Tom Norman podcast cover
Episode: 10

Tom Norman - Community and community management

Posted on: 17 Dec 2020
Tom Norman podcast cover

Tom Norman is a community management professional who has been helping people and businesses build online communities for the past five years and now runs the Kickstart Your Community project.

In this episode, we dive into the importance of community in the digital sphere. We discuss the emergence of community as a key player of the industry in the past decade and cover some of the key considerations and benefits of a strong online community. Tom shares some key lessons learned from a particularly challenging recent project and provides some essential words of advice for successful community management.

 

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Transcript

“We all want to have communities at scale. You don't get there and actually start with individuals, you know, like ultimately it's full of a bunch of humans and humans you know we're weird, we're quirky, we're strange, and so it's important to build it for individuals and help those connect and then find techniques which help that to scale.”

Intro:
Welcome to the Agile Digital Transformation podcast, where we explore different aspects of digital transformation and digital experience with your host Tim Butara, content and community manager at Agiledrop.

Tim Butara: Hello everyone, thank you for tuning in. Our guest today is Tom Norman, community management professional and founder of the Kickstart Your Community project. We started chatting with Tom about community and different approaches to community management then we figured; hey, why not have a more in-depth discussion on the subject in a podcast episode. So, here we are, ready to bring you some great insights on building and managing online communities. Thanks for joining us Tom. Would you like to add anything to the introduction?

Tom Norman: Thanks for having me here; it’s great to be here. You know there's a big debate about what community even means and I feel like it's not just a social media following. Sometimes people think oh that's all it is but I feel like community is a lot more than that and it's much more of a two-way conversation between the brand and between the members themselves, so I think that's the most important thing I’d love to set the start.

Tim Butara: Yeah, the social media following and the social media presence is just kind of the most visible, the most obvious part of the community but there's so much more behind it, it's kind of just the tip of the iceberg so to speak.

Tom Norman: For sure, for sure.

Tim Butara: And how long have you been working with online communities? You've probably seen some major shifts in this area throughout your work, throughout this whole process.

Tom Norman: Yeah. So community has been something which kind of grabbed my attention for the past five years or so and it really began actually with in person community believe it or not in a cafe and I was doing events organizing and stuff there and I started to feel the real tangible benefits of community in real life and then yeah after that it's really been the last three or four years I’ve been doing it online and I think the biggest shift in this time I think has-- there's two I’d like to mention.

One is that a lot of online communities first starting with Facebook because it's so easy so… you know the Facebook groups are quite an easy way to have a community and it's been a big shift recently of people leaving Facebook partly for political issues you know it's like oh you're not paying taxes and stuff like that but also partly because just because it's not that good, the experience isn't that great and as communities are maturing I think that people want to have a better experience for their members as well.

So that's one trend I think and also the other trend I’d probably mention is the fact that the actual industry itself is maturing. Like I think community industry or professional industry are probably in the same place that growth hacking was maybe 10 years ago and I feel like it's just maturing and people are starting to realize, wow, this is something we should really focus on.

Tim Butara: When did you first start seeing community kind of becoming this buzzword and as you said kind of an important aspect of a brand, of the digital… it-- was there any important milestone that you could really pinpoint and say this was it, this was kind of the moment that cemented the future in the course of community and how it's treated in digital transformation?

Tom Norman: I’ll be totally honest. I can't think of an exact milestone. It's-- I’ve been you know doing it kind of quite ad hoc the last few years. Just doing it kind of in my own little zone and it's only really the past 18 months or so that I’ve been exposed to the entire industry that it is and you know I’m just right in the beginning of that wave as well.

I’m probably eight years late because some of the earliest community professionals began you know we're talking 12 years ago probably and I’m riding the wave of joining the last couple of years ago and yeah I couldn't tell you an exact milestone to be honest.

Tim Butara: Yeah, it's probably something that happened kind of organically and without people really realizing it at the time and then once it happened it was already kind of a semi-established part of the whole strategy.

Tom Norman: Definitely.

Tim Butara: And what's the importance of having a strong and active online community, how does having such a community benefit a brand or a company?

Tom Norman: See, I think this is actually one of the key components that sometimes people miss. The community, it's really important that it's tied to a business goal or otherwise it will still lose funding or you just give up with it.

So I think one of the key elements is that you're-- you have a business goal first and the community supports that. You know it's very cool to say, “Oh we want a community.” Why?

Because you want to look good in social media, that's not a good place to start from community building. It's like, what do you want your community to do? And there are lots of aspects it could help. It could help with customer acquisition for example. You know you might have a-- you might serve the community first and that helps them to become you know customers eventually or it could be products, for example, you know.

