being on camera, and I've got other calls where I have to be. I have one customer that's like, Mary I don't see you on camera. Do you think you could get on camera today? And I'm just like why? You've seen me before. I don't want to look at me funny.
My most recent job was a camera's on like it was considered this filter. Your camera was off if you were eating, he couldn't chat like Sorry, camera off of an eating and like my husband's company. Never ever no one ever ever has cameras on 100% cameras off so think every company
is different. I
like the camera. On the worst is when you get on like a customer call and you have the camera on and you're waiting for a customer and then they join and they don't have their camera on and then you're just talking to yourself and you're like, Okay, this is awkward, but I'm just gonna leave it on so you can see me since that's how it started.
I always have a debate on like, do I turn mine off? Do I leave it off?
Oh my god. On a couple of occasions I pretended like my internet's bad. Like I noticed that they're not on this like it you know? I'm just gonna go off video.
Not Oh my god. I do it all the time.
Like zoom confessions. I'm just like,
Oh my God. I'm having trouble hearing you. I'm turning it off. I also work with people internationally and I actually find because of the accents. I do prefer cameras on even though sometimes I'd like to hear them leaning in.
That's a good point. Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and record this, just so people can listen in recording and progress. If they don't make it. I'm surprised we have nine because I don't remember nine people even signing up. But that could just be me being a little tired this week. So let's talk about community care. I think you were the one who started this. So why don't you kick us off with your questions or your ideas?
Yeah, totally. So I started a new job maybe like five months ago or so. And one of my first like initiatives was like starting a community actually came up in my interview process and like, wasn't even a part of my job like that they thought and then so I looked into community vendors and they're a lot more expensive than I thought. So I looked at higher logic and then I looked at incited and inside it was like starting at 80k. And then our logic was somewhere between like 50 for like their lower level plan up to like 110 for more like the enterprise plan on so obviously like, I don't know if any of your budgets are a little bit more scrutinized more than normal this year, but it's like kind of how to come up with definitely a lower cost option. So I was thinking about like a free slack group kind of just starting it with like our advocates and growing from there and I'm kind of a noob on Slack. So I was going through like their online thing. And I didn't know if there's a way to do it for free. The only option I was finding which was like $8 per user, which like doesn't sound like a lot but can definitely add up and say dollars a month per user but like you know, if you have 100 users that's $800 a month. Which comes to like, but would that be like about 10 grand? So like I was wondering if anyone has had success doing like breezeblock or like very low cost?
I don't know I'm interested in that, too, for exactly the same word thinking the same thing, Kara. So in Slack was our route as well.
Well, I can like have Go ahead.
Oh, yeah, like so. I don't know when this happened. But sometime in the past we like already have like a free external Sligo slack so it's already kind of there. But I think they're like trying to invite people who weren't part of like, you know, absolutely go with their email and it was they're having trouble with
that. So
I'm very curious about the free slack communities or if you've set up if anybody set up a Slack community and if it's been outside of your organization, like you set it up as a totally different slack or if you use Slack connect or sort of how all of that works, too.
Well, I'm happy to share from Mary Christopher Mary's
in my last role, we were evaluating community platforms and fortunately, I was laid off back in August, we selected one, I thought we were looking at higher logic. And some of the other ones care that you mentioned. I thought they were like 40 grand a year. Yeah. Or do you know like in your research, because I'm surprised to hear 80 to 100 Unless it was a totally different kind. of packaged but Mary What do you see in terms of pricing?
Yeah, so I can talk about a lot of this stuff actually so incited, and Higher Logic. We we actually tried to go with vanilla at one of my last companies. And one of the customers I have now has been our and that was around 40. So Higher Logic being from around that to up over 110 Makes sense inside it and I know Christine just got incited last year they were going to be around 40 to 60 to start but then for all of the additional development and integration work. It was going to be quite expensive. And Choros wanted 100 And like 30 for a year so all of those are options. Go ahead, Christine.
I guess I've also put a preference so we were going to do a migration so we have a free community through Zendesk. So we're gonna migrate that community on to Higher Logic slash inside it and I think that could have also been what like made the price a lot more.
Yep. And we honestly got a little bit of a deal because we helped to build an integration to thought industries with them. Yeah, that problem so we got a partner deal with them. So our price was a little bit less than than Mary's quote. Okay,
I use sorry. I was gonna add I use vanilla and ours was definitely in not like 40 to 50k range as well.
