Turning users into advocates at scale

Karin: So I'm Karin Wolok. I'm gonna kind of talk a little bit about my experiences that kind of led me towards more and more understanding and enlightenment about turning your users into advocates. So to start it off, I'm gonna talk a little bit about my journey. I'm not gonna bore you with too much with it, but so there is, I do have some kind of non-traditional background into working in dev community stuff. I used to work for Eminem, like the rapper and then 50 cent, and I was doing music marketing for a long time while I was there. I know, it's like totally, you'd actually be surprised on how related it actually is. There's a lot of commonalities there. And while I was there, I started a woman's networking group by accident. The initial thing was like, I just wanted to meet with my girlfriends for happy hour and just talk about stuff and how can I help you, help me?

And then it slowly developed into this thing and we started getting sponsors and then the event space, and it was always free to get in. I like never made any money off of it, but I ran it for like way too long for like 12 years in Philadelphia and New York. But it organically grew and like the database was just huge and it was amazing. So that was like my first kind of accidental experience in the community. And then I had gotten a job with Neo4j. It was my first kind of DevRel community role. And there I, you know, was managing the developer community. And after that I joined a company called StarTree. It was very, very early stage. I was employee, I don't know, 13 with a bunch of like a bunch of engineers. There's no marketing people, nothing.

And within the first year of me being there, and like I was pretty much the only marketer, we brought someone in, like towards the last bit of that first year, we went from 50,000 docker image downloads to over a million. So yeah, it was amazing. So the, you know, it's it's grown the open source product around StarTree, Apache Pinot. I actually left StarTree this past Friday, so I'm kind of independent ish slash floating around picking up contracting opportunities and whatnot. So so yeah, that's a little bit about my background, but I'm gonna talk a little bit about my journey and experiences here and just what I generally observe about the community and user engagement ecosystem. And hopefully you guys can get some really concrete takeaways from the talk. Okay. So when I joined Neo4j I don't know if anybody here familiar with Neo4j?

Yes. Graph database company. Really, really cool technology. If you're not familiar with it, you should definitely go Google. What is a graph database? I'm the one giving that presentation, by the way. So you should, that's why you should go . So the first thing is that I realized is that they had already like a really healthy community with like a lot of engaged people, people hosting events all over the world. And I was like, what caused this community without like having a formal community manager. I'm like, how did this happen? And there's one thing that I really, I mean, there's a bunch of different things, but one thing I really give a lot of the credit to, and it's this guy right here, Michael Hunger. He was supposed to be here tonight, today. So tonight I'm like, it's five o'clock in Philly and 11 o'clock here.

It's not tonight anywhere. So he was supposed to be here today. Unfortunately, he didn't make it. I was gonna point him out in the crowd, but he's not here. Michael Hunger is they're head of developer relations. He's been with them for like 12 years. And there's a few things that he did that I think really helped encourage this highly engaged and enthusiastic community. The first thing he did was gratitude. He's always thanking people. I mean, he is the biggest gratitude giver you've ever seen where it almost kind of loses value. You're like, okay, I get it. So he's just always like, thank you for doing this and thank you for doing that. And I saw that you responded to this post and you wrote this black post and you commented on this, or whatever. He's just constantly, constantly thanking people. The other thing is also recognition. So in order to be able to thank people, you also have to recognize when they're doing something for your community. And that's another thing that he was really, really good at every little thing of something, some way somebody contributed, he'd recognize it and he'd write them either publicly or privately, and he said, Hey, I noticed you did this thing. Thank you. And then the third thing was inclusion. So he always tried to include everyone he could in everything that he was doing. He was always sharing things with the community, how do you wanna get involved, things like that. And I think these are the three things that I really contribute towards, like the health of Neo4j's already thriving community. So I wanna talk about a few things. So first thing is that we have a tendency to like wanna ask our users to do different things, right?

