The Community Trash

Building your community: a new blog series of mine dedicated to sharing out knowledge on building communities, both from 0 > 1 and stepping into an established community. I plan to include posts about setting up a new social space, community standards, and moderating in the near future, today I’d like to talk about how to start building communities in the first place. The hardest part is to know where to start, and understanding the benefits and downsides of existing communities versus building a brand new space can help.

During my time at Microsoft, I became the expert in building and bonding with online communities. I don’t really know exactly how it happened but I made friends with people who did the same stuff I did at Intune and became quite friendly with the Windows Insiders team really early in my role, so that’s likely a good reason. I also had great connections at Xbox Insiders from my time on Xbox including one who mentored me on their community building practices for Reddit. I helped stand up the Edge product group connection forums to build relationships with the volunteer moderators and independent advisors for Microsoft’s Answers site as the first product group to pilot the effort. This led me to meeting up with the supportability team back over on Xbox and advising them of how to go through creating their own product space on Answers to build relationships with the same group of volunteers. Before I exited Microsoft, I had advised the .NET team on how to stand up a preview community program. Over on the Xbox Ambassador team, we had launched their community Discord server in 2017 which I helped admin, and I’ve ran/moderated a few servers over the years since then. Unofficially I helped out in two community servers dedicated to Microsoft in both consumer and enterprise spaces for the Edge team, with one server honoring me with a Community Hero role (mostly because of my shitposting skills 😂). I’ve been around the community world in a variety of role levels and in this post I want to share out some of the pros and cons of stepping into an existing community space as a company representative or standing up an entirely new space for your community to gather. Note: I am not going to give you advice on how to market these spaces – it’s my honest opinion that word of mouth will help these spaces organically grow with you engaging genuinely and honoring your word as a company – or admitting when you are wrong and being honest about product changes. 🫰🏻

There’s two different ways you will build or grow a community: there is an existing community and you want to establish yourself as a company representative to build brand loyalty, or you are going to build up a new space to nurture a baby community from the ground up. There are pros and cons to both of these, but if you think you don’t have an existing community you may be underestimating your users already; I have found very unlikely communities pre-formed for products.

While every role I have held so far was me stepping into an existing community, this doesn’t mean that I didn’t look to start new community spaces from scratch. One of the worst things about the community on Edge was that it was so splintered. We didn’t have one solid place where everyone could connect well with the team, and we didn’t really have a way to track our biggest fans across all of the spaces we did have. I worked up a few plans to utilize things like Orbit.love to track conversations or repurpose some of our other spaces to organize the community better, but couldn’t earn dev time to help build the tools needed. While working on the Xbox Support Forums, we spent a long time building an in-house forums customized for the Xbox community because we knew that Answers was not the space the community would gather – Answers is a site designed for support, not community building, and we recognized moving the community to that space would be a detriment. It took a lot of resources from another team, but we involved the volunteer moderators during the testing phases to help curate the platform to the community they helped run. The suggestion of kicking off a Discord server on the same team was met with resistance at first. I wasn’t the driver of the plan but supported and assisted taking it on as a social space – the application was specifically built for gamers and has a ton of good features for community building, it just made sense. But the decision makers didn’t understand the whys behind it, mostly because they themselves weren’t a true part of the gaming community, and it took some persuasion to get it going. The point is, even if you have an existing community, there is very likely going to come a time in which you will need to build a new community space.

I love humans. We will gather around a common cause often and the technology we use is no exception. From the company itself to your products, there are often existing communities talking about your stuff and the business decisions you make. I love finding passionate people who built communities outside of official spaces because then your role will come with essentially a pre-built community. You will often find well-established community members as moderators and there will always be historical chatter about your products – such great data to dig into for customer insights, and if the original posters are still around you have the opportunity to talk to them more about their thoughts. Highly technical consumers simply don’t trust companies who step into their communities; if you don’t know how to speak to that community, you come across as either tone deaf or a marketing monkey. Once you get deeper into a community, you may find that some moderators or long-time members believe themselves to be gods. I try my best to work with them to tone down their ego, but sometimes you have to yeet the ones who are not willing to change. The last hurdle that needs to be tackled is access to administrative tools and metrics to the established spaces. If you don’t have the right admin/mod access for a lot of social platforms you have no way to really track how well your community is growing. This requires you to have a really close relationship with the moderators of those spaces to either get the perms for access or help with accessing the data. I find empathy is a top notch skill to build those relationships.

Now, you may either be a newer company/have a new product or you want to build a new space for your community to congregate. What platform you choose is highly dependent on what kind of community you have – you need to identify how your community communicates with each other when planning, this is key to what platform you end up deciding on. Knowing this will help show your community how much you respect who they are and builds loyalty. Whatever platform you choose, the best part is that you get to choose the one that has the tools for metrics you want to track how healthy your community is. Some forum platforms have great customization options when it comes to metrics you can track, really the sky is the limit with those. Starting a baby community offers you the opportunity to form close bonds with the early community members, most of whom end up being your biggest supporters and worth promoting into community lead positions like moderators. However, what platform you choose is also based on how many engineering resources you can get; some platforms require developer skills and you need to either hire an external vendor or pull/hire an internal resource to build the space if you aren’t a developer yourself. IMO, this is the best route because you get to fully customize the experience and include early community members in forging a community together – again, building that loyalty (have you recognized a pattern yet? 😉). Going this way will make earning the trust of the community much easier and give them the opportunity to share their candid feedback early. They see almost immediately their opinion shape a community, but it can still take time to fully earn their trust. The part of the process that I find seems to cause the most delays in launching a community space is the collaboration across the entire company that is required to do this. You need to work with product, engineering, marketing, comms, maybe fold in customer support/success, leadership, and the hardest ones legal to get full buy-in on a new platform that represents your company. An experienced community program manager can navigate this and get things signed off with minimal compromises, some newer to the role may need to compromise on their dream state a little more. Understanding all of your platform options should help your story around why the company should invest in doing the work.

Investigating how communities function is my favorite thing to do starting out in a new role. I get to dig into new information and build new friendships. My time on both Xbox and Edge gave me lifelong friends thanks to how I inserted myself into their communities, and it all starts with data. After you get social data, then you get to dig into platform options, what metrics you can track, and build a community program with set goals all at once. Next in this series, I will detail how to start up communities on various forums platforms, Discord, and Reddit. There’s an aspect of this process I didn’t mention here when you are also advocating for the user voice as a community program manager: social listening – I’ll talk about the art of this skill in a future post. Remember to be empathetic during your interactions with both your coworkers and the community members and you’ll find people will work with you instead of against you while either building a new community or forging bonds with an existing one.

– 🧜🏻‍♀️🦄