Hello, and welcome to Bad Community Advice.
This is a show that's all about terrible tips and toxic takeaways.
I'm your host My name is Seth Resler, and I am the founder of Community Marketing Revolution.
And today, we are going to talk about gamification when it comes to community building.
Really excited my guest is a fractional chief customer officer a CX strategist and a communications adviser.
She helps brands design intentional customer journeys, building thriving communities, and craft stories that resonate.
Plus, she's got a brand new book out.
It is called Transforming Customer Brand Relationships.
It's a hands on guide to building stronger connections and deeper loyalty through empathy and emotional intelligence.
Please welcome Christina Garnett.
Hi, Christina.
How are you? Welcome.
I'm doing well.
Thank you so much for having me.
Oh, thank you for being on.
Congratulations on the book too.
This is your first one.
It is.
It's very exciting.
Yeah.
It's it's very it's a very joyful experience.
It takes a lot.
It's a labor of love for anyone who's written a book you know.
But it's No.
I don't.
I have no idea.
You need to you need to write one.
Oh, man.
No.
It it it seems it seems hard.
I I mean, I don't know.
Is it easier in the age of AI? Do you use AI for any of it? Does it, you know, or or is it still all you? I mean, what is the process? It's very much me.
Um, I would say probably the only way that I used AI during the book was to essentially ask myself, like, what am I missing? And saying, like, here are the main things I wanna cover.
Is there anything that I need to make sure that I'm including.
So it's it's almost like like a backup check instead of, like, please write this.
You know? Yeah.
So it's definitely me breaking down all the pieces.
It's in three different parts and covers.
Basically, the the first part is What are all the moving pieces that build these customer brand relationships? And then the second part is on community, which is, like, obviously something you and I are deeply passionate about.
And it talks about how a lot of the reasons why CX is what it should be is because we have these silos that are kind of separated amongst all these moving pieces that create that relationship, and community is the silo killer.
So great.
But how do you build that community so it can be a silo So the second part is basically holding your hand and walking you through how to build a community from scratch or how to reengage a community if it's already been launched, but maybe it's just not feeling itself.
And then the third part is what happens when everything falters? What happens when you have this brand affinity, but something happens? There's a PR crisis, AI changes how your customers work with you, whatever that looks like.
And so it's a way for you to really kind of reassess through all the moving pieces.
And What I love about this is a lot of my working community and a lot of my work in CXs, you are you are building off of other people's work.
You are building off of other people's touch points, their relationships.
There is no singular person that owns relationship that is that is influencing this relationship, it takes all of us, which is honestly, like, community at its core.
Like Right.
It takes a village.
It literally takes a village.
So this is a kind of a and Opus to all the villagers that it takes and, like, how can we get everyone together so we can really take care of our customers.
So we're gonna talk to you about gamification specifically because that's your bad advice that we're gonna talk about.
But before we get to that, I want to dig in a little it to some of the topics that you cover in the book.
Um, first, there's a question that, uh, I'm fascinated by, which is that, obviously, community is so central to your work and to what you do.
Like you said, it's it is the heart of the book.
Um, and yet so many of the people that we have on this show have the word community in their title.
They're community managers or community consultants or strategist or whatever.
Yeah.
Um, you chose to put the word customer, you know, in your title Um, and in the book.
You you don't actually use the word community in the title of the book.
And I have to imagine that that was deliberate.
Can you talk a little bit about that decision? Yeah.
Absolutely.
So when I when I look at all of the things that I've done in my in my career and in my work, really comes down to the central pillar of who are we taking care of.
And so I think about, like, when I think about the customer, I'm essentially calling out the tree.
And if you're a community manager, you're calling out the forest.
So It's kind of like saying I'm a community manager, but instead I call myself a humanist.
I I wanna take care of people.
And so it's very much isolating who it is that I'm caring about in the community, and then the community becomes secondary to that.
It's it's how community is then in service of that customer.
And so I when I think about, like, when I when I left to to start my own company, pocket CCO, I really kind of thought about what is it that I love to do? What is it that I wanna be known for? What is the work that really gives me purpose? And it comes down to making that special for the customer.
And community is one of the ways that I make it special for the customer.
If that makes sense.
Yeah.
No.
Absolutely.
It does.
Um, one of the things that I know you covered in the book is the customer voice.
Talk to me about this concept.
What is the customer voice and why is that important? Yeah.
So we we see a lot in our in our a in our daily lives, like the deluge of there's media and there's influencers and these all these moving pieces.
And a lot of it just is so clearly there to make you believe a certain thing or work a certain way or convert instead of really being useful for trust.
And so as we're seeing more and more technology, we're seeing more and more companies enter the market space, and everything kinda feels like a red ocean right now.
When we think about differentiator and we think about who we trust, the brand's gonna tell you they're great because they need you to believe they're great so you'll pay the money for their product or service.
The customer though, the voice of the customer, you're gonna be more likely to trust, even if you don't know them.
Like, if you've ever made an online purchase, but you looked at reviews first, you don't necessarily know who those reviews are from.
You don't know who they are.
You don't know whatever that looks like.
