Reddit and Community: Why Sonos Stopped Choosing

[Speaker 1]
Thank you, thank you so much, Julian. How's it going, everyone? Everyone doing all right?

Good, good, good, good. Like Julian said, this is my first time speaking outside of the states. But I did come here from Puerto Rico, so a bit of a long flight.

Hey, hey. Yeah, so today's Reddit and community, why Sonos stopped choosing. Most people put a professional picture up there.

I decided to put a picture of me actually exploring. This is me scuba diving when I'm not doing community management. I'm doing technical scuba diving.

Been in caves in Mexico, deep down, over 100 feet, all kinds of cool stuff like that. So a little side note. But yeah, let's hop right in and cover some kind of ground information.

So Sonos and what I do there. Sonos is a premium audio system company for your house and on the go, about 17 million households worldwide. Really, really awesome company.

I came that way by way of the Apple Store. And they needed someone to do community, and boom, there I was. So yeah, so now what I do is I'm the head of global communities.

That is looking at Reddit and community as one holistic program. Our Sonos has 275,000 subscribers, about 125,000 weekly visitors. Community forums, getting inside customer communities, 480,000 members.

So really, really, really interesting kind of look at where people live, what types of profiles we have in that space. I started my personal community journey at Sonos working as a community engagement specialist was my title back in 2017. Fast forward to 2022, 2023, I was invited into our Sonos by the admins of the our Sonos community.

That is a community-owned run subreddit that had actually been around for 12 years before we came on the scene. So they had a very established spot, and they invited us into that space. In fact, the way they did it was actually reaching out to our CEO via our CEO email, and they asked for a engineer.

And the CEO was like, nah, you're not getting that. But we can find someone who will. So with that said, I'm still the one that answers at 2100.

We were just talking about someone who kind of answers the call in the middle of the night on weekends, someone who is always kind of on. That's definitely me, a little bit of an ownership on that. So one thing to take a look at is the false binary, something I've kind of seen over a lot of my conversations and conferences that I've done these talks at is there seems to be some type of Reddit or community, Reddit versus, I think my first draft of this speech was Reddit versus community, like if you had to, they were battling for it.

And honestly, it's completely false, and we'll get into it a little bit why. But further on to that nine o'clock or 2100 problem, it's 2100 on a Sunday. Customer speaker or your product, whatever it might be, fails, or in my case, the speaker drops off the network.

Where do they go? Thinking about where your customers go in the moment of crisis, what do they do? Where do they go?

Do they go to your community? Poll time. So further on to that section there, where do you think your customers talk about you the most?

So kind of one leading into the next. Are they going to Reddit? Are they going to other third-party platforms in their own communities?

Both? Google? Think about that.

About 50-50, all right. Cool, both? Reddit, a little back and forth here, all right, nice.

Yeah, yeah. It's so interesting thinking about how folks engage with our brands in that moment of crisis when things like that happen, right? Or even when it's not necessarily a crisis, right?

It could be a positive thing, right? We've been very lucky in the Sonos community and Sonos Subreddit, when things go really well, people take photos. For a while, there was kind of like this challenge where people would hide their speakers in their living room and ask people to find where they hid the speakers.

So yeah. Cool. This is really helpful, this is really good, because one thing I did see, I forget exactly who I was speaking to, but it was someone from, I think it was from Google, and they were saying, or no, it was from Reddit.

And they were saying that a lot of the search queries on Google are whatever it is that they're looking for plus Reddit, right? And so more often than not, absolutely end up being on Reddit, right? Great.

Cool. We can go ahead and move on to the next slide here. Rented and owned land.

Two very different things, right? So rented land, owned land. We have Reddit and we have community.

Now this is a little bit different. I know that some companies have looked at opening their own subreddits and kind of owning that space in Reddit. I think that's kind of an advanced thing.

Full transparency, we've parked the Sonos support subreddit, but we've made it private. We don't really quite know what we're gonna do in that space. We don't know if that's really, if we wanna use Reddit as a support channel like that.

We're very lucky to have this kind of garden that's been community made and curated. But looking further at rented land and owned land, right? Reddit, in our case, when we're a guest into that community, right?

Mods set the rules. Records belong to the platform. In this case, when you're not owning the sub, all of the metrics and insights are owned by the admins and the people who run it, right?

So that's the folks, the community. They own those metrics. Helps to build a relationship with them, for sure.

