Form community programs to make your job easier

Karin: So I'm Karin Wolok, I'm the community manager at Neo4J, which is a graph database company and going to talk about creating community programmes that actually make your job easier. There's other benefits to it too, and I'm going to dig into some other kind of aspects of it and how to actually make it happen. Alright, so first I'll just give you a little bit of background about who I am because you're probably like, I don't know, is she even qualified to tell me this stuff? I don't know, maybe I'm not. But, so I came from a background in music. I worked in entertainment for a long time doing marketing and sponsorship development, which is basically when you are working on the talent side and you have potential sponsors, you try to figure out ways that, for example, it's like the T-Mobile presents this concert or whatever, something like that.

So you'd have to just figure out ways for these brands to connect to the consumers through the entertainers. So I was doing a little bit of that and it was interesting, I did really know much about programming or software development at all.

At that point, everything I knew is music and I worked for some very big names, including Eminem and 50 cent, a lot of stuff in rap. And then worked with Live Nation for a little bit. So while I lived in New York City, I started a, well, I call it a woman's resource sharing group, but it's actually, it's a networking group. But basically we just help each other. It's kind of like an ecosystem. Who do I know that knows you and how can we all help each other? And the resource sharing was basically the core point of the community that I built. And I didn't make any money off this group.

I ran it for 12 years. I ran it in New York for a long time, and then I moved to Philadelphia and then I launched it in Philadelphia after I got a little work. And that's where I live now. So I didn't make any money. I was doing it because I really loved bringing people together and making people successful. And I didn't realise it at that point, but basically I was setting myself up for what I do now, which is the community management type of stuff. So now I manage a global community of software developers, data scientists, and researchers. Our audience is quite broad because people use Neo four J in all kinds of different scenarios.

So it's pretty cool. Really, really smart, amazing people. So I manage our global community and create programmes to increase support and advocacy. So let's talk shop. So actually in developer relations and community management, they teach you not to use terms like let's talk shop because it is understood through a shared culture rather than a easy language for everyone to interpret. Let's talk shop. Basically, what do you do for work? So I'm assuming that most of the people watching are in developer relations type roles.

So

Speaker 2: Chances are a lot of the, do you help solve people's problems to reframe

Karin: Your mindset instead of thinking about your job this way, lemme see. Second, instead of thinking about your job this way, I'm hearing that I see that I'm getting some audio issues that I'm cutting in and out so I can try to maybe situate myself if that would be good. So instead of thinking of your job this way, I'm going to challenge you to think about it instead of your job is going to shift to now is your goal is to make other people in your community more successful at the things that you normally do. And this would be as part of their contributions to the community. So it might sound a little crazy because you're literally giving them the opportunity to, hold on. Yeah, sorry, if I'm getting audio, if there's audio issues, I can just see if I can swing into a different room or something and see if that helps it. Okay, good.

Okay, good.

Thank you. So it sounds a little crazy because you're basically giving your community members your job, they're going to be doing the things that you are actually tasked to do, but most people in our community already do these things. So I'm just going to talk to you about some of the tactics that you can do to build these programmes out to make it a little bit more of natural thing and rewarding for your community members rather than just asking them to do your job. So first of all, just want to talk about the shape of a community because I think that this is important to understand in general. So while a community is a place of common interest, it's also a place where people can give and take from one another, almost an ecosystem of sorts. So the benefits of creating community programmes that consume some of your roles and responsibilities isn't only that there's less work for you and decreased need for staffing and things like that.

But it also offers you an opportunity to extend awareness about your product outside of your current audience. So you are basically breaking barriers by getting an opportunity for your community to do the visualising.