So you want to make sure that you are really amplifying and celebrating and also listening more than anything else is you are listening to the voice of the customer.
What are they saying about you good, bad, ugly? How do they feel about you? And is it a situation where they're happy, but they could love you? Because a lot of brands are chasing this kind of, like, random cult status.
Everyone wants fandom.
Like, being a fan has become its own kind of aesthetic in our in our marketing space, and brands want that.
Like, they want hard core devoted fans.
The problem is is that they don't give them anything that's fan worthy.
They wanna do the bare minimum, but they wanna be loved and returned.
And that's just not how that works.
And so a lot of the book is talking about how you need to embrace the voice customer, you need to listen unapologetically.
You need to listen being prepared to get your, like, your feelings hurt because you need to know what they're saying, what they're thinking, because they are they are the real influencers.
They are the people that people really believe when they decide whether or not they're gonna go with you or they're gonna go with somebody else.
And so the voice of the customer is priceless.
And that's that's data you don't have to mind for.
That's focus groups.
You don't have to do.
That's market research.
You don't have to, like, pay millions of dollars for? Like, it still boggles my mind how so many companies will essentially hire a firm and say, like, I need, like, I'm gonna pay you a million dollars for a deck.
Tell us what we don't know.
Your voice of the customer, your customers that are, like, passionately against you for you or kind of in the middle, they will tell you all of that for free without bias without without having to pay them a million dollars for a deck.
Like, you can make the deck out of whatever your findings are if you just listen.
But it really comes down to what is the voice of the customer saying, and then also the byproduct of that.
How many people are listening and trusting and determining how they see your company based on what those people are saying.
It's absolutely priceless.
And a lot of companies are not using it effectively.
Yeah.
You talk about this in the book.
Social listening.
And, you know, I I used to work for a company where we would do these focus groups.
We would bring people in and we would talk to them, and that was how we got the feedback.
And you got the feedback of the small group, and you sort of hoped that that was representative of the larger group, and maybe you would follow-up with the survey.
But we're now in a world where you have these tools where, like you said, people are talking all the time if you know how to listen.
Right? Absolutely.
Talk a little bit about how brands should be listening.
A lot of brands are reactive.
They are paying attention to who adds them.
They're waiting until someone said something negative and get tagged enough times or it becomes a negative thing.
And then they they they literally wait until it's a PR crisis, and then all of a sudden they're listening.
We see you.
We hear you.
And it's like, you should've been doing that to begin with.
You could've hit this before it went viral.
You could've been proactive in taking care of it.
And so the brands that really want to make a dent and understand what their customers are saying, what they're feeling, and how that's impacting the sentiment around their brand, they need to have an understanding of their customers from, like, just a laser focus.
How do they talk about you? What kind of words do they use? We talk a lot about, like, keywords and SEO and what hashtags to use, but we should be thinking about how do your customers actually talk about you? If you're a shoe brand and you're doing you're looking for tennis shoes, but your customers say sneakers, you're not gonna get the data.
You're not gonna get the pull of information that you need.
So you need to understand what kind of keywords would they use? What kind of questions would they ask? How are they using AI? Or are they using TikTok? Like, more and more people are using AI and TikTok is like their search engine.
Okay.
Great.
But what words are they using? Have you searched yourself through AI and through TikTok to see what comes up? Are you following the footsteps of your customers to see how you show up when they are actively trying to look for you or look for your product or service? You need to be doing that social listening, you need to incorporate those findings into these are the kind of mentions we need to be keeping up for.
Do we use a tool? If so, what's our budget for that? How many, like, how many times would we think this would capture? How many mentions are we thinking about for these keywords? Because that's also gonna impact your budget because a lot of the tools that they use is based off of mentions and, like, how much traffic they're pulling.
So what does that look like? But, also, you need to remember who these people are.
A lot of times, I'll see social listening set up.
And the one thing they wanna do is they wanna a social listen for their competitors.
Like, that's fine, but why would you focus on the competitors, but not focus on your customers? Like, you're looking at the wrong audience.
You're you're targeting the wrong people.
And because you're doing that, you're gonna be reactive to your competitor, not reactive or proactive, more importantly, to your customers.
So you need to be setting yourself up for success.
And in the book, I set up a plan for how do you build that social listening structure? How do you start setting it what steps do you need to take? What do you need to think about? But you need to have a very, very proactive understanding of why social listening is important and what tools are available to you because it's video now.
It's not just text.
So you need to be looking at, like, it what tools are you using? Can they pull from video? Can they recognize your logo in a video and be able to alert you that way? What are the options that you're thinking about? Because video content's not going anywhere.
It's gonna continue to proliferate.
And so if you're thinking that I should just be posting and, like, mentioning, like, actual written out mentions of us, you're gonna miss out on a lot of intel and a lot of intel that people are watching.
And paying attention to.
So let's talk about where community fits into this strategy because when you're doing social listening, it sounds like you're talking about listening to people where they already are, the where those customers may already be gathering.
Um, when you set out to build a community, what we're really talking about is creating a space where they can gather.
Yes.
Does that help make that social listening easier? And is that why we're doing it? You know, where what is the relationship there? Yeah.
