Community Hacking

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, effective community management stands as a cornerstone of successful B2B marketing strategies. The Adzact podcast brings together leading experts in marketing and community management to share their insights on building, managing, and leveraging communities to enhance business outcomes. This report explores the nuances of community dynamics, the strategic application of technology, and innovative approaches such as community hacking, all aimed at fostering engagement, trust, and growth within targeted business sectors. Through expert contributions, we delve into how structured community forums, data-driven strategies, and the judicious use of influencers can collectively drive meaningful engagement and prove invaluable in the era of data privacy and customer-centric marketing.

Guests

Ashely Friedlein, Founder at Econsultancy and Guild

Joel Harrison, Founder at B2BMarketing and Propolis

Conrad Ford, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Allica Bank

Neil Brennan, Vice President of Creator Marketing at Meltwater

Emma Isichei, CMO at MHR

Claire Beatty, Senior Director Customer Marketing at Genesys

welcome to today's podcast. I'm Joaquin Dominguez, Head of Marketing of adzact a B2B ad platform. And today we have a fascinating topic which is community hacking. We have experts here in creating communities. And we will start with a definition of what is actually a community, for example, versus an audience. Why is so important today and different types of community. And if it's possible to hack a community and finally how to measure its success. But first of all, let's start with a quick round of introductions. Ashley, would you like to give a sentence on yourself?

Thanks Joaquin and Hi everyone! I'm the founder of two businesses, one Econsultancy, which is a community for marketers learning about digital marketing, e-commerce and more recently Guild, which is a tech platform for running professional communities.

Thank you. Joel.

Thank you. Yes, I'm Joel Harrison, editor in chief and co-founder of B2B marketing. We are a many things, but a core of our business is a community for B2B marketers to help them be better at what they do.

Thank you. Claire.

Hi everyone. My name is Claire Beatty. I'm senior director for customer advocacy at Genesis. For anyone not familiar with Genesis, we are a market leader in cloud based customer experience solutions.

Thank you. Claire. Emma.

Hi, I'm.

Emma Isichei I'm the chief marketing officer for MHR, who are a HR, payroll and finance software company.

Thank you. Emma. Neil.

I'm the VP for creative marketing at meltwater. Meltwater is a martech business. We help customers make better data led decisions through social and more traditional media insights.

Thank you Neil and finally, Tom.

My name is Tom Gatton. And I'm the chief executive and founder of Adzact which is a B2B ad platform which is helping people remove the bane of B2B click fraud and make more effective use of their B2B budgets.

Ashley and Joel, I would love to hear your view. What defines a community and what distinguish a community from an audience.

Yeah, the slight variations, but I'd say a community's a place, where people come together to interact, share knowledge, and build relationships around a common interest or purpose. I think the difference between a community and an audience. Is in a community? Its members engage with each other. So it's a many to many model. And also that the benefits of belonging can be just intrinsic, as in it's they're just sort of want to be part of it for its own sake, whereas an audience tends to be more of a broadcast, one to many relationship, as in the somebody sending stuff out to the A list or to an audience. And also there the benefits mostly accrue to the person, the sort of host or owner of the audience so often say if a sales and marketing reasons. I think also there are other categories like fans and followers, like in social media, which is distinct again from, community, audience and even a network, I would say is subtly different from a community, tends to be more transactional and again, more about extrinsic benefits like money or getting a job.

A very fulsome answer from Ashley. I think it's, great to have the definitions, the criteria, and your way you framed it was great around the difference in a community and an audience. I think that is, definitely, germane, from my perspective, particularly in mind of our community, which is propolis, I think is very much around just kind of picking up partly what Ashley said. It's about people coming together to succeed. And succeed by collaboration, by sharing. But there's also an aspect of belonging as well. It's something where they feel that they are intrinsically linked and have things in common with other people, and that's in all of their interests to be part of this. I think you framed the conversation brilliantly in terms of audience versus community. But from our point of view, we've always felt like we've had before we launched our our actual digital community. We've always felt we had a community with a small C, because our audience has also been a community. People know each other. They do share, but informally in an unstructured, way without a kind of construct. So I think there is a kind of a blurring of boundaries, but I agree to your point. There is a distinct there is a formalized community is something different to an audience, which is as as you said, what is one to many rather than interactions between themselves?

What makes community marketing so important today?

I think at the moment it's about trust. There's so much noise out there in people in terms of, vendors, technology companies, agencies in the world I operate in who are talking, it's very hard to disseminate the wood from the trees. So to have a place where you can go to get objective answers to your questions and validate your opinions and get constructive help is really, really vital. Otherwise you could be listening to a million different, suggestions or solutions which have, different levels of objectivity associated with them.