But enormous reach, fast moving. One thing that I've really kind of looked at and shopped internally when building this global program of Reddit plus community is that Reddit is the widest part of the funnel, right? That's where we get the biggest reach.

That's where people find us while they're looking at cat videos or looking for a recipe or whatever, right? That is our biggest reach. And then we wanna bring them in and wanna bring them closer to the brand.

That's where we bring them into the forums, right? Sentiment forms first and fast, certainly. And where search and AI tends to grab.

We've definitely seen a lot of pulling in from AI, LLMs, going straight to Reddit and pulling from trusted, vetted sources from there. So being engaged, providing value in there certainly helps. Looking at the owned side of things, right?

You own the data. You own the membership, right? Narrow reach, but opportunity for deeper engagement.

Durable, searchable, plugged into the CX stack. There's a lot of things that really help with having that community plugged in through the whole process there. So in short, Reddit is where trust gets won or lost.

We'll talk about that. And forums are where it compounds, right? Is where we kind of really move forward into kind of plus or minus in terms of that trust.

Neither is better. I do wanna be clear about that. They do different retention work.

Brands fail when they judge one channel by the other channel's job or metrics, right? Reddit can't necessarily do what community does and community can't do what Reddit does. They're different.

So getting invited, right? This is a very interesting kind of timeline, just as meandering as it looks. So starting in 2018, started customer care technical care, moved to community specialists, that's me.

2022, Sonos admins and moderators invite Sonos to participate. In 23, the early Reddit program was built. I joined Sonos specifically as a social and community manager on Reddit only.

Didn't work on community, that was another program run by another person. We had our app debacle in 2024. Maybe some of you, if you're Sonos customers, remember the app update in 2024?

I remember it. So interesting enough about that, about a month or two before that went live, I had just started an AMA program on Reddit. Yeah, yeah, I don't know, it was office hours and instead of you having to find me in the comments, here's a place where you can find me final Friday of every month.

Hit me with whatever questions, memes, whatever you got. I'm here to just be available to you. Two months later, app went out and my manager was like, are you sure you wanna keep doing that?

And I'm like, I can't, I can't not do it now, right? Like, I've already started this. Not doing it says something way more than whatever could ever come my way, right?

And at the end of the day, right, it's my duty as a brand ambassador to be that bridge, bring that information back to the proper teams. So it'll be tough, sure, but we gotta do it. And then fast forward, a whole bunch of shifts and movements, new CEO, 2026, just this year, we announced our global communities program.

And so that was the joining of Reddit and community, putting them together into one program and then we moved that program from CX customer experience into marketing, which is a very interesting play. I will say, and this is kind of like internal baseball if you wanna call it that, the moment moving into marketing, money was just so much more available for like products to super users and events and all these other things. It was a different way of looking at community from the company's perspective.

So it's been really cool, been really cool, cool change. So why Keith from Sonos works where Sonos Official didn't work? Fun fact, when we started on Reddit, Reddit was like, don't use Keith from Sonos.

I actually parked Keith from Sonos the moment I signed my offer letter to come back to Sonos. I was like, oh yeah, Keith from Sonos, this is gonna be it. I didn't tell anybody about it until they were like, what do you think our handle should be?

And I was like, Keith from Sonos, I think sounds really good. And like I said, Reddit was like, you need to be a brand. You don't, Keith from Sonos, what happens when you leave?

Then we'll handle it. But Keith from Sonos, the whole point of Keith from Sonos is you get Keith, and I just so happen to be at Sonos. It's not about being a brand.

It's about being a person first, a part of the community. An actual face, not a brand. Have a couple examples of some of the things where I pop in and reply.

Some of them can be completely out of left field. People are talking about like, what's your favorite movies to test your sound system? I tell them I like watching pretty much any A24 film.

Anything everywhere all at once? Yes. One of the great things, and a lot of folks kind of ask about this, like if you don't have the right answer.

I don't have the right answer. I don't know. But let me find out though, right?

So the idea of being a person first, not this perfect brand impersonal shell. Reddit is not the place for that. So took some faith from the team and from the higher ups, but I mean, when you're getting 82 upvotes or 268 upvotes on just being a person and just talking to people, it's hard to say no to that.

But at the end of the day, authenticity, right, is key. And I know that authenticity's kind of like been a buzzword for the past like year and change, right? But it really is.