So on and when you're building a community, whether it's closed or open or whatever tool you're using for that, you should absolutely be having some kind of social, um, some kind of like social listening or community intelligence, probably is probably the better term for this.
You need to have some kind of community intelligence to see what people are saying.
But you have to understand that the way that they show up in a community that is owned by a brand or facilitated or set up by a brand is gonna be very different.
Than how they show up on their own personal accounts.
They might let's say that you have an advocate for a brand, they're a champion or ambassador, or whatever whatever kind of moniker they call themselves.
And let's say that they They are very angry about something that happened with the brand.
But because they have privileges or perks because of who they are as an ambassador, they are probably more likely to not say anything publicly negative about what happened, but they might if they're in a closed community where they know that not everyone can see it.
So maybe they're in a pavilion or maybe they are in an exit live, where they know they're in more of a closed off space, so it's not gonna be accessible to everybody.
They're gonna be a bit more candid versus they're not gonna go on LinkedIn and blast you because they know that that they would essentially risk their placement and all the perks that they have.
And so You not only need to think about where they are and what they're saying, but you need to think about how that behavior could shift based off of where that community intelligence is coming from.
And so understanding all the different community that your person could be a part of, and what that looks like is huge.
And so one of the things I talk about in the book is behavioral psychology.
You need to have a very clear understanding of behavioral psychology and why people do what they do.
And one of the things I see over and over again is the lack of psychological safety.
Now psychological safety is kind of blown up in the past, especially from, like, an employer, an employee experience perspective where, like, you wanna have psychological safety at work and all these other things.
You need to have the same psychological safety in a community and with your customers because of this exact thing.
Because if I am fearful that I will be penalized, if I am honest with you, if I don't say anything but glowing things, that I am less likely to tell you the truth when what you absolutely need to fix the problem is the truth.
Same thing with those focus groups.
How many of the people in that focus group may be your ICP key, but their actual motivation is the gift card that they get for being in the focus group.
So they're gonna give you the shortest answers because they wanna get in and out.
They just want the gift card and they wanna go.
That doesn't necessarily mean that what they're giving you is high value.
It doesn't necessarily mean that what they're telling you is a full truth.
They're telling you what the bare minimum they need to provide in order to get the benefit to them, which is deeply transactional.
And so thinking about how we show up with people, how we talk to them, how we incentivize them to tell the truth, not what we wanna hear, but what we need to hear, is deeply necessary for brands to really capture true relationship and have the psych having the psychological safety to do that is important.
And in the community space, we talk a lot about lurkers or passive members of the community.
And we talk about how, like, basically, how can we poke in broad them and kind of encourage them to to join and do more.
But what we don't talk about is how we need to create emotional and psychological safety for them.
So if it's, hey, I don't wanna be the person that's perceived is always asking stupid questions.
Or I'm afraid that if I ask this question, no one's gonna respond to me.
I'll just get ignored or, like, a plethora of different ways of why they don't wanna act.
If you have lurkers or passive members of your community and you're thinking about How can I push them instead of how can I emotionally and psychologically make it safe for them to do something, then you were asking the wrong question? You need to think about, basically, from a behavioral psychology perspective, how can I make it easier, safer and better for them? How can I really incentivize them to take that first step and be more involved and engage in the community? Yeah.
And I would imagine safety looks different depending on the type of community you have.
You know, I mean, there's communities example, something like an alcoholic's anonymous where Yes.
Anonymity, uh, I mean, it's right there in the name of the of the group.
It becomes really important.
Whereas it's not as important in other communities.
Um, you know, we had, uh, on my other podcast, I I talked to somebody who was running a center that allows teens to get involved in the music industry and psychological safety in that case meant making sure that the parents aren't necessarily in the room because they don't feel comfortable getting up on stage in performing if they know that mom is standing in the back of the room.
And so it's a little bit different depending on the the community.
Right? It absolutely is.
Like, like, with most things in life, it depends.
And so that's why it's so deeply important to do the research and to understand who is like, who are you actually building this for? And are you building with them and having them be involved in the process so that you have that understanding? Because we each have different motivators.
We have different pulls for us in our life.
Like, we all contain multitudes, but then we want us all to fix like, push this person into a box and say, this is their avatar.
This is what they do.
This is how I motivate them.
And then you talk to them and do a customer interview, and you realize you got it all wrong.
We base so much on assumptions when what we should be doing is doing that social listening doing customer interviews and really kinda seeing, like, what does this actually look like for you? So when I when I joined HubSpot, one of the and I was able to announce, one of the first things I did was I wrote a tweet in a LinkedIn post saying, If you are a fan of HubSpot, I wanna talk to you.
I want you to slide into my DMs.
I I wanna learn more about you.
And I asked them questions.
And I didn't ask them the norm, like, so how long have you been using our product? And what? I asked when was the last time that you felt loved by us? When was the last time that you felt, like, we saw you? Like, we, like, you got something really cool out of this relationship.
Like, when was the last time? And it makes them see things very differently.
It's not the traditional.
How would you rate us from one to five stars? Like, it doesn't tell you the nuance.