So you're not only providing diverse content, but also writing a real feeling of exchange. So instead of you thinking about it and you creating a community, think about it in the way that you're creating an ecosystem where everyone in the community can give and receive in one way or another. So just to add to that thought, even readers are contributors because people who readers those people serve as eyeballs. So it does make a full circle in a way. So that's something that's important to consider too. So just in a nutshell, instead of you creating for your community, let the community create for the community. Alright, so step one, we're going to talk about how to, this gift makes no sense for this section, but I thought it was cute, so I just figured I'd add it. But now that your mindset has shifted in a little bit of a different way to perceive this, we can start with basic outline of the how to and where to start giving your community members a reason on why they should do this thing, but not just giving them a job, your job.

So step one is probably the most important thing, and I think people don't do this enough, is talk to your community members, talk to them, ask

Them what they want, empathise with them. They want to meet other interesting, maybe they want to be seen

As a thought leader. And you're going to have to dig a little deep here. That's why I have the dog digging holes. You're going to dig a little deep when you're talking to them. So sometimes you want to be able to fish for things that are not clearly explained you. So you have to kind of read between the lines. You have to try to understand what their intrinsic innovations are.

So why do they really want to do something? Why do they want to write a blog post? What does it actually give them? Why do they want to present at a conference?

Why? So what feelings are associated with that thing? And that's a good place to start. So consider what your members have as their overarching, and then what intrinsic motivations might be lined up with those goals.

Why do they want to write all these blog posts? People randomly create tutorials. Why do they do that? And these things can sometimes be two separate things. They're overarching goals and they're intrinsic motivations. But a good place to start is by actually creating a list of what people's goals are and what motivations have that things on how they normally contribute to your community. Now, I'll give you an example. So if you ask me why I accepted to speak at this conference.

So I would say something like, oh, I wanted to share my knowledge and experience. I've learned a lot and I wanted to share my knowledge and experience with others, but what you actually might be trying to get out of me, and I'm not saying this is my case, but I'm just giving the scenario is that maybe I wanted to be seen as an expert or maybe I wanted to prove something to myself, or maybe I just wanted everyone to know how cool.

So these things are actually very intrinsic, feeling motivations that are important to pay attention to because these are the things that can be rewarded upon with your community and really drive consistent contribution. So reading between lines, very important. Many of these things, these intrinsic motivations that you kind of analyse are going to be assumptions, but the more you talk to your community, the more you'll understand who they are. And you'll also start to see and recognise more as you observe your community members' behaviours and their responses to certain rewards. When they get mentioned, are they retweeting and posting this thing everywhere? When they get certified, what happens?

Where do they post it? Why do they talk about it? Those types of things. So make a list of these things, these goals of the overarching goals when you're talking to your community and the intrinsic motivations that might be behind 'em.

Step two, how can people contribute? So this is kind of where I was saying, well, this is your tasks, your normal job, the thing that you do. You can also try to analyse your intrinsic motivations too, of what makes you feel good when things happen, when you contribute and write blocks, create training materials, what really drives you there? But you can create a list.

So make a list of these are different ways that people can contribute to our community. It doesn't have to be limited to anything. You can write as many as you want, maybe to give you some either ideas of, except for writing blog posts and things like that. Maybe it's translating content, some of the content to their native language. Maybe they can help find some bugs and some source code, or they can speak at a virtual conference or they can answer questions on a technical forum, things like that.

Maybe tutorial videos that are different style from yours, things like that. So after you have this list of how people can contribute next to those, try to write down the intrinsic feelings that a person may with these intrinsic feelings that a person may get to doing these different things. So for example, digging in a little, and this might not be the case when you talk to your user, you'd probably understand a little better.

But so answering technical questions and giving advice to someone. Generally those people like to solve problems. They want to work through their thoughts and

Probably makes them feel good, but they also feel very helpful. And the gratitude and knowing that they were able to help somebody solve a problem or they came up with the most optimal solution. Those are the types of things that might be the intrinsic motivations in there that you should pay attention to. So if it's things like speaking at conferences or blog posts, like I said before, not necessarily reflection of me, maybe it is, but you want people to think that you're smart and you're cool and they recognise you as an expert. So there probably will be a lot of commonalities amongst your top contributors on the patterns of why they do specific things. So there will be a lot of overlap, but these things are a good thing to lay it down on a piece of paper, you could literally just take a piece of paper and write it out.