We're like, we want them to write blog posts, we want them to host meetups, things like that. And all that stuff is great, but there is something that's important to consider. There is an ecosystem and this has to feed into your ecosystem. So I just kind of use this as like, you know, whatever Google's a ecosystem, you know, it's a self, self-sustaining ecosystem on the internet. But the idea is, is that whenever you're asking your community users to provide something or give some kind of contribution, it has to be valuable to the rest of your community. And that, which I'll talk about in a little bit, it actually filter like sets up your situation to like consistently get feedback and encourage more contributions. People want to be valuable. Like, we know that when we get good feedback or high views on our blog post, or we see even just like little comments from people, they come to us and you, they're like, oh, that was really helpful.

We know how much it encourages us to do more, right? So that's why it's important when you're asking your users to do stuff, don't just ask them to do stuff. Make sure it ties into a bigger picture of something that's actually going to be useful for your community. Okay? Types of users. So I've taken some of these terminologies from like other places that I've learned about community stuff, of other talks that I've been to, but I've also made some up. So sorry for like the random names. The first one is the lurkers, right? It's sounds like a negative thing, but I think everybody has their space in the ecosystem. These are the people that just watch and don't say anything. They never comment, they don't respond, they don't like whatever you are, you're not trying to turn every user you have into an advocate.

The goal is to get a little bit more from each user. So your lurkers are trying to get them to do a little bit more. And then I'll talk about the other types of users. Then you have your commenters. These are the people that provide feedback. They like things, they might ask questions, they're a little bit more engaged, but they're not the ones that are actually providing the engagement. I mean, sorry, the co like the bigger contributions like blog posts and organizing meetups and speaking at conferences and things like that. And then the third one is your contributors, like this lady in the hard hat. So basically your goal here is to get each one of these levels to judge through a little bit more than what they've done in the past. So you're not trying to change your lurkers and to be blog post writers.

They may, some may, but some may not. And that's okay because they do have a space in the ecosystem which I'll talk about what their role is in this ecosystem, okay? So minimizing the barrier to es to entry. So when you're thinking about the different kind of users that you have in your community and how they engage in your content or whatever kind of com, other community contributions that you have, you're thinking about one, like what's one level more than what they're currently doing. So for example, your lurks, right? They have a tendency to just look around, they just read, they never do anything about it. They don't like, they don't share, they don't do anything, right? If you can ask them to do a little bit more like, Hey, was this helpful? Thumbs up? Or do you wanna share it? Or do you wanna give feedback or do you wanna ask a question?

Or something like that. But something really, really small to get them to do a little bit more than what they're currently doing. So that's kind of what your goal is with your lurkers. And then same thing with your commenters, right? You have people who like things and things like that, try to get them to do a little bit more. Be like, Hey, why don't you send some feedback to the speaker or give us suggestion for another type of topic that you want. So you're trying to get a little bit more from them. You're not asking your lurkers to write blog posts, right? But it's just a little, a little bit more. And then the same thing with your contributors. Level them up from what they're already doing. They wrote blog posts. Maybe try to get them to help them to create a talk and submit it to a conference.

Things like that. Okay? This is still the minimized barrier to entry thing, okay? So I'm gonna go over, I, I observe a lot of things that seem like they're unrelated to developer relations or community, but they are very, very much not. Does anybody here put up Google reviews? Like anybody? Like, okay, so it's a fair chunk of people. I'm a big Google reviewer and I just observe how they suck you in with these fake points that mean absolutely nothing, , it's true, right? You're like, oh, I got five points for, for what? I don't even know what that means. But so I, I just observe a lot and I think that they do this really, really well. Now, one thing I want you guys to notice is, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Growth Hacker Concepts, but Growth Hackers are basically engineers that do marketing.