Yeah, I think it was interesting. There was a McKinsey article back just over a year ago now, I think September 22nd. But where they said community is the big idea in marketing for this decade. So we'll see whether they're right or not. But I think there are two big reasons why communities are sort of hotter topic in marketing at the moment. One is that just particularly in B2B marketing, some of the tactics there are feeling either a bit sort of stale or it's a bit saturated, and as a result it's getting very expensive. So just actually getting anyone's attention and response to anything is getting harder and harder and therefore more expensive. There's information overload. There's a move to the, you know, they call the dark web. So like messaging apps, places you can't as a marketer get access to necessarily. So I think just how on earth do we get anyone's attention and get them to care at all is, is is getting harder and harder. And and therefore community is a way to build that goodwill, that trust, that relationship, that access and so I think that's a key one. And also then obviously, first party data or data generally is is a hot topic and with sort of cookie death on advertising and with social media, where you get very little, ownership or access to the data because that's kept by the platforms themselves. If you've got your own community, you know, you've got profile data, you've got conversational data, which is like a real time focus group and insights. Now, of course, using AI, you can really easily mine those conversations for some market insights and buyer signals, all sorts of stuff. So I think that, you know, saturated, expensive other channels and access to first party data via your own community, a part, you know, part of the reason as well, why communities is sort of hotter topic.

It's interesting for MHR. We have a couple of communities around our platforms. So one being our I, Trent and HR platform, and it's interesting that the community runs itself. So what I mean by this is that they often have hacks that they need to do on the platform or want to do on the platform, and because it's so customizable, they use this community to have that conversation. And initially we started jumping in and going, oh, that's a knowledge article or that's thing. But actually it works really well when they can have those conversations that they can find if they need to, but actually going, okay, so and so at college or so and so at each shop have done this. Therefore this is good. So we find it's a really nice way that the community advocates the platform and talks about the platform, and we're not worried in it whether it's negative, if there's something more negative, because again, the community will kind of moderate that. So it's an interesting approach for us. I think it's quite effective.

It's fantastic that it's passed that threshold. Now. Self propelling self kind of perpetuating. I feel like the thing that the definition between a community and an audience is maybe that lack of centralization whereby somebody owns everything and broadcasts to them. And the way that you just described how that evolved was very much that it, you know, whether or not it's happening through a channel that you own, the community is interacting with each other. And even if the channel wasn't there, they would probably still find each other and find another mechanism to communicate. And so, for me, I feel like that level of interconnection is the definition. But did that change as your community evolved and scaled?

This is the interesting thing. So the community for I, Trent, was set up by somebody that worked for us and then left and took the community with them and became a consultant and grew and grew. So we are actually a member of it versus the person that can lock it down. Now we have a lot of influence in it on what we do, but I think that makes it more trusted because we're a member versus a driver. That and I think that's the change. We have another community for another platform that we've set up. And I don't think we're seeing success, but we're not seeing the rate of success compared to the other one. And I think it's because we all know when suppliers own things, they feel people feel pushed upon. We can do exactly the same approach through the both of them. But the one we don't own. People go, oh, okay, I like that one. That approach. So it's an interesting there is a certain element of getting a third party to sort of foster it and start to grow it, I think is something marketers should look at for their companies versus always trying to own something. And I think not being afraid of what's being said there. I think, Neil, I think that's a really important point, is don't be afraid of it. Embrace it. You know, when we had a few technical issues that were caused by an internet provider to us, we were able to share it in the normal way he would, but we were also able to use the community to publish it through, who again offered them comfort within a team of what's going on. And it's not an individual case.

There.

Are different kinds of communities. That's fascinating. Emma, really, really interesting when there are different kinds of progenitors of communities, you know, and in Neil's point there was around the ownership by vendors, for example, in that space. And Ashley was kind of alluding to that earlier on in terms of their space. That makes up many of his customers at Guild. But, there's another aspect of community development which is around from like ourselves, from the kind of legacy media brands moving into operating communities whereby it is inherently owned and operated by an organization, but with an objective mindset and rationale and need to do that. So, you know, that's another rationale, and it's another means of operating back to the the kind of question that I can pose at the very beginning, which is around the difference between the audience and a community. I mean, our challenge in doing what we've done is to is that there is there was a community, there is still a community, a wider community in B2B marketing. And our challenge is we have to monetize that. We have to make it membership only. That means that what happens is that you, exclude many of the people who might voluntarily drive the community in terms of volume of activity. And LinkedIn is a great example of that, but might not actually then preclude other people from talking, from sharing candidly. So it's about finding that balance. So I'm just circling that as another model that's very relevant because you're seeing we're not the only legacy media organization that's gone down this route.

It reminds me of Ashley, something you said to me some time ago that that when you're actually building the. Community, you know, trying to achieve that threshold that Emma, you clearly passed with the I, Trent community, that there are a small number of people that disproportionately contribute to the conversation, driving the conversation forwards. And they, you know, that can be like 5%, you know, just 1 or 2 people in 30 that actually post a lot of the stuff. And I think you said sometimes they don't always have the most to say, but they kind of the glue that sticks everything together. So tell us about that.