Also one of the companies I’m working with right now, they've got a community we're building for the product and you know, if they're a tech company building a good product to be able to have members there who you can kind of iterate ideas with and kind of brainstorm with, it helps you kind of cut out the mistakes and a lot leaner to building products to market rather than trying to invent it all yourself and desperately seek kind of people to validate your ideas with this, but much better to have that community with as you go along to kind of build and generate these ideas with.

Tim Butara: And also if you do it as you go along it's probably easier to kind of have a more cohesive picture of the community aspect of your business. It's not such a disjointed activity, community management, that is, and community building, if you kind of have everybody on the same page and if you kind of convey the importance of building the community to all key stakeholders and all key team members.

Tom Norman: Yeah definitely. And that's why it's really important to have your metrics measurable as well. You know it's important to measure metrics. Community can almost sound a little bit vague sometimes. Oh, how community is your community? But there's actually metrics you can measure.

It's not just you know it's not just members, it's like active members, how many are lurkers? How many are engaged members? So it's really important to have these metrics and especially marrying with the metrics that your key stakeholders like you know the CEO or people that they're interested in seeing as well.

Tim Butara: Oh yeah those are some very good points and also they lead perfectly into my next question and that is; it's-- I think it's safe to say that not everybody has the exact same idea and definition of what community management is or should be I think there are-- if you asked a hundred people you would probably get maybe not 100 but maybe you'll get 50 different definitions. So to you what would be the key elements of effective community building and management?

Tom Norman: For me, like I said before I think one of the key components is that it's married to a business goal. Like, that's really important because otherwise the funding won't last the community, the CEO and the core team were like, “let's not give money there anymore.” So I think one really key component is marrying it with a business goal and having metrics to measure, but the most important thing about community is that it's balanced with the community members' own ambitions and drives too.

So what I mean is you know if you're only focused on the business goal it's going to be a really crap experience for your members and they're going to, very quickly, go somewhere else and that's kind of the end of their experience in the community. So just as important as the business goal it's got to have the right membership goals. You know, why are these people here? What do they do together? What's the bigger purpose for being together? That's almost the key is marrying and balancing these two perspectives. You can't drop either, you can't drop the business goals and you can't drop the community goals.

Tim Butara: What would be kind of the go-to approach for achieving this, for marrying these two goals?

Tom Norman: I think it's having the business goal first. You know that's the North Star, if you like, of what you want to achieve through this community and once you've got the North Star you can then ask yourself you know, well what do the people do in this community, you know why are they here? What do they want to do here? Who do they want to connect with? What makes you an insider rather than outsider? Stuff like that. So you know the business goal is the North Star and then almost the community goals are essentially almost like-- almost tactical development to kind of build towards that North Star for the business.

Tim Butara: Yeah, those are some very good points. It’s kind of the people goal is kind of derived from the initial business goal.

Tom Norman: Yeah, I think it has to.

Tim Butara: Cool, yeah. And what about maybe some particular projects you probably, you said that you've been working with community for eight years now, if I remember correctly, right?

Tom Norman: A little less. Like five years. Yeah, five years or so.

Tim Butara: So you've probably had quite a few challenging and interesting community projects either since launching Kickstart Your Community or like previously. What was the challenging project for you and what were the key lessons that you learned from working on it?

Tom Norman: So one of-- I’m in a project right now which is quite challenging mostly because it's really early stage and also it's working with seniors. So I’m working for a U.S company at the moment and it's like an online platform for seniors to connect and attend virtual events during this kind of horrible Covid experience which you know is a beautiful idea and you know seniors really do need some ways to connect.

However it poses its own set of challenges. Like one; you know seniors aren't necessarily that tech savvy and therefore trying to reach them in the first place and trying to guide them step by step onto the platform and answer what we're doing is quite a challenge in itself. So you know I think that's been a real challenge and it's also about trial and error a lot. You know we try something and it doesn't work so we try and figure out, okay what part of this onboarding chain isn't working, where are they dropping off, what part they don't understand?

So that's been really a big challenge and I think that's key which a lot of people can relate to in community is-- it's inherently working with humans and humans are unpredictable and you might have all these crazy great ideas about what could and would and should happen and then it goes completely flat and you're like, well what happened? 

So I think that's a big challenge in community. It’s not some professional industry; it's very like okay you do these things and you get this output. Whereas community because it involves humans, because humans are weird and crazy and beautiful it kind of it's not as easy as, you do these things and get this output, so that's I think the overall challenge in working in community.