Okay, so I will share a few things one, I have been saying for at least a few years now this slack is been a great community to use for a b2b kind of community, a great platform. A lot of customer or community people have disagreed because they feel that something else might be a more perfect option, but it being that you can get it free. Anybody can add to that almost anyone in the b2b space for the most part, most people have slack for something or they've used it for something even if I have like a customer that uses Microsoft Teams. They also use Slack. So most people I know there's a few people in our space that are pretty active like Allison and BARBARA THOMPSON that don't use Slack but a lot of people do. So it's pretty easy as far as that goes. Like the engagement, the adoption, ZZ all of that. And last week, the guy Richard Millington, who's one of like the top community consultants in the world runs fever be from the UK and he wrote about how having on site like on your website forums is not as successful as it used to be. People are liking this chat ability a little bit more, and having something that's widely adopted like Slack, especially with b2b He wrote about has been really helpful. Now, it used to be a pain because you'd have to take like, like pay attention to everything, manually. Track like, who's active and all of that, but now most people can use common room.io for free. And that shows you who's registered who's commented, who's gone inactive. And actually last week, I figured out how to set up an extension with air table so that I could just every conversation that kind of segments, the conversation, and I can just open the conversation, hit the extension and chrome and it'll save the whole conversation for me so I can put it either on a website or just leave it in that database. So I can always go back to it is kind of a pain because you do have to click on each conversation. But you don't have to go to each response. So in the time that I've had my new community set up, we've had like 150 conversations in the public channels and if I click through those over six or seven weeks, I can save all of those and that's not bad, I don't think for what you're able to do. So common room. Now we're signing up for slack, you can sign up for free. Almost all people are starting with a free one. Anyways, unless it's for like Sligo, the problem with what Kara's talking about where you have to have a sligo.com email is when you're signing up if you select that, then it makes it so anyone who signs up with a salido.com email can automatically get in. If you don't select that option, then you can just leave it and you have the invite system where people go and sign up and you can approve them or you can leave it so anybody can sign up. So that's my my pitches. If you can use Slack use it like for now that's really helpful. There's a lot of tools out there that let you keep track of all of these things. And it's getting a little bit harder to make those forums as successful without a lot of other layers. Now if you have like Influitive they I look at as layers where you have the community itself, and then you have an advocacy layer on top of that and those working together along with all of your events and other programs like matching people and stuff like that, that it'll add to each other kind of like cake layers. But alone it is more difficult with just the forums on a website. So that's what I
thank you super helpful. One thing that help would be helpful to clarify as for making comments and things is how we're defining community. Yeah, when I'm looking for its customers, so it's not prospects. I mean, we might put in some like late stage leads, you know, so they can see what customers are saying, but like we're not looking to create a really big that has lots of you know, rant random potential customers. So for those who are doing that, so I guess my question is, like is, do we still think slack is good, even if it's a closed customers only community and if so, how would you know who was a customer? There? You wouldn't have single sign on from your product. You won't be able to tie the customer back to any of your other systems you sort of have slack is like an island is that is that right? Or are there things either through Zapier or common room or other services that can can make it more integrated?
There are more options that you can like, include for automation when you can have it so anybody that signs up for slack to your slack, they're called workspaces. The they have to be approved. And you can either do that yourself or there might be other ways to use the automation to do that with Zapier. I'm not exactly sure you get 10 Free add ons for any slack workspace. And one of those can be Zapier and then obviously you pay for the ZAP separate on Zapier. So there's that it is kind of like its own little island. As in like it's not a website. Like you're not going to have people inside of a website. They're like That's where having the forum has been helpful for a lot of companies, but you're still not getting all of the benefits of having a community that are because a lot of people don't actually engage. Does that answer the question? Okay, so Oh, yeah, just answer Patrick. Patrick, I have considered circle but I think when people are using circle they overdo it with the amount of options and they'll have like 50 Different places where people can immediately jump into the community and it's not. It's not super effective. Like anytime you're starting a community and you add different channels like in Slack or different groups, you're really starting several different communities, several different spaces that you have to seed and so people go a little overboard. Circle does have some really nice options as far as like the events right inside their platform, the app, all of that. But they doesn't have that. That stickiness that Slack has from already being used for so many other groups and better mode. I have a tribe account, but I've never figured out how I want to use it. I signed up when they had a lifetime purchase option. And I still have it. It's just sitting there. I haven't found that it has a lot of the integrations I would want so that was something we also looked at at one of my last cus one of my last jobs and we decided not to go with it because it didn't have the integration that you find when you are looking at the nela or corals or something like that.
