Let’s Get This Party Started: Expert Tips for Building Vibrant, Engaged Communities
Join Chris Rauch, Chief Customer Officer, and Senni Niemi, Head of Scaled Customer Success at Supermetrics, as they dive into the strategic importance of community building for B2B software companies servicing thousands of customers. In this session, they will share firsthand insights from their journey of launching and nurturing a thriving community at Supermetrics, including the essential frameworks that can guide you in initiating your own community, the hurdles they encountered, the victories they celebrated, and the practical tips that have been instrumental to their success. Whether you are considering starting a community or looking to revitalize an existing one, this session will equip you with the knowledge and strategies needed to foster a lively, engaged user base.
Okay, welcome everyone to our final session of day one of Pulse Europe.
My name is Oliver Marit, I'm a Gain site CSM for customer communities and it
gives me
great pleasure to introduce Chris Rauch and sending the Emmy from Supermetrics
for this
final session of the day.
They're going to be talking about launching a community and fun fact about
Chris, he
refers himself as the cloud man for multiple reasons.
He's been an advocate of the cloud since the noughties having bought his house
on the
internet in 2004, I believe, met his wife on online dating before that was even
a thing.
And then, Seni as well probably has an interesting story about her dating
experience probably
from the last time she was Amsterdam, but I'll let you ask her about that after
this
presentation.
But yeah, please give a warm welcome to Chris and Seni.
[Applause]
Thank you and a big welcome to you all to this session.
We are between you and Pulse Party.
So I'm very aware of that, we're very aware of that and I want to talk to you
today about
parties and it's all about parties and I'm going to talk to you a little bit
about how
that fits with communities because a great party, a great party and by the way
this is
a photo from one of the supermetrics parties, somewhere in there might be Seni
and might
be me somewhere, I can't quite see us, but this is one of our parties, we have
good parties.
But there are four things you need at a good party.
You need people, you need lots of people, you need a great venue, you need to
give them
food and drink and you need dancing and music and dancing.
And for me, a community is the same.
If you're building a community, and by the way I'm going to give a bit of a
plug here,
if you're building a community and you haven't watched Richard or Beyond Today,
watch the
recording.
They were amazing and the stuff they talked about, Seni and I were taking loads
of notes.
Think of us as the, we're the new kids on the block, we're going to be doing
this that
long, but we're going to share what we've done.
So I want to talk a little bit about using this theme of the people, the venue
and what
you need to think about, it's about the audience, it's about the audience and
who is that audience,
how you get them about the platform, about the content you put out there and
then importantly
about the experience and the experience so they want to come back.
Because a good party is a party you want to go to next year and a community is
a community
you want to go back to.
Once one time visitors, nah, we want them to come back, we want that engagement
So today we're going to talk a little bit about that.
But before we do, I'm going to give you one minute on who we are as a company,
Supermetrics.
So I'm the Chief Customer Officer at Supermetrics.
Supermetrics, essentially in a nutshell, we connect, manage, analyse and
activate marketing
data for organisations.
We have about 17,000 customers, we've been around 10 plus years.
We deal with, I think the fun fact is 15% of online advertising spend is
processed through
our pipes and our platform.
So there's a lot of stuff coming through.
And we've been doing this for quite a few years, founded by an individual
called Mikhail 13
years ago in his front room.
And so that's all I'm going to talk about the company because today is really
about
the community.
And why did we have a community?
So this was a strategic imperative.
We had a presentation to our leadership team on this topic.
It was scheduled for 20 minutes.
Am I right, Cine, it took an hour?
We used an hour of a two-hour meeting to focus on this.
This is really important to Supermetrics.
It's important for a number of reasons.
It's important because we want to essentially operate at scale.
We have 17,000 customers.
I can't keep hiring people.
I can't keep throwing people at a problem.
I need to get, operate and serve customers at scale.
I need to do peer-to-peer learning.
Enabled customers in our space use our product more.
If they use our product, they stay.
We have serial customers who stay with us for years and years and years across
multiple
companies.
If we can get them enabled, they're sticky.
We need to listen to our customers.
