DCS: Digital Center Stage

Hello, hello friends, how are we doing? (audience cheers) Okay, I like that, that's good. Okay, so I am here to talk about strategy and then I'm gonna let the technology product folks do their thing, and of course this dies right off the bat. There we go, very cool.

So, there's gonna be three parts to this. I'm gonna talk for maybe about 30 minutes or something and then we'll have some Q and A, so if you have good questions, hang on to them, we'll pass around a mic and do all that stuff and happy to answer anything. First and foremost, we're gonna talk about GEO, AEO, CNN, KFC, whatever the term of the day is on this, seems like we cycle through them. I wanna talk a little bit about what's happening, why it's happening, how you should think about it, and then we'll shift into what do you do about it, what should your strategies look like going forward and some practical application stuff, okay?

So, raise your hand if you have a chart that looks like this for your academy, your community, your digital customer success. Anybody have a chart that looks like this? You're all scared to raise your hands. Okay, your bosses are not in the room right now.

So, there's a lot of charts that look like this right now and it's really freaking people out, right? And understandably so because this is what we've reported on, maybe these are page views or visits or visitors or some counting metric like that. And so, it's really freaking people out because they see this and then you go on LinkedIn and people post this and they're like, community is over. Websites are done, no one cares, no one will ever go there again.

What we've really done is moved it, right? We've moved it to the prompt window, to Google search, whatever the case is. So, obviously instead of going to your community, your academy, your site, your knowledge base, your support, you know, whatever it is, they're just gonna go type it in chat GPT. The problem is that we just don't really have visibility into that today, right?

So, when you look at this it's like, hey, it actually might be the case that your content is being used more now than it ever had before, but you don't know it, you can't see it, they don't have the tools yet, right? And so, you kind of have this blind spot right now and I'm pretty confident this is what's happening. We're all gonna find out when the tools come out and if I'm wrong, you can go on LinkedIn and yell at me and tell me about it. Happy to be, you know, happy to be wrong.

But from my seat and what I'm seeing today, this is actually kind of the truth of it. And so, it changes how we think about what we're doing because it's not so much, hey, like nobody values this stuff anymore, nobody's coming. They're just consuming it in a place that you don't directly control and you can't measure directly today. Make sense?

Okay, so, there's a few things that are happening. The traffic's declining, right, we talked about that. Leaders only see the big scary drop off and their conclusion immediately is like, cool, we can cut this, right? We don't need this thing anymore.

Let's just go ahead and, you know, lop that off and like move on with life. That's not really what's happening. And so, it's really up to us to educate people. So, I'm gonna try to educate you today so you can go back and educate your leadership about how to think about this.

Because otherwise, the wrong decisions get made, right? The wrong assumptions happen. I do think it's, we're just in a tough spot right now where you don't really have a way to measure this as you would want to today. I think we're all waiting on, you know, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, et al.

To build essentially like Google Search Console, but for OpenAI, you know? And like show me how many times my content is being surfaced or referenced or sourced, right? In the makings of the summaries or whatever it might be. There are a few tools out there today.

This is not an ad. I don't know these guys. This is just the first one that I saw and so I took a screenshot of it. It's called OpenFound.

They're not affiliated with, you know, any of these providers, but they basically, you type in your URL and they go in there and they pop it into all of the popular, you know, AI, LOM, whatever. And they try to give you a sense of like, hey, here's how you're ranking effectively from the SEO days. And here's maybe what you should do about it up against your competitors. So there's some interesting stuff here.

I think it's third party and, you know, we'll see how all that goes. But it makes sense to me that in the longer run, all of these LOM companies are going to have tools like this that they will then charge you for. And you'll get the privilege of paying for it and you'll see how many times your content is being surfaced. So there's that.

Real quickly on like how you should think about what to do about all of this, in the meantime until we get said tools and said visibility, is growth no longer equal success, right? The days of like, oh, up and to the right forever, cumulative registrations, it's just done, right? And it honestly was kind of always done. We should have been moving more towards quality rather than quantity.

But we don't have a choice now. So now we're forced to think this way. And, you know, think about success rather than growth and like what metrics mean success. Helping someone via AI still counts.