Totally we were thinking about and I don't mean to get too far away from the question, but we were thinking about, like a specific user community and how we can integrate with the product. So it's just one click from the product with SSL, the things that drew me to circle I haven't gone with them yet. And probably might not who knows world's a crazy place. The was that like one is it kind of looks familiar with slack like the interface is very similar to Slack where people are used to seeing like those channels in the left there, really see what you're saying. I'd like that every single channel is a community in and of itself, and so like use that sparingly. But that gave us a great opportunity for to play or to have a space for a different user groups to come in. And talk with one another that's like directly connected from the, from the product itself. So that was one of things we were thinking of, and it's also like way cheaper than like 40,000 I think we're we're looking at somewhere around of like $400 a month.
Yeah, it is a lot cheaper. But yeah, it does go back to that stickiness now, like if your users probably if they're in the b2b space will probably already have slack on their phone. All they have to do is add a new workspace. It's the same app. It's going to be a different app. And sometimes if people are really excited about it and you have it really active, right from the beginning, you have your community seated, if they pop in there, they see that there's a good 15 Other people talking and having conversations they're going to they'll do the download, they'll sign in with a new app, they'll add the notifications and all that if you don't and a lot of people do not go through the process to set up and see their communities before launching them. They kind of launch it and then let customers seed it. But customers don't always do that. Then it's a lot harder to one win those people back and to get them to take action and download that and all of that in the first place. I'm probably biased on slack because I've used it even when I built my online site forums like I helped launch the forums for sales hacker and outreach. I did it for demand base, even when doing that and we had slack communities and groups that we were using before that I fought to keep slack as well. Because that instant conversation of being able to say Oh, I can message Christine, and have her respond within a few minutes. And get her to comment or post something means that my community can move a lot faster, even if she's posting on the actual website itself. So it just helps. Yeah,
for sure, for sure. I was thinking hoping that circle, like as a web app would be pretty easy just to to launch right like you click on the link in your product. And then hopefully with some kind of SSO, it would just launch in a new tab already ready, set with all your information.
Yeah, it does. A stream I do like circle. It's just a little bit different. It's not the immediate conversation as much as people want to have and well a lot of those platforms do have a chat feature as well. It's out of the way like it's inside a different app that they have to use. And so it's not as accessible and engaging.
Over totally para was your who is your audience? Are they primarily b2b Or are they like a diverse range of folks?
It's kind of a lot, so it's b2b and also b2c?
Yeah, like, what's the industry profile of these folks?
So it's also it which is a little bit interesting because some IT people don't use Slack.
That's true. That's awesome.
I would I would seriously think about discord than to care.
There's discord. Yeah. And mattermost is another one. I think that it asked them what they use. I mean that that should have been something I said in the first place is you know, asking people what they use for groups and communities. Obviously go to your customer first.
Yeah, so about like maybe a month ago I launched like a very small survey. I think I sent it up to like 100 customers I literally just pulled who wrote us like good GT reviews in the past year and a half survey them and I was like, like, what apps are you guys using? And a lot of people said they're on Slack. So the other reason why I also want it on Slack is because like if I get any technical question, then I can just tag my product team and I don't have to like send them a link to an outside source or anything like that. It would
all be in Slack.
Yeah, because your whole company is using it to
Yeah, and I also think like a lot of like, even besides if you're like like I know Cisco doesn't use it all but I feel like most part people like use Slack or familiar with Slack or even like I don't know, I have a few personal slack so I'm on that has nothing to do with work.
That's true. Yeah. And we had a real problem
with our audience base not being able to access because of security protocols within their organization. With slack, and it was it we had to knock it out of contention pretty early on in our process. Even though we had a lot of people who are using it there were enough of the audience that we were trying to hit that that couldn't that it just it was just not an option.
