Hello, and welcome to Bad Community Advice.
I'm your host.
My name is Seth Resler, and this is the show where I invite community professionals on.
To talk about their terrible tips and toxic takeaways.
We get the worst advice they have ever received.
We talk about why it doesn't work and what you should do instead.
And today, we're gonna talk about ROI.
This is a really important topic in the world of community building, my guest helps brands engage their customers to increase satisfaction lower costs and generate more revenue through the power of community.
He's recently worked with companies like Airbnb, DocuSign, Greenhouse, HubSpot, techstars, and anymore.
Uh, he is also the cohost of a fantastic podcast.
I've learned a ton from it.
It's called in before the lock, uh, as well as the founder of the Community Strategy Academy.
Please welcome Brian Oblinger.
Hi, Brian.
How are you? Hey, Seth.
How you doing? Good.
Thank you for taking the time.
I really appreciate you being here.
I have learned so much from you and and all the stuff that you put out.
You're a regular speaker on the community circuit.
Uh, you've got a lot of fantastic material out there.
So it's so great to be here and get your insight, particularly on this topic, uh, ROI, and and we're gonna dive into that in just a moment.
But before we do, uh, I wanted to ask, you know, I kinda wanna level set here because you deal with a lot of enterprise communities, a lot of large organizations, uh, you know, I'm guessing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of members, probably things that are built on platforms.
Uh, for example, something a game site or a Chorus that is really built for that kind of volume, uh, and and I imagine that you're usually talking to people who have a title like community manager.
They may even have an entire community team.
This podcast is not necessarily that audience.
This is folks who may not know that there is a job title called community manager.
They are very much at the beginning of their community building journey.
They may be content creators or event producers thinking about How do I, uh, build a community with dozens or hundreds or or maybe thousands of people? They may be looking at platforms like mighty networks or circle or heartbeat or even things like, uh, uh, Facebook groups, discord, slack, uh, you know, stuff like that.
Um, so I wanted to start by asking, to what extent, uh, are the principles of community building common, and they don't matter the size it it, you know, there's certain universal principles.
And to what extent, uh, are they different? Are there factors that you need to consider where, you know, maybe when you're building a larger community, you're doing something a little bit different than what you might be doing if you're building a smaller community? Yeah.
I I think it's absolutely a critical point and I'm glad we're covering it.
Um, I would say that maybe 70 to 80% of, you know, best practices or, um, principles, whatever you wanna call them.
I think travel well across types of communities, industries, verticals, you know, audiences, whatever the cases might be.
It's really that extra to 30%, I think, that changes somewhat, uh, or even drastically depending on the type of community you're building, who you're building it for, the platform you're on.
And I often remind people, and I'm glad you called it You know, I do work primarily with, um, like enterprise type companies, although I've worked with everything across the board that you could imagine, um, that it's important to sort of cite where your advice is coming from and who it's for and where it's applicable.
Um, because oftentimes you'll see folks say, oh, well, I did this, you know, in my nonprofit community or my slacker discord channel with, you know, a 100 people in it.
And then the next sentence is like and this is the only way to build community, and you have to do the same thing in enterprise where there's 500,000 members in the community.
And that's it just couldn't be further from the truth.
A lot of those strategies and tactics, you know, don't travel well and aren't really and the other way too.
Right? Like a lot of us enterprise folks are like, this is the only way to do it.
And, you know, um, and I I I think it's important to acknowledge that we use this word community, but that can mean so many different things to different people, which is why, you know, in the consulting world, we always use the the dreaded phrase.
It depends so much because it does really depend, you know, what you're trying to do and you definitely take all the advice, uh, with a grain of salt and make sure it's applicable to your your situation before you run off and, you know, do it.
One of my biggest questions in this area is, you know, often with smaller communities, we are trying to create a sense of belonging to facilitate connections between the members.
Are you doing that in an enterprise community when you've got that many people, uh, or is it really just about sort of transactional, uh, you know, knowledge change, if you will.
Yeah.
I think we're always trying to create some sort of, you know, relationships to people affinity for each other, um, you know, belonging, whatever, whatever terms you wanna use.
But I think you do it in in very different ways.
Um, and I think the order of operations is different.
So for example, you're right that in a lot of, let's call them B2B SaaS, you know, kind of support or customer success communities, the transactional, um, you know, learning piece of it, like, hey, I'm here to learn about a product or understand why it's not working the way I think it should or, um, I wanna if I should even buy this in the first place.
