Episode 109 - Vacation Matters and The Intersection between Community and Business Needs

i'm Nicole Saunders.

you're just a regular now, and I think i've had you on the most this year and it's been really a delight so and I think users are really enjoying it as well, so thanks for coming on again.

yeah absolutely I actually had somebody out in the world, last week, say, oh yeah i've been listening to your podcast and I was like oh awesome that's cool I was really excited to hear that well do you in fact listen to us, Chris.

I know, like kind of funny because. People people will reach out to me, and now I get sometimes spam stuff but hey can I be on your podcast and they have nothing to do with Community management and I had. Had this one guy that one and I let him be and I haven't pushed it out yet, but it was around crypto communities, but really this guy's a crypto CEO or something and I was like. Interesting yeah.

yeah so one of the one of the really cool perks isn't desk is after five years, you get a six week sabbatical. And so I hit my five year anniversary in February.

Should i'm out of here.

Well, honestly I wasn't going to take the time right away. But then it just sort of ended up kind of making sense, this summer, and I, you know i'd always imagine that when I took a sabbatical i'd like go travel Japan or backpacking around Europe or go to Australia. And it ended up just becoming like this is going to be an old fashioned summer break i'm going to like. read books and ride my bike and do some writing and eat lots of ice cream and hang out by the lake. yeah.

what's your favorite ice cream.

Oh gosh for years it's been chocolate peanut butter, but this summer i've started to get more of a taste for the vanilla based ice creams. there's there's one of my local ice cream shop that's like vanilla ice cream with Carmel and peanut butter cups and cookie dough chunks and I I love that one and I love anything with hot fudge on it, but.

i'm up to.

Like chunks of things in my ice cream I like to chew on it, I guess.

Be drinking beer or anything. Just you know.

yeah. I know I I feel i'm going to admit this to find like what six episodes and I don't really drink much these days I used to be.

I don't either.

he'll beer aficionados to work at the great American beer fest and ovo and hung out with microbreweries and stuff. And Alaskan. Just yeah I just kind of backed off drinking so actually my new favorite is athletic brewing company has a whole series of na beers that are actually pretty good. really like. i've been enjoying those mostly this summer.

to reassess local.

Know athletic performance because national there are a couple local microbreweries that are starting to get into doing a couple of enablers which i've been. really pleased with there's one out of milwaukee called the River West Stein beer, I think, and that was always a favorite and and they started producing neighbors in the summer that tastes darn close to the real thing so that's been my thick. skull.

yeah you know, so my wife and i've been doing that, or we went on vacation, I guess, I could call it it's called trans rocky so two weeks ago, we ran this 120 miles in. Colorado.

And altitude of that.

up and outs diamond Dallas Texas, so you know it was definitely a challenge, it was a six day kind of event and everything else, and so I did have a beer afterwards, but. beforehand, I have, I drink a little, but I was just trying to stay away from it, because I knew anything that I did was going to affect my running hiking. abilities for those six days, and so, although a great trip, you know i've stopped drinking a lot of beer, but I did have one, the other day so.

Oh me too um yeah so got i've got about 10 days left here before I go back to work and it's been amazing to have so much time to do all the things I love, one of the wanted to do for a long time is write a book i'm doing is what it's about I don't know. I. wanted to write a book. And so I decided to use some of this time to start doing free writing every day and will kind of brain dump and see what came out and some things are starting to take shape.

So knock on wood cool some.

next two to five years, hopefully it will finish and publish something, this is a big goal, and this is, I guess, this is my official like putting it out there in the universe, and say now, but i'm gonna try to write a book.

Are you thinking, personal or business or you know you know, like that are.

different ideas, the ones that seem to be resonating the most are sort of like. The genre I can best explains like memoir as self help here's all the crazy stuff that happened in my life, maybe you can.

learn from it um I love, how you use self help goodness.

yeah right I you know I mean Community builder.

servant leader exactly yeah let's.

hope others um I have had some thoughts about working on some Community related research and writing as well, so who knows, maybe i'll have three books by the end of this whole thing um. But look good just handled that and see some friends and play some music and get outdoors a whole bunch you know it's. Good. The hardest thing I think about working full time is be in front of a computer all day and it's really nice to not have to do that quite as much.

Accurate I mean it's it's a kingdom on our pre show you're talking about how it's really nice to kind of really. You know, let loose and not think about work too much and things like that, and you mentioned that you know, the first two or three weeks it was really nice, but then you know you kind of started missing doing the work. You know, and just been focused on some of that.

I do, I mean when I miss my team. I work with some really great Oh, and if it feels like friends that I haven't like seen for a little too long, you know I don't know on on there. Right now, so i'm excited to catch up with some of those folks i'm really excited because we actually got approval rockin and go to the cms summit in California it's me the first time, most of my team members have met in person is thinking about going to that maybe I will go.