And I feel like in a world of efficiency, we have completely lost the art of nuance, and you don't understand the nuance unless you're actually getting to know these people, hence the relationship.
Yeah.
So You used the word there that I love, which is Brandham, obviously a combination of brand and and fandom.
And I get how people might evangelize about their sneakers or their car or things like that.
Does this concept apply to all brands? I mean, what about things just like batteries? Where I just I need batteries, and I'm not passionate about standard batteries.
Uh, you know, maybe some people are, and I'm not judging.
But does it apply to everybody, or does this only apply to a certain type of brand.
I think it really depends on the type of product or service that you're providing, but it absolutely can.
I think batteries are a great example.
So when I think of batteries, because I'm a millennial, I think of the energizer bunny.
Like, that is my immediate thing.
And so what that does is I immediately have brand recall because it's not a bunny.
It's the energizer bunny.
And it keeps going and going and going.
So I also have a tagline that's gonna make me have trust and believe, well, I need a battery, but if I need a battery that's gonna laugh, is gonna keep going, I'm more likely to pick the energizer bunny.
And so when I'm looking for things and you were thinking about a brand, um, that would probably have, like, that isn't necessarily brandon, but you could get there.
So they're the majority of the people are not gonna be, like, a devoted battery person.
But there are gonna be niche groups of people that absolutely are devoted and a part of their personality and a part of how they self identify is what they choose and what they don't choose.
So you could have that friend that, like, that friend is never gonna get the dollar store version of anything, or they're only gonna want a brand name because they they immediately assume that if it's a brand name that there is a higher quality, it's like associated with that whether that's true or not.
And so it doesn't work necessarily for everybody, but there is gonna be a niche group of people where, like, that is the brand that they associate with because they've never had a bad circumstance or a situation with them, but also they associate that with this is a part of who I am.
What does buying the more expensive battery say about me as a person? And that's where you start kind of flirting with the brand of space.
Because when someone is a part of a brand, um, Apple is a really great example of this.
And I think with the news of the new iPhone, I think it's I think it's, like, a walking case study in Brandon and what can break it because and I'm gonna have to write this because I've been thinking about it, like, all week.
But when it comes down to it, people associate their love of Apple with who they are.
It is it it's a shortcut.
It's a cheat code into how they think, how they spend their money, what kind how they feel about technology, what kind of quality of things that they like, what bubble is on their phone, all of these things.
But those brandoms can be fractured based off of if it hits something that is a not negotiable for the customer.
So it could be like, I just bought my phone a year ago.
What do you mean there's a new one? It could be there's absolutely no way I'm gonna spend $2,000 on a phone.
Are you absolutely kidding me? Or it could be, who told you to make an orange one? Like, why was that the choice? Like, it could be weird, but we all like I said earlier, we we contain multitudes.
We all have triggers and non negotiables, even if we, like, know them in that moment, or they have to be triggered for us to to realize it.
But there are brandoms where it becomes a part of who you are.
It's I would only play Tar that is this brand.
I would only play a piano that is that.
I only listen to music on such and such.
I would only buy this this kind of purse, or I only stay with this kind of hotel or this kind of airline.
And airlines, you see this especially.
It's the the airline that never lets them down or the airline that if something bad happens, they they're they give them more patience.
They give them more lenience to fix the problem because this is their ride or die.
This is their go to, and this is probably just an outlier versus, ugh, every time I ride and such, there's always a delay.
And so you wind up being a different person behaviorally when it's the brand that you that you are devoted to versus the one that you would just occasionally use.
You have a lot more patience with the brand you love.
You have a lot more forgiveness um, but it also means you get louder for better, for worse because you are passionate.
Marvel.
Great example of that is Marvel has devoted fans, but they are also, like, the meanest the the meanest people to Marvel are Marvel fans.
It's like, it's not an out the DC fans are not are not creating the hate, the way Marvel fans are.
So it it's kind of that give and take.
So, uh, you know, and I I love this concept of social identity that you're talking about where people are are saying something about themselves by associating themselves with brands.
Um, let me ask about what we mean when we talk about communities because in the digital space, uh, sometimes what we're talking about in communities are essentially crowd sourced knowledge forums, right, places where, um, I go because I can find information, and it, you know, the company can either decide that they're gonna hire a million customer support people and answer every single ticket individually or they can just all throw us in a group.
And so when my inkjet printer breaks and I'm trying to figure out why, I can just find the answer.
Um, but there isn't necessarily a sense of belonging there.
And I know that you talk about the importance of a sense of belonging when it comes to building this random.
Can you talk a little bit about that and why that's so important? Yeah.
Absolutely.
So I think support communities are necessary.
I think there's definitely for either budgetary reasons or safety or for whatever that looks like, it does create a needed piece.
It would I would probably associate it with, like, I love Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
And the second layer, so you have, like, the survival layer, then you have the safety layer.
A safe a safety layer piece would absolutely be a support community.
So you basically have other outlets in order to get help so that when something bad happens, the community as and the company itself has set up multiple ways for you to get help.
Knowing that like nothing's perfect, things are gonna happen, but we're here for you in multiple ways.
You can choose.
The problem with that is that that is such a such a very, like, surface level approach to community.