It's taking heat on a bad day when you ship a bad app update and people get it. They're like, hey, I know you didn't ship the update and I'm sorry that you have to deal with this. And I'm like, you're right, that's true.

But it is what it is, right? The brand account, when you post from Sonos Official or something like that, you don't get that chance to make that like personal connection. Rented land, yes.

So bigger than anything we could host on our own channels and this really kind of set the story for press, retail and the people inside Sonos. In this case here, you're a guest, right? This is a very interesting point here, post.

My favorite thing that we used to do at Sonos was make these making of a product, showing you the team behind it, all the work that we go into, durability and other things like that. And they were my favorite videos to watch about our products. And I was like, oh, we have a new product coming out?

I'm gonna post that on Reddit. I'm gonna share it with them, it's gonna go awesome. I posted it up and that's 20 upvotes after a whole year of it being up.

So it had plenty of opportunity to get more than 20 upvotes, it did not. And so these are the kinds of moments where just showing up every, it's about consistency, right? Showing up every week, not just on the launch weeks when you have something to say, it's showing up all the time.

And you know what? Sometimes you're gonna strike out. Sometimes you're gonna completely miss.

That's okay, that's what makes part of just being there and being consistent. Trial by fire, this is a look at the app debacle. After seeing posts and posts and posts of, Soto sucks and get rid of the app, roll it back, I'm gonna sell my speakers.

Ultimately, I just was like, hey, we're gonna make a megathread and you're, I'm just gonna get all that and let's put the end of this megathread here. It was pinned to the top of the subreddit for months and months and yeah, 1.3 thousand comments. That's a lot of feedback.

And I was the only reading it at this point, right? The whole company was reading along with us, right? The CEO, product team, software team, hardware teams, UX, all of this.

Ultimately, this isn't the first CEO post. This is probably our most recent one, yeah, about four months ago. It's been a process, right?

When I first joined or when I rejoined Sonos, the crown jewel, the big thing that we were aiming towards was getting the CEO on Reddit, which is generally, if any of you are familiar with Reddit, and CEOs is kind of a dumpster fire. Those don't really land that well. And so that was my challenge, was to get the CEO on Reddit and not have it be a dumpster fire.

Then we did the app thing. So I was like, oh, this is not looking so hot. But with going through the Keith from Sonos angle and just being a person and just saying like, hey, be you first, take the blame.

I mean, that's what you do. You're the CEO, do the thing. But show up and not just show up once and disappear.

You need to keep coming back, keep coming back. And so with our new CEO, Tom Conrad, that's what he's done. And what's really great about that too is he actually comes to me now and he's like, hey, I wanna post this, is this okay?

I'm like, you're the CEO, you do what you do, man. I'll let you know if you're gonna step on a mine for sure. But it's cool that there's this kind of respect for the expertise, for knowing the community like that.

And that goes all the way up to the top, right? But yeah, the CEO and how we go in this space, how he engages in that space has been very, very hands-off, right? The point of this is to feel as authentic as possible.

It should come from him, he should write it. I will give you outlines, things to say, things maybe not to say, but you need to write this. And he takes the time to do it, which is really awesome.

At the end of the day, the crisis did teach us what we can and can't control, right? We couldn't control the volume of comments, certainly not. The tone or the upvotes or how the front page looked.

We could control, however, whether we showed up, how we showed up, how honest we were, and whether or not we came back the next day. Again, consistency, authenticity. Reddit sent the temperature.

You know, again, with that widest kind of funnel view, and the forums held that torch there, certainly. The on-side and the hand-off. This is where we start to look a little bit more, I know we're getting really close to the time right now, than the hand-off.

This is where we actually kind of look at the interplay between the two programs, right? So, on-forums, this is where the trust compounds, is what I was saying earlier, right? Search and deflection, long-tail answers that keep working long after the published date.

It's really kind of looking at the community forums as a repository for deeper dives, richer content. When we look at Reddit, Reddit is very much like a social media, and if you type anything more than a couple paragraphs, people's eyes glaze over, they don't read it, and they start commenting. So the idea is, you know, French fries on Reddit, and give the full burger, full meat, deeper dive in the community, where people will sit down with a cup of coffee, sit, drink, spend some time with us, right?

Doing really great product feedback, beta cohorts, so with that extended time, session times in community, we can get to know our people a bit better, and assign them into beta cohorts with the product team directly. Executive engagement, right? Using the community forums as a, kind of like a, again, like a repository of these executive communications, so that people can kind of look back and see what we've said, when we've said it.

