Hello and welcome to Bad Community Advice. I'm your host. My name is Seth Resler, and this show is all about terrible tips and toxic takeaways. I invite community professionals on to tell us about the worst advice that they have ever gotten, why it didn't work, and what you should do instead. Uh, my guest today is somebody who is very well known in the community industry. She is the senior director of CX strategy at Higher Logic, one of the popular community platforms where she advises customers on how to integrate community into their business strategy and to align it to their overall goals. She's been in the community space for 15 years building for everything from early stage startups to large enterprises like Zendesk and everything in between. Please welcome Nicole Saunders. Hi, Nicole. How are you?
What a nice introduction. I'm good.
Thank you so much for being here. Uh, you know, we are going to talk about something that, uh, I, I'm so glad that you brought this up as as bad advice because this is something that I hear all the time coming from the media and content creation industry. Uh, but
that's not actually the world that you play in, and yet you are offering this advice.
I'm, I'm gonna tease it. We're not gonna talk about it yet 'cause I want to hear a little bit more about your background first, but content is king, is what we're gonna talk about, uh, and why that may not be the,
the, the proper advice for this day and age. Uh, before we get to that,
let's talk a little bit about higher logic, because one of the questions I get all the time, uh, in this spaces, what, what community platform should we be using? What, what, uh, and where does Higher Logic fit
in the overall ecosystem? Who are your typical customers? What types of organizations are you working with? Who's building
community on your platform?
Well, I'm so glad you asked. 'cause I know a lot of people get confused about Higher Logic. We've made some changes over the years and, um, we actually have two community platforms. We have Higher Logic Thrive and Higher Logic Vanilla. Uh, they each have a little bit different capabilities depending on what the focus of your community is. Um, so we sort of have two audiences as well. And the products aren't the perfect split between each audience, but, um, we have membership associations and nonprofits are a big chunk of our customer base. And then we also have a lot of customers in the B2B space. So primarily technology companies, but some others as well. We've got, um, some different kinds of publications, a couple of B2C communities,
and we are just really focused on being a community platform that fits into your broader tech stack. So we, we pride ourselves on being very extensible, very API forward, um, and offering,
uh, a lot of data and metrics, which is one of the things that I've always found super useful about the platform. You can actually really tell what's going on,
and I always like to preface this when we have folks like you on who are dealing with larger
enterprise organizations, because when I created this show, frankly, the customers that you're working with on a day-to-day basis are not
necessarily the type of people that I had envisioned. I mean, this is really, because I come from media, because I come from content creation. I'm thinking about podcasters, YouTubers, email newsletter writers or legacy media organizations, radio stations, television stations, newspapers, things like that. Um,
you are dealing primarily with a different type of client, like you said, a lot of software companies, uh, people where there is a job title called Community manager and that's somebody who goes in and is running
the online platform. Correct.
That's definitely true for the B2B audience. Our association audience is probably more similar to the creators that you work with in terms of community is part of a broader marketing ecosystem that they're managing. And community is the product in many cases. Um, and so it's, it's cool 'cause we really get a pretty broad view on all of the different kinds of communities that are out there and the kinds of needs. And that's, that's part of why we have the, the broader product suite with a couple of different offerings that we can tailor to an individual use case.
Got it. So you've got some customers where it's community led growth. It is, the community is supporting the sale of some other product or service that your customers offer. Yep. But then you've also got these professional associations where, like you said, community is the product, this is community revenue, and what they are selling is, Hey, you're part of this group and you get access and, and it's the membership, right?
Yep, that's correct.
Do you find a lot of differences
practically speaking, you know, in the approach to community between the two or bar and large, the same principles apply to both groups?
I think the same principles apply at the heart of it in terms of what people want out of community, how to engage people, how to build that sense of connection. Where it starts to get really different is first in what success looks like for each of those communities. You know, with our business audience we're talking about KPIs related to success, support, revenue, that kind of thing. Whereas with membership associations, it's a lot more focused on like, what is the engagement? How is this driving other aspects of, uh, the offerings of our association, that kind of thing. Um, and then as you mentioned also with the way that things are staffed, often, uh, our enterprise customers will have an individual or a whole team of people whose entire job is to run the community, whereas at associations, it's often part of someone's job. And so when we look at the different capabilities and feature sets of our platforms, we're looking at what kind of management capabilities do you have in place? Is your primary objective driving towards business goals or more driving around, uh, engagement, which is not to say that businesses don't also wanna drive engagement, but, um, it's a very different thing when you're not as concerned about measuring things like support deflection or revenue impact. And you're much more focused on are people coming to our events? Are they consuming our content? Are they finding the help that they need? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So different set of metrics that makes sense. And like you said, ticket deflection, meaning if a customer support inquiry comes in, do we handle it? You know, that's something that your B2B customers are gonna be concerned about, which the association customers might be measuring something different.