Maybe I'm using it as research for a a purchasing decision for my company or something.
Um, that that initial hook, the original reason for people coming, often is a trans factional.
I'm just looking for an answer to my question or I'm looking to learn about this, you know, product or service or or whatever the case might be.
And so we tend to optimize for that a lot, um, and and think about that a lot.
And that's what I would kind of called acquisition, you know.
Um, and then once they're there, what you're hoping is that maybe they came to get a really specific technical answer to a technical question, but you're hoping what they find while they're there is, oh, and there's also you know, a user group meeting, um, near me next week, for example, that I should go to.
And, oh, and here's where I can put my ideas and, you know, co collaborate, co innovate with other people.
Um, you know, those sort of engagement driven things where they start to talk to people like them and understand each other better are often the second thing in the flow.
Right? And we're really just trying to be as helpful and as useful as we can and if we do that and we do that well and we help them, then we might have an opportunity to engage them on a deeper level and connect them to other people and those kinds of things.
So I think ultimately all communities are, you know, uh, at the end of the day about building relationships and helping people find their people, you know, and all of that.
Um, it's just a little bit different depending on, you know, are you are you doing this because it's a thing you do for fashion, or is it a thing you do for work kind of changes the calculus a little bit? Yeah.
Uh, and along the same lines, you know, when I think about building a community, I think what we're really doing is we're creating a space where people can come together, and that space can be online.
But it could also be in person, uh, if when when you're dealing with these enterprise organizations, because some of them do have big of it.
You know, HubSpot's got a huge conference that they do every year, for example.
Um, where does that fall within the interaction with the community professionals or the community teams.
Is that usually part of what they do or is that a separate thing in your experience? Uh, ever increasingly, uh, it's becoming more a part of what they do.
Uh, we're seeing a very large return to in person events, um, especially as AI sort of changes the the nature of what communities are and what their purpose and value is and why people do or don't come to them.
Um, you know, maybe I guess we can talk about this later when we get the predictions, but, um, people are starting to realize that the transactional come and ask your question get an answer or model is changing a little bit.
Right? It's not dead.
It's not over, but it's largely moved, uh, to a new interface, which is the the chatbot.
That's where people are engaging and asking questions and getting answers to those, you know, sort of transactional support queries, if you will.
And so the strategy for communities is shifting to be more about the things that AI today can't and probably won't ever replicate, which is in person meetups or user groups event driven, whether that's virtual hybrid or in person, you know, expert events, AMAs, um, you know, like a lot of networking, a lot of those kinds of things conference as you were saying.
So you're starting to see that a lot more and more, um, and I think it's gonna be a bigger part of the strategy and and more importantly a skill that community builders have to have going forward.
It's interesting to hear you say that because I am getting that sense from the event producers that I watch, that it used to be that we would go to events, particularly conferences for the content.
You would go because of that keynote speaker that you know.
And now, look, Gary Vee has more content more podcast episodes, more YouTube videos than I could ever possibly consume.
I don't need to take days off of work and fly across the country to go see what Seth Gordon's gonna say.
I am going because of the other people that I know that are gonna be there, and I'm looking for time to hang out with them.
And and and I think that is a changing nature of events, and it's it's interesting to see that happen.
You know, you're talking about it both online, but also in person events as well.
So Yeah.
Well, I think we're at least maybe at least we're being more honest about it than we to be.
Right? I think I think we all used to like justify our our conference budget or spend.
It's like, I'm gonna go.
I'm gonna learn all this stuff.
I'm gonna come back a better a better Brian, you know.
Um, and then you get there and you're like, I just wanna hang out with my people, you know.
So I I think that was always the case.
Maybe it's changed how we how we talk about it or how we position it, you know.
Um, but I do think, you know, that's always the real.
Um, that's the real reason that people go to conferences or those kinds of things whether they know it or not.
I I think it's a large driver of of the attendances, the networking, the same old friends, making new friends connections, um, you know, especially in the professional world.
Right? Like, there's so much value to who you know and who they know and It's basically like buying insurance for the future when you need another job.
And who was that lady that I met three years ago at that conference in San Francisco? Oh, yeah.
I'll ping her on LinkedIn.
And, you know, maybe we can talk about opportunities or whatever.
So I think, um, yeah, it's probably it's probably both.
We're being more honest about it.
And it's also I think conference and event organizers are sort of shifting the way they think about events to be a little bit more community networking connection driven.
Yeah.
Uh, it's funny you say that if there's one piece of advice I could give to my younger self, I would go back right before I went to college because I thought college was about what you learned and what you knew.