I think it'll just such a good so such a good time it's like camp.

My Community people.

ran and his team, I don't know if you know fran but he he's the VP of Community at. A port calm. And he's going to be there and bring some of his team folks there, so should be fun.

Well, we should we should all get together and.

That would be yeah that'd be cool maybe I was thinking about like kind of if I go out there than just having a bunch of like 1520 minute peers over beers you know with different people would then. You know, but seems like a lot of work because had to carry a bunch of shit yeah so I don't know we'll see.

But we're good on your iPhone it's fine i'm really understand. i'm.

telling you they won't understand whenever you started listening to that shit. Right, I mean like it's like this sucks you know i'm not gonna. Get you really need good sound, you know, and I could probably buy something.

Expensive go okay. anyways um we got some exciting to see my team, but it's also i've really realized i'm a kind of miss. sort of the day to day sense of accomplishment that comes from being at work, getting through your meetings and checking off the things on your to do list, and you know, certainly. When you're on your own time, and you know chatting a little bit about this in terms of like what am I going to do when I retire someday and it's like this.

all the time.

You do have to come up with. You know your identity outside of work and the things that you're going to do that are going to bring you meaning and a sense of accomplishment outside of it. But at least was work, you know some of that's kind of built in you don't have to sit down to read it what's going to be a meaningful to do this for me today. So I missed that I, and you know I really feel like work in some ways is.

Details story, so I was you know I could sit down at home right like and think all right, I want to do the dishes and sweep and MOP the floor and because it needs to be done, I mean you have to do that anyways pretty quick. Right, but then you know i'll just take a quick nap and then i'll think okay I should put up these clothes that's right next to my head that my wife yeah go do that later and then.

I don't start with too much presentation, but I will say that, like I think when you've got sort of the time pressure of working, it makes your free time. It is a little bit easier to focus and be like okay i've only got three hours of free time tonight, what I really need or want to do with that time and I think you appreciate it more you know for.

or whatever.

You say whatever you know, and time is starting to like melt together so i'm excited to actually kind of get back into it, but I think the biggest thing and what i'm really hoping to return to work with, as a new perspective. One my cameras are my company the super like cameras on company for zoom.

So close you have something in mind. If not it's fine I was just I was just curious like.

You know we've had a couple of long term things like one of our big things is that our Community is really started as a support community. yeah for a couple of years now we've been really trying to work to not alienate the support side of it but. i'm trying to. bring a broader kind of conversation into the Community and have it do. More adjust your technical questions and that's been a big challenge to solve and we've been kind.

of you know.

Working with all these different tactics and it feels like we've been like kind of beating your head against a wall of like well, we tried this this move back to the first idea. So I think it'll be helpful to get that break in that separation and then sort of come in with fresh eyes and see if your approaches that we can.

I love it. And I think that's a big one, and you know because I feel like I saw something from rich millington the other day that says. It is way easier to start a support Community than it is a topical Community or you could see it as. Topical or. You know thought leadership or whatever at thought about that for a minute and I thought it really is, if I could start a support community in a minute.

yeah I mean I don't know this interesting point and we haven't talked about in the pre show but i'm going to go down this rabbit hole for a minute. Okay, you know thinking about that difference is like a support Community versus like a community of practice and you know one I think it's really hard to take an existing Community and pivoted into something else right yeah.

You should you keep what you have probably right, you know.

yeah but it's like you really kind of have to relaunch it. Right, you need to. Have a spare moment of what this was is kind of shut up shuttered, if you will, and what it's going to be going for, and there needs to be a pivot point we've really been trying to sort of like incrementally take those steps. yeah and it's.

He just awful right.

yeah they have to think about it and to. it's more of an open ended question right, we all know from doing surveys and things, yes, yes or no question somebody you know click the yes or no button, but if you. leave a space and state, please tell me about your experience with us.

As people.

won't fill that in and a community of practice that's kind of the difference is you're looking for more of these long for ongoing conversations um. So I think it is a real challenge, but it is also where a lot of the meetings, and I think that there's a lot of stuff it lands in the middle, like the example with support practitioners, you know it's one thing to say hey how do I set up this automation. yep. it's nothing to say hey this is for running a support organization.

So I think one is you've got to think about you know that we can continue down this rabbit hole, because I think it's a good one, is. You can understand what, what are the business goals and what are you trying to accomplish at the end of the day, right So when I think of.

Well, and moreover I think it's making sure that you know what your audience needs. yeah yeah i've said this so many times that I think the mistake, a lot of organizations make when they launched their communities as they think about what they want the Community to do for the business. yeah. But if that's not aligned to what the people that they're trying to engage actually need or want it's never going to take off.