Yes. I mean, very roughly, there's sort of benchmarks being done under this over the years. There's, 5 to 10% of any given community might be the sort of chatty ones, as in the ones who are sort of happy to proactively put put stuff out there. And that's true. You know, if you run an event, for example, and you have round tables or conferences, you know how many people actually put up their hands, how many people actually, you know, say something without being prodded to or being asked? It probably is 5 to 10% equally. So. It's not it's not. It's just a sort of human. Some people are more extrovert or forthcoming than others, opinionated and others. Doesn't mean they've got the most useful views. Always. So part of the, you know, skill, if you're managing a community or, you know, moderating an event, of course, is to sort of draw out some of the quieter ones because they've often got a lot good to say. But it does mean yes in terms of just sort of organic momentum within a community. It depends a bit on the use case, but if you've got a sort of general peer to peer one, it does tend to mean you want to get into often sort of tens or hundreds on guild, actually. Interestingly, a lot of the sweet spot seems to be around 300 to 1000 people, which is enough organic momentum for it to be self-sustaining without it getting too noisy and overwhelming, which is, you know, there's a downside, actually. Communities can have disadvantages of scale, and they can get worse as they get bigger if you're not careful. So, you know, interesting dynamics around that.

Isn't it interesting though actually, that the five and 10% of people who actually actively contribute, that hasn't really changed since the beginning of social media, has it? It's a pretty constant. And even though we're in this potentially in this closed environment where there's a lot less to be lost by being candid and sharing human nature is such that it's we're still in that space. So to that point, you know, in propolis, we exactly that we have because our people buy in as a corporate member for their marketing function, we find exactly that, that only a small number of people will do it. We have to work hard on on all platforms, all channels to get people to contribute. And we do that for a variety of means. And exactly to Ashley's point, we've always done that with events. We've always done that with roundtables, with webinars that we do. It's about finding about the interaction that you have as a community manager to run that. But we do initiatives within the platform. We seek to try and tease out. We try and get the whole community to focus on particular issues in a short period of time and get them to focus on the areas we we call a sprint. And then in some ways, you would call a development sprint. But yeah, it's fascinating that you I think we have to accept that this is the way it is. Right? There'll only be a small number of people who will ever really be drive that. And it's fascinating, to hear from Emma about how that works at her communities.

We have a similar approach at Genesis Emma to yours. By the sound of it, we have a customer advocacy program that our customers need to enroll in, and we've done the analysis, and the customers that are enrolled in our advocacy program have a 92% higher lifetime value than those that are not. And so we say the space has a really four main kind of areas of benefit or focus. The first is similar to you all like networking with their peers, overcoming shared challenges. The second is about learning about the platform and really accelerating their adoption and innovation. A lot of our customers really want to showcase the innovation that they're already doing, and they want to find out whether they're using the platform in a unique way and whether others have achieved similar benefits. So we give them the opportunity to speak at conferences or to work on content with us, like blogs and webinars and that kind of thing. And then our platform is also gamified. So all of the content that they engage with, all of the activities that they do on our behalf, they get points for it that they can redeem over a wide range of benefits. And that might be, you know, Amazon gift cards or, you know, merchandise, but it's also training and development. They can do Genesis Cloud certifications and they can also accrue professional services time. So depending on how they want to use their benefits, you know, it can work at a lot of levels. We promote our program as the gateway to their strategic partnership with us. So it's got a huge benefit to our business to have a highly engaged advocacy community.

So I was just going to say just off the back of that. Claire. So it's interesting you say so from a customer advocacy perspective because obviously our business. We help brands to partner with creators and influencers to be able to grow, whether it's their own network and their own channel. But to build awareness and through creating advocacy programs we see today are much more successful in the actual outcomes and the results because of the authenticity that comes with it. The fact that people are talking about you, they're not necessarily being paid to do it, but they've already been part of the program. And so, yeah, we've seen a lot of success where brands have rolled this out and then been able to prioritize, creators that they work with based on the past interactions that they've had with the brand and the fact that they are genuinely strong advocates and that they're not there just for for monetary gain.

Absolutely. And it's, you know, it's about working with the customers to find out what they're looking for as well. And it might be that, you know, they're doing a really interesting project and they want to promote it in their own organization. You know, perhaps there's other business units that would benefit from the type of innovation that they're doing, and they want to promote it that way. You know, other times, you know, they're looking at their career and they want to be a speaker and want to have more of a public profile. Sometimes they just come into the program and they complete a few short challenges because, you know, they want to get some gift cards or whatever it might be. So it's like really working with them and understanding what motivates them and trying to find the win win in, in the opportunity.

How much do you orchestrate that, Claire? Do you have to work quite hard to orchestrate it, or does it just happen kind of organically?

As you said earlier, it depends on the type of advocate. There are some who come into the platform every day. It's the first thing they do in the morning. There's others that you know, you need to work with them on the account level and say, okay, this is what's happening in terms of advocacy across your employees. You know, you've got these many enrolled advocates and this is their activity. This is what they're interested in. How do you want to partner with us? You know, do you want to leave it as an individual level, or do you want to work with us more strategically to think about advocacy as an organization? So it really depends. You know, obviously we have, some organizations do work with us very strategically. They see it as sort of a win win for their brand. Others, that they just do it for fun or anything like that just to grow their own careers.

Conrad, welcome. We have been talking about the the communities, of course, and community types. What drives success in communities, would you like to give a sentence on yourself so the rest can know more about you.