Exactly. And of course, at a B2B organizations, 'cause like it costs money to staff that phone line, and if you can get users to find the answer online or from each other, it's gonna save you, uh, money in the long run. Whereas most membership associations are less concerned with that piece. They're also not fielding the same kinds of questions about, you know, how do I access this API or how do I reset, you know, these settings in my system. It tends to be, uh, different kind of conversations that are happening there. Yeah.
Let me ask about this and, and I don't know if you've experienced this, but, um,
you know, I come from a lot of live events and event production background, and I'm curious if those two types of customers that you have think about events differently? Because I tend to think of live events as just another
gathering another way for your community members to come together. Do you find that the associations, um, do more live events? And is live event strategy part of what your B2B customers are thinking about? Or, or, or does it not come up in the conversations that you have?
Yeah, I think that live events are a little bit more baked into associations. It's, it's part of what they've always done. It's part of what they've always offered. It's a, a really key part of their engagement.
I think it should be for businesses, but it, what happens a lot of the time is the live events are run by a field marketing team or a dedicated event team. And so it tends to be a little bit more outside of the community space. That being said, I am seeing more enterprise communities understanding that value of either live or virtual or hybrid type of events and how critical that is to connecting customers. There's also a piece of this that speaks to sort of the philosophy of community management shifting from I manage a forum to, I manage things that connect people to one another. And I think that that's the direction that the community industry as a whole is moving into.
Yeah, fascinating. Uh, before you were, uh,
with Higher Logic, you were at Zendesk for a long time. Yep. Um, tell us a little bit about what you did there, and I'm curious what it's like
when you move from the client side to moving to the, you know, vendor side. And now that you are, you know, not just dealing with one community that you're running, but, but you are now dealing with lots of people. What have you learned as you've now dealt with a broader cross section of communities?
Wow, that's like three questions in one. All right. I'll try to tackle all of them. Um, so first, you know, what I did at Zendesk when I started there is, uh, me and one support agent that were answering questions in the q and a section of a forum for one of five product communities. And they had actually separate communities for each product, which is not what we would call a best practice today. Um,
over the eight years that I was there, I just sort of kept expanding my scope, you know, first I said, Hey, why do we have all these separate product communities? Let's merge them all into one.
Hey, why are we only answering the support questions? We should be managing all of the discussions in the community. And then we got that going and then
users started saying, you know, these answers are great, but we, we'd really love to like see live presentation. And so we started hosting community events and webinars and doing that kind of thing. And then people were really active in the chat and they're like, Hey, you know, we,
part of the reason we come to the events is we like talking to each other in the chat. Could we have an event where we just talk to each other? And so we launched a user group program and got chapters going worldwide. And then I started working with our customer marketing team and they're like, Hey, how do we tap into the community to find really passionate customers we can use in marketing? And so we launched an advocacy program and so the scope just sort of kept building out and expanding.
And then the whole time I was doing that, I was also frequently getting tapped by customers saying, Hey, we're really interested in how you run the community at Zendesk. Can we pick your brain a little bit? And so I actually, even though it wasn't really part of my job, had already started doing some strategic advising for people taking what I was doing and learning in my role and sharing it with others. I'm a a big believer in paying it forward. So one thing I'll put out there is, you know, anytime people need help or they just wanna pick my brain, I always make myself available for whatever that is. Um,
and then of course, the whole time I was working there, I was thinking about like, oh, I wish our platform did this. I wish our platform did that. And so I got into a conversation with the Higher Logic folks one day and they said, well, we'd, we'd love to have you come share that insight with us. And so I moved over to the platform side and now get to do that same kind of strategic advising even more broadly, um, but also get to have some influence on our product roadmap and, and what the platform does. So it's really fun because my, my job is basically to be a liaison with the field. I go out to events and come talk to folks like yourself and, uh, share what I know and then also gather up the insights that I can learn from other people and take that back to the company to say, Hey, here's, here's the capabilities I think people are looking for. Here's the marketing messaging I think will resonate. You know, here's what else is going on in the, the industry that we should be aware of. Um, so it's been a really fun transition. It's not all that different other than it's a little funny to not have my own community that I'm running day to day as much. So I keep finding myself starting up, you know, chapters, I've an ambassador for some other platforms. Um, I've got a study group that I now is basically a user group that I, I lead, uh, on behalf of Hy Logic. And so I'm still finding my ways to be hands-on, uh, as an individual contributor while doing some of the more, uh, uh, strategic level of work. Um, I think the biggest difference is just, uh,
how people approach me. I definitely have noticed a little shift in terms of like, people are always a little suspicious of if I'm like there to sell or something like that. And I, I never am, I'm always there just to be helpful and to learn and to share what I know. That's, that's how I think that, um, we can all be best in our professional roles. Um, so that's been the biggest difference is just sort of coming in with that, uh, other side. On the flip side, I can take those insights and actually do something about a lot of it and help to solve problems for people a little bit more directly. Yeah.