And recognition, super user program, I'm so stoked on this, we were just not too long ago, in September, able to get our super users together in person, we flew them out to a New York event that we were doing for Sonos, for product unveiling, and these are some people that I remember talking to when I was, you know, a community specialist in 2017, and so to be able to like, get them together, see them in person, and be like, hey, you're a real person, super, super, super cool. Hurdle, everything's got its hurdles, and you know, we had a spam attack not too long ago, spam attacks, as all of you, I'm sure, know, happen, and there's only so much you can really do about it, right? It's not a thing of preventing it, it's about reacting as quickly as you can, as possible, right, in our case, we had folks who made accounts with like, the username, administrator, whatever name, and like, they would send DMs, so it wasn't a spam attack, like, by making posts, they sent DMs to people, saying, you want an iPad, click on this link, and so, it kind of flew under the radar there for a little bit, but what's great is, within hours, our moderation team caught it, we had our user list, our username block list completely re-engineered with any possible translation of the word administrator, admin, or anything else like that, and then, we let members know what happened, right, take accountability for it, hey, this is what happened, should be taken care of, if you see anything weird, please report it, right? The reason I bring that up, right, this is something that you can control and hit on own land. If this was on Reddit, that's over there, there's only so much you can do, you can try and combat it by posting and saying, hey, watch out for this, but it's not really your community to kind of do that, like, maybe you can help out by talking to the owner of the subreddit, but your hands are a bit more tied, right, than where it would be if it was on your own space, right?

Just recently, we did launch a bunch of new things in our community, big thanks to Julian for help on that. Threaded replies, a refreshed front page, request line, which is the ideation board, community rituals, office hours, the AMA program that I started on Reddit, that actually was reduced to quarterly, and now we're bringing the monthly AMAs to the community, so we have a monthly continual AMA, if you wanna be engaged and talk to the company, there's no better place than the owned community forums, right? State of the business posts, so kind of like the State of the Union kind of address, but from the business, from the CEO.

Location-based groups, so we're using groups as a means to have neighborhood chats, so with Sonos, it's like, hey, I got a really great deal here, that's pertinent to those who live in the UK, or Germany, or Australia, or the different markets that we have a lot of folks in, so giving them a space to have those types of conversations, and then global translations, right? Global translations allow us to have one global community, rather than having different instances for different languages, right? So the idea is, bring everyone together, give them their neighborhood spaces through that group, but try and keep everyone into one space, right?

One problem, one loop, and so again, this is looking at the kind of whole pie, where Reddit surfaced the issues in the forums, we document the fix, kind of the full look at everything, search in AI, surface the forums thread, and then Reddit, what we do is we'll, anytime that we have a resolution, and that we post that on forums, that goes back to Reddit, so we'll post that, and we'll say, hey, this is a deep dive into X, or what happened here, wanna read more? And there's a link to the community.

So it all kind of, it's a two-way bridge of back and forth, right? So where AI fits in all this? It's a good one.

AI moderation in Gainsight has been absolutely stellar for us. Profile moderation, especially after that spam attack that we had. Julie and I worked on the code of conduct, reworking that code of conduct, so that the AI moderator could actually understand, rather than our own code of conduct, but kind of teach it how to kind of read through everything, and what normal looks like.

Signal through MCP. Rad is an in-house built tool to look at Reddit. Very similar to MCP, it uses Claude and the Reddit API to look at the subreddit, and mentions of product names, do some really top-of-the-level sentiment analysis.

Yeah, really, really cool stuff. But the idea is having AI kind of look at the broad side of everything, and kind of give us some analysis, some gut takes of things, right? Reach, as we said earlier, with AI pulling everything, and serving it to people who use those LLMs. And then scale, with global translations, right?

That's really the big thing with this, right? Is being able to have everybody in one specific community, being able to engage regardless of the language. Real quickly, the framework.

There are different programs that we have across global communities. We have our product and app launches, AMAs, beta recruitment, executive engagement, and our super user top contributor programs. So, on the Reddit side, it's informational, right?

For products and app launches. Forums, we have our deep dives. Get really into it.

Quotes from the team, right? AMAs on Reddit, and then we have our deep dives. Quarterly, community, monthly, right?

Beta recruitment. Hey, we're looking at doing this new beta program. If you are an installer, AB installer, come check this out over in the community.