In that case, though, it doesn't hurt to have both it was it's very helpful. It's kind of like a setting up your company. And you get a Facebook page, you get a Twitter, you get a LinkedIn, like you know you're gonna post to those things. This is another place where a good segment of your people already exist. And you can engage them either in the same ways or a little bit different. And use that to build habits and feed them into your other community because that's a lot of what community is to is thinking about. How do I build the habit of getting people to visit and comment and post and all of that, and the immediacy of slack helps with that. And you're definitely going to have people with learning products that can't use Slack. But, you know, even a small slack of 15 to 20 people that want to be your enthusiasts and evangelists that can be a huge part of building and seeding your community.
Yeah, a big reason why slack came up is a lot of our customers are also NetSuite customers and NetSuite community is run on slack so we have like a Sligo channel in there that's fairly active. So like, that's a big reason why I was like, okay, like, there's obviously some customers who can't do it for security reasons, but there's already kind of a community on a different community for Sligo.
I found that sometimes people figure out other ways to get into the community too. If they really want to participate and they you know, they can't on their computer but they can't on their personal phone. I wouldn't go out of my way to suggest that. But one other thing I wanted to point out is that you're probably going to want to have your community, your Slack community, separate from your company, community, so a different workspace and just have the people from your company that you want to have them participate sign into that as well. Otherwise, you're going to come across where in your company workspace is probably paid for. And you want to keep the free workspace because you're going to have up to hundreds or 1000s of people and you don't want to pay for that. And it's going to be a pain to have to go through the slack. Connect the slack invite guest and all of that because I was looking at that recently, and you can have one one paid account for all for five people on a free account like that you would bring in on a FREE account but they can only access one channel. So it's just very restrictive.
The problem that I ran into I set up a Slack connect within our own slack workspace. And it's very intimidating because you only have the one slack connect channel that everybody's speaking in. You don't have those different channels. So I would definitely echo that Mary.
Good. I'm glad it's not just me.
Slack connect was also a little just like not super user friendly to set up. either.
Yeah, it wasn't in. So for me when I had been invited on flat Kinect to do things I had to be accessing from a paid account. So I had to be on a customer account that was paid and then be brought into the other customers thing which was an NDA nightmare. It was
international, so with our company, our customers are like 50% North America 40% 30% 20% ish. AIPAC. there for anyone else is also like global. Are there other considerations or challenges around slack?
Yes, I've seen where other like people in the like me especially or India, which I can't I don't know where India is as far as a pack or a Mia. But where they wanted to use WhatsApp. I haven't used it. I've seen more people just offer slack and others join from all over the world. And that it's not a huge issue. But sometimes people are like, well, I already have this or I already have that. And you know you have to kind of find out what did you What do your customers want if you have quite a few people that want to do slack. And that's more than what the app or whatever else or is. I would go with Slack and I don't know the tools that are available for WhatsApp. I know that common room.io is amazing for what it offers. I mean, they have a free account, and that's what I use. And then a paid account is 1250 a month like 1200 50. So it's a huge jump, but it's a great tool. I mean, you can even do a few automated messages that are like you can bring in personalization for the person's name and slack. I haven't set it up because I just feel like it doesn't give me I haven't set up groups and things like that. I like to segment more and it starts to feel a little fake. So I didn't do that. But they do offer it it's I can show you if you want to see sign in
have a question when like if we don't have really a large community right now and I was gonna try to launch something within slack for our advocacy program. That's where I was kind of going to start and start to build out community from there. So starting with our advocates, they're engaged. Have you in the past or anybody else kind of figured out? What are the channels like did you create the channels sort of right off the bat? Or do you work with that group to say sort of these are the channels or these are the areas or topics that we would want to identify and have conversations in.
So there's two things if you're starting for your advocates, then you have a mission of kind of like working with them to build your advocacy program. So I would consider like what something that's really interesting to them that they would want to be a part of. Can you hear me? My Siri is acting up on my computer. So I'm not sure I understand say, oh, Marie theory I think it's one of my kids. Hold on just second.
Maybe Siri can solve community problems. would be fun. So it sounds like a lot of you already have communities that are just trying to maybe sell for solutions, but then there's the house and you said you're gonna be launching a community soon. So there's a couple of us that are in like the whole new community realm too.
Yeah, for sure. I'm gonna
start a new gig about four months ago. And so like, there isn't anything that exists currently and right now trying to build up like small Sikh community before we build out like a real like big community. And so but we keep hitting this point over and over again, which I guess the reason why these software's exist, of like, we can create these cool events and have all these great conversations and stuff like that, but how do we fill in the whitespace? And so and so, like, we're looking at a few different platforms.
