Episode 489 Building Communities With Todd Nilson



Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks to Todd Nilson about building communities.

Show Highlights:

1. How Todd got into building communities.

2. How to do build communities.

3. Tools to help build your communities and how to select them.

Show Notes

Hey. Rob Cairns here. And today I’m here with my guest, Mr. Todd Nilson. Todd, how you doing?

Doing great. Thanks for having me on the show.

Well, my. It’s been a long time coming and I thought we’d do something. We talked about communities and how to manage communities and that’s kind of what you’re into. I don’t know if you know, I think I’ve shared with you ahead of time. I’m I Co manage one of the biggest WordPress communities on LinkedIn that we’re sitting at about 14,000 members right now and counting. So just a few there so.

Just a smattering of a few. Yeah, I, I I remember us talking about that a little bit the last time, especially some of the controversy and things sort of swirling around that that world. Yeah.

We’re not. We’re not going into. It so I wanted to ask. I like origin stories. And how did you get into community management and how did that kind of and that whole side of your business take off?

You know, I will probably sound like just about every other person who’s moved into community as a profession by saying that it was accidental. You know, just like Spider Man was bitten by a radioactive spider accidentally and ended up with these super. I very accidentally fell into community management. By way of my earlier career as a recruiter. Where I got very interested in and enamored of social media platforms and their ability to deliver business value to people and was an early proponent of using those tools and using. Software collaboratively to build connection and trust between between people. And that ended up growing into a career direction for me because it was something that didn’t exist really strongly before. For before 2010, not as a not as a a corporate profession. Certainly, although there was of course certainly many online communities before that. But I became very interested in that world of software that’s dedicated very specifically to bring people together so that they can. Share. They’re passionate about or get work done, or raise funds or awareness about an issue or help each other for having some kind of, you know, shared. Illness or health challenge. You know, lots of reasons why people come together in these. Technology mediated spaces to help each other.

Yeah. And I think the hardest part with technology spaces is you’re not physically always there, right? We’re doing these. You and I are doing this call on a virtual call. And I think I still think as humans, we crave for in person connection, right? I’m gonna die this.

We do.

We do and I think I got an appetite for that community building. There was. There was an inflection event for me. Put it this. That kind of gave me that that career direction into community building and that was around 2008, 2009, when there was the technology downturn that happened a lot of people found themselves out on the street. Even though they’ve been in their jobs for 10/15/20 years and suddenly. It was a whole new world of work out there and there’s this thing called LinkedIn and we need profiles on LinkedIn and I don’t know how to search for a job, you know, going to monster dot. Or, you know, some of these. There’s a lot of confusion and fear around that, and at the at the time I was a recruiter and. I had been. A little earlier on with a tech bubble burst. Were these things called pink slip parties? That that people would hold. Old recruiter, we go to a bar. At your. Give you some ideas how? Maybe maybe you go and network with other people. Work basically commiserating about what went wrong in that in that job situation. And I I like that idea of sort of communally helping each other in the space, but I hated the idea of the the the negative way that that space was convened around the pink slip and sort of let’s go to a bar and drown our troubles, you know. I I felt like there was a more positive way to turn it so. Around 2008, when that hat, when the downturn happened again, I and A group of other recruiters got together and collaborated to put together something called a job camp. And we we created the Milwaukee job camp event and. Ran it for the first time, thinking well, you know, maybe we’ll have a few people show up at this thing. We set it up as an unconvention. Which for anybody that doesn’t know what those are, it’s a vote with your feet kind of event you come in, you come up with the agenda of topics that people want to talk about. You want to talk about writing resumes. Great. Go ahead and do the session at 10:00. We’ll put it up on a virtual on a, on a screen and people can kind of show up if they feel like it. We have 500 people show up at the first one. This is kind of cool. So let’s let’s do it again. We ended up doing the event like four times. About 1500 attendees, each of the other times that we ran it and helped an awful lot of people, and we set it up in such a way that it was going to be fun and it was going to be more upbeat and help people kind of get. Mind set straight because that’s the biggest challenge when somebody’s in a job search. And we just had a lot of fun, you know, building it into more of a celebratory event like, hey, learn how to do a LinkedIn profile. A Bank of computers over here and people that know how to. You we’ll do. Here’s somebody that’s doing head shots. Let’s go ahead and get a picture of you. We’ll get it up on your LinkedIn profile. Oh, you want? You want to do a mock. Great. Go over to this room and and you know, talk to five different recruiters and get different views of you know, how to how to conduct yourself in an interview situation. And so it was, it was much more of a carnival atmosphere than what you get at a. A job search or like a job fair. I was called a job unfaith ’cause they they’re just not great experiences. And so it kind. Of I was bitten by the community bug in that sort of that in person element. Of connecting people, but it, but also it had a strong online component too. We had we had a website, we had a good social media.