So, awareness on Reddit, on community, we actually have discussions happening there. Little peek into the future. We're actually gonna be using one of our instances for a beta community, so we'll have a distinct program for beta to happen, which I'm really stoked about.

Executive engagement, right? This is an interesting one, because it kind of happens as needed on Reddit, right? Especially with the CEO and the C-suite, they're looking at Reddit as kind of like a PR marketing type play.

Outside of the echo blasts from forums that we have, like the regular kind of biannual things we have in the community, if there's something that Tom wants to say on Reddit specifically, I'm not gonna tell him no. Like, yeah, go for it, absolutely, right? So, a little bit of a as needed, whatever kind of he thinks is good, but at bare minimum, whatever we're posting on community, you gotta be doing that on Reddit too, right?

Just so we can kind of point back and forth between the two. And top contributor program. This is an interesting one on Reddit, because the most thing that we can do is give folks flair on their accounts.

But on forums, we can actually get deeper into that. We can do super user programs, product seeding, trips to New York, evidently, now. All kinds of cool stuff.

Measure each channel on its own job, right? So, Reddit sentiment trends, week over week. Signal surface to the product teams.

This is something that I've been really telling folks about Reddit specifically as a two-way bridge. Yes, we can communicate to the people, but we need to bring that back to their respective teams, whether that's software, they need to hear this. The hardware team needs to hear this.

User, the UX team, they need to hear this specifically. Search and AI visibility, self-check. This does require a little bit of your own work, but ask a question that your customers would ask on Cloud or chat GPT, and see what the responses are.

And see how often you get noted. Are the answers that are being generated the answers you're giving? It's just a temperature check.

It's not something that you can, you're not always gonna be able to pin down the magic sauce so that you're always prod up top. AIO, GEO, it's something I look at. It's not something I'm gonna build a whole program over.

Things change so quickly, it's a moving target. So just focus on making good content. That's the easiest thing I can say with that.

Forums, search traffic, accepted solutions, best answers. Response coverage, time to first reply. These are things that we can immediately have an impact on.

Ideas submitted in action, that's the whole ideation side. Not only are we listening, but then in those monthly office hours, I can then go back to that and say, hey, these were the top ideas, and this is where those stand specifically. It's a bit of accountability in that, right?

And then super user activity. Engaging and empowering our super users to be able to engage and answer questions. We don't wanna run the forums.

We want it to continue to be community run, but we wanna be able to provide the value of whatever the programs offer, or the AMA, or teams coming in, or whatever it might be. But we really want to spotlight as much user-generated content in there to engage more folks. One report covers both with direct links attached, so people don't have to go looking for, where did this come from?

Why did this say this? It came from here directly. Key takeaways.

Yeah, Reddit builds trust. Communities wear compounds, as I said earlier. Credibility on rented land comes from an authentic person, or persons, who follow the community norms.

It shows up even in the bad weeks. Design the handoff, structure feedback, or an executive presence on own land, and then link between. That's putting the two programs together, right?

Leaning into what each of them do in a natural way, and then pointing them together to kind of tell the whole story. Last one. Measure each channel on its own job, and then report them together.

Show it as a holistic kind of program altogether. Yeah, I would say a lot for these four different things, it's a lot to take in at one point, especially when you're just looking at getting into Reddit. So, just pick one of them.

Pick one, and see what that might look like in your specific program, in your specific company. What works for me might not work for you, right? And that's okay.

But overall, the lessons should be applicable in terms of being human, engaging, showing up, consistency, authenticity. Thank you. Question time.

That's QR code to my LinkedIn, so feel free to scan that, and I'm happy to connect and chat more.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you so much.

[Speaker 1]
It was really amazing. It was a lot, sorry.

[Speaker 2]
I didn't know, but it was super insightful also for me. And I definitely recognize also what you say about authenticity and being your true self. I think that goes long ways.

I had it in my community back in the days also that I think people just speak, or also look at the brand differently if they actually speak to a person, not to a anonymous company account. So, we have some questions. Let's go through them one by one.

How do you prevent marketing branding from telling you what not to say?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, man.

[Speaker 2]
They're not all up in your business all the time.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, no. It's interesting, right? So, because of the app debacle, I keep looking up and it's right here.

Because of the app debacle, our marketing team, we went through a couple different CMOs and a whole different marketing team. So, our marketing team was kind of like stun-locked about what to say. We stopped posting on social for a while.