Alright. Let's talk about your bad advice. And this relates to something that you just said, which is,
you said your members at Zendesk would come to you and say, Hey, can we have events where we just talk to each other? Uh, yeah. And I thought that was really interesting because your bad advice
is this
content is king.
And like I said, I come from the world of content creation and, and the media world, and this has been taken as gospel for decades now. Absolutely. Uh, and, and I'm with you. I, I think that maybe this was true at one point, but that has shifted. But tell me from your point of view, uh, why is that, why is that not the case? Why is content no longer king? And if not, what is? Well, I definitely recognize this is a little bit of a hot take. Um, and to be clear, I am not saying that content is not important. It still has a role to play,
but where it comes into play for community is for the longest time everybody was, oh, well, people show up because they have a question and they stay because they find really good content. And so the most important thing is that we fill our community with really great resources and really great content, and that's what will bring people back.
And I think that there's a couple of things at play right now. First, there is the AI of it all, which is to say there's a proliferation of content out there. Some of it is good, most of it is not,
but there's a lot more noise to signal in the content space. But second, I think that the real key is
content is great when you're trying to build an audience or when you're trying to share information, but when we actually talk about what builds a community and that difference between audience and community, which I know you've talked about in a couple of different episodes on this show
community is about the connections between people and how they connect with each other. And so, if I'm thinking about what draws me in as a community member, it may be the content initially, but what keeps me there is that I met somebody that I want to talk to more and I have those connections. And so to me, connections are king. Connections are the thing that actually turn your community that came for the content into, or sorry, the audience that came for the content into the community. And so really what community managers need to be thinking about when they're talking about building community is how am I connecting the right people to one another? And in fact, I'm glad that you mentioned, um, that user group program that we launched where everybody's like, we just wanna talk to each other. Because the key was the community was a sort of the, the big pool, right? Everybody could come in and jump in and be in the same water,
but then people were like, I need to find my group of people. Right? The lap swimmers wanna go over here and the the people wanna be water ballet over here. I'm known for really weird metaphors and taking them way too far, by the way. Um,
but the point was really that what we found is like people didn't wanna just come and talk to other Zendesk users. They wanted to talk to other Zendesk users in their role. If they were a knowledge manager or a support manager or a customer success person, they wanted to find those people.
And historically, a lot of these kinds of meetups are hosted by location and region because they were in person. And I think one of the beauties of having so much opportunity for virtual events now is people can actually connect with
in a slightly more meaningful way of, in terms of
the person that I might have the most common in common with is not living in my city, but I can still connect with them and meet with them. And so
all of that is coming back to the point of
connection is king. And if you're really trying to build community and engagement that is durable and that lasts,
you need to be focused on how am I connecting the right people to one another? And how am I facilitating opportunities for them to meet each other in meaningful ways?
So I love this. Um, there's a lot in there and I kind of want to go through it piece by piece. Let's do it. Um, first, this idea of content is king. I
I feel like some of where that may come from is that, uh, community managers or people who are starting a community
feel like they need to do something. And sometimes creating content is sort of the default, oh, I can do something here. It it gives me an action that I can take. Um, and, and you're saying that that may be the wrong action that really, it might be about right off the bat. You've got to
connect. I, I liken it to being a party host. When somebody first walks through the door, you gotta go, oh, I'm so glad you're here. Hey, you might, you're a, you're a an accountant, you might wanna meet Joe over there. He's also an accountant. Let me introduce you to him because you guys might have some stuff to talk about. 100%. I use that party metaphor all of the time, and I honestly think I got into community management 'cause I like hosting parties.
Um,
but it is, it's really about those connections and it's about saying, Hey, I know of someone else who was dealing with that same challenge last week, let me connect you. And I think that challenge piece is also a really critical element of it. Um, we can talk more about that in a little bit though.
Okay. So how do you do that right at the beginning? So if somebody's brand new to your community, it's the first time they're showing up to one of your events or to your community space, um,
how do you advise clients to instantly connect them to somebody else?
So much of this comes down to what you can know about people, right? Um,
one of the things that's been flying around the enterprise space for a while is this idea that
a lot of customers or users or members, depending on how you wanna talk about them, don't mind sharing data and information about themselves with a company so long as you use it to actually make things better for them. And so a piece of this is understanding who's coming into your community and whether it's having them fill out a little profile or in this day and age, having them talk to an AI bot that can say, Hey, what are you here for? What are you interested in? Cool. Let me help connect you with some of the right people. Um, finding out just a little bit about them so that you can start to funnel them into the right places. I think some of this also is where you start to get into thoughtful community design and how can you create spaces that are easy for people to find where they can self-select into the right areas, right? Do you have a groups page where there are groups and it's really clear what these groups are and who they're for and somebody can opt in, how can you encourage them to do that?