It's basically kind of you guys, you know, and they, they're really hacking the system. So if there are ways that you have the ability to automate any of these systems, do it by the way, the Growth Hacker marketing book is amazing. I know we're doing the book club thing, you gotta read it. It's like literally marketing for engineers. It's brilliant. And it's like everything's low budget. Okay, so what happens when you start Googling reviewing things, right? They're like, just a little notification how, I don't know if you guys can read this, but hopefully again, how was Stubb's barbecue? So it's just asking me something really simple, right? Give me a little small review. So it also tells me here that I'm popular and my content is important to the rest of the community. People care, right? This is like the talking about that ecosystem.

This is gonna be something that's valuable to other people. They want this, your top 10% of bar reviewers, which is kind of sad, but . It also tells me that the photos here get over 6 60, 700 views, right? So I'm like, how can I not wanna contribute to that? I'm like, my photos are gonna make an impact. People care. I'm top 10% of contributors, I'm gonna do it. So they ask me something super simple, just give it five stars, one to five stars, right? This is how they suck you in little by little, getting you to do everything afterwards. They're just like literally their entire algorithm for recommendations. So then after I make this thing and I said this was five stars, what do they do? They thank me. It literally says on the bottom, thanks for the tip. And then it gives me the next little call to action getting me to do a little bit more than what I did before.

It's like, do you wanna write a review? No, we're done. So here's another example. Another one. Do you wanna, how was Arlo Gray? Whatever you're ranked 10% of restaurants. And then they give me a different kind of prompt because now they know that I'm the kind of person who puts one to five stars. They're like, maybe she'll write a review, right? She's willing to post the photo, she's willing to put a five star thing. Maybe she'll write overview. So they put answer quick questions to help others, right? It's like the feedback of this ecosystem loop. So of course I'm gonna answer questions. Look, I earned three points, means nothing, literally doesn't tell me where I go. But it does give me the feeling that I'm growing in this impact community. Like I'm an important Google reviewer. People care. I have two followers, by the way.

I don't know who they are. I'm like, who are these people that actually care about what I'm reviewing? So, and then it, so it also gives me the option to contribute more, right? So it's like little, little little wanna do a little more. You wanna do a little more? Yes, yes. And then here is this insane question thing. I don't know if you've ever been through like the answering questions on Google reviews, but how did I get to this? I was like, this is not what I signed up for. If they would've shown me this ahead of time, I would've not signed up for that. But they slowly brought me in. You know, now I've done like 300 reviews and all these stars and people care and whatever. I'm pretty sure I'm not 10% of anything, but like, you know, none, none nonetheless. So this is kind of like showing the step by step little barrier to entry.

And when I say minimal, ask people to do the very bare minimal. Like if you're having them review docs, like, was this helpful? You know, because realistically the ideal thing that you have, when people go to your documentation, you want them to go in, get their answer and leave, right? You don't necessarily need to post questions. So, you know, if you can get a little bit of that feedback, that's highly valuable. So these are the things that are really important for this type of engagement strategy. So first is showing what is the potential impact of this, right? Like, people care. This is how many people are requesting this type of talk. These are the talks that we've seen, like showing them that there is a demand for these kinds of content. There's type of content gratitude, which I talked about before. You cannot have enough of this.

Like, this has to be like an internal company culture thing, where it's like you have, you see somebody doing things, you thank them privately, you thank them publicly, just always gratitude, gratitude, gratitude actual impact. Now, this is something that we don't really practice, but it is amazing if you actually have the ability to give people feedback on their impact, right? How often is it that like your YouTube video goes up and you're like, wow, reach a thousand views and like all these comments are whatever. And like, it makes you feel proud, it makes you wanna do more, right? Showing that impact to your users and being like, Hey, this is how many people read your blog posts, or these are the kind of comments that people get for this is like, how many thumbs up you got or whatever. Like, that's gonna be valuable to your users and make them feel like they actually have a real impact. It motivates them to do more. Leveling up. This is pretty standard. And community programs. You can have champion programs. You don't necessarily need to have a champion program, but it has to feel like they're somehow going up. Like with the Google reviews thing, they're like, you're 10% of the top whatevers. And like that is important to make them feel like, I hate to say this, but like their status has gone up. There's a book and I'm currently reading, so I can't give you too much of the in depth of it. It's called the Status Game. And it talks about all the different elements of creating levels of status and how you make people feel like they're leveling up. And there's little things, you know, like reserving front seats at your conferences, like people who are on the higher hotel floors, like who really cares? You don't have a view anyway, you know what I mean? But like for some reason it makes you feel like higher status or special pens or whatever. You know, there's things, but seriously, like in the presidential desk, it talks about it in the status book. There's like a de there's a desk and there's one pen, and then this one president came back, he put two pens, and now all the presidents want two pens. It's just like, it's ridiculous. But that's a part of the status game. And then the other thing is like finding what their next level of contribution would look like.