FF.

Presence that was built in a very grassroots way. I still credit. The virality of that event with. A LinkedIn message that I sent to about 50 or so of my contacts in the recruiting world. That formed a kernel of volunteers who got excited about and it turned into a community of of collaborators. Know that built this experience so sorry. Long example but, but that was that was really a formative moment for me. Wise to see the potential of, you know what, online. To build together and to understand. That sense, you know that the excitement and the fulfillment of building communities with people.

No, I agree with. I think it’s an experience worth sharing. We taught communities an online and the first thing everybody looks and says. Let’s go create a Facebook group.

Yeah.

And I can stake my hand, and I have to tell you. I hate the Facebook experience more than most people. And you’re laughing at me, ’cause. You’re in the same boat. I bet. And I am at the point where you know, I guess it was about 2010 or 2014. I really jumped on in a big way, partially because I was running ads for clients. If I’m gonna run ads, I might as well do some other stuff. And then I started looking at all the rules around communities on Facebook and said I don’t really want a part of this mess. And one of the problem is you don’t own your data, the Convention rules. And I think people create Facebook groups frankly, because it’s easy and they’re lazy. And that’s it.

Low bar, yes, yes.

And I’ll say that’s a big. I think you should look at some other. What do you think about where you should create a community and why in that whole that whole discussion? We didn’t talk.

About this up front, but that that is that is such a perfect entry to this discussion, because I think, you know, Facebook has made it very easy to create private groups or even public groups within the space. But you need to think about. Where to build your community online? In a way similar to the way. A urban planner or an architect plans a building or space. Is the space where you want to convene people. To the purpose. That, that, that you’re trying to trying to fulfill in the space. And so yeah, it’s really easy for me to create a Facebook group. For my, for my community to try to create that and Facebook actually has some pretty good training and guidelines around community creation. But what they what they don’t tell you? What is a matter of? You know the the situation is that. When you are. Joining a Facebook group, your chances of actually seeing the notifications from that group and being able to participate and come back to on a regular basis are very, very low. And so I. Liken it to trying to convene. Quote Making group in the middle of a casino with blinking lights and lounge. You know, going on like you’re trying to create a space, a safe space for those individuals to gather and and talk about the stuff they care about. In the middle of a carnival in the middle of a a gambling casino. And so like so you. About the. The ecosystem or the environment in which you’re trying to build that community and they need to think about the purposes that you have, you know, for that space, some, some communities need to exist because they’re trying to educate people about some technical topic or something that they need. And that means you’re probably going to pick a community platform that has some kind of learning management built into it. The ability to offer courses or take courses. Some communities, like a lot of lot of the work that I do, is in B to B style organizations. A big use case for them is to enable peer support for their products or. So like I’m trying to create this great environment where power user A can help newbie C to solve a problem. You know in the space and I want to acknowledge those power users and lift them up. Maybe it’s ideation. Looking for new ideas for my software or service and so there are community platforms that have special abilities to let me do that so.

OK.

It’s never A1 size fits. It’s a it’s a tailoring. That experience, you know, in choosing the platform based on. What your core. Value drivers are going to be for that space.