And all that changed because because of technology and everything else, and I would have told myself, no.
This is about who you know, and you're here to build.
I pulled my nephew aside, and I told him this.
I was like, don't worry about what you learned, you know, build relations.
Go go to parties.
That's that Seth's advice for going to college.
It's just forget everything else.
Just go to the parties.
That that, uh.
We're done.
There there you go.
So there's my bad advice.
Let's actually get to your bad advice because I think that this is really important.
I ask you for, uh, terrible tips that you've gotten.
And you said, don't worry about ROI.
Just keep building.
And I know that this is a really important topic among, uh, community managers and community professionals that, um, proving the ROI of the work that they do is often one of the most difficult things that they have to do.
Uh, you think people should start right from the beginning? Talk a little bit about that.
Yeah.
So, so, um, I've gotten this advice myself in the past when I was building communities.
Um, I also hear this a lot as a consultant out in the world working with other community builders that are building communities.
So what often happens is especially early in the life cycle of a of a community or maybe even before it's built, um, we we go and we build a strategy and we think about, you know, what is this community and what's it gonna be and what do we need to build and all of that.
And the natural sort of, you know, last thing about that is like, okay, well, how are we gonna measure? How are we gonna know if it's working? And and maybe what business goals does that stack up against, um, which is always my advice for community builders is, you know, let's make sure that we tie this thing to some sort of meaningful number at your company so that people understand why it's important, why we're investing in it, and critically why you're here, you know, why they pay you money to do this, um, somewhat selfishly perhaps.
But, um, so you go and you present to executives somewhere in the company and you say, Hey, here's our strategy, here's what we're gonna do, and then you talk about here's our business goals, or here's how we're gonna tie it to business goals, and, you know, maybe get some ROI calculations so we know what the value is.
And oftentimes, very well intentioned, very supportive leaders will say, oh, don't worry about that.
You know, I know, you know, I know this is gonna be valuable.
Don't worry about all that measurement stuff or don't worry about like calculating ROI.
It's too early.
Just go and build a great community and, like, we'll figure out that that ROI thing later.
And I appreciate this, you know, from those leaders because it means they believe in community, they have an affinity for it, and they're trying to support, you know, what the strategy is and and they're trying to do the right thing.
And so I wanna make that clear that it's not bad advice from them in that sense.
Um, they're trying to be supportive leaders, which I think is fantastic.
Um, the the challenge with it is is that while that may be true today, when we have that conversation today, it probably isn't gonna be true in six months, or it might not even be true next week.
Right? Businesses change, priorities, shift, budgets, mover, around, um, leadership changes.
Maybe the person maybe that leader's gone in three months.
Right? They go get another job somewhere else, and I have a new leader who's less convinced of the value of this thing or maybe had a bad experience with it somewhere else or whatever the case is.
Um, and what happens is you get questioned.
Right? Like, hey, justify this.
You know, what's why are we doing this? What's the point of this? What's the business value? And that usually triggers this huge like freak out is what I call it where it's like, oh my god, we have to now pivot, like, they need an answer by the end of the week.
You know, what's the value or how does this tie to the business goals? And now we have to do this huge scramble and this huge, like, we're trying to do data science in, like, seven days or five days to figure out, you know, how might it be impacting the business and the answer is not satisfactory or we can't really get the data in time or what, whatever, right? Um, and so it just puts people in this situation where they haven't really measured it.
They haven't talked about it internally.
Other people haven't, you know, sort of internalized, like, oh, okay.
Here's why community's important.
And now all of a sudden, it's, like, justify your existence here in the next five days or else, you know, kind of a thing.
Um, they don't say it that way, but that's, like, that's the insinuation, you know.
Um, and it's just so much better if you had been thinking about that all along and starting the process of getting access to the right data and maybe finding someone internally who who's a, you know, data curious or a data analyst, and they're helping you and you kinda have it in your back pocket so that when someone asks, you just go, hey, no problem.
You know, here it is, and here's what the chart looks like, and here's the narrative around it, so that you don't get surprised.
Um, and you, you know, before you even get the question, it's highly likely that somewhere in the company someone's looking at a spreadsheet of names trying to figure out, you know, who can we lay off? Like, that's gonna be low impact.
And in that moment, what you want is for someone to step up and say, Hey, well, actually, that person that's doing community, you know, I saw a thing from them two or three weeks ago at a meeting about how it's really driving engagement and retention and, um, you know, helping us make money or keep customers happier or reducing our support costs or whatever.