Okay, motivations for contribution. So this I kind of talked about a little bit but I'm gonna just kind of review these cuz these are really important. So ju so thank yous not just from you but also from your community members. So if you can find a way to make this ecosystem work where people are getting gratitude from the community, people are asking questions, they're giving feedback, things like that. It's going to make your community members wanna do more recognition privately and publicly inclusion, if you are working on something, talk to your community members about it and give them the opportunities to get involved. Feelings of leveling up and earn swag. Let's see, oh, this is kind of the same thing. Feelings of impact and usefulness and then earn swag. I know some people are not big fans of earn swag, like t-shirts.

Like yeah, when you hand t-shirts out and like no one cares, it's like, doesn't really matter, right? But like, and you guys can all relate to this being dev row people, when you go to a conference and you get like a conference hoodie that's says speaker, it's just kind of special, you know what I mean? Like, I've gotten like, and you know, for all the people who work with Microsoft, like, I'm not trying to offend you. Microsoft hoodies are great, but like I've gotten Microsoft Hoodies at conferences and I'm like, okay, it's cool. I gave it to my mom, you know, but like, if it was like, if it's like one of the jackets, which like, I don't, I don't even wear these kinds of jackets, but I will wear it because it's like special, right? So that earns swag. It's also kind of a status game, but that's ano that's another area of read the status game book.

But that, but it, it can also be very, very valuable when people can earn swag. Okay? Earn swag programming. Okay, this is another unrelated slash related dev story. Does anybody donate blood? Yeah. Awesome. If you don't, you should. It doesn't take long. And it's important. You will actually save people's lives. So Red Cross is amazing at getting you to continue donating blood. So initially I used to donate blood. I found out I was AV positive. Turns out I'm better as a d a plasma donor. So when I discovered that, I was like, oh my god, I'm 4% of people have my blood type. Like I'm a universal donor for plasma. I have to donate plasma. It's really not a pleasant process. It's like takes two and a half hours and they take blood outta one arm, put it in the other, whatever. It's not pleasant.

But I was like, all right, I somehow got sucked in. And this is some of the things that American Red Cross does that I think we can learn from in terms of how to get your contributors slash donors to do a little bit more. So this is the kind of emails that they send me. They, this is at the top of the year. This is an annual prize email, right? So at the top of the year they said to me, if you do these things at the top of the year, you can earn this stuff one, one of these gifts. Now I just wanna show you that the first is a lunchbox. Nobody cares about a lunchbox, right? Then it's a $15 gift card for making like, I don't know, eight plasma donations, eight plasma donations, which is like insane for $15 gift card.

Or you get a jacket. Now what am I gonna go for? I'm obviously gonna aim for the jacket. I don't even want that jacket. I don't even think it's a nice jacket. I still have the jacket. I got the jacket. , but . But the point is, is that they give me this like annual package. Like this is what you get if you can do this thing. And they also help you track your progress, which is also something that I think is super valuable. They have an app which shows you the impact that you've made after you donate plasma. It's like, hey, this is how many people you've helped and how many lives you saved and blah, blah blah. And that's like, that's amazing. But that's, that doesn't, neither hinder nor there. Okay? And then they gimme a call to action, they're like, Hey, all you need to do is schedule an appointment.

