Peers Over Beers - Community Experts Podcast

In this episode, Christopher and Nicole discuss the idea that community exists everywhere, not just on a company's own branded community platform. They talk about how community management is evolving to be more cross-functional, with community professionals embedding in other teams like social media and customer success. Inspired by FeverBee: The ‘Community Everywhere’ Era Has Arrived: Don’t Waste This Opportunity

Check out the blog: The End of Walled-Garden Communities

Key points they cover:
  • Community happens across social channels, forums like Reddit, and other informal spaces online. Companies need to think about how to participate in these spaces, not just drive people back to their own community platform.
  • It's important for community managers to align strategies and data across all community touchpoints, though this requires breaking down silos and working cross-functionally.
  • No technology alone can solve the problem of managing community everywhere. Human insight is still critical to connect the dots.
  • At its core, community professionals love building relationships and connections. The challenge is balancing that with showing business value.
  • To understand your customers, you need to know them as whole people, not just their interactions on your community platform.
They conclude that managing community everywhere is complex but critical for the evolution of community management. More collaboration across the organization is key.

Creators & Guests

Host
Chris Detzel
Chris is a versatile Digital Community Strategist with several years of experience. He has owned community vision, strategy, and execution. He is responsible for leading the development and execution of community engagement programs, creating compelling content for customer communities and acts as the voice of the customer. He believes that data should drive decisions as it is the key element of any long-term successful strategy.
Host
Nicole Saunders
As Director of Community at Zendesk, she oversee the Community Team (part of the Global Digital Experiences team), set strategy, define policy and governance, develop and launch new community products, and engage our user community. Our programs include: an online community, virtual events, user groups, community champions, customer advocacy, and an annual global virtual community summit.

What is Peers Over Beers - Community Experts Podcast?

B2B Community Strategist Chris Detzel is your host for this fun and straight shooting podcast for enterprise community leaders / managers and digital savvy professionals. With easy and natural inquisitive banter, your host will tackle hard issues facing community leaders and managers in their day-to-day struggles, and yes, sometimes over a beer. From starting new communities, digitally transforming enterprise culture, moderation, and globalization techniques are all up for discussion.

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In this episode of Peers on Beers, hosts Christopher Detzel and Nicole Saunders have an in-depth discussion about the idea that community exists everywhere, not just on a company's owned community platform.

They start by acknowledging this is a complex issue without easy answers, but an important one as community management continues to evolve. Christopher notes that community has always existed everywhere, but now companies need to think about how to manage it holistically.

Nicole shares how early branded communities were often just on social media, then there was a push to bring community back onto owned platforms. But users still gather in many informal digital spaces. She says community professionals need to become customer experience experts that connect those dots across the full journey.

Rather than dividing ownership, Nicole advocates that the community team should be the center of excellence guiding strategy across all touchpoints. They discuss the need to embed community skills and thinking into other groups like social media so they can collaborate to manage different spaces while aligning data and insights.

They explore how technology alone cannot solve this problem. Even tools that centralize data need human analysis, as Christopher illustrates with an example of how product feedback in community forums differs from development roadmaps.

Shifting back to the human side, Nicole talks about taking inspiration from local physical communities. To become truly customer-centric, companies need to understand what matters to users across their whole lives, not just interactions regarding the product.

Christopher echoes the importance of building genuine relationships, sharing an example of how he personalizes outreach to execs based on details like family or hobbies. This holistic view can reveal opportunities to creatively engage them as thought leaders.

At its heart, both agree community professionals are drawn to the career because they love fostering connections between people. But they must balance this with proving value to justify resources.

They emphasize that managing community everywhere requires breaking down silos, collaborating across the organization, and never losing sight of the human element. Though complex, it is key for community teams to evolve.