And what the goals are, and I think another factor too, is who is running that community, or the moderators for that community ’cause I know like. As you know, I I Co manage only LinkedIn group and we have some pretty strict rules in that group and and we adhere to them and I’ll tell you LinkedIn is known as can be a stammie platform depending on how you let it go. And we actually moderate all out all the. So the option we went in our group and this was a group that LinkedIn actually came to us and asked us to run for them. So they wanted us to do that for them. One of the things we do was we went to a full moderated form and we had. So because. Because that’s how you get rid of all the. Look at me. Here’s my call backs and it’s like and people don’t understand that the moderators are as important sometimes as a platform itself.

Yeah.

Absolutely. And and in fact I I would say, you know, when I when I talk to organizations about building communities, there’s there’s 3 levels of trust that you need to look at. One is is the platform trustworthy? You know it. Does it feel like a spammy experience? It a. Contemporary user experience, you know to be in this place does does it feel like? And you know, and I’ve gone into. A hotel. And they’ve locked the doors and they’re trying to sell me a timeshare, you know. Is it a trustworthy place? It a trustworthy organization. The second level. And that’s. That gets into the representative, that organization, your moderators and the people that are running the community and you know, are you being transparent about the reasons why you’re convening that space? Do you get out of it? In it for you. That you were trying to enable us as a group of people who maybe have an interest in this topic or this product or service. And that’s not. 100% clear, like a lot of pharmaceutical companies, had to learn the hard way that people didn’t like it when they didn’t disclose that they were a pharma that had a had a financial interest in the drug, that they that they were taking.

Of course.

And then the third level, and this is often overlooked too, is can I trust the other people in the community? Is is there an assumed benevolence? In in the other people. Who are in that? You know, these are these people who share my concerns and they. What I what I do as? Was encountered, I think in the early days of if you remember second life where corporate organizations tried to set up like. You know, meeting the spaces in second life. And this was before you could kind of keep spaces private and they were. They were invaded by people that wanted to demonstrate against them or or just wanted to troll them and were throwing. Rudely shaped objects that people in the event. So if you can’t trust other people there, it’s it’s hard to get people to to a place of intimacy if they don’t feel safe. If they don’t feel like they’re in a trusted environment.

So I wanted also to. We’re talking a little bit about Facebook and, you know, goals. Let’s talk about platforms, because this is a discussion that can go off the rails real quick, but I know. I’m a techie. I have a techie background. All the tech communities seem to like to go on discord servers. I was saying to you before we went to record I just throw my hands up because I hate discord. So rule #1 is if. The community’s in. I’m probably not gonna join ’cause. Just can’t be bothered. What platforms do you really like and what you don’t? And I’ll preface this by saying there’s some new ones like Skull that seems to be the rage right now. There’s a couple others, and then if you’re trying to build community. In my $1000 question is should you be building your own form on your own website and saying forget all the platforms? What do you think?

Well, so you’re so I’ll I’ll address the the bit about Discord first.

Sure, go ahead. Yeah.

So I I I think that there’s there’s some kinship to that idea about what should I just start up a Facebook group because it’s easy for me to spin up, I think.

That.

Right or wrong, a lot of dev communities, a lot of gaming communities. Will default to discord as an option because they feel like everybody gets that you know, so I’m gonna. Same thing happens with slack.

Oh yeah.

That you’ll get invited into slack communities just because, oh, everybody gets how that works. So so there’s there’s less of a bar to the user experience, you know, going to those places. I I think that those. Are Colin Berry chat heavy? They are asynchronous, but I think there’s a there’s a large synchronous component to them, meaning like conversation is happening back and forth in real time. In platforms like discord and Slack and Microsoft Teams. That creates some problems for community building. First of all, because of the nature of the chatter, as you start getting more than 100 people in those spaces, they become very loud. Spaces.

They Don.

And and you start to feel overwhelmed by keeping you know, how do I keep up with all this stuff? And then, of course, there’s what did. What did I miss this the the FOMO? If you’re missing out from that space, there’s AI. Think it was back in 2015. Was a medium article that was sort of a. Tongue in cheek and said dear slack, I’m breaking up with you and here’s why. And it was really all about. It was just too hard to be in that space, so I think there are problems with those kinds of presence based community applications. And and I don’t even think they’re necessarily great community applications. When I think about. What is an effective community platform? It does allow me to have a synchronous conversations which find those platforms can do that, but they also.