Which is like minimizing the barrier to entry, right? So like donating plasma is not a little thing, but the all I need in terms of a call to action is pretty simple. Just like schedule an appointment. And then I'm like, look, I'm part of a winning winning team. So there was not only the annual prizes that they kind of like put me as a status. It's like I'm, by the way those jackets say plasma donor on it. They also do kind of like exclusive or pop-up kind of awards, holiday exclusive things. So it's like if you donate between this month and this month you get this baseball shirt or Christmas shirt. I have so many like exclusive things cause I lined it all up with the annual thing. So they had the annual thing and they complimented it with this to make me, to make sure I'm continuing to do the engagement.

Cuz maybe I'm like, ah, eight a year, that's a lot. But then I'm like, oh, I can get this t-shirt, I can get started in January. You know? So yeah. Okay. All right. Making users. I have like four minutes left. I'm gonna try to rush through this really quickly. Make users feel like there's some part of something bigger. So this is a event that I did when I was at Neo4j. It was way better than we even could have imagined it to be. We basically created a, a fake holiday. It wasn't like a real holiday, but I was trying to make it into a holiday to celebrate the guy who invented graph theory. So what I did was is I put it out to their entire community. I was like, you can organize your own events and you could speak at your own events.

I'm like, you register them here. We set up the, the back, the background of it with like my developer relations team where people could like register their own local event. It shows up on this big map and then other people from their local towns can register for it. They can also promote it or partner up with a meetup or whatever. And people could sign up for their event. And then we have this url. We collect their, their sizes and everything. And we shipped all these little events. We ended up having over 60 events in six continents by random people who were never engaged in our community before. And they all organized their own events and they all had these t-shirts and people were wearing them that day. And they watched a big video, like on that big screen that we created about what is Neo4j.

It was amazing. It was like for us, we ended up, so we did collect leads, although we made a promise that we're not gonna reach out to anyone unless they personally actively subscribe. Because everybody hates that. So we have to have empathy. But it, it was like a huge success and we were able to reach so many people that were not in our community. They were in their communities. So that was a really big deal and it was very, very impactful. And the whole process, if anybody has any questions on how we actually built this out, I'm happy to share it. Another example is we did, we changed Valentine's Day to Visualization day. So it's like happy V-Day. We had like, this was like one of those exclusive things. You get a, it was, it was really cute. We had a T-shirt that was a heart and it says Neo4j is my data bay.

Like we took the S out , turns out bay means poop in like another language. So it's not that great , it was like, this is my data poop. But we ended up having all these social media posts of Neo4j Neo4j what's it called? Yeah, visualizations doesn't matter. But this is like the example of like all the T-shirts. This is in Kira. And there's another talk that is, I'm not gonna dig into it too much because you can go watch it. It's by a woman named Jessica Wao. I saw her at the CMX Summit and I thought her talk was really amazing. And she talks about like the elements of belongingness and the feelings of inclusion and all that kind of stuff, which I just think are elements that are important to include inside of your community programming.

You can watch this, I'm, I only have one minute left of like two minutes. So it's like sense of oneness, kin, kinship, language, clear roles, leadership, common belief, rights and rituals. So if someone comes in and they get accepted, there's a whole process that gets them into the system, you know? And let's see. Yeah, if there's anything else in here, like having like a language secret society kind of things, you know, like only do you know about it. Also finding the small contributions. This is really if you have the ability to automate any of this to kind of flag you when like new people are contributing or asking questions or whatever, and automating any of this process, this is really, really important. Some of this happens organically, like inside of like the star true community. Neha is amazing, but you know, somebody posts something you or says something or help someone or whatever.