Okay, so this is can you see my screen? Yeah, okay. This is the inside of common room. It shows all of your members when they first like joined when they first logged in, let's see if this person has messaged or anything. Now let's look at Christine. Since she's on the call I suppose we could have listened looked at me but we're hearing enough about Mary today. So kinda import some stuff from your their LinkedIn automatically and I was talking to someone this morning, I think at grammerly that uses this and they use the paid account on common room and it imports anytime somebody shares something on LinkedIn. So that common room can let you know that you have to give them points or something for the advocacy. But I think that's just the paid version. But this shows like their post it shows the last time they were active, things like that, that can be really helpful and then you can even search the conversations. So we've had 152 conversations. If I click and open one, then I can use my little extension here. I don't know if you can see that. Can you see it? Yeah. And that will import like Alexei started this conversation. These are the replies and then I can click here and get just like take a little screenshot of her photo so I have it in my database and can remember who everybody is if I wanted to. And yeah, it's just really helpful. And then it has some reporting features that show you how many people have been active. Total membership. It's only 130 Because I just started this in December and total active members in the last 28 days because of course it goes down because of Christmas activity and all of that it's really really helpful to see like what is going on, where you wouldn't be able to do that before with Slack.
And you're telling us that this is a free tool you're using.
Yes, that is what I'm telling you.
Well, no, that's good. No, I love it. When you see airtable has features like that, that I really liked to they're free. So no, that's great.
So it seems like the primary like things to solving for is like there's community going on in a bunch of different places. And this kind of aggregates it and makes it easier to like report on and analyze.
Yeah, it does. It's, it's working with more and more platforms. I've only really used it for Twitter and slack. And then I use the LinkedIn aspect, like it just pulls from LinkedIn. I doubt Christine used her LinkedIn link when she joined. It just was able to make that connection automatically. So that's always nice because I like to connect with people on LinkedIn. Even people that are in your Slack channel, wherever my customer seems to respond or be most active, that's where I want to be if it's email, LinkedIn, Slack, whatever works for them, and I tend to put that as like a tag either in Salesforce or in common room so that I know where to go to talk to them. Interesting.
We know she could find me anywhere.
I tried at a previous company to create community through LinkedIn through a private group there. We did not see like any or not a lot of engagement whatsoever. Like we saw maybe somebody comments once a week, you know that kind of fun stuff or AD and we had about 600 or so folks in the group itself. Where it was beneficial is just like recommending posts so it ends up in their timeline or it's where people already were so just freed LinkedIn ads as Yeah. Engagement, our webinars stuff like that. They're one of the biggest problems with it, though. Was that like I couldn't get any data on like, who's doing what in the platform? I can't sort through anything. So having a platform like that would have been like, fantastic in order to pull in some reports and better understand some folks and connect it to database stuff.
And LinkedIn does not have a good community platform. It it's a place where you can go and participate in like the broad community of LinkedIn and there's a lot you can do like I just started on LinkedIn channel in the slack that I have because several of us are trying to do more personal branding in 2023. And I took a course on how to do better with LinkedIn. But their group function is awful. Like it's fairly useless in my opinion. I don't know who has one there. But unless you're using it or going outside of it, it's not very helpful. There's you can't it's kind of like having a Facebook group where there's less engagement because a lot of people join LinkedIn but never do anything. At least on Facebook. They have done stuff. But you lose people so quickly and you can with Slack, too. If you get to the point where somebody turns off No, no all their notifications and logs out. That will happen but it's less likely to happen than with LinkedIn or Facebook groups. And LinkedIn is great for like the one on one, the DMS I am in direct messages all the time, but not in specific specific groups. And if I go into a group, it's just to see who else is there and be able to message with them without having to connect Yeah, I thought you did and sorry
for people thinking about starting with Slack meetings or budgetary reasons, are you thinking that you're going to graduate to a more expensive platform later? Or is your plan that slack is your plan like you're gonna go with that? Like, like one suggestion from from someone on my team was like, we start with Slack, we build it up. Once we get once we've like gotten to a certain point, then we move we've proven it then we move to one of the more expensive platforms. And I'm just curious your thoughts on that and how disruptive it would be to move people versus just going all in at the beginning and spending the money.