And then I think the third piece of that is coming back to events. And when you have an event that somebody can opt into and you can have a little bit more conversation and learn a little bit more about them, then it becomes easier and easier to help facilitate those connections. So I think that there's elements all the way from onboarding to AI to, um, just trying to get to know people, right? Uh, I have always in my career made a point of talking to two or three members of my community every week just having a coffee, just saying, Hey, I saw that you joined my community. I'd love to get to know you for 15 minutes. Can we just sit down and chat? And that will go so much further in making them feel welcome and in helping you understand who they are and who you might wanna connect them with than just about anything else you can do.
Yeah.
We should point out that this may depend on
the size of your community and, and the maturity of your community. Um, and I'm thinking about, for example, I, I've been a, a podcaster for a long time and I remember when podcast movement, one of the big conferences first came along
and, and there weren't that many podcasters, right? So you were just excited to meet somebody who knew what a podcast was, right? And, and now fast forward to today where everybody and their mother has a podcast, I think I've got like 12, right? Um,
and so now I'm not excited to just be in a room with other people that have a podcast. You start to see them splinter out, oh, we are the, uh, uh, personal finance podcasts, or we're the comedy podcasts, or we're the we women in podcasting, or we are the podcast, uh, uh, engineers or editors or so on and so forth. And then it becomes more important to
connect people to the relevant people once the community kind of grows to a certain size. Right? Exactly. Exactly. And it's interesting because there are also things that happen at different levels of scale. When your community's really small, it's much easier to get to know individual members. When your community's very large, that's where you have to start relying on, Hey, can you fill out a form? Can you talk to a chat bot? Can I connect this with my CRM so I can scrape data about you so I can then better facilitate these things? And so, you know, uh, I've always loved the phrase that community is built on things that don't scale. And, uh, that is true to a point. You have to do the things that don't scale to start and then eventually figure out how to shift them as you get bigger and bigger.
Yeah. Okay. So I wanna reconcile this with another piece of bad advice that I, that we have talked about on this podcast, which is that you don't wanna open up your community for the first time and have a million different, you know, rooms that are all dedicated to topics because you sort of want Correct. A critical mass.
Yep. But then there does come a point at which
it, it does get,
you know, large and you need to break it into these smaller groups, right? So it it, it evolves,
it does evolve. And I've always said that I think the best is the critical mass is so key, right? You have to have enough people in this space that it feels energetic and useful and you know, there's things going on there.
And if you wanna take it back to the house party metaphor,
as your guests arrive, you're not gonna say, oh, you like music, so you should go in the backyard where the music is and you like games, so you should go in the den and you like movies, so you should go in the living room. And now you've got all these like, people standing alone in their rooms. What you do is you get everybody in one room, and then once you get enough people, it starts getting a little crowded. You say, Hey, anybody that wants to go play music, we're gonna fire up, you know, the band out back or anyone that wants to go play games, we're gonna get some stuff going down in the den. And then you start to pull people off once you have that critical mass of, um,
people that are interested in, in breaking into a subgroup. So I think that's a really important one as well.
So let's come back to this idea of content. And um, yeah, again, we're not saying content doesn't matter, um, but you're saying it's, it may not be the be all and end all. What role do you see content playing in helping people make connections?
Yeah. Or, or in community? There's a couple things. First of all, it is true that most people are gonna come to your community because they're attracted to a piece of content you've produced. They wanna come talk about it or because they're looking to find somebody that can help them with something, whether that's learning a new skill or dealing with a challenge that they're having or whatever that is. And so the content is important because you gotta show up in search if people are gonna come to your community. You have to have content that's gonna bring them there in the first place for sure. And you do need helpful resources and things that people can engage with.
Um, but where I see the big difference being is if you have one hour to work on your community today and you could write a blog post
or you could connect with three people,
I would prioritize connecting with those three people and do the blog post down the road when you have more time. Because I think that that's what's gonna make the bigger difference about those three people coming back and engaging and getting more people involved.
But
the content that's really helpful. Things like summaries, things that pull great knowledge out of a conversation and make it easier to surface find. Particularly in this day of LLMs, where
half the time the point isn't even for the search engine to link to your thing, it's just for it to show the information that is useful.