And so if you have a support community, I think that's great.
But I would encourage you to do so much more than that.
And so there's other ways that you could be a part of it.
So let's say that you build a support community and you want it to be deeper.
You're like, Christina, you're right.
But how do I even do that? How can you get people in in a more engaged place within that community? So for example, let's say that you've created a system where people ask questions and some people go in there and they they give the answer.
The habit loops for that are pretty slim.
They're not really you really only have, like, two major use cases.
You have the asker and the savior.
You have the asker who comes in there.
They're only gonna go in there when they have a question.
And then they get their question and then they leave.
And then you have the savior who wants to come in there, wants to be the helper.
They wanna come in there.
They're gonna look for people who can, who can answer questions, they can answer questions.
And either they do this out of narcissism, they just wanna feel like the smartest person in the room, and I have all the answers, Reddit is a great example of that.
There's a lot of saviors.
I'm smarter than you people on Reddit.
It it thrives on that kind of energy.
There's also people who are like, hey, I had this exact same problem, and I don't want anyone else to have the headache I had because it was horrible.
Here's the answer.
Like, this is my good deed for the day.
But those are the real, like, habit loops you have in that system, which doesn't really encourage, like you said, belonging.
I don't really belong in a place.
I'm just this is a this is an interactive FAQ.
Not not much more than that.
But what if you turned that into an ideas for them? Like Legos done this, where they recreated a space where now you can offer up ideas for what kind of future sets you would like.
Or maybe it could be like, hey, I have this problem.
But instead of me just, like, trying to get an answer, why can't I talk to your product team? Or why can't I talk to someone in support and say, like, this shouldn't be a problem if you had this feature.
Why can't you build this feature that fixes this.
So, like, no one needs to have this question again because it's resolved.
You've you've now created a new feature that not only solves this problem, but also increases the value of your product or service.
Now that's just something else you can sell to people.
Like, that's a win win for everybody.
Great.
But then you can get into, like, alright.
Well, what does that look like at scale? Do we have a customer advisory board? Do we have a part where they're able to engage with what a future road map could look like for the brand? What does that look like? And so what you're doing is you're taking people from I'm gonna ask questions or I'm gonna answer questions and leave to I'm actually gonna get invested in this.
I'm actually gonna I'm actually gonna give ideas.
I'm gonna give I'm gonna give my thoughts and I'm gonna actually make the product better, not by asking questions, not by answering questions, but by being proactive and going to the next step of, well, what would be really cool is if we actually have this.
And a lot of times in support groups, you'll not only see people give an idea.
They'll tell you how they would build it.
Like, they'll tell you exactly how they would ship it.
I saw this a lot at HubSpot, where they would go in there and be like, this is what I would do if this was possible.
Here's how I would build it.
And they don't, like, necessarily, like, copy and paste code.
But they kinda walk you through the process of, like, this is how I think it would work mechanically and how we could make that become a thing.
Now imagine if product looks at that, sees that and was like, you know what? That's a really brilliant idea.
And I like how they did that.
We'd just probably tweak it a little bit based off of, like, how we develop things.
And then what I'm gonna do is we're gonna ship it, but we're gonna tell this person, and we're gonna celebrate them because this was their idea.
And this exists because of them.
So we're gonna give them their flower.
First.
And that person is gonna tell every person they have ever met for the rest of their lives.
That is their child now.
That that feature that you shipped is their is their first born child.
They're gonna show it to everybody.
They're gonna take pictures of it.
They're gonna put it on social media.
It's gonna be the best campaign you've ever run.
You've paid absolutely no money for it.
They're gonna tell everybody.
And you know who's gonna believe them? Everybody, because they are the voice of the customer.
And they're gonna they're not only gonna see that you fix the problem They're gonna see that you listened to the customer.
They're gonna see that you celebrated the customer, and then the people who are on the fence of whether or not they should be a customer of yours are gonna expect that treatment.
Wow.
With I'm where I'm currently am, the CSM barely gets back to me and doesn't answer any of my questions.
And this company, their competitor, they not only solved the problem, but they created a new feature to make sure that problem never happened again, and they gave that person their credit.
Wow.
I wonder what that would ever happen to me.
I wonder if they would treat me like that.
And so that's what's really interesting too about social listening like we've talked about is you're not the only people seeing this.
People are seeing this.
And if you treat your customers badly or you ignore them, there's gonna future or potential customers in the chat that are watching this, thinking that if they become a customer, they're gonna be treated the exact same way for better, for worse.
And that will absolutely be a part of their decision making process.
What's so fascinating about that? And perhaps a little counterintuitive is essentially people are coming into the space to take something.
They need something.
Yes.
And you're making them a giver.
They they wind up giving something.
And ironically, in the act of giving something, you get a lot more, but but also so do they.
So Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And so what you wanna do and it all comes back to that psychological safety.
If you create a space where you can both thrive and you can both win, then people are gonna be more likely to give.
If there's if there's a problem, and that's one of the issues I have with gamification, is that when gamification is used and it feels like a zero sum game, people will play until they realize they can't win.
And then once they realize can't win.
There's no incentive to give.
And they will start slowing down.
We'll stop engaging.