That's definitely my angle. It's been thrown around that we need to do more with community. I mean, we're on you know, we're customer marketers. We're on with Mary you have extensive experience running community. I want to build out sort of this advocacy community and then show how difficult it is to manage as one person even with, you know, a very active group of people and try to get the buy in that if we want to do something. It's going to be an investment not only in probably a more robust tool, but then also in people. Yeah, because it takes a lot to manage that I think it's really interesting what you said earlier, Mary about how people aren't going to the forums as much anymore. But I will say the interesting part about that is like, you know, using different tools, I'm sure that we've all done plenty of Google searches in the past to try to find answers with how to solve a problem. And if everything's at SLAC people aren't going to be able to find the answer. So there's, there's like a part of sort of, maybe your your knowledge base that's going to need to continue to have some of that interaction to solve you know, the most common problems, but then maybe some of those more complex conversations or maybe strategy sessions are happening behind a closed door in a Slack channel or something like that. Yeah, so that's sort of my, Rebecca's gonna build it out.
So there's a lot of thoughts there. One is for the last like four years, I have worked with multiple companies that were building out their on site forums and started with Slack. And that was because I push I was like, No, we need to have slack. People are active on Slack. That's where we need to be. And we're, I'm not going to close it like it's going to be just another channel like being on LinkedIn or somewhere else. Now, I'm seeing fewer people make that leap to a different forum. One you can still and it can be beneficial for what you're talking about, Jennifer, but what I also see is that a lot of these companies want to do SSL. And if they're doing SSL then it doesn't usually come up in Google. So you're not getting the search, like the search juice or whatever you want from it. So it does take away from that. And like I said, with the air table. Let me just show you guys something that I'm working on. I haven't published this or anything like people can see it, I think, but I haven't shared it with anybody. So I think one thing on here is Rebecca is going to be like, Oh, that's me. Sorry. It's not like live nobody has seen it. But if you go here and let it load and scroll down and click on any of the results under slack messages, this is where when I export things, and I'm working on the air table extension, this is where the conversations can show up and I'm going to actually make this so that any of the members of CMA weekly have to log in to this to be able to see it, but it'll basically give us that background function of never losing our conversations, which has been helpful to me in the past to have like common room, but to have it for everybody else I think is going to be really helpful. So Rebecca, if you want to kill me afterwards.
Okay. Is that because with a Slack free version, they only keep things for 90 days? Yes. Okay, so that's one of the things to know is you're not going to have that history of people wanting to like, look back and read things from a while ago. You lose it all.
You do Freebird
ish. So you can take a free you can take a free trial every once in a while for like seven days and get access to that old stuff. At any point. You can save it where there's a lot of tools now that will save your Slack conversations What's that,
like if you user if a user wants to search for a topic, right?
Yeah, go back but they can ask you as a community manager. It's it is a trade off, but it's not something that I've seen be a huge issue. Even with being in the customer marketing slack, where I was the community manager. There's like 1700 people. I probably had two or three people over six months ask for something that was older, and I can go into common room and find that for them. So for me the trade off being 40,000 plus a year just isn't worth it. It's not worth the fight internally or any of that when I can also just repost the conversation. I mean, how many forums are you in where you see that? A lot of conversations come up a lot. It happens. Not that I'm saying I mean, you can decide how that works for your company. But the trade offs
Yeah, everything is everything like it's a trade off probably. But so one of the other things I've been thinking about so yeah, so we're coming up this The good news is customer marketing is going is taking the lead on community. I've been in other companies where it was a support community, more support focus, but where I work, our customers are b2b, it's like finance. Primarily. We do have 1000s of customers. So not everybody has a CSM we are working on like a scale customer marketing motion, which leads me to support and so that's the other thing I'm considering is if you're in Slack, and people have questions about things that they need to know the knowledge base, that they're gonna have to come out of that word and assume it's a more seamless experience to go from community, the knowledge base in the more expensive paid platforms is that, yes, free is.
Yes, but if it's SSO that you have so say you're in Slack, it is own individual space, right? And then you link them back to the SSO knowledge base. If they're already logged in, logged into the platform, it should just take them there. So it shouldn't feel uncomfortable, I don't think and I link people out all the time. I think it's a more common thing that people are uncomfortable with.