Um, so I think those kinds of resources are really helpful. The other thing that's really helpful is, um,
thinking about what is a challenge for your users. And I kind of teased this earlier,
I think a lot of organizations and individuals and communities are scared to
deal with conflict or challenging conversations in their community space. 'cause they're worried that it's gonna look bad, that it's gonna be become a dumpster fire conversation, something like that. But an important thing to keep in mind is that overcoming challenges is the thing that
helps people build connections. It's the thing that bonds them. And at the end of the day, it's probably the reason they're coming to the community in the first place. And so I think content that also helps surface and
move people towards solving a challenge together can be really important. So you think about it, you have a great piece of content, right? That's super useful and people are gonna come and say, Hey, yeah, great liked it.
But if you have a piece of content that raises a little bit of a controversy or a discrepancy or introduces a challenge for people to work on together, that's where you're really gonna get conversation and people going back and forth and debating and that kind of thing. Now, this is also where moderation becomes very important and having guidelines, and there's a whole strategy around that. But at the end of the day, the content should be really useful to people. It should surface knowledge quickly and it should help promote more debate and more conversation. Yeah,
it's interesting to hear you, uh, talk about that because I do think a lot of brands have this fear that, oh, people might say something negative or might be critical of, of our product or our service or what we do.
Absolutely. They're going to, and that's a good thing, right? Well, look, the, the, the opposite of love is not criticism. The opposite of love is apathy is I don't care and I I'm not gonna part, you know, you look at something like Marvel movies and who are the biggest critics of Marvel movies, it's the diehard fans,
you know, the, the well, and that's the thing is it takes passion to be critical of something. I was just debating this with something the other day where, um, they were like, why is everybody online like so negative and so critical? And I'm like,
because they care, because they're passionate about it. And you have to have a certain level of expertise about something in order to be a critic of it in the first place, at least to put together any kinda well-formed argument. Um,
but yeah, those, those are the things, right? And you know, if I was running like a, a community for Marvel or something, I would be constantly sort of setting up conversations like, who's better this character or this character, which one of these characters you think would win in this kind of a fight? Or something like that as opposed to like, tell me your favorite thing about the Marvel character costumes. Right? Nobody cares about that.
They wanna get in debate, they wanna have that back and forth. And you're right, brands, I cannot tell you how many times I've heard a brand say, well what if someone comes in and complains? And I'm like, well that's the whole point. You want to know what their complaints are. You wanna be able to engage with those complaints. You wanna be able to take action on it. You can't do that if you hide it away or don't allow that kind of conversation. Um,
the key, you know, this is where I keep coming back to you. Like I'll always, always say the key is
hiring a good community manager, hiring somebody that knows how to engage that conversation, how to draw the right insights out of it, how to resolve it, how to manage the conversation so that it stays productive and constructive and doesn't just become,
you know, a bunch of people
complaining about something but rather really sharing their insights. And the biggest thing that I think people miss that is so important, and this goes for any kind of community, your biggest detractors are your most passionate fans. And if you can take whatever it is they're complaining about and fix it or do right by them, or just make them feel seen and heard, they're gonna become your biggest cheerleaders. So when you have somebody who's being
obnoxious in your forum, like get excited, you've got somebody to try to win over to the other side, that could be a really wonderful member of your community in the future. Yeah. Uh, I think that's so important. And and is that something that you've actually seen where, where people have
started as critics and become evangelists for a brand?
Absolutely. I had that happen a couple of times for me at Zendesk where I'd have a user, they'd be in the community, they'd be like, you guys never listen, you haven't fixed this thing. I dunno what's going on. And I'd be like, hi, I'm here. I'm listening, let's talk.
And we would have a conversation. And you know, sometimes, um, a lot of the time this happens around like customers who come in and they want you to change something about your product
and you can't all the time either 'cause you don't have control of it or it's just not a big enough priority or it's not a big enough, um,
solution to be a standalone like feature or something.
But by engaging the conversation saying, Hey, you know, I totally see where you're coming from. Here's some other ways you can solve that problem, and here's why we can't build that right now. They'd be like, oh, okay, well
I wish you could fix it, but now at least I understand why you can't, thanks so much. And they would show up again the next day and have more conversation, but this time it would be a little bit less heated and they'd be a little bit more helpful. And over time
that continued into you where now you've got this relationship and it's just because I engaged with and talked to that angry person instead of being like, oh, they're just mad. You know, let's
mark that post to, you know, hide that post and we'll email them and not worry about it. Right. Um, so yeah, I've seen that happen any number of times in both communities I've managed in and other communities as well. Yeah. And by the way, I'm a hundred percent killed. I've been that guy, I've been that complainer before.
I have too.
So, you know, it's, I now, because I work in the industry, I always try to be like, hi guys, I'm so sorry that I have to bring this up. Um,
but I do need you to know something about your product.
But you know, and none of this is, this is also not to say like, don't let the trolls have free license. Like, you have to have guidelines, you need to moderate it, you need to make sure it still remains like a safe space for everybody else in your community.