It's just one of the major problems with gamification.
I'm not anti gamification, but I am anti.
It's gonna fix all your problems.
It's gonna solve all your boo boos.
Like, it's just not It's just not.
Yeah.
Well, that leaves right into your bad advice.
So let's take a look.
Uh, we should just use gamification to hit our numbers.
Talk to me a little bit more about that.
I mean, you've touched on that, but, uh, first of all, for anybody who's not familiar with gamification, explain what it is and specifically, you know, how it can be used correctly or incorrectly in community building.
Absolutely.
So depending on what your community is built on or what it looks like, you will have incentives to be able to encourage people to do more.
And this can be badges.
It can be points.
It can be a leader board.
It could be, like, if there's, like, likes versus down votes, all of these things.
But it's basically your dopamine farming your community members into engaging.
And it will absolutely work for some people It will absolutely work.
It will be just enough of a carrot for someone who is in there, but may not necessarily wanna engage to engage because they want that new badge or they want those points or they wanna do whatever.
The problem with that is that is kind of sounds transactional, doesn't it? Doesn't that kinda sound transactional? If you do this, then you do that.
And you and I both know that great community doesn't feel transactional.
It feels relational.
And so what you wind up doing is as as community has continued to grow.
And I'm a firm believer.
Community is not something that, like, yes, it has its hype cycles.
But community has been around since we were in caves trying to, like, come together to hunt so we weren't killed individually.
Like, it is an ancestral need.
For survival, for connection, for relationships, for livelihood, for all these things.
That being said, as the corporate space has discovered community over the past, like, two decades, it's been commodified quite significantly.
And so people want specifically leadership, they want community to give us numbers.
They want leadership to return certain things.
There needs to be an ROI on, like, how much support, like, revenue have been we've been able to defer based on this? How many support calls were we able to eliminate because of this? What efficiency were we able to drive? How many members do we have? And I'm not saying KPIs are bad.
KPIs are not bad.
But when you do the work with the with the pure need to hit the numbers, then you've lost what community is all about.
And that's when you see community managers getting burned out.
That's when you see communities not working when you see engagement slipping because the community managers and the people running that community daily are having to do things to push the needle knowing full well that that's not how humans work, that that's not how we're actually gonna get people to special and feel like they belong.
We're it's gonna feel like we're asking favors or we're telling them to do things versus, hey, it'd be really cool if we could, like, have this event or we could connect or we could do all these things.
And so I've had this advice, like, that they treated gamification like it was mandated.
We'll just use gamification.
Like, we'll hit our numbers.
We'll just use gamification.
The worst advice I've ever gotten because it doesn't work for everybody.
It it is transactional in nature.
And as soon as the gamification, whatever dopamine it's giving, whatever incentive it's giving is not worth the ask or is not worth the time that is required for that task, then people are shutting down.
And so we talk about leaderboards.
Leader boards are great until they're not.
There's gonna be people who would literally run a marathon for you.
But once they realize they're not gonna win, they stop.
There's gonna be the Pokemon collectors.
There's a there's a subsection of humans that they have this, like, need for to collect.
And so they want the badges for the sake of the badges.
The badges could be useless.
It doesn't matter.
They just want the badges.
Until I just I don't know.
I think I have enough.
I think I'm fine.
There's there's not really I'm not really actually gaining anything about this, and so they stop.
And so if you have not created any real reason to be a part of this bigger space, then what you have done is you've conditioned them to only do things for a treat.
And this is gonna be a bit controversial, so I apologize in advance, but it needs to be said.
But if you ask, ask customers to do something and you give them a little treat for doing it, you do that to your dogs.
You do that to your dogs.
You do that to your pets.
Are you treating your customers like your pets? I think it's a question worth asking because some people will know that and be like, I don't wanna be treated like a dog.
You know, I've been in that situation where I have seen these leader boards in certain communities that I'm in.
And You know, I I don't know how to explain it, but I was like, I was like, that's not what I'm here for.
I don't care about that.
Exactly.
And the people who are genuinely wanna give, they actually get distracted by that.
Because they don't wanna be perceived.
Like, I'm a helper.
I don't wanna be perceived as someone who's rocking a point so I can say I'm at the top of the leader board.
I just wanna help.
And so it's it go it always goes back to site to that that behavioral psychology of, like, what is actually the reason why they're there, what do they hope to gain from this? What do they hope to give? Like, and what is the final four? And that's why I really like Maslow's hierarchy of needs and using that for customers and community members instead of just relying on gamification because When you look at that, you are giving them intangible things that actually change them, transform them.
And I believe, like, great communities can support you.
They can help you.
But, like, the communities that you really wanna be a part of, the communities that you can't wait to go in there and see your people, they transform you.
They help you become your higher self.
They help you self actualize at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy.
And so this is alright.
Well, did someone in your community get a job that they never would've had a chance to get because they were able to network and meet people and learn things in your community? Where they given an opportunity to speak at a workshop, and now they get to do talks around the world, or were they were they able to, um, were they able to get opportunities to go to events that they never would have gotten? And so a lot of times we think that, like, I've I've seen so many brands.