I think this is like, maybe this is one of the main things you should take away from this or write down or take a picture of the slide or like whatever you're gonna do, is that there's this idea, like going back to that chart with the black line, you know, kind of dropping off the table there, is that like, oh, well, you know, we're not helping. Like if someone goes to Google and they type in, hey, I'm looking for, you know, this, that and the other and you come up in there, that, we did it. Congratulations, like it still works, it still counts. Even if we can't measure it today, that's a success story, right?

It doesn't have to happen on our domain in a way that we can directly measure for it to matter. And so I think everybody kind of needs to pivot their thinking a little bit away from this like, well, if I can't measure it, it doesn't matter and I don't care, I'm not gonna optimize for it because your customers, they're happy with this, right? They got the answer they wanted or learned something or whatever the case might be. We talked about this, right?

You should be moving towards quality. We wanna understand, you know, not the counting metrics never real great anyway, but I think we need to get away from those and, you know, like, were you satisfied this, by this, you know, what are the outcomes? Are you going to, are you more likely to do this? Are you less likely to do that?

These kinds of things are what we need to understand about the total experience of this. And I think we'll shed some light on how, you know, strategically we think about it. And last but not least, that brings us to surveys. They're so back.

So, you know, I show up in companies all the time and they're like, they just guess, you know, about what we think our customers want this or we have a hunch that they, and I'm like, just ask. You know, like, let's stop spending millions of dollars to guess about what we should be doing here. And so I think in this world where we actually can't reach into, you know, chat GPT or Claude and like understand it, the best thing we can do is just ask people like, hey, tell us about that experience. Where did you find us?

Was it good? You know, give us some more information. So I think that's gonna return as a primary measurement mechanism for all of us here in the room. And hopefully you get, you know, a good enough sample size for that to be statistically relevant and answer some questions.

Yeah. Okay. I'll leave you with this in this part of the talk, which is content is still a queen. We hear a lot of people right now talking about, oh, like, you know, people aren't going to community.

They're not going to our knowledge base. They're not going to Academy. They're not going here, they're the other place. But your expert content is still a moat.

It is still what differentiates you. And as soon as you slow down, you'll never be found ever again. Right? So there's this idea of like, you know, hey, like AI knows everything about us.

Like we don't, why do we, why are we writing knowledge articles? You know, why are we publishing all this stuff? It doesn't know anything until we tell it. Right?

I think it's a really important point here. And so if you come out with a new product, a new service, you change a name of a product. I just went through that last week with one of my clients where they changed the name of all of their enterprise products on one day. Shout out DakiSign.

(audience laughing) And so we were like trying to figure out how to do that. And that's a great example of like, you know, AI doesn't know that the CEO went on stage last week and changed the name of the product until we tell it. Right? And so there's a lot of things we need to think about of like why content still matters, why community still matters, why producing original expert nuanced niche, work around, you know, type stuff, is still super important.

So I would not stop because if you stop, it's gonna stagnate and it's likely that, you know, like in the SEO days, you're less likely to be found, less likely to be promoted, less likely all the things. So in a lot of ways, this is just SEO 2.0. And there's a lot of like hot takes out there on the shout out LinkedIn. Takes, you know, out there from the bros about all of like how this is all brand new and crazy and you need to redo your whole thing.

And if you don't, it's like, just do all the same stuff you were doing for SEO, right? Like a lot of it's gonna be fine. And if the AI is so smart, it'll figure it out. So there's my challenge to our AI friends.

Okay, so onto the strategy part. So that was just the context, believe it or not. You know, so that's what's happening, how to think about it. I'm gonna talk a little bit about strategy here of how to think about like, well, what do we do then going forward knowing that we're not getting this traffic, people aren't coming directly anymore.

You know, how do we build community? How do we build education? And you know, part of it is to sort of like rethink this a little bit. Number one, we're all sick of AI.

Anybody tired of AI or tired of hearing about AI? Your bosses are in the room. We can all raise our hands, it's okay. We're recording this, don't raise your hands.

You know, every survey, like I'm sure you've all seen this, right, like every survey that they've done, people are just like, oh my God, like I'm scared of this. I don't like this, it's trying to take my job. I'm trying to ram it in everywhere, right? So there's sort of a fatigue around this, is one problem that we can think about solving strategically.