Maybe they think twice about it, you know, And then the last bit is when you get to the point that it's time for more money.
Right? Hey, we need to upgrade our platform.
We need to hire somebody.
We need bigger budgets for that event program we're trying to do in instead of the conversation being like, oh, they're asking for more money, like, it's just it's a cost center.
We spend a lot of money on this already.
The conversation switches to, you know, hey, I made you $5,000,000 with a $100,000 investment.
Imagine what I could do with $200,000.
And it completely changes the nature of like how you talk about community inside of a company, the support you get, and ultimately success you're able to have.
Are you ever working in situations where the community is a product itself? And so it's something that directly, you know, because there's a subscription model or or membership fee or whatever it is, versus a situation where, uh, maybe it's a free community, but it has an indirect impact on revenue.
And can you talk about the the difference between those two? Yeah.
I I work with several clients where, the community is the business or at least is very, very closely tied to, like you said, a a membership and a, you know, an alumni and association, um, professional networks, those kinds of things.
So I see that quite a lot.
Those are just easier to measure, you know.
Um, that's kind of the big difference is that there's a there's a closer association to people are signing up for memberships or subscribing, um, expressly to access the community or the network or or the events or whatever the case is.
So those just have a clearer path to understanding the value of community, you know, for the organization because they might be one in the same.
Um, in in sort of like the enterprise context, I describing if you're a software company or a hardware company.
Um, it's it's a little bit more about extrapolation and directional measurement and cohort analysis to try to understand, hey, are people that are active in community more likely to renew or, you know, less likely to submit a support ticket that's gonna cost us a $150 every time they do it.
Um, and so it's a it's a little bit more fuzzy and you're trying to kinda draw those not conclusions, but those those lines of like, hey, we think this is having this, like, really great impact.
And, you know, it looks like people that are active in community are doing more.
Um, and that's part of the challenge, right, of why this is so hard.
It's easy for me to come here and say like, Hey, everybody start thinking about ROI on day one and start measuring it.
The realities of that inside of companies is much more complex.
And so, you know, getting access to the data, having some someone who, um, has some, you know, analytical capabilities that they, they can run the numbers and have them be somewhat real, um, and then ultimately producing an insight, you know, that you could take to an executive meeting and say, hey, look, people and community tend to buy faster or buy more or they advocate for us more whenever those things are.
Um, you know, it's hard.
And that's why, you know, it's like what's the old from a league of their own? If it if it was easy, everybody would do it.
The heart is what makes it great.
Right? And I think that's true of measurement and why we don't see so many people do it even though we just talk about it all the time.
It's so funny that you mentioned that quote because I literally that somebody to somebody, uh, in the computer space.
One eleven.
A couple of days ago, who was just having a rough time, and I I said on that quote.
Yeah.
It's a great quote.
Uh, so let me let me ask about, uh, something that you mentioned there, and I wanna know how you think about it, uh, when you are indirectly generating ROI from community, meaning that it's not the product.
It it is supporting some other product or service that you have.
Community can reduce costs.
For example, customer support, you know, we can hire a million people to answer the same question over and over.
We can put them in a community and have them, you know, help each other out.
In which case, we're talking about ticket deflections, and that is, as you said, it's it's money we would have spent otherwise, but we're not.
Uh, versus the situation where it's actually about generating revenue.
For example, let's say I have a, uh, software that has an annual subscription, and we know that when people are in the community, they are better at using the software.
And so they're more likely to renew their subscription.
How do you think about the difference between community that reduces costs versus community that has an actual impact on the money coming in? I think, you know, kind of back to the beginning here of, like, you know, the 8020 or the 7030, I I think I think this falls into the the former bucket of, um, pretty applicable across community types.
Right? So, like, in both scenarios, you just described sort of like the the question and answer, you know, support and success community versus the, you know, membership network community.
The driver on both of those of like why do people come and why do they continue coming is value and that value is often delivered in the form of content, right? And so in both of those scenarios, your strategy is almost certainly create a bunch of really great content and continue creating a bunch of really great content to keep people interested and excited and feeling like there's a ton of value there in addition to, you know, the networking, the connect the belonging part of it.
Um, so I don't know that it's markedly different.
It's probably more about who are the personas involved and what do they want and making sure that we're tailoring, you know, our content strategy our engagement strategy, our event strategy to make sure it's delivering value to them, whatever that, you know, however they deem, uh, value to be.