Tim Butara: Yeah it's kind of less tangible, less set in stone than in some other industries, probably also due to the relative youth of the particular industry. But also you know you said that community is about working with people, but not only that community kind of presupposes that the number of people is relatively large and the more people you have, the more likely there are to be differences between these people and consequently the less likely it is that you'll provide a solution that will suit everybody in the same way possible. So yeah I can see that these can definitely be challenges especially with an audience that's as you mentioned earlier a very—okay, maybe less tech savvy than you're used to with people that you interact with.

Tom Norman: Definitely.

Tim Butara: And how did you go about? I'm particularly interested in this challenge of seniors being less tech savvy. How-- what were some solutions for this particular challenge?

Tom Norman: First of all it's actually working-- I think one of the key elements to building any community is actually working directly with the members. So we started with you know a small group of let's say it's 10 active members or more, I don't know, and it was kind of working with them. Okay, so what did you understand about this, what didn't you understand? And just a one-to-one almost unscalable relationship in the beginning is really key to kind of scaling as well.

So you know working with them we realized a few flaws. Okay, this is not being understood very well, this is not so good. So that was the beginning stages also just like I said earlier metrics are super important. So just seeing these metrics and being able to see over time. Okay so people come here onto this website, but they drop off here, this is the stage we're going to overcome here. So that's been really important too is just understanding where people drop off, trying to understand why and then putting the fixes in as we go.

Tim Butara: Yeah, these types of data seem to be very important in almost every aspect of the digital even if it's something very people-related and where it's kind of maybe less intuitive that you, that data would factor in so hugely, but I mean, we're living in 2020, you can't have successful digital initiatives without at least some reliance on data.

Tom Norman: Yeah, exactly. And that's another thing, community, you mentioned at the beginning any trends which I’ve seen in community, that's something which is happening more and more, is there are becoming these trends, these like they're using more and more data in community too. Like you know it's not this wishy-washy like from the heart thing anymore, it is partly, it's partly intuitive but you've got to have data and metrics to kind of back that up.

Tim Butara: Do you use or like at least at least know of some community building software or some tools that are really popular or that you found helpful?

Tom Norman: There is a few. I don't... I use... I used, a lot of mine is just on Google Sheets. You know for example Facebook provides you a lot of data with who's in your community, what they're doing, who the top speakers are, so if I’m using Facebook groups for a community I usually use Google Sheets and just analyze it.

There are some websites you can use, I think there's one called Periscope, it's not the same as the app from a few years ago there's one called Periscope I believe which also has more insights more data available and I think that's going to be a trend we see over the next few years, more community like database community projects.

Tim Butara: Cool. Make sure to send me a link to that so I can include it in the additional resources section.

Tom Norman: Sure.

Tim Butara: And okay you mentioned kind of knowing that you're working with people and making your communities people-centric and actually interacting with community members is one of the key things that people trying to build and boost their online communities should have in consideration.

Do you have any other key words of advice for people who are just getting started with community management or and are like maybe still trying to find their way, having some issues, running into some challenges?

Tom Norman: Yeah, the first thing, I’ve mentioned it a few times, but I think that's why it's really key, is you've got to have a reason, a goal in mind it can't just be I want followers that's not a community that's an audience and that's also not enough. Why do you want followers, what's the purpose of having the followers of the community?

So marrying it with a goal is I think the first and foremost thing to do if ever you start a community and once you've got that, I think the other thing which I think is really important is, we all want to have communities at scale, you don't get there unless you serve individuals, you know. Like ultimately it's full of a bunch of humans and humans you know we're weird, we're quirky we're strange and so it's important to build it for individuals and help those connect and then find techniques which help that to scale.

You know, don't start from the, let's just how can we serve 100,000 people, how can we serve 1,000 people? It's like, how can I serve these five people as good as possible and then, okay so how do we scale that to 50 people and how do we scale that to 150 people? So always start small and go all in with the unscalable and then notice the trends which really work and use that as you scale up.

Tim Butara: So would you say that kind of having the initial mindset of; oh yeah I want to build a community a community of I don't know 100,000 members maybe that's not the right way to go about it?

Tom Norman: I would say so. I would say you know the 100,000 member community is something that ensues you from doing but it, ensues you're doing good work. It's not something you can necessarily pursue from the outset. You've got to have a real purpose, you've got to really care about this community, you've got to really serve them and then it leads to a 100,000 community. If you start out with just I want a 100,000 person community, like you know what does that even mean? So I think it's really important to have a much more kind of person-to-person approach in the beginning and then scale that as you go.