And I think that's only gonna get more the case, right? As this unfolds. The second one is, and Yuris and John are gonna like fix this here, no pressure, in a few minutes, is that I think in a lot of the products that we use, like the AI functionality has been a little bit like slower to materialize than we had hoped. But it's also the case that as it does materialize, and you're gonna see that here in a minute, everybody's gonna have the same thing.

I think there's this idea that like AI is gonna be this like differentiator in our experiences, but if all of you are using all the Gainsight products and everything that they're gonna show you, then it's kind of table stakes, right? It's like, we all have it, we all have the same thing. So how then do we differentiate ourselves, given that all of these features and functions are rolled out broadly to most people, and let's say that most people are using them. So those are kind of the two things like strategically for us to focus in on here and try and solve.

I think to date, this has kind of been the answer that you hear from people is like, how do we just, like we gotta figure out man, how to get AI in there, we gotta sprinkle that AI dust like all over that thing right there. And again, I think that's just gonna happen, right? I think like the platforms are gonna evolve, you're gonna have these features and functions, and so I don't know that you should spend all your time, you know, worrying about that or thinking about that and trying to like build your own custom stuff. I think the experts, Shadow Gainsite, you know, are gonna do a lot of that for you.

And so you should focus instead your time and your energy on thinking about the experience and the human side of this stuff. So I think therefore, the right question to ask is this, which is how can we create something that AI can't, or what can be the counterweight, or what can be sort of the people version of this stuff to build an experience that is differentiated, does deliver something for your customers that other people don't have, and ultimately can help you in all phases of the game, of the land, expand, retain, support, you know, whatever those are for your company. That's where I think you should be going, and that's like the new North Star going forward here. And the mixture of that with the technology side of it, I think will put you in the right place.

So my proposition here is to think about what like, okay, great, all sounds good. Cool story, Brian. What are those things? Well, I call these the people powered pillars because it sounded cool mainly.

But, you know, local meetups, right? Like, hey, we're seeing this a lot. I'm gonna talk about local meetups in a minute. We're seeing this come back in a huge way.

You're all at a really big local meetup right now. You know, so we're seeing in person come back. It's what people are asking for in those surveys, right? So the clients I work with, we ask people what modalities of community do you prefer or like, or what do you want, or what do we not have, or what do other companies have that we don't?

These kinds of questions, that's the answer. So if you're not kind of thinking about that, you should be thinking about that. Cohort learning, right? Put people in a group.

We're kind of doing that here with the tables today a little bit. You know, there's a bunch of these, right? Advocacy. Who here runs advocacy programs?

(audience cheers) Shout out advocacy and Jenny Asaba. Hello friend. I think advocacy programs, they've always been around. I think they're super underserved.

What you find out with most companies, like I show up and they're like, "Oh, we have an advocacy program." Like, "Cool, show it to me." And then they take me to the page on their website where there's a form to fill that basically just puts them in the reference pool. And it's just like a numbers game churning through people references thing. Not advocacy, right? We'll do advocacy strategy another day, you know?

That's a whole other talk sometime. But that's a huge one now because it's like, well, how do we get people, you know, more interested in talking about us and doing things and rewarding our most passionate folks? Networking and mentoring. We're here, great.

Hands-on labs, right? Especially in like the academy education world. Doing more hands-on things, more in-person things, more, you know, doing rather than telling, I think is important. Again, we get that feedback in the surveys.

Peer-led office hours. A lot of companies had a lot of success with this. So like, "Hey, every Tuesday at four, Eastern, or whatever we do an hour, you can show up, ask any question, get an answer, you know, from someone else on the call or an expert that we brought in." You know, these kinds of things. In-person learning, contests and challenges.

A lot of companies have success with these. And last but not least, again, expert content is still the go. So there's all of these things. What can we do that AI can't replace today or doesn't have a shot of replacing?

The example I've been saying to people is like, you could probably do the operational side of building a user group meeting in Miami next week. But like, Claude ain't gonna run your Miami user group meeting locally in Miami next week, you know what I mean? Not yet. So I think these are all the things that you wanna think about and strategically orient what you're doing towards like, these are people-powered things, right, that AI isn't gonna conquer anytime soon.