Know if you're in community, if you like search for a topic, do you see form answers and support answers, or do you only see Yeah, that was more thinking about it as I don't know if that's even possible because I haven't done that
before? Yeah, no, you're right there is not federated search. So you would not have federated search across all of them. It would just be unless, so if you had your Slack back up to the website, in some way to have federated search on that, it still wouldn't show up in the slack federated search, but it is something that you can offer still on your website. So it is a little fragmented but I don't I've never had anybody have like a frustration or be upset about that. I think it's very normal to have links out to other things from slack. Like people understand this as a chat. This is a immediate place to kind of get answers. And the trade off for that is that it's not all nice and pretty exactly as the website but the functionality of having slack and that immediacy, I think that pays off. I'd much rather work with a company where I go ask them a question and I can get somebody's answer in a couple of minutes. Go back and forth, have it done with then go submit a ticket, wait for that wave again and go back and forth. So fine, you know, ask your customers to like Jennifer was saying she was thinking about starting with the advocacy. I am a very community led community person. I just thought that yesterday on a call you were on Rebecca, but um, you know, ask them let them tell you what they think like oh, I don't like this or I don't like that. I mean, it could be with financial companies that they're just uncomfortable with that sort of program. And you learn that right away and get rid of it. Just whatever you need to do. So that's my approach. Is staying really open to what they're saying and asking, you know, what do you think about this? Is this a kind of experience that you would want to participate in? Hopefully I'm helpful.
This is very helpful thinking through some of like the things that you did to set up when you launched the new like CMA weekly, Slack workspace and community. Did you have all of your automations like, Hey, welcome, like tell us all about you and everything. Set up and common room before he launched it or? No,
I did not. I probably should have planned it more. For several months. I was thinking I'm just going to start my own and then I'd be like, no, nobody would want to come they already have like four other slacks. I'm not going to do it. And then something happened in the main customer marketing community. And I was like, Okay, I'm just going to do it and see what happens and it's okay. I mean, it's only 130 people, but compared to you know, the 1700s that are in the other one, but a lot of those people weren't active anyways, out of the top 25 people that were active over and that 20 of them are in the new ones, so it's okay and I did not have automation setup. I don't have automation setup for it now. Because normally when somebody joins, I'll just go message them myself. I and you'll want to do this with your own communities, especially if you start with advocacy. Building the relationship is so important at the beginning of that, like they're joining your community, they're taking a step to be closer to you. And we should acknowledge them and accept them and celebrate them and be like super excited to have them because they're gonna give us so much value while we're also trying to help them with, you know, their career and personal brand and all of that too. So
one of the things that I'm curious about is that specific point about the like, making sure that you're a welcome mat for everybody who comes in, you know what I mean? And like, it's difficult if you have something set up through SSO and everybody's already kind of in, right. And so thinking about, like, what are the touch points that makes sense in order to provide that like big welcoming experience? And so like, balancing them on top of the, like, being a vendor, I'm like, very much aware of that fact. You know, that like, if somebody comes in and participates, the last thing they want is a vendor to like jump through their throat, you know, to share stuff. That's one thing I've experienced in a lot of like, like non tech specific ones, like a few different slacks and a part of like, I posted it and then get like four DMS from sales reps that are like, hey, actually, I think we could solve for XYZ, you know, stuff like that, but, and I feel like my, my people who would join my community kind of already know that experience. So I'm just trying to figure out like, how do we give that welcoming experience to folks without making it? I don't know that like gross part of a transactional relationship with a vendor.
