to understand how to best get others involved without taking up too much of their time that's a super good question amanda and it's actually something that we're talking um in our own community about right now how do you get more people involved and how do you get them more excited because you know sometimes the work i'm doing is only exciting to me like i just reorganized all our slack channels and i'm like singing about it from the rooftops and people are like well done beth um i think starting is like with a low lift so asking people to come in once once a week maybe on a wednesday morning and just peruse the conversations what are people talking about answer one question a week kind of thing um the other thing is if you have rituals in your community we have a welcome committee um once a week on mondays they come in and they welcome all of the new members in the in the thread that we start um you know maybe they take a shift on the moderation crew like once a month they are moderation or moderator for a week where they're in charge of commenting and liking and responding to questions so you can kind of have like a tiered approach of that um again starting with a super low lift maybe it's only once a month they do this the first of the month they come in and then from there you can work your way up we actually do have like an engagement cycle framework at cmx too that i can probably track down um and that engagement cycle could totally relate to how to get other employees involved but i will say that part of the challenge of getting them involved or part of the way to get them involved is to get them excited and that would be those reports so a weekly report or a monthly report to tell people like look at how many questions we answered this month look at how many new members we got these are the top posts we had we had 9 000 likes in one month or something so you're really showing them how much is going on and almost make them get fomo like fear that they're missing out on something awesome i needed that advice i really did like i talked about week over week like how can i get people excited without like you know with with it being more like organic excitement so thank you for asking that amanda thank you for answering that with such a good answer beth um we're getting really close to the end but i still want to ask one more so we might go one minute over um drew who is amazing and is starting a really cool company right now drew put a question in the q a that says how do you create credibility and hype to get users to want to join an online community when you're starting from zero okay so that is a really good question and i think that this is kind of where that groundwork comes from in the beginning and like the manufacturing the conversations and the excitement so not lying manufacturing um when you are starting a community of any type it's about personally inviting people and telling them why they specifically should join this place um reaching out to people via email or linkedin or whatever method you'd like but telling them like i see you work at x company and i see that you've done this much work on these projects i really think you should come into this space i would love to answer some questions i would love for you to answer some questions of our members or this is a topic we're all talking about right now i would love for you to come in and join us and doing that for 20 or 30 people so then all of a sudden you have these say 20 people in this space who are feel good that you ask them you invited them into the space they're talking about something they're interested in and they're an expert on then you start asking them what are their challenges so now you can start to kind of cross um like i said manufacture those conversations you know if member x needs help with this one and this member just told you they're good at that now you can connect them so you are making those connections which will then kind of build a relationship and grow the ultimate goal is for those two people who had this awesome connection in your community even when it was just 20 people them to go out and invite a friend each so now you have 40 people and then it kind of grows exponentially from there um but again in the beginning it's focusing on the quality not the quantity we all have this grand idea of scaling but you really need to focus on controlling what you can control in the very beginning and that's those like awesome conversations with awesome people so good um i wish that we could talk all day and i knew that i would wish that but it is 11 32 my time so i have to let you go i have to let everyone who's here go back to the rest of their day but beth this was like such a privilege for me it was really a dream come true to talk to you and learn from you and now know you so thank you again for sharing all this um i've gotten a number of questions about a recording you will all get a recording and um you'll get that via email i'll share other takeaways from this but beth thank you again and thank you everyone who tuned in for being here yeah thank you so much for having me and i will say i mean of course join the cmx community but if you had any questions that didn't get answered or you want to start a discussion with me um i'm on twitter which i normally never like promote but uh that's a really easy low lift way to like dm me or or um send a tweet to me or something and we can start having these conversations there that's great and just with regard to cmx it's cmxhub.com right yeah cmxhub.com community and then it's kind of a choose your own adventure how you want to get involved okay perfect well thank you so much beth have a great rest of your day thank you everyone for tuning in and i'll see you all soon thank you
2021-03-02 05:07