Make sense? Okay, nobody nodded, which scares me. Does not make sense whatsoever. Okay, in-person, a word on this, because it's so important and like, if you had to pick one of those things, like if you were doing none of those, I would say the user groups, local user groups and advocacy.

Those are the two I would like point you to in addition to content, remember, content's queen. You know, look, people wanna get together with other people. It's probably why you're here, shadow cane site. Like, yes, you come to learn about the product and the keynotes and this and that, but you're probably mostly hyped to just meet other people and network and that thing.

Am I right about that or no? No, okay, sorry, Yuris, I'm sorry, man. So there's that, but you have to build it the right way. One of the challenges I see with a lot of companies trying to build these is like, oh, well, we'll do it all.

We have to own it, we have to control it, it has to be brand approved and all this stuff. And there's some ways that you can do that and scale that, but it all comes down at the end of the day to who are the people in these markets that we're partnering with and empowering them and enabling them and giving them support to scale and run these, let's say, once a quarter in a local market or something like that, is what the people that have done well with this, I think I have like, yeah, the usual suspects on there, the Atlassian, the Sales Forces of the world, shout out Holly Firestone. These are the things that they did and do and that's what makes them great and that's why when they give you the stat and they're like, we had 9,000 user group meetups last year in 92 countries in the world, it's not because Holly got on a plane and flew around the world 364 days of the year or whatever, it's because they find local chapters and people who are willing to do it. And then the last one is, again, back to the survey thing, we always ask people after these events, like tell us about your experience and why did you come and what was the most valuable part and what's the one key insight you heard and how does that affect how you're thinking about your spend with us or these kinds of questions.

And they'll just tell you, like, oh yeah, really enjoyed it, I met this person, they said something really cool, it got me thinking. And then you try to obviously tie all that together in the back end with the data of, are they more likely to renew, are they less likely to churn, did they submit less support tickets, you know, you're trying to build that story. And it's really helpful because it's not an abstraction, it's not here's what we think is happening, it's like this is what they told us, which is a much more concrete way to tell your story internally. Okay, I'm gonna build this out, there's a lot here, just for the sake of time.

Don't do everything all at once. When I put the slide up with the pillars, people are like, oh my God, I gotta do all nine of these tomorrow, by noon if possible. And the reality is that depending on where you are and the maturity of your community, your academy, your digital customer success, it's gonna be totally different, right? I think one of the challenges strategically is we say, well, you know, that's what Lovable did, that's what Zoom did, like whatever, and those are good examples and we should learn from all of those, but it's also the case that you might just be in a completely different place, right?

You might have a different size community, a different phase of community. There's a lot of like types of community that happened, like a retail brand will go nameless, shut down their community a few weeks ago and like everybody flipped out and it's like they're a retail cosmetics company, not as relevant to those of us selling like CRM software or something like this, it's like, who are you, where are you, what are you trying to do, what are your goals, what have you done, which of those pillars do you wanna do and try to match that up strategically to like where are you and you know, I always tell people like, especially with the user group one, if you've never done that before, just run one, run one in one city with one host, see how it goes, learn from it, make it two, then make it four, then make it eight and along course of time, you know, it'll all work out for you. Okay, practical application stuff here, the little subtitle there, I hope you like people in the back, you can squint, that's kind of the headline here is that what AI today is really good at in this context of community and advocacy and support and all these things is the operational bits, right, it does that really, really well. What it doesn't do so well is like all of the human aforementioned people powered stuff.

So, you know, just to give you a sense, we'll start with community, then we'll go to like academy, learning, university, whatever you call it, you know, there's a bunch of really good things actually that it can do and again, you're gonna see some of this, you know, recaps and digest, right, obviously it's really good at that, shout out MCP servers, moderation assist, the word assist is doing heavy lifting there, I'm gonna show you the other side of that coin in a minute, but it can do some cool things in terms of like taking high volumes, understanding the context of it, the sentiment, you know, all that stuff and maybe flagging, but not actioning, for example, you know, search content, recommendations, personalization, the back end, like CRM, you know, we got nine systems, rats nested together, like it's really good at pulling all of that context together and helping you out. Personalization, I think is gonna be one of the most important contributions of AI to any customer experience, is knowing who you are, what products you have, what you've done recently, what you care about, what you don't care about, that you just went to the Chicago meetup yesterday, and then, you know, when you show up, like cool, like here's what's for you, here's what's new, here's what you missed, I think that's actually gonna be a big leg up for a lot of these experiences we're trying to build, and then we talked about, you know, sentiment analysis, trends, the analytical side of it, right, like who in here is a data scientist? Okay, now who in here makes monthly or weekly or regular reports about what you do, you know, I'll raise your hands, right? So there's a big gap there to be solved too, of like hey, how do I use some of this stuff to help me build, you know, the insights and analytics reporting.