We need to listen to what they're telling us about our product.
We need to improve engagement and retention.
But fundamentally, it's about serving and it's about operating at scale.
That was the imperative that drove this.
I'm now going to hand over to Cine, who's going to take through, who was
leading this,
to take through a bit more detail on that.
Amazing.
Thank you, Chris.
As Chris mentioned, we are still early in our journey.
Basically, what has happened so far this year is that we signed the agreement
with
Gainside basically by the end of March.
We were asking, "How long does it take to build a community and get it live?"
We were told that it takes at least three months.
When I went back to Chris saying, "Hey, this will take by the end of maybe the
end of Q2,
we'll get it launched."
I know we need to do this in 10 weeks.
That's what we did.
By June 11th, we soft launched the community, inviting some of our top members,
some of
our top users to the community.
As of today, we are a community of 1,100 registered members.
Still early in our journey.
Before, we decided to go with Gainside.
We had a proof of concept community in Slack.
What we realized quite soon is that, "Okay, we know that this is something that
our customers
value.
This is something that our customers want, but at the same time, we wanted to
build something
that's more scalable."
For example, from the SEO aspect, Slack is not really a community in that sense
That's the reason why we decided to go with Gainside.
What does it look like in numbers?
As I said, still early, we have about 500 posts that have been created on the
platform.
1,500 likes, 3,500 monthly active users in the community as of now.
Top sources for those users, 35% still comes from email, 20% comes from organic
search,
35% of all of our community members are from the US.
That's definitely our biggest market.
Conversion from a visitor to an actual registered member is about 7%.
Give you guys a bit of context.
What is the journey ahead of us?
As mentioned, we're quite ambitious with our setting goals.
By the end of next year, 10,000 registered members are the number that we're
aiming towards.
But I would still consider that being a supportive metric really.
On the longer term, what we want to achieve is improvement on new customer
acquisition.
We want to be community-led in that sense, and of course retention.
We feel that if we get community-right, retention will be much easier for us.
Online and offline, so we don't want to build something that only happens
within one platform.
We want to build something that comes to you.
For example, we have amazing customer groups and communities that are already
doing things,
let's say, in South America.
How can we make sure that we're doing more of that than we go to the places
where the
customers actually are?
How do we enable that?
Peer to peer, of course, something very important to us.
I think we've had very good first insights in terms of how this can work.
I'm so excited to see even more of that.
Some time along the journey, we will be the biggest marketing and data
community globally.
Aim high.
Then before we go into audience platform content experience, I will briefly
show you what the
community looks like as of today.
If you're familiar with the games platform, this might look familiar to you.
We have all the basic elements, conversations, news and updates, events.
If you have a gamesite community, most likely it looks something like this.
I will talk about custom pages as well because we've started experimenting with
them as well,
but more about that later on.
We'll move on to audience.
In terms of the audience, when you're thinking about engaging, if you want to
think about
engaging someone in using a piece of tech, for me, the why, what, how model is
so, so
important.
If I want to get one of you to join our community, the first question you're
going to go is
why?
Why should I bother?
What's in it for me?
What's going to happen?
For us, when we think about our audience, being really clear as to why and what
problem does
this solve for the individual, what problem is it for their organization.
Once you've got the why, okay, so now I know why I should bother.
What's going to happen in this community?
What does being engaged in this community mean?
And then the how is how do we execute on it?
And I think if you're going to think about audience, and we're having an other
conversation
with someone earlier who's thinking about community, is making so, so sure the
why and
the purpose is clear.
I think Richard talked about that in his session earlier today.
His purpose is super, super important.
If I was honest and we were giving ourselves a score, we kind of have a clear
why, but
actually on reflection, I don't think our why is as clear as it could be.
And I think I would encourage all of you to really think about the why.
What problem are you solving?
Very specifically.
I think with that in mind, that drives, once you've got that clear, sudden your
audience
becomes clear on what you're doing with them.
Cool.
Before I talk about the tactics that we've used for audience acquisition, I
said give
the user a compelling reason to come to the party.
Why would they join?