So are they going to join as a customer or as just an average person? Okay, so they already have some relationship with a brand. And then it's just, you know, learning about them, like being really interested in who they are. What are you working on this year? I probably asked most of you that and slack. You know, what topics are you really interested in? And then making sure to go back to them? So, you know, we had somebody that joined the community last week, he wants to do a call to talk to other people that are building a program from scratch. So I'm going to put that call together. I'll go back to him and say this is when we're gonna have the call. I hope you can join us, you know, just really acknowledging them. And for me, it's within the first couple of weeks, trying to make sure to include them in a couple of different things. And I wanted to just say earlier in the caller, I was thinking about this and then it slipped my mind. But as communities are forming on the internet, I'm finding that a lot more people want to get those, like have those conversations and get the right connections. And they're doing that through the different programs and stuff we do. So that's why I think a lot of it is moving away from the forums, because they're finding that conversations and zoom calls or immediately on Slack or having several programs within your community like the match programs that a lot of communities do. The weekly calls where it's just informal and people can get on and kind of get to know each other and build a sense of community without you having to do all the work. Like all of these little things one are giving them benefits of being in a community, taking it off of the forums where there's a lot of that and making it more immediate and more like in their own time in what space they have. And I think that's going to continue to grow as you know like people are already using zoom and things like that, but and in that when you launch a community, one of the things that I see a lot of people say is joining this community, you're going to learn you're going to discover share, connect. It's it just falls flat now because how many times do you join a community to do all of those things, but nothing happens. So when you join a community, having somebody that you consider it's a real person trying to have a conversation with you. And it's hard to do that with every single person that joins if you have a huge launch. But if you do it slowly or invite several people at a time 50 People at the most. You can build some of those relationships and have a better foundation for the community and having those programs those are the things that I use to get people to join my community where I nurture them into advocates. Like I have a community that's going to be launching for one of my customers and we're doing a top contributors program, because that's what Kevin Kevin Lau says on his course is to start your community with the top contributors program, check, okay. And another one is weekly expert sessions where they can just get on and kind of do like clinics, talk about whatever they're working on. These little programs that have very specific benefits out way, join our community and connect with people because then you're really making a connection. You're saying this is exactly what we're going to do. And so, with Slack, you can have some automation that says welcome. Make it really short. And just be like, Hey, I'm Patrick. Glad you're joining and let them respond. Because both longer messages that tells me right away fake, it's automated. This is not a person talking to me. This is why DMS on LinkedIn are so good for having conversations, because there's not a ton of tools that will automate it. Or when you use like the Sales Navigator it's $100 a month and who's wants to pay that?
Yeah, totally. I think this that's really reaffirming to hear, like one of the things that keep yelling at our team about so marketing teams that like nine people, and total and I'm the customer marketer. And like we've talked about Yeah, learn customer market. Hell yeah, you got this, the like yelling at it with our SEO and all that kind of stuff. It's like we really need to lean into community what kind of community platform should we buy? Or like the what? Like, it's like, none of that is like an out of the box solution. And like that's why I keep harping on this concept of like a small Sikh community versus like what is that community that you purchase? And so I'm really trying to take on that like we do these program, like small programs like these, like user group meetings and the short calls and stuff like that. We establish those first before we go into like, a larger program and so it's cool it's such a great gut check to do to make sure that that's kind of the right strategy.
Yeah, and Christine crew chick she's on this call. She is doing something very similar. She did start a community but they're doing a lot of smaller things to get people involved. And Rachel Ward just joined, all bound in the last six months of last year, and she wants to have a community at some point too, but she's building up by starting these smaller programs that you can use to move into community because she doesn't have the time she has one person. And I just think it's really helpful. And like I said, fever be they talk about building communities and he's like, start is flow and build relationships. That's where you're gonna get your foundation to keep growing. If you don't do that, and you have one major launch because it keeps your CEO excited. And you see Oh 1000 people joined today. 1000 people joined tomorrow like now you have 2000 people as a community manager or community team, or maybe three people sometimes that you have to try to build relationships with and then build relationships between because they're not usually there to just connect with you. They want to meet other people. And like me saying, you know, I'm sure Rachel would have a great conversation with you, Patrick. But you know, you're here because you want to see what other people in this space want to know. Totally. So, oh, look her hours almost up. All right. Rebecca, how crazy Do you think I am?
I knew we're out of time. So I'm just putting in the chat really quickly. My last job I said community without a platform like communities and it has to be a platform communities bringing people together and seriously I don't know how one person teams are going to manage a community. I think that
it is yeah, it is. It's hard and it's community is always moving and evolving and trying to find a better, faster, and more satisfactory way to connect and get all of that information. And so we're in a space where it's kind of like what's next and it's not the forum's. Okay, well, I will see those of you who are in my community which is free to join and I know you're gonna want to when you come in and I'll whenever we want to set up another call like this, let me know and we'll do that. Thank you, Kara, for suggesting.
Sorry for being off camera. I got my COVID shot yesterday. And I look absolutely terrible. That's okay. Yeah, I guess boostered
everybody, have a good day. Really helpful. Thank you very much.