Um, but I don't actually think that they're, you know, super duper different in that way.
Yeah.
Let's talk a little bit about metrics, uh, because there is this temptation now that we can measure everything, you know, we can kind of assign a number to anything we want out there.
There are certain numbers that are important and and certain numbers that aren't.
I mean, there's a temptation to think that just because we can quantify it matters.
When you are thinking about community metrics, especially when it comes to ROI, what are the things that you're looking at that you think really make a difference? You know, often talk about measurement in two buckets.
Um, bucket number one is what I call operational metrics.
So these are things like page views, unique visitors, number of posts, number of likes, number of replies, um, thread depth, average time to response.
You know, the things that most plat community platforms are gonna give you out of their analytics package.
So that's like bucket number one.
And I think, um, we shouldn't ignore those.
I think they're super important as community builders.
The, you know, that's great information.
For us to know how what we're doing is working or not and what we need to change and how we can make it better.
The second bucket is the actual business value side of it, and I've said a lot of them I think along the way, but it's like, you know, how likely is a customer or a user of of community or not to be better educated about the product to purchase faster per purchase more, um, be happier support or request support less often, I should say, um, have less questions for their customer success manager, um, buy, buy faster, more stuff.
You know, hey, they upgraded.
They bought a new thing out of our product because they learned about it at an event or in community.
How long do they stay compared to people that don't engage in that way? How happy are they? Um, do they advocate, you know, for us more? On some of these or a lot of these you get into the correlation causation game, you know, um, of like, well, of course, people who are active in community, you're gonna do all those things.
Um, you try to demystify that as best you can.
You try to lane to people.
Hey, this is actually just like the best data that we have.
And so, you know, you're right that it's probably not the end all most ironclad thing in the world, but we're trying to get directionally to some answers here to understand you know, what the value could be.
So in that way, to calculate all of the things in that second bucket, um, it's not, you know, it's a mixture of data sources.
It's you probably have data from your community platform.
You probably have data from your CRM system.
Could be Salesforce or, you know, something like that.
You probably have data from your financial, if it's not the same as your CRM, which sometimes is not.
You might have, like, you know, we need to know, like, which accounts are upgrading or renewing or churning or whatever.
So it becomes this, like, data science exercise where you're like putting together a bunch of different sources and mixing them together and trying to understand, you know, if they influence each other at all.
Um, so those are the core, you know, kind of metrics and questions to ask and the different data sources that you you often find in this.
Are there any metrics you wanna call out as as vanity metrics or metrics that maybe don't matter as much as people think they should? Uh, you know, and Yeah.
I mean, other things like that that will lead people the wrong direction? You see a lot of volumetric metrics.
So things like page views, total users, you know, total active users, cumulative registrations.
Those don't actually mean anything, especially when you look at them cumulatively.
Right? It it might be interesting to say like, hey, we did it.
We, you know, we went from 5,000 to 10,000 members.
Like, great.
That's that's cool.
That's something to celebrate.
But then when you think about it, like, okay, but of those 10,000 members that came to community in the last year, let's say, or two years or whatever your timeline is, how many of them are still active? How many of them are still posting? How many of them abandoned the community altogether? Like, this is the thing.
You always see people celebrate.
Like, we did it.
We have our one millionth member signed up for the community that's been live for ten years, and then you go into the analytics.
And it's like, yeah, 25,000 of those are actually active in the last six months.
So it's, like, not that impressive, but just a, you know, a, uh, a factor of being around a long time.
So I would stay away from those, like, cumulative volumetric type things and look more for things that indicate value or quality or, um, you know, hey, people tell us in surveys that the community is more valuable to them now than it was in the past or that they find their answer quicker or they feel like, you know, they have a better connection than they used to in the past.
Um, that qualitative sort of analytics, I think, is is much more important in telling, and strategic in the way that you it helps you build a better community.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
Um, you know, we've talked a little bit about this idea of not identifying sort of the organizational value or the business purpose of your community from the outset, uh, you know, not thinking about ROI from the beginning.
Are there other mistakes that you frequently see, you know, community builders make when it comes to ROI that we should avoid? You know, we should talk a little bit about this a good reminder to talk about the reporting side of it because it's one thing to go get the data and do the calculations and come up with a number.
But then the question is how do you tell people about it? You know, and I talk about this a lot we should, at the end of the show, we can point people to, like, free.
I have just, like, free to the available templates and slides, and you can go steal this from me and, you know, make it your own.
Um, but I talk a lot about the, like, the reporting side of it, you know, how do you build a report.