It's not good at replacing full-on moderation judgment, I began my career like decades ago in a gaming community, and I'm here to tell you AI ain't gonna solve some of those things anytime soon, it's a wild west out there, I would not let it action some of those things without a human explicit, like in the loop, so be careful, you know, there's some things that can do, but I would be careful about it. The generating new content, sure, if you wanna just, you know, make a summary of everything else on the internet, shout out every LinkedIn post ever right now. You know, building authentic relationships, trust, transparency, recreating this, what's happening right now, you know, probably not. All of your insights, all of your lived, you are in these products, you do this work, you think about it all day every day, you're all on your phones in Slack right now as I talk, talking to your teammates about this, probably not gonna be replaced quite yet.

And then just like humans are super underrated. Give yourselves a round of applause for being super awesome. It turns out people are kinda good at what they do and kinda cool. Okay, so last but not least here, let's shift over to the customer education.

I guess I should ask at the beginning, so who here, like would you say your primary responsibility is community? Nice, okay, how many of you would say your primary responsibility is education, university, academy, okay, how about both? All right, so AI and customer education. Again, the personalization stuff is awesome, you know.

Especially if you have courses, interactive lessons, you know, like hey, this has 10 chapters or 10 lessons inside of the course, however you think about that. Hey, it turns out you don't need to watch the whole thing or go through the two hour thing, like just skip to this chapter at minute marker, 13 minutes and 22 seconds. Like this is the thing you actually need and we know that because we see where you're getting stuck or you submitted a support ticket or you called your CSM or whatever the case is. That's gonna be super powerful to get people to what they want faster and better and cheaper.

Surfacing the right content at the right time, quizzes, knowledge, you know, these things, again, summaries, transcripts, I'm sure half of you are transcribing this right now, I'm sure. Translating localization, we might finally conquer localization, probably not, but we might get closer than we ever used to. The dream of localization, I see the pain on your faces. Yeah, I've lived that pain.

And then this one's kind of interesting too, is like how do we know where people are in their journey and like who's kind of falling behind or like who needs a leg up or is there a proactive outreach that a CSM could do knowing that people kind of feel like, ah, it seems like they're kind of not getting it and we see their product telemetry as well and like that kind of indicates that they might be a churn risk or something like that. Okay, don't expect to hear. Instructors, okay? They're like smart people who have knowledge and teach for a living.

Teachers, also super underrated, that is a skill. Cohort, peer accountability, trust, transparency, all these things we talked about, recreating the energy of like a live session. I know that like most of you are like, what the hell is this guy talking about? We're doing everything digitally now.

This is digital customer, it's what the D stands for. But I'm here to tell you that some people don't learn well that way. I know that's shocking. Some people need to be kind of in a classroom environment.

I think you're gonna see some of that come back as well in some scalable ways and it's just not gonna do that. Real world skill application I think is also important. Shout out everyone who graduated college the last couple of weeks who basically just used chat GPT for their entire college experience. And then I just think there is something to be said for, I met a person, they taught me something, I now associate that piece of knowledge with them and they with me and you're somewhat bound to that forever more.

Okay, so that is all that. How we feeling? Does it feel good? Hopefully helpful.

Okay. Happy to take any questions. I got a few minutes here. Yeah, you can find me, you can find me and Erica and then I do have an academy.

You can take some courses or whatever you wanna do. So, questions, comments, concerns, gripes, moans, complaints. We're gonna go classroom style here with hand raises. We're not gonna do any slido submissions.

We're gonna get this in the room. So do we have anyone who wants to raise their hand that's closer to me here? I'm kidding, I'll go in the back. Okay.