I think that. As a community leader. I have to say that. They think about that, because you know i've talked to CEOs i've talked to leaders, you know with the customer and our marketing space. And they think you know community is going to solve all our problems and come up with all these business outcomes and then you're right, you have to think about well.

that's really like that is the in a nutshell, that is the role of the committee professional is to find that sort of intersection point of venn diagram of what does the business need and what do the customers need and. And I would hate the intersection of those two things any really meaningful and compelling way i'm.

Right so.

cool and so you know you look for a need the company has is for people to be able to use it their product or service, I need that the customer has his help on being able to use it effectively. boom there's an opportunity for Community and I think what we're seeing is as communities mature it's that question of like Okay, how can you go beyond that.

Trying to like, by the way, supports not going away right support is not going away.

And in fact I would argue that if you try to launch Community that's not focused on support you're still going to get technical questions and you're going to need. to know how to deal with that when you get those support sins in your community.

For sure.

But I can definitely see why you know we've talked in the past about how there's so much content and training and education for Community managers on how to want your Community how to set up your strategy. basics and there's not as much about how to pivot and I think one of the reasons is the real. answer is that. it's very hard to.

shift the mature community and.

that's the best way to sort of to relaunch it and to apply a lot of that original strategy or you know, ideally, you just do it right, the first time, and thanks for you.

got it in place well you know you also, I mean you guys started, five, six, whatever years ago. Maybe longer.

or 15 year anniversary. crazy.

You started 567 or whatever, years ago, you know. As but.

Almost 10 years old, when I came in so that's part of what i've been working with.

You, and that is a challenge, and so it's probably a good conversation to have is. How, how do you kind of walk into somebody else's kind of strategies and ideas and thoughts, you know let's say it's a mess, but it is, I mean you've got to untangle a lot of things that you just don't know.

You know, you know, like when I walked into zendesk there just wasn't a lot of strategy, it was. sort of a head launched and was trucking along but there wasn't any one person that was actually in charge of the oversight or the management of all of it had been a very collaborative effort which. is beautiful from a Community perspective, but at a certain point of scaling you running a community by committee. or with handoffs between different teams and it gets a little messy and.

When you say to restart a Community a lot of things going through my head so i've never restarted a community, especially like that, and so. How do you, you know what do you do with the already support stuff that you have right and or do you just kind of start a community for practitioners of you know. Support for example and and and just kind of keep this other Community going, you know, because it is very important, probably a lot of business value I would assume.

Well, on the slack note I think slack is really great to sort of augment or create sub communities like we've had a lot of luck with it, where like We took our super members in the.

Community.

we've designated to that Community moderators and we created a slack space for them.

I like that that's good I.

created a tight really awesome Community months that small group but slack doesn't scale. right we can't put up 20,000 people in a slack. Community it's not going to work, so I think slack has a really good role in a Community ecosystem. Okay, especially given that most of the Community platforms out there, these days. don't offer like chat rooms or idioms or something like that so. flexor that augments real time engagement piece. As far as we launching you know we haven't done it yet.

And so it's clear, I believe that there will be repercussions, if you got rid of the support stuff. When I think it went off case deflection some other things, Google kind of I don't. You know.

I actually have a story about this Chris so I we did a big sort of relaunch of all of zendesk systems over the last couple of years. Okay, you know we've been worked out of one zendesk instance, since the beginning of time with the company and it was clear that was time to. move into some of like the new what I want to say basically sort of start over right there's a lot of like stuff that was gathering up and so.

Because there enough definitely every submission probably.

And so we actually got fairly aggressive with it we archived a lot of stuff so we kept everything been new in the past, I think, a couple of years. And then we did about 2500 posts in conversation that had high page views or we actually let some Community Members vote and say hey is there a post that if it disappeared, you would be sad about it tell us and we'll keep.

That one.

Which is a great way to engage.

The Community around this whole exercise right.

And so we ended up migrating about 20% of our Community content into our new instance and the rest of it. got archived didn't get deleted, we still have it in a record somewhere if we ever need to refer to it and, in some ways it did what it meant to do right it.

Now it's fascinating I mean Maybe it was better you know, in the long run for the Community to kind of be you know, taking taking out some of that stuff but you know, again, there are repercussions in the short term. You know and.

that's such a great call out Chris you're so right like you know the, the next step isn't just like Okay, and I was gonna wait for the Community to repopulate itself, but how are we going to rebuild some of these things and. One of the things that we did is we took a few hundred posts that we thought were really good, but there were out of date. yeah we started as members and said hey would you want to repost this with some updates, or we rewrote a lot of content and republished it as well.

I think rewriting it and republishing it. starts the clock all over again right so. it's like. it's fine and. good and bad.

But it's really good with.

The line is good, with Google later it is it the other thing is you got me kind of thinking about this, this new way of kind of thinking about Community from a thought leadership, whatever we call it topical I don't know but is that. I think you're also going to have to think about a content strategy around.

really wanted to get into that.

yeah but. it's it's. You really kind of have to start thinking about a strategy around you know, content and what is it that. One is what is it that you want to think about what is it that you want to cover, you know how can. zendesk help you know within that thought leadership piece right because that's probably where you have to kick it off in the first place.

