Recap notes from CMX 2023 Summit session. Grammatical errors and typos are my own 🙂

Abstract:

My session will cover the variety of tactics I’ve learned as Director of Community at Morning Brew ideating, launching, and scaling Morning Brew Learning’s Digital Community of 3,000+ professionals. I’ll share how to think about community as you’re building a V1 of a product, how to nurture that community as you release the product, how to get feedback from your community to iterate on future products, and when/how to infuse community into different product offerings. The talk will be extremely tactical, giving you frameworks you can immediately apply to your own digital communities and businesses. – Kyle Hagge, Director of Community, Morning Brew

Notes:

• Variety of different interests and background experience allows community managers to better relate to different people
• Think about personal monopoly – build your stack 3 things that you’re passionate about and eventually you’ll be the primary person that organizations will look to.
• Morning Brew learning transitioned from Audience (newsletter) vs. Community (Education Courses). Are you building for an audience-based or a community-based product?
  • Audience = one to many (not in contact with each other – only with Morning Brew)
  • Community – many to many (experiencing product with others who are experiencing it as well)
• Why do community? Yes, you’ll make more money. Need to make money to display impact for an organization. Generating revenue.
  • Generates revenue: newsletter was ad-based
  • Creates brand evangelists: are they falling in love with the product to refer peers?
  • Find pain points: nice, but find content gaps (typos, missing information)
  • Increase LTV of customer: visitors paid how much to take classes (generating revenue). go deeper, charge more.
  • Displays social proof: post courses on linkedin, telling friends, “cool company, great experience”
  • Makes product feel more human: meet readers in person and makes both sides feel more human – knowing the faces behind the product and care about successes and career
• Tactics from building morning brew learning
• Don’t just gather – but help solve a problem
• Community is more of a slack chnnel of your existing audience. It’s not just bringing people together anymore – help them solve a problem
  • What “persona” are we serving with our existing product/service?
  • What problem does this persona face? Want to grow in career, become better at their job to become a better manager, etc.
  • How could a community help solve those problems? Build more skills to teach personas
  • What experiences will we have that allows us to achieve the community goals?
• Tech is on the margins – focus on the quality of experience. No need to use the latest product. Need to focus on the customer experience; keep it simple and basic so that they can focus on the event and the speaker vs. where they are, how to use the tech. Sometimes the lamest platforms are the best (ubiquitous to solve the problem)
• Community managers are architects (builders) not stars – focus on the community design and experience. Where to comnnect with people, where to find answers, etc.
  • Onboarding
  • Engagement
  • Subgroups – as community scales, easy to feel like you can’t meet everyone. Build deep connection with smaller group. Focus on niches – focus on a member meeting 5 people to form deep relationship
  • Feedback
• Friction is good – don’t automate the humanity out of your community. That’s why people are coming to community form. Safeguard from automation.
  • Personal – he made a personal video for every new member (!), but it made a difference that it seem like he cared. “Put in time before I gave a single dollar.”
  • Intentional
  • Relational – Always respond and follow-up to automated messages. More likely to come back – white glove treatment.
• Tactics for Events
  • Create rituals – habits to familiarize with space (use the same song to start an event, play the same song) and it’s a trigger for them to know what to expect. Start by have people go to the chat to warm it up (introduces people to know where the chat is…energizing and fun) and speakers like an engaged chat
  • Expectations – be clear about how you want people to act in your events.
• Clarity if kindness
  • For audience Q&A – attendees confused about what to do. “Going to Q&A and here’s how you do it” – tell them what the expectation is. They will be more likely to participate.
• Throw an after-party (breakout room)
  • Give people a roadmap on how to have conversations with other attendees so that they get to know each other.
• Tactics for creating connection
  • Coffee chats live pairing two attendees together. What are you hoping to get out of this? Manually pairing, but it was powerful in helping them meet the people they want to meet. Help them connect the dots to deliver value to customers
• Focus groups. on demand – feedback is incredibly powerful, show that it’s valued
  • Always give feedback to a survey to show that you actually read it. They feel heard.
• Some things won’t scale, but it’s essential to. do- taking time to respond to surveys, etc.
• Ask for advice, get money twice
  • Go to existing audience. and understand what you want us to build for you.

Steps to Build community

1. Analyze existing audience/customer base
2. What problems are they facing or subgroups is your audience facing
3. why do people like your product?
4. Design community
5. integrate community into existing company ecosystem