2.

Provide for durable knowledge. In these spaces. And by that I mean can I find stuff that I put in there before, if anyone has ever tried to find something via search in slack or discord.

OK.

It’s a nightmare, right? And and they’ve tried to shore this up like I’m more of a slack user. I’d like. I usually run the other direction when when discord is, I’m invited. Used discords and I’ve been in them but. I’ll usually stay away from them, but you know the slack has tried to address this by adding things like canvases and bookmarking things in channels and all that. It’s still not an effective method for discovery of rediscovery of of resources in the place, and I think that’s a that’s a key to what makes a community platform work or not work is, is searchability and the dur. Knowledge in those spaces. So the platforms that I do like to answer your question, you know, I think that they they tend to split in two directions in my view 1 is more. Enterprise level large scale community platforms that need to have a lot of good web hooks, they need to have a good API library, you know built in. You know they integrate with other systems. So there’s some old players in the space like koros and higher logic. And newer player Gainsight, which used to be incited. These these may be gobbledygook words to some of some of your listeners. These are. These are platforms that are more prone to be bought and used by large enterprises, particularly large SaaS based. Companies. But in the B2C world as well, you’ll see. You know more commonly showing vanilla forms is another one, which is, you know, modern take on the old. Bulletin board, you know, style forms. You know that they were out there.

I did.

And then there are what I’ll call sort of the the the new kids on on the block, although they’re not entirely new. Some of them have been around since 20/14/15 or so. And those are. They’re a little more turnkey, you know, in, in terms of how they work, so. More people will probably recognize mighty networks or circle. They have an awful lot of name recognition. Not lately, but there’s there’s a lot of other good ones out there. There’s disciple Media, there’s, there’s disco. Discourse a great best of breed discussion platform. As well, but I track about. Well over 80. That kind of come up on a pretty regular basis out in the world and there are more, you know that are that are hitting all the time. And as far as favorites, that’s it’s. It’s hard to pick from among all my kids, right? But. But I think that some of the ones I mentioned are ones that I tend to work with a little more frequently. I don’t know that they necessarily win in all the categories, but they they tend to have some specialized. Use cases now as. Discussed a little bit earlier, yeah.

So what you’re suggesting is don’t build your own. Go find a SAS. That kind of does it for you, right? They do it well and they’re. In place.

Why do you want to reinvent the wheel around? You know, and I I have this conversation and I’ve come into companies. And you know, this happens semi frequently where they’ve decided they just want to build their own version of a community. A bespoke community platform. And I was wondering like. Why do you want to maintain the software? You know, for that when there’s when there’s dust or breed stuff that’s out there that is pretty affordable and easy to. Easy to integrate with with your website experience. I don’t see a good reason to do it, and I’ll even say like there’s some there’s some add on platforms that I think are probably not worth the effort as well to add on unless, unless like you really want want to. It like sorry I know. The in the WordPress world but. I got to say like Buddy boss and.

Buddy. Buddy press. I wouldn’t do it.

Buddy Press is sort of the the open source version of Buddy Boss. You know that they went to market and kind of, you know, did their own thing. And I’ve worked a couple years with some firms that wanted to build Buddy boss. Commun. And it’s just in my for my view. The juice is not worth the squeeze, you know. It just takes too long to configure. It’s too fussy and I and I get like when I when I did it, the firm that I work with, I’m not naming names around it. They were big WordPress shop and so they’re like, yeah, we can do this, we. Know let’s let’s use this plat. Form 2 years of development later, the project gets abandoned because. Just too many, too many cooks in the. Too many fiddly bits to configure and you know I tend to believe that. The more. Have to think about the plumbing. The less time you have to think about the the actual building of. The community, the, the, the social process of people. Together.