What frequency do you send that? How do you talk about it in meetings? How do you make sure that people know the value and and the point of community and what's going on there? I think is just as important if more important than the actual number crunching metric selection side of it.
Um, because a lot of people are like, well, no one in my company knows about community or why it's valuable.
And I go, oh, wow, that's that's interesting.
So, like, how do you report to them or in what meetings do to and they're like, well, I don't.
I don't talk about it.
I don't send a report.
I don't flash around any of these metrics.
And it's like, yeah, I wonder why.
No one knows about it.
It's crazy.
Right? So, um, I think it's important to help people understand that you need to contextualize these numbers.
You need to build narratives around it.
And, you know, first rule of community ROIs, you talk about community ROI, you know, when you get a compelling insight or number, you need to make sure that people know about it and have heard about it.
And I'm not suggesting that you intentionally be annoying because that that's not a good idea either.
But what we know from working inside of companies, you know, all these years, is that people need to hear things several times before they really internalize it and understand it and maybe could repeat it themselves if they were in a meeting and it came up if someone said, Hey, what's going on with that community? And this, oh, you know, like, well, I saw the other day that usually, they kinda have to hear things two or three times, if not more.
And so you don't wanna assume that like, well, I sent this yearly report about the community.
So now everybody knows about it and they have no excuse to not know why it's valuable.
Um, you're probably gonna have a hard time, right? You probably need to be talking about it on a regular cadence whether that's like quarterly or monthly or something like that.
And then the last thing I'll say is conversely, you can do the opposite.
You can report too much and annoy everybody.
Um, and then they don't wanna ever hear about it ever again.
And so I often tell people, like, monthly probably the absolute most granular you wanna go.
Like, if you're doing weekly or biweekly, that's really tough, especially with communities because of the ebbs and the flows, and you don't wanna set up a situation where every week people are like, oh, we're way up this week.
This is awesome.
Community's amazing, and then the next week just naturally goes back down.
They're like, this is terrible.
Community sucks.
Like, what are we doing? We need to, like, change everything.
So, um, you know, have a reasonable granularity and regularity of this stuff, but don't take for granted that people read everything you post in Slack or report your email.
You need to probably make sure you drive that home regularly.
So this begs the question, which is in the organizations that you work with, where does community sit in the org chart? Uh, and then by extension, how should community professionals or people who are building community think about how they talk about what they're doing example, should they talk about it differently when they're talking to the sales team than they do when they're talking to the marketing team or the customer success team or, you know, so on and so forth? Yeah.
Couple of good questions there.
Um, I'll start with where where does it live, then I'll transition to where should it live and then we'll go from there.
Um, you know, I often talk about the eras of like community ownership inside of companies and you know, roughly speaking, it's like from the 90s through like the mid twenty tens support largely drove a lot of use cases and usage of communities, um, at companies.
I would say once we got kinda past 2015 into, you know, the COVID years, you started to see marketing own community a lot more, especially in the COVID years because they had all this unused event budget that they couldn't spend.
And so a lot of them pivoted to say, great.
Well, let's do it online.
Right? And it's to community.
So there was a couple of years, like, 2020 through 2023.
There was a lot of marketing driven community ownership and use cases.
Um, you know, gainsight and others sort of introduced the idea of of not introduced it.
It was around before, but it popularized it, let's say, and have been pushing forward the idea of customer success, owning community and using it as a learning tool and integrating with those systems.
And so you saw a wave, I would say, the last couple years of of that of, like, really CS driven use cases and ownership inside a company, chief customer officers, for example.
Um, and what we're seeing today, uh, as we as we record is a lot of kind of return to marketing, but in a different way.
So instead of it being a replacement for spend that they couldn't spend on events, um, it's advocacy driven.
So you see a lot of people with customer marketer titles adopting community and using it as a tool to further their customer marketing and advocacy efforts.
So it doesn't mean that, you know, there's only one use case, like, at any given time, any company.
It could live in any of those places or it could live in product or things I didn't talk about.
It's just these are the predominant, I guess, kind of eras of ownership, if you will.
So to transition to your question about who should own it, my answer is simple, um, which kind of illustrates what we just talked about on the eras thing is like wherever the money is, you know.
Um, I think a lot of people have ideas of like, well, it has to live in, you know, product or it's only can be successful in marketing whatever.
And I just don't think that's true.
I think at every company, it's different, you know, are you a sales driven company? Are you a marketing driven company? Or are you a product driven company? Those are the three kinds of companies in the world, really, if you think about it.