Well, I love how you're thinking about that Chris and you know it's part of it is trusting your your Community Members to be smart enough to realize like okay well here's a brand that makes. Data management software and i'm i'm learning all sorts of cool things about data management, and I can connect the dots that oh hey Maybe I should look into their software.

Their job.

What they're doing helping their career or in.

there. Why do you like, or having this peers over beers. Because we're trying to help people with their job at the end of the day. These are best practice, you know and how we think. You know it's good now I thought leadership out.

There yeah we're trying to help other Community professionals understand now neither one of us is trying to sell a Community platform ourselves either, but if one of us were you know um that would be this would still be the way to go about it would still be the conversation.

yeah.

I mean it's about the about the whole field.

I mean I don't have enough to say like I use a company called higher logic for my platform, the great you know we're all but. I don't have enough to say to speak about it every single time I get on appears over beers you know what I mean like there's probably a several conversations we can have about platforms and what they do, etc, but. You know if that's all I talked about it would be so boring. I mean, I think it would.

Like plug those things you can just. yeah those conversations that are relevant to people because that's The thing is, you know I think about this every time I talk to somebody about sorry community. We all have so many social media accounts and we get text messages when we get our slack I know what you i'm regularly logged into nine different slack workspace.

I just have like five yeah.

might get overwhelming sometimes so what the heck is going to be compelling enough about another online Community for me to go, create a profile and login. To the basis and the. Only way it's going to be something that i'm really going to engage with that level as if it's something that solves a problem that I have a resource, I need that I have on a regular basis.

Do you do you know any Community communities that are doing, you know stuff like that, like you know kind of that thought leadership or you know, would you say there's one or two that you really like that do that.

Well, I mean I spend most of my time in Community manager communities. Right like I spent a lot of time in the cms Community um I would say that's probably the biggest one and cms is part of bevy. yep you match hosts all sorts of things that are Community management related that aren't specific to bevy or even things that baby necessarily does as a platform.

Purchasing it as a Community.

Community will post links.

cannot, I mean.

I can also go on there, and just ask about hiking trails. yeah or how to train for something, and so I think that's, the key is like that's a Community visit, even when i'm not looking for something from rei. Does it, so the need that I haven't regular basis, which is to get more information about the different things I enjoy doing.

yeah again I think there's reasons to have technical Community so and they solve.

Some big partner percent for sure. don't come there, but I think if you want your community to do more than just answer here and there.

it's hard, especially from a B2B standpoint like and if you have. Big time professionals like you know you have to give them something that they want to to want to come back so when I think of you know, a senior VP or VP of something right. they're probably not coming to a community.to.com or Community zendesk calm and posting shit. You know what I mean what they might be interested in is to listen to a podcast around how others are doing these certain things or.

and

When you do that, then. You know you engage they engage in the way they want and you're creating ways for them to engage the way they want you know what I mean that's my thought on communities around kind of higher level type stuff. there's a lot of different ways to do it right and I don't know that an online community is the way to do it for executives or higher level people.

100% and that's The thing is, I think the other thing is oftentimes we're talking about Community people can you really narrowly about like an online community. or a sort of immediate community, but you can have different Community products, as it were, for different segments of your audience and what kind of product is going to sell to a developer as a different product and was going to sell to a VP and.

that's true.

Right between what's a Community thing and what's a marketing thing and what's a customer success thing. And this is where I think that there's so much potential for Community and we're starting to see organizations, putting. Chief Community officer is in place and building a community as a whole organization, because it takes all of those things that are interrelated.

Teams all over to.

Jay, but I think that's gosh we've got like so many more podcasts we can do talking. about this and how Community is so much more than just an online. Digital space it's all of the things that you do that connect customers to one another. it's to solve problems.

I agree, and somebody that's doing a really good job of it and you'll have to talk to her, one day, maybe add is allison boudreaux over at calyx so she was the leader of the Community and their. Academy, so you know I sent you guys an email, so the three of us four of us actually try to get together and just have some some podcast around.

wasn't it wasn't our next conversation I guess.

yeah we'll introduce it because i'll probably have more of a but I did get to hire a person that's going to be very junior for the Community and they'll be helping me with the Executive Council and and a lot of online Community stuff that. That i'm really excited about, and so we can talk about that, but I think we'll have a broader topic around you know.

I would love to well Chris congratulations on your first hire that is so exciting is a huge milestone, and congratulations to whoever it is that comes on board with. us after they start um and yeah let's let's talk about that next time i'd love to dig into hiring onboarding training all of that.

Great well thanks everybody for tuning in for another peers of beers i'm Chris dental and.

i'm Nicole Saunders.