Very, very important question to ask.
When it comes to preferences, before you launch a community, please talk to
those customers
that you have.
Run a survey, ask what do they actually want?
What kind of communities are they looking into on a daily basis, weekly basis?
What are the reasons that drive the engagement in the future?
Is the party special enough for them to join?
Is it worth it?
For them, how can you make it exclusive in some ways?
How can they feel that this is something that is worth being a part of?
Some of the things that we've done so far that have been working really well
for us,
I would say that experimentation is the key here.
We've been running maybe 40 different types of email campaigns.
We've used headlines like, "Hey, supermetrics communities now here come and
join."
What has been the most successful headline so far is that don't tell anyone
this supermetrics
communities not live.
This is the headline that has brought us the most visitors and registration so
far.
If you feel that you don't have your creative juices going, go to .chepe.te and
ask for
suggestions because that's a very good partner to have.
Exclusive content.
What we decided to do quite early on is that we have our quarterly product
updates webinar
basically where our product managers talk about the new things, the better
features that customers
can get access to.
Customers only get access to the content through the community so they need to
produce the
content for the community in order to get access.
Make sure that community is a part of your own boarding process so you tell
about the
community early on.
Either it's in self-service channels such as, let's say, Intercompopata we have
here on
the right side, hand corner or emails but make sure that it's there.
And of course, how can you build those links from your product to the community
So again, there is a link from our product making sure that the customer
actually sees
the community innovation as well.
And then SEO has been something that has been mentioned quite a lot or quite
many times
during today.
How do you identify those content topics that would actually SEO potential?
Nothing that I forgot to mention but super important.
How do you make sure that people, your own people, talk about the community?
In our case, it's the CEO who talks about the community every single month.
It's our CSMs that talk about the community, our salespeople that talk about
the community.
So it's not only the community team who's talking about the community.
So how can you make sure that it's on everyone's agenda to drive traffic to the
community?
Then let's look at the platform.
For essential apps to guide you on your journey with data, you guys are all
familiar with
that.
How many of you uses the Gainsite community platform as of today?
There's a couple.
How many of you use GA4 within that community?
A couple.
Awesome.
How many of you use Search Console?
Cool.
Awesome.
So the reason why we have decided to use these apps on top of the Gainsite
platform is for
us to understand what is actually working.
So in the Gainsite platform, there's a lot of cool features.
Analytics is not maybe one of them.
So in order for us to understand which of those headlines of the emails that I
mentioned
was actually driving most of the traffic, that's GA4 that helps us understand
that.
Or what are the things that people actually search in the top search bar that
you have
in the community platform?
What are the things that people search?
That's what you get from GA4.
And then Search Console, how many organic impressions do you actually get with
your
content?
How many people actually click and how does that trend all the time?
So don't do compromises when it comes to understanding your data.
Make sure that you have the right tools in place.
If you're not, the one who can actually build those integrations, talk to your
IT, talk
to your marketing technology team, whoever can help you.
And then there's one extra bonus.
And I'm definitely not objective when I say that Supermetrics is a good
addition here.
But basically what Supermetrics helps you to do is to create one report or
dashboard,
which combines all of your reports or data into one place so that you don't
need to go
to all of those different platforms separately to understand your performance.
This is an interesting debate actually because we, on the left hand side, 1,154
registered
users.
On the right is 11,766 unique visitors.
Which one should we drive?
And here's the problem is there's a difference between those two.
On the left hand side, those are people that bothered to log in and register.
On the left, on the right hand side, it's all the people that came in once and
did something.
We have this debate internally because on the one hand, if you think about this
, the left
hand side gives me a relationship.
I know who they are.
I can hold a CSM to account that none of your customers in the community.
I know that they're asking questions.
I know where I'm getting penetration.
I'm not getting impatient.
The right hand side, I'm getting reach but I've got no relationship.
And Senny and I have debated this about should we be going after relationship
or should we
be going after reach?
And what's your thoughts on this, Senny?
I think both of them are important.
But what's my argument towards reach, for example, is that if I think about
myself as
a community user, I might use a lot of those communities, like Gainside
community or Hops
but communities, without logging in.
