Are you ready for 2024?
A world on fire and capitalism takes no prisoners. Turn your attention to these key topics instead. Check the calendar for upcoming events!
Hello friends,
I hope you are enjoying a safe and restful holiday season. My family and I are preparing for winter by stockpiling firewood and freeze-proofing water lines around the farm. This is my favorite time of year because I get to watch the land go to sleep under a blanket of snow.
Meanwhile, the world around us is rippling with turmoil. The suffering in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Myanmar, China, and here in the United States weighs deeply on my heart. I’ve watched layoff after layoff hit the industry and the entire community profession seems to be suffering an existential crisis. And who can forget the impending immolation from climate change (are we back to calling this “global warming” yet?).
With a steady diet of human suffering, impending doom, and information overload in our newsfeeds, I want to take a moment to recognize that it’s really hard to focus on office work when it feels like the world is on fire around you. But, we all have bills to pay and capitalism takes no prisoners, so I’ll just say: it’s ok to look after yourself.
The year’s end seems to bring with it a natural slow-down in the office. Whether travel plans and family gatherings add to your stress or reduce it, people have mentally transitioned to time off and time away. But, if you’re anything like me, taking time off usually just translates to extra work in January. And the new year always brings with it both the hope of opportunity and the pressure to deliver in the year ahead. In that spirit, I’m putting together a few things that I hope will be helpful for you in 2024.
Before we get to that, let’s talk about a couple of questions I hope you’ll ask yourself as you go into the new year:
How am I making myself indispensable?
How am I making the community indispensable to the company?
How am I making the community indispensable to our members?
First, let’s address the elephant in the room: many community teams have been trimmed down to the absolute bare bones. For many, this means running community programs with a team of one and figuring out how to “make do” with what you have in hand.
Repeat after me: Always. Be. Scaling.
Learning to scale yourself strategically through automation, process, and tooling will be crucial to surviving (much less thriving) in 2024. Scalability is your secret weapon to having an outsized impact this year. Yes, yes, ChatGPT, AI, blah blah blah…but also document your processes (check out tools like Tango.us), socialize them with your stakeholders, and make everything as self-serviceable as possible. Remove yourself as a bottleneck anywhere you can with tools like Airtable or Jira Service Desk to help your stakeholders submit requests and help you stay organized. Learn how to manage a backlog properly so you get out of the business of tracking down updates. Use Confluence or Notion or Coda or whatever tool fits your organization’s culture and toolkit to make information easy to find, access, and take action on.
Get Clear About Your Purpose: If you are running a brand community, your job, like every other employee, is to increase company profits. Full stop. That could mean decreasing costs (like per customer support costs) or increasing revenue (by growing brand reach, affinity, loyalty, innovation, product adoption, retention, etc.). For many - nay, most - brand communities, their purpose is a combination of these outcomes. Once you understand your purpose, you’ll find it easier to prioritize your work.
Prioritize ruthlessly: Be stingy with your time and commitments. Make sure you’re choosing to invest your limited time and resources on the most impactful initiatives by getting clear alignment on executive leadership’s priorities for the business. Reject the rest.
Remember those anti-drug campaigns from the 1990s? Just say no to scope creep.
That might mean cutting beloved programs and defending your decision to do so by reminding leadership of their own priorities. As I like to say: don’t light yourself on fire to keep them warm. The business needs to understand that reducing headcount means reducing capacity. They have to feel the pain or they will conclude that those other headcount were optional/nice to have and you’ll be on the fast track to burnout. Hold your boundaries. You’ll thank me later.
Own Onboarding with Intention: Companies leaning on self-service and product-led growth (especially as they cut headcount in enterprise sales teams) will continue to depend heavily on the community to provide “free support” to free and low tier customers. Your onboarding process should identify and seek to fill gaps in the customer’s overall onboarding experience with the product and the company, which, let’s be honest, definitely exist. Remember that your customer is a whole, multi-faceted human who will experience your brand through interaction with a variety of teams from your organization. You are the one centralized relationship builder between them and the business - especially when they have no other lifeline. None of your other engagement programs and rallying efforts are going to matter if the product or brand experience are terrible. This is a step in the customer lifecycle where you can have tangible impact on metrics like adoption, abandonment, and satisfaction.
Double Down on Advocacy: There’s no better way to scale - especially a small community team - than by activating the community. Community advocates, when properly incentivized, are the most powerful tool in our toolkit. Intuitively, marketing folks already know this because they’re used to leaning on customer referrals to establish legitimacy with prospects. But don’t start writing up white papers and case studies.
Advocacy is so powerful in the community because it requires individual community members to spend their own social capital on behalf of the product they believe in. The questions you’ll need to answer are:
What do you need your advocates to do with their particular skills, passions, and influence to impact your goals?
How can you incentivize them to perform those behaviors?
My advice: start with a conversation with your most active, outspoken, influential, and expert members and ask them what’s important to them.
Coming up:
Community Rebellion Live (virtual)
Nov 28-29
Our friends at Talkbase are hosting an encore event featuring four new Rebellion speakers: DeMario Bell, Andrew Claremont, Jae Washington, and Shawna James. I’ll be participating in roundtable discussions featuring all of my fellow speakers from the June event in Prague, including Richard Millington, Brian Oblinger, Ilker Akansel, Valentina Ruffoni, Yurii Lazaruk, Peter Van De Voorde, Milly Tamati, and Corina Gheonea.
Join us tomorrow, but save your spot today!
Goal-Setting Workshop for 2024
Dec 13
9:00AM - 11:00AM Pacific
I’m hosting this small group workshop to help you jump into 2024 ready to rock, with your goals in hand. We’ll work through my goal-setting framework together and I’ll give hands-on guidance on your specific situation.
Duration: Two hours
Cost: $250 per person
Seats will be limited to ensure maximum value for everyone.
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