Hi, everyone. I'm the chief product and strategy officer at Allica Bank, which is a bank focused on the SME population or medium sized businesses. We are officially, we've been named the fastest growing tech company in the UK by Deloitte recently. So we're extremely fast growing. And my particular interest in this topic is that our target customer base of of medium sized businesses, they are inherently community minded, albeit at a local level. So they they are in trade federations, same industries. They're close to local businesses through rotary clubs. They have local communities, for example, with accountants and professional advisers. And one of the things we're trying to get our heads around is how we build that community into something scalable that's useful for our customers and also works for us. So that's my particular lens here.

You Emma you have also faced a similar talent, that working with small communities, even that you have a nature which is a massive software?

We also work with small communities. So our newer platform, for example, is as much as I said, a smaller community. And there I think, as you said, the smaller you get, one of the issues you have is contribution. So it's trying to stoke the contribution to make sure that it's not just you talking, but it's it's the other people within the community to do it. And to grow this I think, is, is something that we do very much through when we onboard a customer in enabling them to be part of this. But I think there's a lot more work to be done in. I like the idea of, for example, of gamifying it, I think, Claire, I think that's a really nice way, because I think you feel like you're achieving something versus you're just actually contributing and you don't really see that. So I think that's quite a nice way for us. We probably have a look at that in terms of where we go forward, because I think that will help us grow it quicker.

That felt very clever to me. It was almost like your own American Express point system where, yeah, you're able to oversee yourself, Joel, as it's a paid community. There are some people, like almost the lurkers get all the value and none of none of the kind of, you know, I'm not contributing. There are people that would have been contributing to the free community that you would want to be part of the paid community, for free almost. And I suppose having the kind of reward system is a way of rewarding the behaviors you like.

One of the rewards is worth saying. One of the rewards is that people who do contribute and I in our instance, I'd be fascinated to hear what everyone else has got to say about this is they they enjoy sharing. It's a reward for them. It's something which gives them purpose, and it's something which makes them feel like they're belonging and they're contributing to their, ecosystem. So I take your point. Absolutely, Thomas. But I think there is there is a benefit perhaps more less kind of substantial, but it's certainly there within that. Joel just quickly on that though. That's an interesting point because if people are contributing and it's the recognition or the contribution that they do by, by lifting the levels up that do you think it will excel, that kind of willingness and wanting this to be able to contribute because they are being recognized?

I think it is basically as an ego play, isn't it really. And I think to a greater or lesser extent, we've all got a bit of an ego and people like to, have recognition and, and there's also people like to be helpful as altruism and you can see that happening. So I think it's about as Ashley kind of said, it's about getting over that initial reticence. What are you worrying about here? Why are you scaring why are you scared about doing it? And some of it is modesty. People just don't believe they've got much to offer. Whereas we find that most people do have something to offer, they just even if it's just to validate what someone else has said, it's still useful. So it's about getting over that. But yeah, the more you can I know it's it's hard, it's nirvana. But the more you can encourage people, the more they thank you for it afterwards.

I think it goes to the orchestration point as well. If you do have these kind of super users in there, they also drive a lot of the activity, and we spend a lot of time developing content for our customer advocacy program. Different challenges and the different types of challenges have different point values. So if it's, you know, join a webinar, you know, obviously you can go to our website and watch the webinar, but if you do it through our customer advocacy platform, you get points for having watched it. You can answer a couple of questions and do a quiz. And there's more points. So those are kind of low value or you know, in terms of points, those are kind of lower value activities. But then we also we need a lot of reference activity from our customers. You know, prospects want to talk to customers about the platform, and we promote those opportunities through our customer advocacy space as well. And then you have, you know, hand-raisers to speak to prospects. And those are higher value point opportunities where they can get a lot more rewards for being active there. What we found is, you know, it's it's not obviously it's a it's a request on the customer, but it's not as big a bigger request as you would think it would. They they actively put their hand up for these opportunities to showcase their expertise to share their knowledge and to, you know, the journey that they've been on, the excitement that they have for the platform. We're actually very happy to do that and to get those points.

It's interesting that the scoring system you've applied there almost. We have almost have an implicit one which actually relates to their stickiness as a customer and how we need to treat the customer success. So I wonder if this is food for thought where we could we should make that explicit rather than implicit and then gamify that. So fascinating. I guess, in terms of why people join communities or stay in them, because I think the reason people join them tend to be more rational benefits. So it's like, you know, I get access to premium content or data or events or training or I make valuable connections, or I get gamification, I get points, I get money. That's all quite rational. But the reason they stay in a community typically is much more emotive. So that is more, you know, the sense of belonging status and particularly in B2B authority, fear of missing out, you know, personal fulfillment, giving back purpose, all these sorts of things. And that's in a way the kind of the true power, I think, of a successful community. It's harder to sell it up front. But once you kind of got that, you know, and obviously it's used for kind of retention things and loyalty type metrics rather than acquisition stuff. So and I think actually, I mean, Joel, you can speak to this, but the if people pay to join a community as well, that's, you know, obviously might mean you get fewer people up front, but their commitment then they want to make it work. So they're paying for it. I guess it's a bit like if you're paying for the gym, maybe you're a bit more likely to go than if it's free. So paying in a sense can be a good thing. Interesting you mentioned Conrad, the Rotary Club. So you're clearly thinking about these, you know, communities of lots and lots of small business owners and, you know, senior people at small businesses that you want to get engaged in this potential community, as you say, they are often already part of things like rotary clubs. It's probably quite useful to see what works for pure communities like Rotary clubs to see, you know, what sort of benefits and there are to being Grand Dragon of the, bath, Rotary Club or whatever it is.