They think that, like, the peak of love is sending swag.
And they use swag kind of the same way that a lot of brands use gamification.
They think it will solve all their problems, but it doesn't.
It has diminishing returns.
Nothing is gonna feel like the first hit.
Nothing is going to smell and feel and just like, make you feel as loved as that first hoodie or that first mug.
And so when you continue to give them swag, it doesn't become like, oh, look what they gave me.
It becomes like, that's just what they do.
They just give me, like, a box once a quarter to thank me for being customer versus that first time they gave it to you.
And you were just like, you wanna tell everybody how special it was.
You know, swag is something that I spoke to Charles Vogle, who wrote the Art of Community about.
And and Yep.
We talk about how it's important to imbue it with meaning that it's gotta be a symbol.
It's gotta be a token of something, a token of the relationship, not just just something that's valuable.
So let me ask a lot of these online communities have gamification features, these online platforms built in.
Um, is it your advice that people should be very cautious with those and when should they turn on those features and start using them? I think a leader board isn't necessary for a small community.
It actually doesn't make a lot of sense.
It's like we're gonna we're gonna we're only gonna have five people race, but we're only gonna celebrate, like, the top three.
Like, that alienates people really quickly.
I think a leader board is great when you have, like, a large amount of community members.
And because that, that kind of, like, helps people self select.
Like, oh, these are the most engaged.
These are probably the people that are solving the most problem.
And so for that case, that could be a situation where, especially if it's a support community.
I like leader boards where it's based off of, like, how many solutions they've given because that's you're basically, I you're you're you're identifying the helpers.
And so that leader board isn't just to, like, celebrate them, but it's also a signal to new members.
Like, hey, if you have a question, these are, like, the top five people who help.
So that's probably, like, a good person to start with.
So it it means multiple things.
If your leader board is just there to incentivize people to do more, I would argue you need to come up with a deeper reason for why that's there and what is that leader board actually signaling in order to do that? I do agree with you that it needs to have meaning and that meaning needs to grow and you need to understand the diminishing returns of that.
So for example, let's say that on Valentine's Day, every single year, you give your wife red roses.
That's it.
Nothing else.
And let's say that, like, there's no deeper meaning in the red roses, it's just, everyone gets red roses on Valentine's Day, so that's what we do.
And you do that every single year.
It doesn't take long for that just to be a ritual, but it just be like, well, that's what we do.
And the ritual thing becomes less special.
It just becomes a part of your daily life.
So, like, you need rituals and you need meaning.
But if you can get them to be imbued in both, that's where you're gonna have power.
And so, for example, every time I travel, I get a snow globe for my daughter.
Every time.
And it's a ritual.
She knows that if I go somewhere new, I'm gonna get her snow globe.
The differences and the meaning is is that she knows that that's not something I can easily get.
I have like, make sure I have enough time in the airport.
Also make sure the airport even has something.
If not, I'm gonna have to, like, get to figure out something else.
But it also means she's gonna get these different kind of keepsakes of my journey.
So wherever I was, a part of her was with me, and I wanted her with me there.
And since I couldn't take her there, I brought a little piece of where I went back to her.
So it means more.
And as brands and as community people, we need to think about what we are setting up for people to build that relationship.
And so when was the last time you as a community manager asked how people's day was, not because it was a prompt, not because it was a Monday, not because, like, but, like, you genuinely just wanted to know.
You genuinely just wanted to care.
Find that the community managers that do the best job, it's not because they have a spreadsheet.
It's not because they have a checklist.
It's not because they have the shiniest tech.
It's that they genuinely care about the people in that community, and so they show up for them naturally.
They don't need to be told.
I need to do a check-in.
They genuinely show up and say, like, hey, you've been quiet for a past couple weeks.
I just wanted to check on you, make sure you're okay.
Not because they got an alert saying that, like, that person's engagement was down, but because they literally live and breathe in that space, they saw the absence.
They literally saw the absence of that person.
And we're like, I hope everything is okay.
And so it it always goes back to the human.
It always goes back to how are you showing up, not because you were told to, not because it's in best practices, because because you actually thought about that person.
And I would argue if you are a customer or you are a brand, when was the last time you showed up for people without a CTA? Was the last time you showed up, not because you had to sell anything, not because you needed them to sign up for an event, but because you genuinely just wanted to check on them.
I think if we started doing more of that, like, we can use AI to drive efficiency to the moon.
But, like, with all the time that that's saving us, How are we showing up more human to say, like, I was thinking about you.
I noticed I haven't been seeing you in the community.
Is everything okay? Just wanted to check.
Like, it's it's those little things, and that's what actually builds relationships.
It's not the big it's not the big box of swag.
It's not the number one on the leader board.
It's the little tiny moments, and it's it's just like any other relationship.
It's the they were there for me when I didn't even need to ask for it.
They showed up and and picked up the call when I didn't even give them a heads up on what I was calling about.
They showed up for me without a CTA.
That's that's crucial.
That's what you need to be doing for your community.
Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense.
Give me give me an example of somebody who's doing gamification right, and and tell me a little bit about why you think it's being done right in that case.
Honestly, I think Reddit is probably doing gamification in the best way because they have, like, the more the more, um, the more posts you make.