But I think this fear of,
oh, somebody might say a bad thing. Like if you're worried about somebody saying something bad about you, like, don't have a community 'cause it's gonna happen. And the key is what you do with that and how you respond to it, not that you prevent it from happening altogether. Yeah, I I mean I think you could even see this play out in real life in, in our society at large, that when people used to get together, you know, it's not that they would always agree, uh, but we used to get together more just in clubs and meetings and associate, you know,
whether it was scouts or churches or whatever. Um, and now that we are all behind our keyboards, just pumping out content that lets everybody know what we think, but not necessarily engaging as much as we used to. Um,
there is more of that, that conflict. I mean, I
I I've often viewed it as
we need more community spaces where people get together because
not that we will have less differences, but we will be more accepting and understanding and accommodating,
uh, of all the differences that we have. Right. I mean, I
that is so true. And
as a community professional, I, I do read a lot of books on social psychology and communication and connecting and how do you, you know, do conflict resolution and things like that. And the thing it always comes down to is when you need to get people that are sort of on opposing sides of a situation to talk and start to find an understanding, the key is finding a little bit of common ground, some common experience,
some common value something, and then building from there and getting to a point where you can actually talk in a reasonable way about
each side's point of view. And maybe they each come a step or two closer to each other and understanding each other. And we so desperately need that in society today. And I think because things have gotten so vitriolic online, people are really afraid to have
conflict and to have debate in person. And yet that is the best way for us to come together as a community of human beings in whatever setting that is. So I always encourage people, like, try to take one step towards somebody that you're having some conflict with, find that common ground and see if you can start to have a little bit more of a conversation about it.
Yeah.
Um, let me revisit this Content is King concept again. Yeah. Um, and I wanna, I wanna take a another look at it through a, a slightly different lens because again, I do think that there was a time when content is, you know, there was a time when we all, it's before my time, but we all sat around and watched the last episode of mash, right. You know, things like that where, where it was, and, and
part of why I don't think content is King anymore is because the technology has changed. Yeah. That content may have been king when it was scarce because you needed big expensive technology to produce and distribute it, and you needed a team of professionals. And now that everybody can create content,
uh, it, it's no longer king because it's no longer scarce.
Um, at the same time,
there's actually been an evolution in the community technology. We can do things that,
you know, I think these content publishing and distributing tools kind of
evolved a little bit quicker than the space building tools with, you know, platforms like yours. But also it wasn't till the pandemic that we all started using Zoom and talking to each other, right? Yeah. And it, it wasn't, and, and these tools are now
elevating to a level where,
you know, people can build spaces and come together and talk to each other and build connection, not just spit out content at each other. Is that your sense too?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things to unpack there. You know, your comment about like, not only is media not scarce, but it also used to, um, there used to be a real sense of monoculture to it, right? Like you, you brought up like every getting together watch the last episode of Mash or Friends or the OC or
whatever. People younger than me used to watch,
um, there was a date and there was a time and you'd go to work the next day and everybody would talk about that episode because we all watched it and now
everything's on demand. It happens at any time. And I think that has influenced online communities as well.
Um,
and so, you know, I definitely do see that things have evolved. The biggest one is the shift from asynchronous to synchronous communication.
Um,
back in the day you felt like it was totally reasonable to post something on a forum and wait three or four days and see if somebody responds to you. And now people really want that instant response. So I think that is where things like Zoom and person in, in-person events are becoming like, I want that real realtime interaction. Um, we're also seeing things like Slack and discourse, um, discord, there's both platforms out there and they always get confused. Um,
but the realtime chat capabilities are something that's important. And so I think that we, a lot of communities are having to adapt is there's still a reason for asynchronous communication. There's still a lot of use cases where it is helpful to have something that
either happens more slowly or where you've got longer form responses that you need a forum type setting for,
but there's a lot more proliferation around how do you augment that with more real time communication and other ways to connect with people.
So do you encourage people to think about, uh, a strategy for both, you know, hey, hey, yeah, what communication should be asynchronous, but what communication do we need to
bring people together so that they can react in real time? And, and
how do you think about those two differently? What, what is best done in one channel versus another?
So I, that's gonna vary for every community and you're gonna kinda have to test things and evaluate it. Uh, you know, just like we always used to ab test content, um, you to try different things out. The other thing to keep in mind is people have different communication and learning styles. And so anything that I'm putting out that's important, I'm like, okay, I've got it in, in posted in the forum in a slide deck for the visual learners. I've got a video for the people that need to like hear it and see it in motion. Maybe I've got the audio version for people that just wanna like listen to it while they try it in their own system.
Um, so I really think about all of those pieces and what is the interplay as well, right? Can I start with one and promote pushing to the other?