I don't think they have that sort of thing anymore. But, I guess the point I was making there is that they already have communities. They're just offline communities, and they wouldn't be doing that kind of thing if they didn't find it valuable. And indeed, I mean, our North Star, our internal North star, we want to become the most recommended business bank because we know that SME owners talk to each other and they talk to their accountants and they talk to other trusted advisors. So, in other words, you know, the single biggest driver of growth for us can be and should be recommendations. So what I'm what I've been trying to think through is basically, you know, organically offline they've found ways of building networks. So how can we enhance and build on that. Because one of the challenges with our segment of the SME population, the few hundred thousand medium sized businesses, is they're very fragmented, right? You know, our customers are outside every town. There's the industrial estate. You accidentally do you have to do a U-turn in its small factories and warehouses. These are our customers. They're very fragmented. This is why I think they consolidate a local level. But how do we find a way of of replicating and building on the value they already find from networks so that we can add value to our customers and get closer to them. So that's kind of the problem we're trying to solve. And I've kind of started from the point of what kind of networks do they already have. Because clearly that must be where they find value.

I would love to hear from Neil. His perspective from from an influencer marketing perspective, because you helped your, clients with influencer marketing programs. So could you share your insights on how to convert your creators audience into your audience? And this fragmentation problem that Conrad is talking about?

I find it actually quite fascinating because I think that the I sometimes the idea is particularly from a social media. Conrad, you just shared an example from an offline example as well. But the idea of building a community can be a little introspective because there are so many, like the internet has been around long enough for there to be a community based around every interest and every category and every niche. And so I think the example that you were sharing there, which for us we've seen work really well online as well, has been this idea of contributing to a community which in itself then starts to obviously gain awareness, build brand equity, and can start to change association through, the example you gave again, like you could do it digitally as well. I actually would say it's probably much, far easier to do it digitally, digitally than it is to do it offline. But identifying where those communities are, who's in them, what to contribute, and then looking for ways to insert your brand into that. And one way to do it is through own channels. But obviously influencers or creators are another way to do that. And we've seen some brands, be very successful in doing this. Garmin is an example. I go back ten years. Garmin. Was very much known for navigation. I would have said TomTom was their biggest competitor. Whereas now over half of their revenue comes from wearable technology, which is by far smartwatches. And one of the challenges that they face is like, how do they start to change their brand association to be known as this? And the way that they didn't do it was to go out there and build a community of technologists, because that would be the obvious choice. But by understanding why people purchase wearable tech, they were able to identify, I mean, communities around running, cycling, yoga, swimming, they even have like a there's a community based around dog training because their technology can be used to help them with that, too. And when you break down all of these different interests, it's it's far easier. Rather than building one encompassing community that straddles all of these, they were able to start partnering with people that have influence in each of these different types of communities and start to stitch that together as well. And so I think they're a really interesting example, just because their business is so diversified and there are so many different use cases for a very similar product. But I found that that was, a way with which they were able to tap into communities far quicker than if they were trying to start from ground zero, produce content that was going to appeal to such a broad audience themselves. It would have taken a lot longer to get to where they are today.

I think that's super interesting. Neil and I just I was going to say for Joaquin it this, this is germane to the topic, to the title of the session, which is how do you hack? Because when you and I and Ashley were talking about this beforehand, we, kind of questioned whether even there's a compelling title. Is it even something which you can do? Can you hack your own community? You probably can't. But you can hack possibly hack somebody else's community. But then is that there's the ethics around that and there's the objectivity around that, having inserting influence into community, I guess, is a very pragmatic and sensible way to do it. I guess the other way is just literally partnering on a more formal level with people. And that's something, again, which we do. We have we have commercial supporters of our properties community where they are able to participate, but under strict guide rails, and contribute useful stuff. Because their ability to have formalized influences is it's less clear and obvious. They're less in their roles. But perhaps they might be at larger organizations. So I think perhaps to answer the question, that this kind of the notion of creating your own is hard to hack, but but finding others is seems like a better way or a quicker and cheaper way to do it.

You'll certainly find people trying to hack your community. Even our community. You find people coming in and starting to sell their own stuff.