So step three, so reward system. Everybody knows you have to do rewards, but I'm not talking about the type of rewards that are swag and whatever. I mean the deeply rooted intrinsic rewards. So let's think about that person who answers technical questions on our forum. So why are they doing that? So they enjoy solving problems. But even if you dig a little deeper, maybe you think about they like knowing that someone needed their help and they were able to help that person, and the person adopted their advice as the solution. That is a big feeling is when the high of the person who's answering technical questions on a forum learns that that's what's happening.

And like, oh my God, think about how powerful it would be if somebody that they answered a question and helped solve a problem, came back and said, oh my God, that was so helpful.

Look at all these great things. What if that person tweeted about that thing and was told all their friends about how amazing this person was that they were able to help them solve this problem? Or even if they just came to them privately and said, oh my God, thank you for going above and beyond. This is what you were able to give me. I couldn't even imagine doing this on my own. Imagine how that would make your contributor feel. So these are the type of rewards.

So you can create these loops basically. So let's say you have these types of people that need to be recognised and thanked more often, or they need to be able to know that their solution was affected and they were able to solve a problem like the check the box that this is a approved solution or voted it up.

That feedback loop is very important as a rewarding motivation for somebody who's doing that kind of thing. So if you're answering a bunch of questions and you're not getting any feedback, that's not fun. You want to be able to know that your work is being valued. So your job from here is basically to figure out how to increase those actions that loop back into those intrinsic motivations. And it can either be from you or your organisation or the users or contributors from your community. So if you can motivate the users and contributors from your community to always go back and say, did this help you?

Did this help you? If it did, please thank the person and let them know how amazing it was. So this whole loop thing is very important to try to figure out ways to make sure that that emotion is being met for your community members.

So what needs to happen for that person to be able to get that feeling? And it could also be a thank you note from the head of product or another executive from your top contributors or something like that if it's difficult. Sometimes it can be tough. When people are just flaky with things, they ask questions, they get there, and so don't even come back. So it happens, but there's other ways to do that too, but just always focus on that motivation.

So just a little last slide. Well, I have one other slide after this, but so just some little extra tips. So when you tell your community about what ways that they can contribute, generally speaking, it's very good to be clear about what they need to do. Normally I say if you're working with a team, creative flexibility, I love that. But if you're working with community can be a little different.

Sometimes they need a little more structure or they don't really know if they can actually tackle that. So if you were serving something that serves as a guide or a template, so if they're writing blog posts, be like, oh, here's a structure you can follow. Give them a guide or a template to work off of.

And you can also, in a similar sense here, that could also help you with identifying obstacles. Why aren't they doing the things that you're asking of them? Maybe they don't have the time or they don't feel like they don't know enough. And then you could think about how you can support this and minimise that challenge. So remember what I said at the beginning is shift your idea instead of you doing your job, think about how you can make your community do your job and be successful at it. So that is how you want to approach the things. So you could try to work with one person at a time to see how it would work and then scale it out in a programme that does expand and doesn't require your consistent ongoing attention.

Yeah, and I think that's it.

Oh, and pay attention to your community user behaviours. These are the things that you can identify a lot of intrinsic motivations just by watching your community and how they do things and how they react to stuff. Simple case, going back to that technical forum, if somebody says, oh, thank you so much, it was great. And then the person who answered that question says, you're welcome. Oh, I'm so glad. Even those little things mean a lot. And since this is going to be my shameless plug, because we're hosting an awesome virtual summit and I love doing things with other communities and bringing people together. I mean, I ran a women's networking group for 10 years for free because of this thing.

But we're hosting a virtual summit and we opened up community partnership opportunities. And if you're interested in getting involved, please contact me. That's my email. That's the link. You're welcome to go to the site too. Check it out.