For a while, I was the only thing that was happening in social media. So, that was my time to shine, honestly. And so, I built kind of my credibility in that.

So now, they kind of come to me. Of like, is this okay? Should we be saying this?

Should we not be saying this? What's the temperature like on Reddit? They look, marketing in general, they look at Reddit.

And so, I'm trying to massage community into this. Be like, hey, this is a holistic thing. This is why I said global communities and Reddit is a part of that.

So, that being said, I'm very lucky that they come to me to kind of like gut check things. And they also trust me to be able to kind of write copy. I do give, I send that copy to product marketing, to legal, to PR, to just make sure that the checks are there.

Team player, right? But really, throughout my whole career of being technical support specialist, answering phone support calls, being in community, being on Reddit in the hot seat, they're like, you're good. You got this, Keith.

So yeah, it's a tough one, but I just flex my Reddit muscles and they're like, okay, cool.

[Speaker 2]
Kind of jealous of that.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, sorry.

[Speaker 2]
How do you get people who are active on Reddit also to contribute on the forums?

[Speaker 1]
You know what? Surprisingly, there was a very interesting like Venn diagram moment when I started seeing the same usernames from the community forums on Reddit. And I was like, it's the same person.

No way, awesome. And so, feeding that on both sides has been kind of a very interesting kind of value proposition I guess is a way to put it. Because when I see folks who have that kind of space on people who are active on Reddit, being able to point them to where they get more detail and more value in the community, that's the way to kind of leave the breadcrumbs to kind of come back.

And then having folks who are on the community, like one person, one user, his name is Guitar Superstar. He posts a ton on the community and he posts, not as much, but on Reddit. And so when he posts something on Reddit, almost every time, it's like super, super valuable, super, super helpful.

And so when that happens, I make sure that I respond to that. I'll reply in thread and be like, hey, thank you for sharing that. Super, super helpful, right?

Or if he says something that's right, I'm like, hey, Guitar Superstar's got it right. And upvote his. And then typically because I'm showing up on a thread, people see that and they look at his thread and then they upvote there.

So on a personal level, user level, you can do that. But again, I think that when we're talking about getting people who are on Reddit to come to the community, it's the whole french fries, hamburger kind of idea. Give them a little taste of the value in Reddit.

And then if you wanna go deeper, you wanna get the full story, the exclusive look at the new product, you gotta do that in the community.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, I really like that approach. And I see that also with social media channels like LinkedIn or so, I know that also there, sometimes you would have the headline there and then the deeper discussion, like an ongoing discussion with also the actual company then in the forums. Next one, you said you create your own archive of Reddit threads.

Can you expand on how and why? Do you get inspiration for community content from there?

[Speaker 1]
Absolutely, right? But at the same time, yes and no, because the two platforms are two very different, right? With, you know, people go to Reddit to do other stuff and they just so happen to also be looking at Sonos stuff as opposed to people who log into the community to like get into Sonos, right?

So, but yes, we do have a, I believe the terms of service for the Reddit API is I think we can only have 60 days worth of data and we have to keep it updated. So if someone deletes a comment, we have to delete it in our archive. So it's very manual.

But we have a really cool tool that does it automatically. It like compares what we have and also we have an AI tools person at Sonos that built it out. He's the best.

But yeah, so ultimately, it uses the API to read the subreddit and it'll, you know, categorize each thread and all the comments in it. Like I said, give us basic sentiments, sentiment score, how often certain products are mentioned. That gives us a good kind of pulse on like what are they talking about?

What are some of the things that they are, is it how to set up home theater? Cool. Maybe that might be something worth exploring in terms of writing up an article on home theater tips and tricks or hopefully we have that content that already exists in the community because we have had our community for 20 plus years and then surface that community or surface that content and then spotlight that on the front page, right?

There's a lot of ways we can kind of get into it and we're actually doing other cool stuff, getting the community into our app. So being able to surface user generated content so it appears in your Sonos like controller on the app if you're doing something, we're getting there.

[Speaker 2]
But I think that's like super cool. That's like Champions League or Superbowl. That's like Superbowl for like being like in the product, being in the app.

If you get there, that's where the users are. That's where the questions are coming up. Yeah.

Next question. I think that's a really important one also talking about business impact, right? We saw activity metrics for like community and for Reddit.

But like if we now speak on a business impact level, is there like a North Star metric that you're chasing? Is there like a KPI that like would show are you successful in what you're doing on Reddit in the community?