You can get, like, different, like, likes, down votes, all these other things, but you can also get other badges that kinda signal who you are.
And just like we talked about gamification and, like, a leader board, like, determining who are the best people, there's little tags that will show up on certain people.
So, like, I love vintage watches.
So I'm in the cartier and vintage watch subreddits probably more often than I should be.
But it's such a learning atmosphere for me.
I absolutely love those subreddits.
And when I see someone say something that is apps feels like very, like, I don't think that's right.
If they have, like, number one contributor, I'm I my immediate thought is, oh, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, and they're absolutely right versus if it's just some nobody that doesn't have a tag.
And so Reddit, I love Reddit.
I think there's a lot of information there, like most platforms that that have, like, large amounts of people, it is as toxic as you as you've looked for.
It's deeply toxic.
It's deeply narcissistic.
But there are some of the most brilliant people in that thing.
You just need to know where to look.
And you need to know, like, alright, that's not my person or that person, I'd I definitely wanna make sure I'm following so I can, like, learn more.
But also brands, brands have learned, like, social listening on Reddit.
Like, the the one of the best things that you could do if you wanted to ask a question was put your question and put Reddit behind it because chances are someone has had that exact same problem.
If that if someone has ever had that problem before, it is on Reddit somewhere.
Like, you just gotta, like, search through the through all the mess to find it.
And so I think Reddit does a really good job because it incentivizes people the right way.
It recognizes the people who are, like, yep, you've done enough.
Like, you're clearly an expert.
We're gonna designate you as such.
And so when you see that person writing stuff, you're more likely to credence.
Like, I immediately believe someone significantly more than nobody, uh, a nobody post when it comes down to if it says they're like a number one contributor or anything like that.
And then you're able to see their other posts and see, like, what other kind of contributions they've given.
So I do for, like, the people that it's a part of, I think I think the gamification that Reddit has is perfect for its ICP.
I think it's absolutely perfect.
It incentivizes in the right way, and it's very clear what you need to do to kinda, like, like, go up that ladder.
But also the amount of, like, energy and time and solutions you have to do to even get up that ladder to be one of those, like, top contributors is pretty vast.
Like, you're you're invested.
You are head easily invested.
And so if you were just kind of like casually going in there to try to gamification to try to game the system, it wouldn't work as it wouldn't work as well.
You you really have to invest if you wanna if you wanna be a part of that in a deep level.
Well, what I'm noticing in what you're saying and the way you're describing it is that the gamification is aligned with that concept of social identity that you were talking about earlier Yeah.
That, you know, people want to say something about themselves by the the groups that they're members of and the products that they associate with.
And They are able to do that with the gamification.
They aren't doing gamification just to check a box and say, yes, we're doing gamification or to ratchet up the numbers like you said.
Um, well, this has to have a deeper part.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is fascinating.
I could talk to you about this forever, but, let me ask you one last question, and this is a final question that I ask everybody.
Make a prediction.
Five years from now in the community space.
What do you think we're gonna be talking about? I think we're gonna still be talking about the deeper, more ancestral parts of community.
I think we're gonna still talk about third places.
I think third places are still pretty pretty much under attack.
We're seeing more and more, um, smaller groups and hangouts being disturbed and turned into things that are, like, commodified like concerts right now or impossible to go to the way they were, like, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago.
And so a lot of the third places are still being eroded.
And so third places, as a community function, are still gonna be highly valued.
I think as AI advances, I think offline community is gonna become even more priceless because we're gonna we're gonna gravitate towards the real.
We're gonna want to know who these people are.
I think we're also gonna go just kind of like how we went from, like, macro influencers to micro influencers being more of a thing.
I think we're gonna see macro community versus micro community becoming more of a thing and more people wanting to become a part of micro.
And it being a gatekeeper keeping kind of functionality because we want to be a part of smaller groups.
A lot of us that have been a part of communities or have been working in the community space know this.
The the goal of community for most brands is they want it to be they obviously, they want, like, either, like, revenue, like, kind of, like, optioned off.
And, like, we were able to save this amount of money because of so and so.
But they also want scale.
They want community at scale, which is great until you hit a point where the community feels significantly more noisy.
And it doesn't feel as intimate.
You don't see kind of like the main usual suspects you used to see and hang out with and talk to.
And so I think that we are gonna see a push more towards micro communities and gatekeeping functionality because we want those, like, private, essentially, like, the group chat.
We're gonna see the group chat, like, take the center stage of, like, this is what I actually wanna, like, this is what I actually like about community.
This is what I wanna be a part of.
You're gonna start seeing Well, cool.
Well, I can't wait to find out.
Um, congratulations again on the book.
Uh, it's absolutely fantastic.
Um, is there a particular place you're sending people to go to it? You can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.
Uh, you can also go to my publisher Cokin page and find a copy there.
But it's anywhere where books are sold, and it's, um, in hardcover, soft cover, as well as Kindle.
So would love to would love to see what people think about it.
Awesome.
It is called transforming customer brand relationships.
Christina, thank you so much, and congratulations again.
Thanks for having me.
Uh-uh