And so in any given situation, need to think about, okay, who who owns the budget? Who's championing this thing? You know, who has the best use case? Can we start with that? Um, you know, hey, great.
We're gonna go do a support use case.
Let's, like, let's drive to that for a while.
And then once you've had success, the goal is actually to do many use cases.
Right? If you're only doing one, you're probably opening yourself up to some risk, whereas if community has tentacles into every part of the business and you're measuring and driving value, then you're kind of you're not indispensable because no one's indispensable, but you're like less dispensable, right, because you're driving value across the org.
So that's generally like you know, the answer to the question is, like, just start wherever it has a champion and money and then, you know, figure it out from there.
And then I I forgot your third question.
Yeah.
Okay.
So so that's where community lives.
Let's talk about you talk if you are living in one of those spaces, how you talk to the places where you don't live? So if you are, uh, you know, in charge of community, how do you talk to sales about it? Is that different than how you talk to marketing or or product to get buy in from each of those areas? 100%.
And I I talk about this like nonstop.
I'm sure people, hello listener.
I know you're tired of hearing this.
If you if you follow me around the internet, this will be new for those of you who haven't.
Um, but you really have to tailor what you do to those organization.
So for example, let's say that I don't sit in marketing or I don't sit in product, you know.
Um, I'm gonna go over to some leader in marketing and I'm gonna say, tell me about you, you know, what are what are your goals for the year? What are you trying to solve? What are the big problems you're trying to tackle? And and this is a bit counterintuitive because your first thought is actually just to go there and like start, um, evangelizing community and how amazing it is and whatever.
And I kind of say, do the opposite.
Go and ask them what are the big problems you're trying to solve this year, this quarter, you know, whatever, um, and listen to what they say.
And don't try to ram the square peg in a round hole, right? What you really wanna do is go to them and say, oh, okay, like, we'll have those three to five things you just told me about your goals and your business and your problems.
Um, maybe here's the one where community can help the most.
And maybe we should work on a pilot program to see if we can move the needle on that and like see if we can prove that some value worked.
Let's start small, right? And let's start in service of your goals, not mine.
And you know what? We'll do this thing.
We'll do it for six weeks or eight weeks or whatever.
We'll come back together.
We'll see if it worked or not.
And you know what? If it didn't work, no sweat.
Like, we'll move on to something else or, you know, we'll cut it or whatever.
But if it worked, then great.
Like, we can build upon that.
We can try to tackle something else, and you just keep doing this cycle over and over and over across, you know, marketing in this case, but also then you go to product, then you go to services, then you go to sales.
Then you go to customer success, then you go to, you know, whatever, um, and you just keep doing it until, you know, you have a probably a bunch of failed experiments, but you have five that worked really well.
And those are in addition to the one you are already doing.
So now you got six that are like really successful and measurable and great.
Um, and that's how you kind of slowly but surely expand the scope and the value of of what community is and you just be helpful to other departments.
It's not it's not about you.
Right? Like, you become a service provider to help deliver their goals.
Yeah.
That's great.
That is so valuable.
Uh, alright.
Here's the last question I wanna ask, and this is a that we ask everybody who comes on, I want you to make a prediction.
Five years from now, what do you think we're gonna be talking about in the community space? Um, well, almost certain we're gonna be talking about AI.
My prediction is that most of the predictions will be wrong.
Right? I don't I don't I'm not calling anybody out or or anything like that.
I just think that it's it's so early in the ball game and all of the predictions mine included, um, are based on what we know today, not what we know three years from now or five years from now and how it's gonna change and what that means.
And so it may sound like I'm trying to weasel out of giving you a specific answer but I think the actual answer is we just don't we don't know yet.
We've seen some early signs of some things where, you know, starting to think about how we pivot to address those, um, in communities.
But I, you know, I think that a lot of it just needs time to ruminate and evolve and we need understand it better before we like knee jerk whiplash, you know, we gotta change everything or throw communities away or whatever.
I I think are maybe premature.
Um, I guess one thing I am certain of or or, you know, have the conviction to make the prediction here in in five years, you you know, everybody set a reminder and come back and, like, let's find out if I was right or wrong.
Um, like we were saying before, I think you're gonna see a lot more strategies that are built around, you know, cohort based like user groups, meetups, connection, networking, events, contests, um, product innovation, like the things that aren't probably likely to happen through a chatbot interface.