[Speaker 1]
It's tough, right? And there isn't one like silver bullet KPI for Reddit and like, yeah, we're doing the thing. The biggest thing when I do like reports up to like my, my chain now and in marketing is, they tend to look at like impressions and views.

You can get that on like on your post that you post on Reddit, right? So there's like a view analytics link at the bottom of every post that you post. So you can see the last 48 hours of a post and what that impression looks like, how many views you got on it.

That's helpful. I tend to do a quarterly look back of, this is an interesting one, subreddit saturation. And that is how many posts and how many comments exist and how much of that is Sonos, like us, you know, engaging in that space.

So it's not just me on Reddit. I now have a team of four or five people. Now, including myself that engage on Reddit.

So with that, we're trying to hit somewhere around two to 5%. Again, it's a very weird thing because we don't own the space. And for us, we don't wanna, we don't want to own the space.

We don't wanna own Reddit. We just wanna be present and being able to provide, you know, value in whatever engagements we do. So we'll look at specific post metrics, how many upvotes, how many comments, kind of a look like that.

And then we'll do kind of like a broader view, like I said, saturation. And in that case, like I said, we're looking at like two to 5% because we don't wanna own like every single convo.

[Speaker 2]
I think we have time for one or two more questions. During the apocalypse, how did you prevent Reddit and the community from becoming toxic? Do you generally just react or you need to run everything by PR marketing?

I think it's also like volume versus sentiment.

[Speaker 1]
Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah. So you can't like, that's like fighting the ocean.

You can't prevent Reddit from being toxic. So it's about taking that and making it valuable to the team, right? Just like anytime there's like a spam attack or just negative, when it's on your community, you can own it, right?

You have your code of conduct. You can, you know, slap a few wrists and be like, hey, don't be like that. But on Reddit, again, when you don't own the conversation, you don't own the space, it's a bit more filtering.

It's like, okay, I understand why these people are upset, but how can I like harness that and turn that into something constructive for the hardware team or in this case, the software team, right? A lot of it came to accountability and telling folks that look, I'm just, at the time I was telling them, I'm just a social media guy, right? Like, so don't come after me, but I am your champion though, right?

And I'm a user too, just like you. I have tons of Sonos speakers in my house, right? So like, I feel it, trust me.

Let me make sure that this goes to the team. For a while, we had a Trello board, which had like a kind of like a card list of what we heard on Reddit, what was getting worked on, what's coming soon, what was recently shipped. I shipped that like on an idea that I just ran by the CEO like in a side conversation and he was like, oh, that sounds great, post it, like make that a thing.

And I was like, all right, cool, did it. And then like the product team like slammed my inbox on Slack and they were like, what are you doing? You can't be sharing that information.

So, but it was crazy because once we posted that Trello board, we had like the verge write an article saying like, this is like the most transparent Sonos has ever been. And I'm like, well, I mean, maybe we should do that. So, yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Maybe you did that. Lovely. Bjorn, last question for today.

How do other social channels fit into the Sonos global community strategy or the program?

[Speaker 1]
Again, a little more inside baseball, like we literally just hired our social, a global social media manager to handle kind of like our social media strategy. So, we're still actually working that out, honestly. I will say though, I was on the interview board for that position and the ideas were to kind of capitalize on the same authentic human perspective.

There's only so much you can do with that on things like Instagram or X or whatever social channel of your desire. But I think, this is gonna sound very marketing. I think with our new marketing campaign and just the direction we're going for social really is hitting that same kind of like authentic hand-crafted kind of look.

So, it's a different function. It's a different end game than what we're doing in communities, right? And that's, again, why I'm looking at it as global communities.

Right now, it's Reddit, own forums. Later down the line, we're looking at Discord. We're looking at other ways that we can really connect and keep that authentic person-to-person engagement and experience.

Social is just kind of a different beast, honestly. But there's a way that we can kind of bring that same value across. So, at the same time also, now that I think about it, we have talked about leveraging Sonos or leveraging social as a way to feed back into more of our deep dives and more like richer content, right?

So, like maybe a sizzle reel about something, a new product. You wanna learn more, check out the Sonos community here with a link to the deeper topic or something like that. But I don't have any hard examples of that yet.

[Speaker 2]
Just theory. That's for next year. Yeah, yeah.

One big round of applause for Keith. Thank you so much.

[Speaker 1]
Thank you, everyone.