EP28: Trolls, ROI & Business Goals with Stack Overflow

08/28/19 • 17 min

Joining us on this episode of the C2C Podcast is Cesar Manara, Community Manager at Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

Cesar believes in creating long-lasting and meaningful relationships between customers and companies. With him joining us, we are going to deep dive into different facets of creating online communities and learn from him what it takes to create one.

So how do you build a community? Cesar shares that it’s important to nail down why you are creating a community. What purpose is it going to serve? What are your business goals? And once you know this, then you have to focus on what your members want. What are their needs?

Consider Stack Overflow where they are focusing on providing tools, resources, and knowledge to programmers so they can do a better job. And that’s not all, the job board on Stack Overflow today is better than LinkedIn.

2. Online trolls and the negativity that spreads easily in communities is a menace that many community managers have to deal with. For Cesar, the answers lie in changing the culture of the community. He will talk about why it is important to change what your peers think is right or wrong. And this can be changed through rewards and punishment. You reward those that act in a way that you want them to be and punish bad actors.

While Cesar knows how to create an online community, he also knows that he needs data. Data that will help him make decisions and drive his community forward. 3. With data, he believes you can figure out what your community members want? What activities do they want to spend their time on? Why are they spending time on your website and so much more? You can then see how those activities can be translated into business needs. Find the sweet spot in between these two and create something awesome.

Joining us on this episode of the C2C Podcast is Cesar Manara, Community Manager at Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

So how do you build a community? Cesar shares that it’s important to nail down why you are creating a community. What purpose is it going to serve? What are your business goals? And once you know this, then you have to focus on what your members want. What are their needs?

Previous Episode

[Repost] EP10: "Must Have" Metrics for Community Engagement with Unbounce

So many metrics, so little time! Luckily on this episode Jess Burnham from Unbounce breaks down for us what some of the key metrics and areas of impact community has. If you are in any way trying to show how valuable all the community work you do is this episode is a must!

Jess shares that while sign ups and total number of community members is good what you really want to track are ACTIVE members. For example, you have 10k community members but many are attendees at your events? You can easily get lost in the big vanity metrics and end up with almost no one actually engaging so focusing on those metrics makes sure you actually move the needle. In Jess’s case, she tracks the weekly active users (aka return visitors) on her forum.

She also mentions that product development is a huge area of impact that the community contributes to the company. Her top community members get direct access to alpha and beta features and give it thorough testing and share the positive and negative feedback that Jess relays back to the product team.

She also has created a group for the top 1%-3% of community members called “Unbounce Experts”. These are the people who are sharing feedback, helping other community members, sharing the product with potential customers and sharing on social. Jess knows it’s extremely important to engage and reward the “Unbounce Experts” so she gives them perks like a private slack channel, free tickets to their CTA Conference, access to the early features (mentioned above) and much more.

While she has made sure to track metrics and scale to 16k members she also knows that some parts of community are unscalable. She still has regular conversations with the “Unbounce Experts” and remembers fun facts about them that they appreciate. That’s the art of community, creating a system where the community can scale and grow itself while still engaging deeply and meaningfully.

Next Episode

EP29: How Slack Is Building a C2C Community from Scratch

In this episode, Derek is talking to Elizabeth Kinsey who is the Developer Marketing Manager at Slack.

Elizabeth knows how to create communities. She first created the Mobile Growth community at Branch Metrics which became the premier community for app developers and marketers. But her streak didn’t stop there, when she joined Slack she helped create the Slack Developer Communities from scratch, which has been a huge success. Here’s a rundown of what we will talk about.

Elizabeth will share with us how two things are most crucial to creating a successful community: tools, and resources. Tools that allow you to monitor your community leaders, help answer their queries and manage your community. And with resources, she refers to the “how-to” guides that have all the information that helps in fostering communities.

Elizabeth will talk about the biggest mistake people make: assuming they will be able to measure ROI as soon as they start the community.. It’s better, in her opinion, that community managers focus on impacting one area of the business first and then move to the next area of impact and so on.

An interesting part of the episode will be around the choosing chapter leaders, who are integral to spread the community. We learn how at Slack she is recruiting new leaders and what characteristics appeal to her most when selecting new ones. Enjoy!