The idea, Neal, of creating very, very niche communities, almost counterintuitive because you think you're trying to build the biggest community you can, but the more closely these people are peers, the more likely they have things to have in common, the quicker you know, if you have a group of three people, but they all know that they're all very similar, share similar pains and interests, they're going to have a much greater spark. And you might have to have three communities rather than one, but it might just have more engagement at each in aggregate. I completely agree. There's, there's we have data to back this up. That is, when you're talking about partnering with creators or with influencers, the more concentrated, that the audience is, the greater the engagement, because as you as you rightly point out, they have a lot more in common. Their interests are much closer, closer alliance. And so by breaking it out into each of its constituent parts, obviously it can be more difficult to manage, but you can be far more effective with it. Just out of interest, because this is slightly not quite about external, but how do you guys feel about creating those communities within companies. So you have, you know, so it's within the walls, but you're allowing your employees to create the communities that then bring you to be able to do advocacy externally or within the company of whatever it could be. So I'll give you an example, and it's a bit of a left field example, but within people first platform we sell you can set up communities. So think like a bit like a Facebook, but it's very much secure and around employees when you do that we have something called we've got a pet community where everybody gets on there. And it started during lockdown where people just started sharing pictures of cats wandering or dogs wandering across streams. But it created bringing people together that not necessarily would have those conversations and then transferred it to employee advocacy, where you started to have other conversations where people were more open because they'd seen these pictures being developed. So then you can start having ESG, or you can start having different types of communities pop up and have that conversation. Now, I know that's not what you're talking about in terms of external, but I do think there is a place for that. And then the hacking comes. How do people jump from community to community and what that looks like internally to your employee advocacy?

I think we've done a little bit of of that, but around sort of diversity equity and inclusion type of topics. So for example, you know, we have a strong women in tech community. We organized an event for International Women's Day. We invited customers in there and we did some social and some blogs. And I think, you know, that kind of topic is a great way. You know, we also have a women in customer experience, leadership and customer sort of forum lunch that we do. I would say it's not like massively formalized though, and I think that potentially could be an opportunity as well, particularly, you know, for example, like a women in tech type of issue where it does straddle employees and customers. I think we can do more there.

I think we see as well this happened more because of remote working, I guess, but where people sometimes worry they're losing a sort of connection or intimacy because they're not in the office so much, or where the nature of their relationship with the organization is a bit more dispersed or fragmented. So, for example, we have quite a few charities using Guild to coordinate volunteers and supporters who aren't technically employees, but they are acting on behalf of the organization and where they feel a bit kind of lonely and isolated just out on their own. And so they want to kind of feel part of something. So I think then there's sort of internal ish communities can work quite well. I think then there is a question around the assumption is, well, that should run on teams if we're a Microsoft house or it should run on slack, if we're a tech startup, which may or may not be the right decision, but you know that there is an almost a personality or a feel to some of these different platforms. And sometimes it's whatsApp groups, you know, or email lists or social media kind of groups and things. So so yeah, that's an interesting angle on internal versus external communities and what kind of is the right user experience and tech platform therefore.

I think you're right, because I think that's a key thing that maybe we've not touched upon is the ease of access to have that conversation on the digital platform. For example, it's another thing you have to go into? The reason we've put it in our HR platform is most people spend a lot of time in their HR platform doing whatever. Plus you've got all of your security elements in there and permissions and things like that. But I think you're right. If we don't, if we constantly move people from different types of platform, you end up with some security concerns, but you also you also end up with what I would call tech fatigue, which one should I use for which, and how do I make sure I put the right thing in the right place? So I think that's really important as well, is that when we think about these things, we think about ease of access and what's right for what type, what group of people.

It goes right back to the question at the start, doesn't it, around, what is a community and, the difference in audience and a community? I mean, we have this we kind of something that exercised me quite a bit. We're on a platform called SAP. Neato, which does a good job. But we find some of our, particularly part of our audience are our CMO. Audience are the hardest ones to convince to actively spend time in there and participate, you know, and so the question is, well, if you did it, if you created a break off group in WhatsApp or on slack, would that be better? But then inherently as a community, you're going to be taking them away from where the where the kind of content value lies. And you'll see, you know, if you look at some of the tech companies, they, you know, they gravitate towards something like Slack because that's where that audience largely is. So it's just it's easy, seamless for them. But yeah, it does play to this notion of, technology first or technology second. And if it's not if it's technology second, then it's, it's, it's again, it's more of an audience. It's a formalized, unstructured environment, but still very valuable.

Has anyone actually built communities recently from scratch? Does anyone have any advice about, the hacking from the point of view of reaching that threshold? Ashley mentioned before, there are probably hard limits. You need 300 people before it can even dream of becoming a self-sustaining, community. Does anyone have any advice on how to breach that, that kind of threshold where it becomes self-sustaining? Has anyone done it?

I think with us, with the people first. We're just over that threshold. But there's a desire to stay in it because, it's a similar to the I Trent one. It gives you tips and tricks. They get their updates on their versions that are coming out. So there's very there's things that are valuable to them. The interesting thing is the tipping point is just starting to see that conversation happen. Before it was more like we pushed, here's a version, here's your releases. This is where you can get this information. This is your checklist, a guide if you want it. It was very much used as more of, I'd say, a push channel. However, we're beginning to start to see the seeds of conversation, like, have you done this before? And then back to my conversation. Like I said about I Trent, we're not jumping in and going, oh yeah, we can do this. What we're doing is we're letting the community have that conversation. But it's very early days and I think, the interesting thing is monitoring and we talk about hacking, you know, the obvious place is seeing a competitor try and jump into your into your community. I'll be honest with people first. The place it is at the moment, we don't want that. So we are able to control it. For no other reason is that we feel that that community is still growing and bubbling, and we want it to serve itself of what we set it up for, which was to help each other and not create a place where it's just a sales marketplace, because you can get that from many other places. So I think that's why, for me, what I would say is about step when you first start it, think about what your objectives are for the audience as well as yourself. Because I see too many things where your objectives are so obvious and the community doesn't come along with you.