And I will still get value from the community.
So I will search for something I will find the answer and then I'll be done.
And I find that there's a lot of value in that.
On the other hand, of course, that relationship also matters.
From supermetrics and if you ask that in a work context, of course, it's easier
for
me to do my job if I understand who those people are.
And I think what this means in practice is do you put something in your
community behind
the login or in front of the login?
Because we had a recent event, a super summit event.
We had a whole load of really cool recordings.
I was arguing, stick them behind the login, it'll drive up registered users.
CMO was going, no, stick them in front because I want SEO.
Who's right?
The answer is I don't know.
But we do wrestle with this and we do talk about this.
And actually it depends on which one you want to measure and which one's more
important
because they are literally 10x different in the conversion rates.
Cool.
Let's talk about content.
As I mentioned previously, I recommend asking your customers what do they
actually value
within a community?
So what do they see there being the important parts of it?
Survey that we ran was quite clear in terms of the priorities.
So our customers want to have access to industry insights and trends.
That was number one.
And then equally important, tips and tricks on how to use super metrics.
So quite, I would say, down to earth type of things.
But let's hear from one of our community members in terms of what value do they
see?
If we would just share between us, like if not just within a single agency, but
just
as a community of super metrics users, I mean, that could just benefit all of
us, of course.
I'm sure there's so many more use cases that maybe we're not aware about and
that others
are using and that could make our work easier and faster and better.
So I think that's why the community is very important.
I'm very excited that you're promoting this.
Cool.
I think the key thing here is that our customers want to make sure that they
get the most value
for their money.
So if someone is using super metrics to do something really well or they have a
very
cool use case, how do we make sure that those are shared amongst other
community members?
Some other content types that have been working for us in the past, so
community challenges,
I think this is a pretty common tactic for many community users.
So asking the community members to share something, those have been very
successful for us.
We have an amazing guy called Ralph, who is our head of data visualization, and
he's
been sharing a lot of industry insights and timely topics about Looker Studio
and how
to visualize your data, and that's amazing.
These are one of the top pieces that bring us the most SEO traffic.
And then, as I mentioned, community exclusive events.
So bringing in people to events where community is the only way in.
So that's been a very good trick for us.
Custom pages, Super Summit was mentioned.
So this is the biggest event for Supermetrics for the year.
And we basically built a custom page where all of the recordings were saved.
So basically, the only way how people can access this is through our community,
which has been also working really well for us.
Cool.
So, thank you, Senny.
So you had lots about the audience, the platform, the content.
Now let's get on to the music and the dancing.
It's quite funny, I was telling my wife about this session, and she said, "Why
are you talking
about music and dancing?
You're way too old to do that.
But you haven't seen me at Pulse.
Give me a few beers, and I'll show you some dancing."
Anyway, let's get on to the experience.
So how many of you have got a community that's about you broadcasting to the
customer, and
it feels like that, and it feels like you're broadcasting out, and that's step
one or step
zero.
Then there's the customer coming to you going, "I want, I want," and you're
answering the
questions.
And that's kind of both of those are okay.
What we all want is we want the customer dancing with the customer.
That's when, if you listen to the Bjorn and the O2, peer to peer, that is the
Holy Grail.
And I would say as someone that we've been on this journey since June, this is
the hardest
thing.
Do I have the magic answer behind the next slide?
No, I've got some ideas, but it's something I'm not giving up.
This is where we need to keep pushing.
Peer to peer is the right way to go forward.
So how do we do it?
So these are some of the interesting posts that came that I pulled up the
actual community.
I think customer to customer is, I think there's something about incentivizing
them.
They're incentivizing them to talk to each other and engage and be active.
You need to give them a carrot, a dangler carrot.
Some people like points, some people do things for points and prizes.
Another thing is allow them to give them a space where they can share.
After a decade in this space, I'm curious to see how others are solving a
problem that's
fairly unique to agencies.
That is a customer not asking for a question of us.
That's a customer asking a question to another customer.
So encouraging and facilitating that.