Austin Grimes everybody. (audience applauding) Yes, this is a live talk show, don't worry. Rose coming. Hi Brian.

Hi Brian, first time, long time listener, first time caller. Appreciate that. Yeah, so I have a unique challenge. I'm building a brand new community.

You know, it could happen in 2026. There's nothing that exists. What is something that you would do to make that brand new 2026 community AI proof or AI ready? Because that's, you know, a lot of my peers are having to adapt what they have and I get to build something from scratch.

So. Yeah, I mean, I think I go back to the local, in-person, user group, scalable, you know, meetups part. I think particularly when you're building a new community, that's a great, that was a great piece of advice before AI too actually, because going to different markets and learning from like, what do people want? Who are they?

What do they need? What makes someone in London different than someone in Taipei? Or, you know, I think like super interesting learnings and then can help you inform the strategy for the rest of what you do. I also think it's a bit of a, you know, pardon the sports term folks, you know, the old Gretzky like skate to where the puck is going thing.

Not to say that you shouldn't do online community or build that, like you absolutely should. It's super critical to do that. I think in your shoes today, if it was me, I'd probably start with the offline bit and use that as a test bed, you know, to try some experiments and research and like figure out who these people are. And then I think that helps you build like, okay, what's our total, you know, global strategy of online, offline, hybrid, you know, this, that and the other thing.

Yeah, and a quick second part. What do you think about content, or like restricting content today? Cause that's been a hot topic. Restricting content, say some more.

Yeah, so like the access level of like community forums versus having them locked behind. You have to sign in, like-- Yeah, okay, I gotcha. Like our friends from Asana are here. I think that's-- Yeah, I don't know that the answers changed all that much.

I personally and strategically knowing what I know about how communities have functioned and grown and added value over the years. And now knowing that GEO is SEO 2.0 essentially, I've always fallen on the side of make as much public as possible without getting fired. That's a phrase I used to use when I worked at companies. I'm like, I'm gonna just-- Wrap it up.

Yeah. You know, making that is like, why do we wanna get in the way of people if I don't have to? Now there's certain things that are, you know, might be sensitive or a roadmap presentation, it's NDA'd, whatever, sure, like put it behind the log in. I think you're kind of only harming yourself if you try to make everything super private and super behind the scenes, especially if that's what you're doing.

And then your customers are like, well, I just go to Claude and like ask, they're never gonna see you ever again. And what they're gonna see is your competitors, you know, just like it always was in the SEO days. Now can you define SEO, AO and GEO for us? Hi kid, someone.

Any hand raisers? If I ask chat GPT, it'll tell you the answer to that. I am chat GPT today. Replacing myself live on stage.

Thanks Brian. B-G-B-T. Hey Brian, I'm Alexis with Zoom. Hey.

So one of the things that we struggle with is our user groups. So customers constantly come to our community as a customer support forum. They're very heavily involved in our product forum areas, a lot of question, answer, that's really the meat and potatoes of our site. We launched user groups a little shy of two years ago, and we really wanted to market them as, you know, these more unique, catered to, maybe it's your vertical, your industry, your location language, and they just haven't set fire the way that we've been privileged to see the rest of the community.

I will admit we have not dipped our toes into the in-person element that you've described for user groups. But I'm curious with the work that you've done with user groups and having, kind of setting the stage to then have people meet in person, can you speak a little bit more about the value that you're seeing come back into the community in the online space from having the user groups and having the in-person meetups? Yeah, it's a good point that when I say groups or user groups, there are local groups, there are role-based, like what's your title, what problem are you trying to solve? And there might be interest-based groups, right?

So they're not all, and I think you're talking about the kind of the middle one, the persona-based groups. We see this a lot, that people will roll out like a, you know, hey, this is the IT admins group, let's say, or you know, whatever, and, but there's not like enough differentiation in that, versus like maybe like a forum where you, like where do I go to ask my IT admin-related question? They're gonna go wherever they think they have the best chance of being heard or get an answer or connect with someone who knows, and to them, it's really like, they're like, well, I've already been doing it, you know, over there. I think like there's more volume over there, like why would I go into, so I think the answer to your question is, if you're gonna do like persona or interest-based groups online, they have to offer very specific, here's why it's different than any of the other community stuff that we have, here's the types of people that you're gonna uniquely connect with that you might not find easily in the other ways, and one way to drive this is to build networking into that, usually some sort of technology-aided networking of like matching systems or, you know, those kinds of things to say, hey, this group isn't really about support or, you know, that kind of thing.