Our experience of this we have not so much as Neal talked about influencers we've started a core facet of propolis is as topic experts, and we have a number of those in the platform, and they've been instrumental in helping to, get the momentum with a platform. So, we've tried not to make them. And so they're not they're not us. But they are affiliated to us. And there are some of them you could probably legitimately say are influencers, others you definitely couldn't, because of their external profile. They provided that extra validation by participating in the conversation. But also it does depend very much on functionality of the platform you're working on. Assuming we're all talking about working on digital platform, they have they have very different in what they do. You know, we find, initiatives and activities, you know, webinars with members is a very good way of doing that. Customer success is really critical given that this is the core of our business and it's probably pretty closest to what Claire's talking about in terms of how structured as is. But actually getting them to have an ongoing dialogue with the members and start to identify questions that they have and needs that they have and say, well, why don't you put this on propolis? Why don't you ask the question of the community rather than them just sitting there and going, oh, I don't want to. I don't want to sound stupid by asking that, because, sure, everybody's got the answer. They haven't. It's about encouraging and just exactly as Emma was saying, you gradually build up momentum. And we've we're seeing that over the to the point now where our experts are very much step back. And they still contribute from time to time, but we're not relying on them to make it happen.

At meltwater, we also have a, customer, community called Meltwater Community. And we've we launched it around 18 months ago. We're just shy of 10,000 members now. And the growth that we've seen. To encourage customers obviously to firstly to interact and to be involved in it, a lot of our implementation program, we make sure that there's an education piece around the community, the value of it as well. We've also had success with physical meetups as well as a company. We're quite, like scattered all around. We have 50 different locations around the world. And so we've had meetups in quite obvious central locations where we know that there are many customers that can come in. We'll make sure that the content is also recorded and made available to other community members that are not in those physical locations as well. And obviously it's been a slow burn. But as you start to build a bit of momentum, particularly the physical meetups we've seen, and then having that content made available to broader audiences has encouraged a lot more people to want to come in and be part of that as well.

Having said that, maybe you need a sort of quorum, a certain number of people to get that organic momentum. There are lots of other factors around, you know, the level of engagement that you might expect. You know, the use case as in what the actual purpose of the community is. Has a big bearing. Also even scarcity of, sort of information or insights. So for example, I remember we see kind of, you know, almost like trends emerging on across Guild. So for example, a few years ago, diversity and inclusion was mushrooming as a sort of hot topic which nobody knew anything about. Quite everyone was learning. Someone had just been appointed as the DNI officer or giving it as part of their job title. And this reminds me of E Consultancy the early days of digital. Then there's a real hunger and a real passion to like, share, learn, swap stuff. And so actually you can have a much smaller group and it can still be more engaged just because there's this real thirst for it. The same happened with sustainability or is happening sustainability. The same now is happening with AI. Like you see sudden all these little groups blossoming and they can be super engaged even with only 15 people because they really, really care and there's nowhere else they know to get the answers. Obviously over time those topics might mature and suddenly there's millions of communities around that. And so you need you maybe need to rethink. But also I'd say there is a danger sometimes I think when people talk about lurkers, we never not very keen. It sounds like a negative term, but if you only measure your community success by the people who are actively contributing, I think that's, a dangerous mistake, because a lot of those people are very happily consuming reading part of they feel part of the community, the fact that they're not, you know, contributing is fine, actually, potentially. I think there's also lots of value beyond, you know, the tip of the iceberg, in a way, just looking at the, conversations that are happening within the community, because there are, for example, direct messages that are happening which you might not see as the host. There are people who are meeting up offline for coffee as a result of them being, and you don't see any of that, it's quite hard to track sometimes. So I think there's all sorts of value there that we risk if we obsess only about levels of engagement.

What sort of skills do you need in your team? If you actually want to create a community and you're going to sit someone down and say, this is your job now to be the moderator or the supporter or the community manager or whatever it is, what sort of skills do you need and how do you keep them motivated? If you know, do you motivate them on people's contributions? Perhaps not. Actually, if actually you need to be measuring something else.

I think it's an interesting question. What skills you need. When I took on my role, I thought that I would be working with customers all the time. And I do work with customers all the time, but so much of my role is actually on the internal peace working with sales, working with customer success, and really like selling the value of the program and helping communicate through them about the value and about getting customers on the right path with Genesis and sharing that, you know, when it comes to renewal time, they'll be using so much more of the platform and there'll be so much more engaged if we actually, you know, do the work to, get them enrolled and active now. It is a sales role quite often. You know, and just in working broadly across the, across the organization and communicating constantly the value obviously the program has to be engaging for customers, but then you've got to really get on board with, you know, the account teams to relinquish a bit of the customer relationship and have them in the community.