Yep, I agree with you. If you’re building a new. So let’s call it Community accent for the sake of it, let’s call it it’s for drone Flyers. OK, just ’cause. I’m in the I’m in the drums right now, so let’s go with that.

Oh yeah. OK.

How do we get people into that community? And then how do we make? Happy like. How would you do? Yeah.

So.

My typical approach when working with an organization that wants to bring in a very specific audience like that is to ask them how well do you know these people? Like, have you talked to? Have you talked about the kind of problems they’re trying to solve? You know. Do they go? You know, are there competitors that we need to know about? You know, is there a strong Reddit that is doing everything that we want to do and if so? What are we going to? That’s a little bit different and it’s going to give them something more. There’s got to be a reason. Come there an old. Who one of his favorite sayings. You’re showing me a bright shiny hook, but there’s no worm. The end of it. There’s got to be. Worm you. There’s got to be a compelling reason for me to want to invest the time to get into this platform.

Yeah.

And and and to, you know, to kind of follow back around to the earlier part of our conversation, making it easy to come into the platform isn’t reason enough. Because then if it’s a low barrier to entry for me to come in. I don’t have to do. I’ve already got an account, you know, on that platform or whatever. If there’s still not a strong reason for me to hang around, I’m not going to come back, you know, or I’ll come back. Maybe if I feel like it. But it’s like you’re you’re throwing.

It’s.

A bone to. That so, so really understanding. Having substantial conversations with as many people, potential people from that community as possible is incredibly important. And then really planning for the operational support of that of that space like the the technology is really the least of my concerns in a lot of these cases. I could put up the most primitive. Of online discussion software. And still have a really strong community. If the people that have a good reason to be there. If there’s a project they’re working on, if they, you know, they love the certain kind of drone and they’re doing mod kits and you know nothing about drones. Right. But but. You need, you know, collaboration opportunities. You know. You’ve got events, you’ve got contests, you’ve got giveaways. You’re giving away. Super cool drone. You know what? I’m. You know, I want to be there. You’ve built you. Know gamification into the platform that’s meaningful that you know. Oh, you know. I got certified for, you know, flying this kind of Dr. Absolutely. That’s now showing as bling on my profile. Now people are going to ask me questions about. I’ve got some social social standing in the space. All these things that I’m mentioning. Are designed to keep that space, you know interesting and sticky as the marketers would like to call it. What’s going to keep me coming back there? Because that’s where my people are. That’s that’s where the coolest stuff is happening.

And I think a lot of it is what you just said. The people I find. Being in enough online communities and urine. Of. Probably way more than I am. I find a hangout where the people are that I like to be and I like to be around and I like to converse with and some of the people are in multiple communities. And then I find the discussions rival out of it. I know one of the online communities in space. Which I will not name right now with everything going on has gotten so negative to the point I I’ve actually checked out. Like I headspace cannot handle this and it’s not the people, it’s just gone. It’s done a total 180. And it’s like I can’t handle this, so I’ve checked right out to the point I won’t even read that community. There, but I don’t think I’ve been in it in like 3 weeks and counting.

Communities will death. It can happen. Yeah, there are. Are. 3 paths of evolution for communities. The the one that that most go for is to sustain. The other one is to evolve because the the old premise for the community is no longer. Or there’s been a change and the third is decline and you know there are patterns of decline in communities and and unfortunately controversy is one of the things that the if the community cannot. Overcome its own negativity. It it will die, it will close and that’s natural. Happens, unfortunately.

And then then there’s people that would argue and say let’s just use a social media platform like X or, you know, whatever. And I always say, have you ever seen the noise on X? If you’re, I just and I’m on X and I’m you’re. X I’m. Sure. And there’s a lot of noise there and I think the one thing about going to a close community or a or a smaller group is the noise shrinks, the noise factor shrinks in the the. Value add actually goes up, not down. Do you think about that?

Yeah. So a couple of. So social, big social, I’ll call out. Make that distinction because. Think communities are a little social.

Fif.

Big social.

A.

Is a commercial marketplace. It is a broadcast medium. It is a, arguably, there’s a town square. Where you see all walks of life passing through and it is very noisy and it’s hard to build communities in those spaces because they are so very public.