Um, the other thing to think about is what content.
Sometimes you have something that's like,
here's a 27 page white paper,
and then here's a video of me summarizing it, and then here are snippets that I can post all over social media and how do these things point to each other. So there is a lot of strategy that goes into what goes where and how does it all work together. But I think the most important thing
is that
a forum is not by itself. A community
or a platform is not by itself a community,
community is the outcome of all of the things that you're doing to connect people to one another.
And your platform is one of the tools that you're using to do that, but it is not a community unto itself.
Yeah. It is part of the ecosystem system.
I think that's really important. Um, and, and I'm, I wonder if you run into, I've seen
other tech companies, not community platforms, but other tech companies where sometimes customers think that if I just buy the tool, everything will be fine. And and not necessarily recognize that, well no, no, you, you, you need a strategy for using the tool and you need to
staff it and figure out all the rules and, and do that. Does that happen with, with higher logic? You run into that issue
all the time and it's a real challenge. You know, as, as a platform vendor, um, we say oftentimes, you know, we've, we've bet our business on selling this tool to people and then assuming that they know
what to do with it. And oftentimes you find an organization that is buying the tool and they're like, okay. And then we just
flip it on and it goes right, and everybody just starts to show up and talk to each other. And
part of where I've gotten really into this strategic advising role is to come and say, no, no, no, no, this is, this is the tool and it's a great tool and it can do all sorts of things to create the right conditions for the community that you're trying to build.
But when we actually talk about what that community is, it's
who are you inviting, how are you inviting them, what are you encouraging them to do? How are you
listening to what they want and being responsive. You know, when I look back at the success I had at Zendesk, it was all about, as I had told you at the beginning,
the customers saying, Hey, well we would like to do this. And I said, okay, great. Let me put that together for you. Let me facilitate that for you. But every one of those programs grew organically out of what users were looking for, not what I thought that they needed. And so
it is so important to recognize like, yep, this is a tool, but the tool itself isn't gonna do the thing. It's the strategy and the management that you put around it that is so important. Yeah. And let's talk about the skillset that people need to get the most out of these platforms. Um, yeah, especially, you know, bringing it back to this, this content is king concept because
the skills that are needed to create a lot of content are not necessarily the party hosting skills that you need to have a successful community. I mean, this isn't about just, hey, can I,
can I go make a great movie about Hobbit or can I go rate the Great American novel? And then you may be very good at that,
but community building's something different, right?
Absolutely. I the best community builders really
are those people that have been called the jack of all trades or the Renaissance person or something like that. Um, good community management requires a real mix of skills. You have to have some technical aptitude to be able to administer and run the platform and figure out what that tool set is.
You need some degree of content and communication skills, right? You have to be able to post and have it make sense and recognize like, oh, this is useful information and I could put it in an even more helpful format over here.
But I think the biggest part of it, and the part, you know, this is why I always say like,
this is gonna be real hard to replace community managers with AI because the most critical skill set is that party host is the ability to recognize who different people are, build relationships with them, connect them to one another, make sure everybody's having a good time. You know, you notice when something's going wrong and you go fix it before anybody else sees, right? Like refill the chip bowl before it gets totally empty. Um,
and so I think that that's the key skillset is being the relationship person, but then also being able to navigate the other pieces. It's also where, you know,
you say, you know, raising a child takes a village, running a community takes a village, and if your team of one and you don't have all those skill sets, then the best thing you can do is either augment yourself with other people, maybe hiring a part-time contractor to come on board. If you're at a larger organization, maybe you end up with multiple headcount where, um, you know, I had one point in time where I had somebody that focused on engagement, somebody that focused on content, somebody that focused on operations, and they each went really deep with those skill sets, but I still wanted them to have the generalist skill sets across everything to at least some degree. But the other thing you can do is lean on your community. And this is another key strategy that I always tell people is
if you really want community, you need to give your members meaningful leadership. And that may mean augmenting what you are able to do. You know, if you're great at the relationships and the operations and you're not so good at content, really focus on how can you find the members of your community who are good at content and support in producing things for their peers and recognizing them and rewarding them for that kind of activity or, you know, whatever those different balances of capabilities are. Um, it's a pretty broad skillset to really successfully pull off a community. If you don't have a team, then you have to lean on your members and you should do that anyway. It's meaningful to them. And your members will
defend and build and work hard on a space that they feel a degree of ownership in. And so it's a really good idea to actually bring them into all of that. I,
I love that concept of bringing them into it and getting them involved, especially if you're a small organization. And I think sometimes new community builders are reluctant to do that. Um, for the organizations that are looking to build a community, one of the places where I see this conflation of,
uh, content creation versus being the party host is when you see a job posting, uh, that's like, we need a social media manager and community manager and kind of
putting those two things together. And, and that's a great example of where these are different skill sets.