For me, I think it's somebody that as well, it's quite important to have somebody that obviously has the ability to either right themselves or commission. Engaging content is kind of crucial to that. If that's a role I see as very, very essential to it. And part of that role, which is seems slightly obvious but not always, is being able to do the market intelligence about what's going on in the market, because quite often I think as suppliers, we kind of obsess, about our own selves and don't necessarily see the complete marketplace as our customers would, would do. And we need to be able to join in those conversations because they may be future conversations. Quite honestly, for a supplier to like MHR to be able to develop in the future from a software perspective, but at the same day that maybe they're not, but we can still add value to our customers and advising them how they can integrate them, for example.

We are coming to an end. I really enjoyed the conversation. You made my job really easy. As you know, I haven't intervened much because it's been a very organic conversation, like in a community, ideally. I would love to hear your final thoughts if you want. What you have learned today and what kind of recommendations would you give to our audience? And please, the microphone is open.

I think the biggest challenge for me is that, it's like many areas in marketing, you can either go and buy customers right now and get a very fast return on your investment, or you can do a long term stuff. The flywheel stuff brand is a good example, and it feels to me like community is in that same category. Having been through the brand journey, for example, you know, you can go to your board and investors 100 times and tell them that it's very hard to measure the impact of brand in the short term. They'll nod wisely, and then you'll go back to the board and they'll say, has it worked? Show us the numbers. I suspect that community is in that category, too. What I've been thinking very hard about, actually, is, there's been a lot of focus on sometimes smaller, more focused communities are better. And actually that I feel like that's a good thing for the conundrum I have ahead of me, because then potentially you've got an opportunity to kind of like come up with a tight knit community where you can get some ROI. You can begin to actually understand what it might mean for your business and then look to scale up from there. With almost every marketing challenge I face from a budget and PNL is always basically, do I take the short term bets or the long term ones? And if I take the long term ones, can I hold my job long enough to see if they pay fruit? Then actually potentially working on that, and going for focused communities and trying to build from there is potentially a way to bridge that gap. And that's a very important insight for me.

I think one of the things I. Feel is a having been through with econsultancy the kind of birth of digital marketing, I guess, and the internet really just is a commercial thing. And then social media and mobile and things that community, although it's kind of obviously very old from a marketing kind of discipline point of view, is actually quite new. And it feels to me like the early days of digital or the early days of social media, where, you know, there's no line item in the budget, there's no one with it in their job title yet it's part of someone else's job. We're not clear what ROI is. We're not quite clear how we're going to measure it. Senior people think that's a sort of side line project thing. It's not, you know, a core part of our DNA or kind of business as usual. And we're still, to be honest, not there with digital yet. Even so, these things take decades, probably to mature. But certainly I feel like with community management, as you know, as a skill set, as a discipline, we talked about, it's not, you know, how many job functions, how do you progress in a community career? These are all things which are still, you know, unclear. I would say so. So I think we need to recognize it's still relatively immature, certainly as a kind of marketing discipline.

Building on that, I think great comments from everyone. I've really enjoyed the session today. It's fascinating to hear from the brands about how they're doing, how thinking about it. It feels like to me, to Ashley's point, community is at an early days, community based marketing in some means is going to become critical to everybody's B2B marketing activities. The question is, how do you need to build your own community in case what is it? How does it what does it look like? Do you need to build an Influencer personas? Do you need to understand the communities that already exist, that are being cultivated by other people, and understand how to engage with those? I'm not convinced that every brand is necessarily going to be valid to have their own community or their. But in some, you know, a very critical means, you know, as Ashley and Conrad were saying, it's going to be part of your mix and you need to understand what that looks like and how it continues to evolve as buyer preference evolves.

I think I've had a great conversation, so thank you. I think especially I love the gamification and the customer advocacy. I think that's definitely something to take away and think about how we can do it, because it just it pushes engagement to the next level. And and for me, I think it's people. People like recognition, people like that element. So that's good for me.

Great conversation for me as well. Happy to pick up any of the topics for further conversations, because we have learned a lot in the last year. And I think one of the things that we have really worked hard to get a handle on this year is around data in terms of looking at the activity that's happening and then being able to see the impact of that on the business. And and that helps at every level, right, with communicating you're doing in terms of resourcing and in terms of actually filtering down some of the even better benefits for our customers. So proving the value like just works for everyone. So yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation. I think it also ties into thought leadership. Like which communities can you really add value in, and making sure that you're clear on your point of view and getting that into the right place. And that might be in some communities that you don't own, but you want to just have a voice there. So I think it all really ties together.

I just wanted to say thanks to everybody. I really enjoyed this conversation. One thing that stood out to me and maybe a final thought for everybody. I like the point that you made about not quantifying the success of your account of your community based on how much people engage. And I think that it's got me to reflect on how many communities that I am a lurker in. And, off the top of my head is I'm certainly a lurker in more communities than I'm very proactive in, and I think that acknowledging that is the first step to know to. Okay. Yeah, it's obviously that that we can never have that as a true north if, if that's how most of us interact in the communities that we're part of.

Thank you so much for coming today. We will write a report and we will have the opportunity to revise what we wrote there. So we will stay in touch. Thank you so much.