We have even thought about going to some of our favorite customers and
encouraging them
to put what they put on LinkedIn on our community as a strategy.
Because I can see them doing it on LinkedIn.
Can you do us a favor and do it here as well?
Start a discussion, see where you get to.
Does anyone know if this is possible?
That is different from asking necessarily a question of supermetrics.
That could be a -- and I think this was actually -- I lifted these straight off
our community.
I think things like this is encouraging and facilitating that.
I believe we're not the only one that's got this problem.
Kind of shared problems and making sure people have that space to ask about and
getting them
to encourage to ask other customers about that.
This was an interesting one.
We pushed this in long grass.
I did ask Sen about this on a Slack channel.
I said, should we have said yeses?
Are you open for community members to post their events?
Quite risky.
Because some of our community members use our competitors' products.
How would we feel if they post in an event that was advertising our competitor?
Okay.
Here's a test.
How many people in this room are not customers of -- of gain site?
Okay.
How many are customers of gain site's competitors?
Okay.
But gain starts to invite you here because this is a conference and a community
for people
in the customer success domain.
Gain site and my view do a great job of not linking you to the product.
I've been in pulse events for seven years.
I only bought the product this year.
But I've been to these events for six years without being a customer.
Because I think it's about being brave enough to own the space and not be
frightened of
your competition.
But this is an interesting challenge about whether we'll do this.
And I think we should experiment and let it happen.
And then we create a space that's not product-centric.
Gain site, in my view, do a damn good job of running community events that are
not just
about their own products.
As evidenced by half this room not being customers.
You're here because you want to learn about customer success and all the things
around
it.
Here's an interesting one.
Should you or should you not allow a community to be a place where people can
say I need
a job or say I need a person?
I mean, that's linked in all day long.
Should you do that in your space?
Is that risky?
Does that cause you issues?
There is a dilemma and I don't have a magic answer.
If you're in a space and you want to be in a community, the ability to find
your next
job or to find your best person, that might make you come back.
And again, that's something we might experiment with and we might test out.
And I don't know if anybody else, I'd be curious afterwards if anybody's tried
this
and has got any experience of it afterwards.
I would love to or even chip in at the end on the questions bit.
But yes, for me, I think that if you're going to get back customer-to-custom
engagement,
you need to gamify.
You need to allow a space to share problems.
People need to learn from each other.
People want to make connections.
If you listen to Nick this morning, it's about connection.
People want connection.
And potentially it's about recruitment.
But what's interesting on the right is one of our core values as a company is
think
like a customer.
I think the answer to this question is stop thinking like your organization,
put yourself
in the shoes of the customer and go what does a customer want?
Let go of what you want.
And if you give them what the customer wants and this has been coming up time
and time
again through the sessions today on community.
Just focus on what the customer needs and then you'll get the engagement.
So as we come to a close on the presentation, every party, anybody here got
young kids,
every party has a party bag.
So I'm going to make sure you leave the room with your takeaway, your little
party bag.
They're going to be party bags, but there will be some takeaways.
So what are the key takeaways here?
I think if we look at audience to summarize, ensure you have a clear purpose
and scope.
What is this for?
And if I'm honest, I think we've kind of got it, but we could do a better job
on that.
Test and experiment.
There isn't one size doesn't fit all.
How many email?
40.
40.
That's a lot of testing experiment.
I think exclusivity is key.
We all love a party where you're on the list and you jump the queue.
How cool are nightclubs that have queues compared to ones that don't have
queues?
Who would go in a nightclub that didn't have a queue?
Scary.
It's either too early or it's a club you know it shouldn't be in.
You want to be there with a long queue and it even better if someone lets you
in the
front.
Platform.
I think the measure and track, and I think Seni picked up on this, the measure
and track
at another level and get all those different dimensions.
And you can throw some super metrics as well.
I think also think about this dilemma about is it about unique visitors or is
about registered
members?
Which is more important?
What do you care about?
The relationships you care about the reach?
Integration.
You've got to wire this into every part of your process and your systems.
Your products got to link to it.
Your website's got to link to it.
Your support's got to link to your support.