It's really about getting to know other people that do what you do, network with them, and then maybe you can extract some like interesting, you know, knowledge from them that you wouldn't have otherwise, but I think it's tough when, you know, because it's like what's the overlap between, you know, those things, so I would say try to clarify it as best you can, but also be willing to walk away from it. It's a bit of an odd thing that I get to say sometimes, is like if you try some stuff and it's not working, rather than keep pedaling in that direction, I'd be a little kind of like ruthless and cut that, and then go towards another thing, reallocate your time, your effort, whatever, to something that is working or has a better shot, yeah, sometimes we tend to, it's the opportunity cost thing of like, we've already sunk so much time into this, and sometimes the answer is actually, bye, and let's go do something else, you know. Hi, all right. We are gonna go to one more question.

Do we have any takers? And then you'll get, obviously, I'm gonna farm Brian out to some various roundtables at the end, so you will get a chance to ask him one-on-one questions, if you'd like. There was one up here. All right, I see a hand, thank you.

(audience member speaking off mic) I was like, these feet are not chat GPT, they're human. Thank you, hi Brian. Hello. My name's Lisa, I'm from Sumo Logic, and I don't actually, we're trying to start our community on the online version, so I have sort of the opposite problem of the gal over there at Zoom, where we're doing, literally, actually, I'm pretty proud to say all these things on your people-powered pillars where we have going on.

(laughs) But we don't have like an online forum where people can go and ask questions and really connect in that way. And so one of my missions from my corporate marketing team was to come here and find out how to do that. So do you have a recommendation on like, where do we even start to get the online part of it up and running? Yeah, for sure, it's a good question.

I think there's a lot of people in this room that probably have a ton of experience with what I'm about to say is, you know, I think there will always be some sense of like, the support use case, let's ask questions, get answers. I think you're seeing it fade a little bit. And so what you're seeing most online communities be about these days is more of the enablement, empowerment, onboarding, education, you know, time to value with the product. So more of like that classic, what you would call maybe customer success or digital customer success, you know, is like, how do we use the community as a conduit at any phase of like the customer experience?

This is where you kind of get into more like customer experience and customer journey, like umbrella over all of these things, which is why you see Gainsight trying to bring together Skilljar and the community, like, let's not make it hard for people to go and find what they want. It should be one experience, but you're seeing that happen kind of broadly where these communities are becoming more of the home of enablement, onboarding, education, connection, right? Like maybe you have the groups or the cabs or the, you know, these different kind of components in there that aren't so much about question and answer. They're more about, you know, how do you sort of like take your journey with this product or service or whatever it is that you sell.

And I think that's gonna be largely kind of the future of the online components, you know, of these communities going forward. There's a lot there. That's a whole other session, but yeah. (audience member speaking off mic) Yeah.

(audience member speaking off mic) Well, I don't know. So she's, for those of you who can't hear, so she was asking, is it just as simple as like launching a community and getting it started? Yes and no. On one hand, I think there is a tendency to overbake strategy a little bit and that's coming from the strategist.

Hi, it's me. You know, I do think there's some middle ground between like, hey, we just need to try something and get some experiments out there. But I think you need to be thoughtful, you know, about how you do it because you do kind of get, you know, it's funny, we used to say like, hey, you get one shot at this. Like people come out and they see your experience for the first time.

Now you might get half, you know, a half of a shot. So yes, but I think you want to optimize for, you know, trying a few key things that people have told you in those surveys that they want, go with their data as the foundation of it as opposed to kind of the spray and pray, like we're gonna launch this thing with 15 different, you know, modules and areas and whatever and then realize that 13 and a half of them aren't that effective and you have to now, you know, back out of it. So yeah, much more to say there, but I know we're short on time. Me cutting things off.

I was like really great segue though, all the in-person questions you have here exactly will be then found on a website, probably by me. So thank you for that question and we'll get all that going. I'm gonna boop Brian off, give him a round of applause. (audience applauding)