Yep.

And so especially you know, depending on the kind of feeling of community or belonging that you are trying to achieve. In most cases. They’re not going to be fit for that purpose of doing it because. Even if I have things like a like a chat or I forget what X calls their little audio chats.

You can send a audio. I know what?

Yeah. Even if I’m doing one of those like, I don’t know that I can trust that there aren’t gonna be people who are. Who want to troll my point of view or? For the sake of it. So I’m gonna guard what I say in that space. And so that’s why we need those more private spaces. The small, cozier communities where people feel a little more freely able to express. That’s why I said like that levels levels. There needs to be a trust in the benevolence of other people in this space. There’s not. It’s probably not a good community space. Probably not going to work well.

Yep.

Doing need video or just audio or just text.

I think we’re. I want all of the cues that I can get so I can get to know somebody. I think that you know, the ubiquity of video conferencing goes a long way towards community building because I can get to know you across the miles. I can see facial expression micro expressions if you will. I can hear tone of voice. Can see sort of how you’re holding yourself in the. I can see what’s behind you. That may tell me something about your your personality or likes or dislikes. Like there’s a whole set of. Visual and auditory cues that I can get now that I couldn’t get when I was limited to a. Medium text is a little limiting in in that fashion and then I think we’re we’re in the slow progression right now. To evolve towards. More proximity based communities. In online spaces, so virtual worlds, things that I think anybody who’s a gamer has run around the first you know, first person shooter environment like a fortnight or something like that recognizes how. How involving it is to be in a virtual world or virtual space and to group up with other people in those spaces. I think that. Businesses and organizations are still in the early stages of understanding. The tools and platforms that can enable interaction in that way and I. There are. Just as there are visual and auditory cues in a video call like this. Imagine spaces where I’ve got, you know you and I are facing each other as avatars and other people are passing by and I can hear my head headphones when somebody’s walking by talking like suddenly. Now I have context around around like a. A virtualized physical environment. And so you know, that gives a far greater sense of space that we’re moving towards. Sorry to give you a complex answer to your simple question, but.

It is. It’s not an easy answer. Any of the stuff it’s it’s always leads somewhere else, so that’s OK. If somebody was wanted. A. We’ve talked about a whole pile of things just. Kind of bring it all together. What would be the three or four things you would say to them? You should do up front before you even jump into the the bowl or jump into the community space. Should they do?

Number one, articulate why you want to create the community like like why for you like what’s in it for you to build the space. How will you? Measurably quantify what it is for you. It you. Are you trying to build? Are you just trying to build? Are you trying to solve a problem in the world you know? But, but I think like getting that written down is really important. And then making good educated guesses about why someone would want to join your space and trying to validate that. Con if you can really address those two pieces, you’re going to go far towards picking the right platform and figuring out how you’re going to manage it day to. And all. But like, really, it’s the Simon Sine. With Y question. Yeah. Why do you want to do this? You know, and it’s not necessarily right for every organization to have an online community or space. I think for many it is. Some spaces just aren’t conducive to that, because there’s no trust there. Like, if you’re if you’re. Part of a. A hobby where everyone is competing with each other in auctions. Hard to build a community around that because I. Trust. You’re going to take anything that ioffer as an idea, and you’re going to steal it and use it for yourself and use it to get advantage. You know, over me so. Those are hard. You know, to those are hard spaces to build. But but I think. By and large, where there is that potential for collaboration that that, that’s a lot more common.

Let me say that this conversation is really a good overview and I I appreciate taking the time if somebody wants to talk to you about building community. Todd, how’s the best way to reach out to you?

Yeah, I love it. Thank you. I am very active on LinkedIn. You can follow me out there and I also got a YouTube channel for clock Tower Advisors. My primary consulting business around community building. Or you could visit me at clock Tower advisors.com and schedule a meeting with me directly there.

With her.

Thanks. Yeah, have yourself an amazing day, my friend. Thank you.

Thanks so much, Rob.

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