It's got to be part of your cadence.
It's got to be part of everybody's thinking.
Wire this into your DNA.
On the content, coming back to the gain site thing, if you focus on your
product, the risk
is you're nothing more than your support site with a bit of interaction.
That's what you want fine, but in my view, I think the answer lies in the
domain and
the potentially.
That's where you might get more engagement and more events offline and offline
and connecting
them and allowing, encouraging that we're going to be experimenting in 2025
with more
offline events which will be driven and facilitated through the community.
But we will actually meet up in person in different cities.
Give them some challenges and gamification.
I think the experience for me as well as connecting, it's about helping them,
allowing them to
share and allow them to learn.
If people can learn, share, connect and be supported, they're more likely to be
engaged.
So are you ready for tonight's party?
[laughter]
Blimey.
Who's coming to the party?
Come on.
Anyway, that's our session.
I hope you found it useful.
I think we're now about time for some questions.
[applause]
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you, Senny.
Great to hear about your early journey with communities so far and with all the
plans you've
got in terms of experimenting and being bold in terms of what you're aiming for
So, yeah, really enjoyed that session.
Those are great insights.
So yeah, you can see a lot of questions.
So is there a risk of these negativity spreading within a community and how do
you deal with
it?
Yeah, there is the risk.
Our CTO has an extensive community background and he was very clear from the
start that,
"Hey, this can all go very badly if we're not prepared."
So we definitely wanted to be prepared.
So there is guidelines in terms of how do we handle those situations so far.
Luckily, we haven't really seen anything in terms of things going really badly.
But I think it's about being prepared, supporting the community manager or
managers that you
have, making sure that they're not left alone in that situation.
And also, I think because community is a place where customers can openly
discuss topics
that are also difficult, there should be a lot to do that.
So I think those would be kind of like...
And just to build on that, we set some very clear moderation guidelines and we
had a moderation
escalation path.
So someone put something really inappropriate.
We have a path to escalate it and people involved to get it dealt with.
That said, as a company, we are very used to being very transparent and open.
We have open Q&A's every month where anybody can ask questions.
We're used to as a culture allowing people to say challenging things.
And I think that extends to our community.
And if someone wants to say something challenging, let's enter into a debate.
I think I wouldn't be...
I wouldn't have a problem with a customer moaning about our product.
At least they're moaning.
Then I can do something about it.
It's the silent ones.
Anybody here in customer success?
Silence is golden.
Silence is a killer.
It's when they say nothing to you, then you know you've got trouble.
I'd rather they spoke up.
Absolutely.
Transparencies key in that regard.
So yeah, it sounds like your community is not fully private and close to
subscribers.
How are you leveraging open spaces for prospects?
Yeah, so the community is pretty much open to anyone.
So you don't need to be a supermetrics customer to reduce the or have access to
anything.
We've tried to actually go out, for example, our trial uses us to the community
because
well, they're one of the biggest assets that we have.
We have like a lot of customers that know our product so much better than we
actually
do.
They know the use cases.
So actually getting prospects and trial users in the community is a big, big
benefit
to have actually from my point of view.
Cool.
So I'm not starting a community from scratch, but I'm hoping to revitalise the
existing
community we have today.
Are there any tips you can offer to re-engage members and inject new life into
the programme?
Do you want me to cover that?
So I think this starts at the top.
If you've got a leadership team that buys into this, then that's step one.
So when we launched this, and even if we re-launched it, we had buy-in from our
CIO, who's our
chief impossible officer, who was our CTO, our CEO.
This was backed by the entire leadership team.
We must do this.
This is a strategic imperative.
So if your community needs revitalising, is your leadership team on board, step
one?
Step two, I think there is a difference between a community manager and an
evangelist.
I had the pleasure of working with an evangelist who's at the back of the room
with a camera,
taking pictures of me, I gee-dah.
You need a community manager that's an evangelist, someone that has a voice in
the community
you're in that people want to listen to.
Then you can create some noise and create some energy.
And there are some good evangelists out there, and there are some that need...
And it's a very hard thing to do.