They are different skill sets. I understand the corporate impulse to combine those roles. You're like, oh, well it's a job where you're using technology tools in a one to many fashion to talk to customers. So these feel the same, but the difference is that
community is really about the connecting users to each other. And social media is usually much more about connecting the brand to the users. And social tends to be much more of a channel where you're pushing information out and sometimes people are engaging with it and talking to you,
whereas the whole point of the community is not the content, it's the connections first and then
layering the content on top of it
as good things start to happen in that community space. And so
I think that there are a lot of overlaps in intersections. I actually started as a social media manager and then moved into community management. So I've seen both sides of it.
But to your earlier point about technology evolving too, social media has become so much more about video, whereas community is still mostly about written words or
meeting type things, right? Meetups and, and events. And so I think that there's a differentiation there too as well. And so if you're a really small company, you might be able to get away with giving one person both those responsibilities. But the thing I would say is
those are both full-time jobs
and if you've got any size to your community, it's probably multiple full-time jobs for people to really do it well.
Alright, Nicole, I I'm so glad to hear you say this, that, that, uh, content still in the throne room, but not actually sitting on the iron throne there. Uh, it is. No,
I think, I think the, the community platforms that are gonna succeed in the future are gonna be the ones that really focus on how do you connect users to each other. And I think the communities that are gonna be most successful, whatever the tool set, even if you're just doing this on an email list, are gonna be the ones that are really focused on how do I get the right people talking to each other?
So let's take it there. The last question I ask everybody when they come on the show is make a prediction. Five years from now, what do you think we're gonna be talking about in the community space?
Yeah, I think it ties into all of this.
One of the things that we're seeing right now is a lot of companies saying,
could we just AI instead of community, right? They're shrinking teams. Some companies are closing their communities altogether and saying, well, AI can just answer all of the questions. And I think what's gonna happen in probably the next two to five years, somewhere in that range, but we'll, we'll project out five years for the sake of your question. Um,
some company is gonna do a great job of engaging with their customers and connecting them to one another and having these really great meaningful relationships and suddenly community's like gonna be the new moat all over again. Everybody's gonna be like, oh, the companies that are succeed the most are the ones that have great communities where they really talk to their customers and they do human connection. And
it's, it's gonna come up like it's some like new idea that nobody's ever figured out before. Um, so I think we're in sort of an interesting evolution right now where people are experimenting with, do we need a community? What does it really do for us? Can we just use AI to give everybody support and call it a day? And I think they're gonna discover that they can't and that human connection is really important and that community is the way to do that.
I, I wanna, before you go, I, I wanna have you expand on this community as a moat concept. Yeah. And, and the way I think about it is, uh, you know, when I was a kid, my parents had me join a swim team
and I think what they thought they were paying for when they wrote that first check was, oh, we're paying for swim lessons and we're paying for access to a pool.
And by the time we paid that fifth, sixth, seventh monthly dues check, it became obvious that what we were paying for is that this was my social life where my friends were as a kid.
And if another swim club had opened up right down the street and it were cheaper,
we would not have moved because I've now established all these friendships with all these, you know, and I'm my, that's where my friends are, so that's what we were gonna hang out. Um, yep. And and that's what you're talking about, right? When you're talking about community Exactly. As a moat.
Yep. It's the, it's the thing that, uh, the word defensible comes to mind, right? Because if you think about like what most really were, it was like to keep the right people in and the wrong people out, or at least make it harder for other people to come in. Um, and in the business world, we talk about that a lot in terms of what is gonna keep my customers with me, even if something
cheaper and newer comes on the market. Um,
and so yeah, I think that your metaphor fits really, really aptly in terms of thinking about like, what is the thing that's gonna make my customers or my organization or my brand
sticky and what's gonna help people stick with me over jumping off to the next thing? And it's,
it's gonna be whether they have a relationship with you or not. Yeah. Awesome. Well, the Cole Saunders, thank you so much. Uh, if people wanna learn more about Higher logic, uh, they can go to hire logic.com, go check out the platform. Um, what would you say to somebody who's considering the platform? I mean, where's the best place to start and how do they learn more about the platform?
Uh, you know, I think the website's a great place to start or just come chat with me or any of my, my colleagues. We've got a number of us that are very active on LinkedIn.
Um, and I'm, I'm always responsive to inquiries. Um, I do also host a couple of meetup groups that are open to anyone in the community or customer marketing field. They're not hire logic specific. Um, so if you're interested in learning more about AI and how other people are handling that,
let me know. I'd love to bring you into the conversations that we're having over there.
All right. Thanks Nicole. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing all of your insights with us.
Thanks so much for having me, Seth.