Um, and so in that way, I think you're gonna see a shift strategically in in many communities to that as opposed to the, um, you know, question and answer knowledge store, you know, kind of part of it.
Although I will say that, you know, when you dig in a little bit to how LLMs work and how they're trained, you can't just stop generating questions and answers and knowledge because then you'll never be found ever again.
Know, it's kind of the new the new SEO is GE, right? Um, and so I think we're all trying to figure out how to square that circle together and, you know, which is priority and what percent advantage of those things do you do? So, um, I guess in classic, uh, you know, consultant fashion, I'm giving you the, like, it depends.
We'll see, let's let it play out, answer, but I I think in this case, that's very much the right one? You know, uh, can you give me an example of a cohort that is the type that you're talking about there that you think, you know, we're gonna be refocusing on? Is the one in your mind that really stands out and boy, this company does a great job with that? Um, when when you say cohort specify for me, what are you looking for exactly? Like, what you were just describing, where it's not just knowledge, but it is bringing people together to to work in a particular way.
Uh, you know, kind of what you're you're given, you know, I I mean, I I hear it, and I understand what you're saying in theory, but I'm wondering if we have a concrete example to to really bring it home.
Yeah.
I would say any of, like, the the advocacy driven type of communities.
Right? So this this would be your notions, your your hub spot, um, you know, to to some degree, things where it's more about being better at what you do and, like, talking to your peers and, you know, learning through through them.
So like anything that has a peer learning component, um, I think you're also seeing that as well that I guess that's a trend that sort of supports this is it used to be that support and community were wholly separate things on different platforms and you're starting to see people say, no, actually community is learning in a lot of cases.
Right? You you it's a different modality.
It's you're not watching a, you know, a interactive lesson or something, but the act of coming and a question or getting an answer is learning.
Um, and so people are finally coming around to that, and we're seeing success there.
So communities where they've deeply and tightly integrated the learning with community.
Um, you know, I know that like SAP is is on a multiyear journey to do that.
That.
Um, you see that a lot with like marketplace driven communities.
So like eBay, Airbnb, Airbnb, um, Etsy, right? They have a real incentive to get their sellers or their market place members together to learn how to, like, how do I be better? How do I sell more stuff? Um, so I think those are all like just good examples of communities that are well down the tracks on this stuff of of, you know, figuring out what's next.
Alright.
Brian Oblinger, thank you so much.
People can find out more at brianoblinger.
com.
Um, you've got so many great resources across the internet.
Uh, you're not hard to find, but since this is a podcast, let's, uh, let's talk a little bit about in before the lock because I think this is a fantastic podcast.
Tell us a little bit about it.
Yeah.
It's it's a podcast that my friend, uh, Erica, cool, and I do.
Um, or we what we were doing, we'll we'll do some more probably in the future.
But, uh, there's like a, I don't know, a 150 episodes or something like that.
And, you know, many years ago, we just kinda said, like, we wanna help people be better at building communities and learning how to do it.
And so it's basically just us dumping our brains topically, you know, one episode at a time on specific topics, um, completely free.
You know, I never asked for anything from anybody.
I'd like there's no way to pay me for it.
It's just we want you to go there and consume that and there's templates and tools and resources on the website, um, ib4tl.
fm.
Um, and hopefully it just makes everybody out there better community builders and the high tide rises all boats.
Yeah.
And what what I find fantastic about it is that you're not afraid to get under the hood.
I mean, you will you will get into the details in there.
So it it is absolutely fantastic.
Yeah.
There's a you'll be you'll be very tired of me by, uh, by, like, episode five or something and you only got a 100 more to go.
So but yeah.
I think that was the goal.
It's like we didn't put any time limitations on.
It's just like let's just pick a topic and let's talk and get it out and let's talk about what we need to talk about and some of them are half an hour, some of them are, I don't know, two and a half hours or or whatever, but we try to do so with the heart of a teacher in the sense of like we really it's all about the listener learning and not us flexing or, you know, what ever.
It's just like how do we really teach you everything that we've ever learned? And also like all the the the ways we failed at this, don't be like us.
You know, I've failed enough for everybody on the internet, um, at building communities, and my goal is, like, I don't want you to do those same things and fall into those same pit.
So we talk a lot about, um, yeah, we're just like big old big old failures, you know, but hopefully that's, uh, instructive to other people.
Well, Brent, thank you so much for the time.
I this was really valuable, and it's so great to to have you here to talk about ROI.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me.
And, uh, yeah, go out there and calculate everyone.
Uh,