It's very hard to find them, and it's very hard to get them.
Because typically, in my experience, I think they come from your customer base.
So I think, personally, I would say that, sponsorship plus evangelism.
Anything you'd add in there, is there any?
No, I think that's pretty much a cover to it.
Great.
We had some lofty goals for next year with 10,000 members of the target for
2025.
So what strategies are you thinking of to be able to reach if you have any
examples to
share already?
I can answer first.
I think what we could have done better this year is for us to work in a closer
collaboration
with our regional marketing teams.
That's something that we haven't really done that much.
So now there is actually proper plans in place of us meeting customers locally,
whether they're
in Sydney or New York or London.
We want to go there and meet them in person.
We want them to organize things that we can then sponsor.
So I think that's going to be a big, big thing.
One thing that wasn't mentioned in the presentation is our own ambassadors.
I think that's something that we could double down on, but also external influ
encers.
There's amazing people like easily Excel.
You can Google that.
And a fantastic lady who does a lot of cool Excel tips and tricks.
How can we find those kind of influencers to talk about supermetrics, maybe
talk about
the community, maybe do something in the community?
So I think those are a couple of the tactics that we'll tap into.
I would also encourage you, as I said earlier, if you didn't watch Richard's
session, I'm
going to watch that again because I've learned a lot through that.
And I think Richard and Bjorn's sessions today, I know if they're in the room,
but cute off
to them because there are some stuff in there that we kind of did an okay job
on, that we
could do a better job on, and that's how we get to the 10,000.
So I think keep learning.
It's hard.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So who creates the content for the community?
How do you repurpose it for various channels?
It takes a village, basically.
I thought today we have product managers who does some of the content,
community managers,
our marketing teams, so a lot of people.
And we have a team that does our kind of email content for our scale customer
success, and
that team does a lot of work on repurposing that content rather than an email
form, put
it on the platform, and our product marketing as well.
So I think taking a village, it's a lot of work.
Whilst we've got one community manager, they would never get it done without
the 10 or
20 people around them.
It's a lot of effort.
Yeah.
I'd also add to that to check out another thought leader in community space,
Brian O'Blinger.
He's got a great framework in terms of how to create a content strategy and a
content
plan for a community.
So yeah, check out, I've had some of his work.
So on to the next question.
So when is it time for an organization to start thinking about community and
when to
realise these plans?
Indicators, flags, we've got an example where in terms of number of customers
or users,
what's your perspective on that, sending Chris?
Well actually we had a community that was run by our CEO, Mikal, back in the
day when
he was, I think he was the only employee that we had.
And the reason for that was that because he didn't have the resources to answer
, to
support tickets or some other channels, he actually decided to invest in a
forum.
One of the mistakes that we did back in the days was that we closed that forum.
So we could have done things better on that front.
But I think it really depends on the situation that your company is in.
I think we are in a situation where we just know that we need to scale without
adding in
a head count, a word count, a word count.
So I think for us it's simply a need from customers but also a need for us to
do things
that scale.
So those would be the indicators that I would say.
What about you, Chris?
I think it's a great question but it's the wrong question.
I don't think you should think about a number.
You should think about the purpose.
Because I've seen an organization with a lot less customers build a community
that's
added value.
I don't think it's about the number of users or customers you've got.
It's why you're doing it.
So whilst it's a great question, no offense.
It's the wrong question.
Don't use that as your benchmark.
Here's the other thing is we actually last Friday.
Last Friday I got called onto a call by a CEO and my chief and possible officer
saying
Chris, should we pull the plug on the community?
And that was a provocative comment to go, okay we've had six months.
Is it worth it?
And I went six months.
We need a year to prove this out really.
And it was a good challenge and it wasn't, they weren't really going to pull
the plug
but they were kind of poking the bear.
And I didn't tell any of this.
They didn't invite you to the call as well.
Funny that.
But we had the discussion and I said this takes a while, this takes momentum.
And are we going to get this right first time now?
Do we need to do more yes?
Is there more we can do?
But I think to come back to the question, it isn't the number.
It's why you want to do it and what you're trying to achieve.