Tim Butara: Yeah I think that's kind of at the essence of building a community because at the baseline of community basically is kind of these pristine relationships and pristine connections and if you're only building a community with kind of the end-goal of quantity in mind, then you kind of limit yourself from being able to create meaningful connections and meaningful relationships and that's kind of that's not what your call endeavor should be about in this context.

Tom Norman: Definitely. I agree.

Tim Butara: Okay, I kind of got through the main part of my questions. Before we move on to the closing parts of the episode, of the call I want to make our discussion a little bit more current, we mentioned Covid earlier and how would you say the events happening this year related Covid and basically everything else going on have impacted the field of online community management? Are there any crucial changes we should be aware of and kind of keep in mind in the future going forward?

Tom Norman: Yeah I mean it's been a really weird year, right? It's been a weird year and I’m lucky that I can say weird, for some people it's been a terrible year and a tragic year and you know it's been a horrible year. But let's just say I feel for the community industry if we're going to marry up to that if we're going to tie it to that, I think that it probably has helped to push the industry forward for a few reasons and I think that's partly because this year has made us all feel so isolated.

We've had to spend a lot of time at home sometimes you know a few weeks or I think it was like six or eight weeks and some people a lot longer and we start to realize how much we rely on human connection, how much we miss human connection and so we sort these connections out online.

You know, there are lots of these really creative beautiful projects online and you know during the Covid lockdown I created this online cafe where people could join us for different online virtual events every day and it was just a way to stay connected and stay informed during that time.

But also I think it also just highlights how important it is to belong to something. And you know I think in the past we used to belong to, we were much tighter to religion and that was something we belonged to and you know maybe we're more connected to our local town and our hometown, and that was something we belonged to, but now we're on a global stage and I think it's more important that's why we're seeking out places online to belong to because now we're on this global digital sphere and we still need to belong, belonging is a human need. And I think this, potentially 2020 just consolidated that, that we need to belong. Like life-- human beings were made to belong to something and it's really important that we seek good places to belong to and always don't get filtered into, almost to be conscious in what we belong to.

There's so much crap out there that we need to be conscious about what we decide to commit to, what we decide to belong to and who we decide to spend our time with. And I think this year by its very nature by how tumultuous it was I think this year we just helped to consolidate that in people.

Tim Butara: Yeah, because humans are social creatures right? And if you kind of prevent us from having in-person interactions, if we have the means we'll find workarounds around it, so now in the era of digitalization it's become even more important for people who are maybe isolated working remotely and this is even more important and more relevant maybe for people who are living alone, who don't have family members or partners or housemates or whatnot and it's even more important for these people and for their mental health specifically to actually be able to be a part of communities, to interact with different people and you know this is kind of the trade-off that we get.

Yes, we have, our in-person interactions have been diminished but we're able to connect with people from all over the world, right? I mean okay now we're both speaking from Slovenia but say you were in the U.S and I was in Europe we would be able to have a great episode, a great conversation no matter the time difference, no matter the physical difference, no matter, the maybe technology difference. It’s a changing world, I guess.

Tom Norman: Yeah exactly. I agree.

Tim Butara: Okay that's it for my questions, Tom. Is there anything else about community management community building that you'd like to cover, that maybe we missed, that maybe you thought of while we were speaking?

Tom Norman: Yeah, I mean the biggest thing I would say to people is we've got-- if you're trying to build a community for your brand, your project, your organization - we've got a really important job: to do we're here to serve people. And that is both a privilege because you know connection, humans, like you said we're social creatures and building places for people to belong to, helping to connect, helping to serve them - I think for me at least is one of the greatest privileges there is. So we've got a real privilege and it's really important to take the opportunity and do good in the world. You know we really can do good with connecting people and helping people to belong. So you know I guess that is where i'd probably finish this.

Tim Butara: Oh yeah thanks for including that Tom, that's a really great note to finish on. I'm glad you mentioned it. Before we finish though if people want to reach out to you or learn more about you what's the best way for them to do that?

Tom Norman: Definitely you know LinkedIn is always a good place or even you know Kickstart Your Community website which is kickstartyourrcommunity.com and yeah to be honest with you if you're just searching on Facebook you can probably find me as well so whatever you want search me and see if I come up.

Tim Butara: Okay awesome, Tom. Thanks for this great conversation with me today and to our listeners, that's all for this episode. Have a great day everyone and stay safe.

Outro:
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