You have to recognize those things because those people have the potential to turn into massive contributors. And you know, a lot of times we're like focusing on growing our community, growing our community, and we're like hoping to find more contributors as we grow. But actually you're more likely to turn your existing community into advocates than you are to keep growing it. And if your process are in place to continue getting engagement from them, then you have the ability as you grow your community, you have the ability to also scale them. That's it. This is the takeaway slide. Which is great. These are the things that are important. Gratitude, recognition. I can't believe my timing is amazing. 30 seconds. So this is so that we're talking about the ecosystem, you have to make sure that it feed into the ecosystem so all your different people have something that they can do. And creating a ladder of easy contribution that's minimizing the barrier to entry. And that's it. I'm the only Korean wall in the world, so you can just Google me. Oh yeah. Questions? Do we have time for questions? Okay. Does anybody have a question? Yes. The guy with the cool t-shirt

Audience member 1: What was the amazing book about girls and marketing, which every DevRel

Karin: Did? So it's called Growth Hacker Marketing. And I didn't realize, I didn't realize what growth hacking actually was, but it's literally engineers that do marketing, like I'm talking about platform integrations and things like that. Like it is marketing that's built into your products, which is, you guys all have to read it. I'm telling you, it changes the game of like what Dev is , yes.

Audience member 2: Hi, I am z I'm struggling to create the, the community from the beginning. I mean, I've made the product, the pro the product is about gathering people together when they have a common concern, like polluted River

Karin: Or when they have what excuse say

Audience member 2: They, they live in next to a polluted river and that children are sick or they, I dunno, they they, they, they want to fight against GMOs because they are, people are getting sick because of it. And the idea is to put a complaint and people will join, join, join, so that there's a community around it. And this community is a network per se, so that it can act directly instead of protesting in the streets. Yeah. And the idea is how to start that com the first community.

Karin: So there I have a few ideas. So it's a product, right? It's a product. Yeah, it's a product. So I have a few ideas. One is like, it's kind of going back to like when people are doing any kind of contribution, they wanna make sure that it's heard somewhere, right? So like if you could promote that, like maybe it's connected to the city somehow, and like the reports are automatically filed in and like you can make sure that they get acknowledged, like where the city writes back to them and says, Hey, we heard your complaint, or something along those things. Those, and if you, even if you kind of talk about this or highlight the fact that it's connected to the city, that could be a value asset. So I'll give you an example of something. This is all in Growth Hacker marketing, by the way, Airbnb they had issues, they had, they had obstacles of people posting their ads online.

Like nobody wanted to post their apartments because they were using Craigslist and Craigslist was working. And, but Craigslist has a limitation of like how many things you can post. So the Growth Hackers hacked in, in Airbnb, they connected it to Craigslist API somehow, and they made it so when you post on Airbnb, it automatically posts on Craigslist and people were starting to use Airbnb as a tool to publish it on Craigslist and kind of hack the system and be able to post more or something along those lines, right? So that's like, that could be something that you might be able to kind of toy with, but that's in terms of like when you're marketing and tying it into your product, if that makes sense. Okay. [inaudible] Thanks. Are you and I'm, I'm happy to like, talk to anybody. I, I left unless asked, mentioned I left my job on Friday, so I'm like unemployed. So if anybody wants to talk, like I've literally free sort of, sort of, I did take a consulting job, so I was like, I have

Audience member 3: A very easy one actually. Did you pay people to run those events, the 60 events that ran around the world? No. No. They were not, like

Karin: None of the events cost was covered. No one was compensated in any way. So what we did was, is we had a map of like where you register your event, a pin shows up and that's like the map that we promoted of this event. We told everyone we were gonna send them t-shirts to their events, which were all like this exclusive t-shirt. When they registered their event, we created a custom link that was all tied into the same place and we created this community graph where like you can see all your attendees and who's going to which event. And I mean obviously it didn't show like the private information. And then and then we sent them the t-shirts and like that was it. And we told them to tweet and put up a sign that says Hello world and everybody did it and it was, it was wild. Nice. So yeah, we didn't, no one was compensated literally with just t-shirts. The whole thing caused us maybe $5,000 and effort, you know, which is a lot more expensive. . Okay. That's it. Thank you guys. Thank you. Thank you.