And it doesn't, it takes a village and it doesn't happen overnight.
Absolutely.
So with the goal of being an industry community leader, how do you incentivise
conversation
beyond your product?
So going from maybe a community of products or more of a community of practice.
Do you want to talk about that a bit?
Go ahead if you have a good idea.
I think you need to, the thing we're missing is we're missing a voice.
We don't have a voice in our side our organisation that has yet come forward to
have start the
conversation from the industry perspective rather than a product perspective.
If that makes sense.
So we have, if we look at the people who are posting stuff from within the
teams, what
there isn't someone posting stuff about marketing problems and challenges.
Now we have some people in our organisation and our solution engineering team
who come
from marketing agencies who could speak to challenges that marketing agencies
and marketing
teams face.
And I think that the, how do we incentivise the conversation is about make it,
make the
conversation interesting so they want to enter into dialogue.
And to do that, I need more people who have something meaningful to say about
the domain.
It'd be like putting someone on stage here who doesn't work in customer success
to try
and flag it and talk about customer success.
You need someone who knows what they're talking about at this conference.
You need people who do it and live it and breathe it.
Who you want to listen to.
And that in the same way for us in marketing, I need a marketing expert
starting the conversation.
Then people have a conversation with them.
And I think that's how we incentivise.
We make it the conversation worth their while because they are having the
conversation on
LinkedIn.
They are, I can see trade agencies who, the heads of agencies who are doing
little, what
do you think about this topic, sign little debate.
I want them to have a debate here so we can then facilitate that.
But coming back to my point, the CEO, maybe we're, we're flogging a dead horse.
We're going to keep going for at least another six months to a year, in my view
, before we
give up on this.
Good to know that I still have a job.
You have lots of other things to do, Senny.
Senny does a lot, by the way.
This is not just our only job.
Just say.
No, no, no.
Anyways, I think what I would add to that is that because we know that there
are customers
that are already active on other platforms, but maybe they haven't found our
community
yet.
Can we bring them to our community?
Or when they are in those other communities, could we somehow get our, you know
, I don't
know, product into that.
In some cases, we don't want to do that, but I think finding those people would
be the
key thing.
Cool.
So probably the last question for the day.
Do you dedicate internal resources to moderate the community?
How do you justify the resources and measure the added value?
Yes.
I saw today we have one person that works in the community full time who is
supported
by maybe 10 people, depending on the topic, or she will find the right person
to help
out if there's a question that we should answer.
I think when it comes to justifying the resource, this is a long term play.
We can't really expect that, hey, we launched the community and now our churn
and retention
is so much better.
It will take time and it's something that you need to experiment with.
But so far, I think we've been okay in terms of getting those resources and
justifying
anything you would like.
The help that our CIO is someone who lived and breathed communities for many
years.
So he got the value in terms of case deflection in terms of better enabled
customers, better
connected, better engaged.
But that has quite a hard benefit to measure.
You can't turn that into head count.
You can't turn directly into revenue.
It's quite disconnected.
But there is significant benefit.
We know that more enabled customers stick around longer.
Customers that solve their own problems.
We have too many support tickets.
One of our issues in our business is our support team is too big.
We have too many support tickets.
We need this part of this is about case deflection.
If we get this right, we'll get less tickets.
I'll need less people in support.
Now, will I prove that out in a year?
It will take a while, but this is an investment play.
And that's how it was positioned and sold.
If we're doing this, we're doing it properly and seriously.
And we'll try it not for six months, but longer.
And then we'll see how it pans out.
And you've always got a job, Senny.
On just to clarify this, she's amazing.
There's plenty of work to be done.
Chris, Senny, thank you so much.
Please give up for Chris and Senny from SuperNet, Chris.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much.
I hope you've had a fantastic first day at Pulse.
I'm hoping to see you all at the Pulse Party.
Chris will be there showing off his dance moves
that he mentioned.
There'll be shuttle buses as well from the front of the building
from 545 to 615.
So make sure you grab one of those.
But yeah, looking forward to seeing you all this evening
and if not tomorrow.
