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- [00:01]
Daniel Murray
Today on the podcast, I'm joined by David Spings, coach, founder, and one of the leading voices in community building. We recorded this episode last year, but it's still packed with timeless insights. David Co founded CMX, scaled it to over 20,000 members, helped lead Bevy's growth, and wrote the Business of Belonging, the Go to book for building meaningful communities. We get into what real community looks like, why most brands get it wrong, and how to build something people actually want to be a part of. Hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the off. Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Today I have David on the podcast. He's a community building expert. He's done this for a while. I'm excited to chat with him about community in general. I know that's been a topic for a while, and some people do it well, some people don't do it well. So I'm excited to dive in. Welcome, David, to the podcast.
- [01:27]
David Spinks
Appreciate you having me.
- [01:29]
Daniel Murray
I want to first ask you, how did you get into the space of community building? How did that happen?
- [01:36]
David Spinks
I kind of think everybody's in this space of community building in some way. We all have our experiences with community, being part of community, starting communities first. A lot of the work I do today is in digital community, and I got introduced to digital communities at a really young age through gaming. I was big into video games in middle school and ended up starting a forum for Tony hawk's Pro Skater 4 was my game of choice. And that kind of introduced me to the world of building online forums and online communities. I was only in middle school at the time, so I got a very early education in all the things that you do to build community. Managing conversations, dealing with trolls, creating rules and guidelines, holding contests and competitions. And so then that became kind of a fascination for me, how the Internet would connect people and how communities can form online. I struggled with finding community in person, so I really relied on the Internet to find connection and belonging early on. And at that time, that wasn't a very normal thing to do. And so I could kind of see that this is the way that things would go. And then of course, it did, and social media blew up, and social media and the Internet became such a big part of how people would connect. And when I got into college, I went to school for business administration. I started connecting the world of business to online communities and how businesses can build communities in a way to achieve their goals. And that became my career. My first job out of college was a community manager, which wasn't really a job at the time, but I was writing about community and business on my blog and a startup found my blog. They wanted to hire someone to manage their community, and so they hired me for three months for an internship and kind of just went from there. And I've spent the last 15 years or so either building communities, starting companies. I've started three companies. Ended up starting a company called cmx, which is a community for community professionals. And we did a lot of work to standardize and normalize the profession of community building and teach businesses how to build community. Developing training programs, conducting research, working with thousands of different companies to help them understand where community fits into what they do.
- [04:10]
Daniel Murray
I want to go into that question of what? Well, how would you define what a community is? Because I think some people think they have community and it's not community. And I think some people have community and they don't know that they have community.
- [04:25]
David Spinks
Yes, the definition question is a big one because everyone's calling everything a community these days. And the truth is it is everything. It's human connection. If people feel a sense of belonging to each other, if they feel a sense of community with each other, then it's a community. So it's really something that people experience. A really simple way to look at it in the world of business and comparing it to marketing is in general marketing, you're aiming to help people, right? You create content, you create experiences, you create education, you create things that bring value to people and help them. When you're building community, you're looking for opportunities to help people help each other. So instead of you creating the article that answers a question, how do you connect the person with a question to someone else in the community who has an answ? How do you help them collaborate? How do you help them teach each other? How do you help them build things together? So marketing, you help people community, you help people help each other.
- [05:27]
Daniel Murray
What would you say the must have traits of a successful community are?
- [05:35]
David Spinks
There's a lot of different theories on what constitutes a community. And I try not to be overly purist in what is or isn't a community, because there's a whole range of depth that you can have. And so if you go to an emotional support group, it's going to have different standards of quality than customer Support forum. Right. There's different expectations around vulnerability, around trust, around safety. And so ultimately, I think you need to have engagement. So people need to be talking to each other, they need to be showing up, they need to be participating. They have to feel connected to each other. So there's a sense of that connection, that emotional connection, that interconnectedness between the group. And often you also see a sense of shared identity. So you'll see them have a similar name, language symbols, norms, cultural norms. Those kinds of factors will start to form. That's how you know you're starting to see a community. People are showing up, they feel connected to each other, they feel a sense of belonging to each other. And you're starting to see those elements of social identity start to form.
- [06:50]
Daniel Murray
When do you think for, like, so you've helped a lot of businesses. When do you think is the time to start formalizing the process of community? Because I know there's like, you have a. Can have a community of just people talking, but like in a place where people can't. You can control the engagement. You can help people, like a forum or some sort of things like that.
- [07:14]
David Spinks
I mean, I think you should start very organically. I think communities emerge. They're not something that you can just force into existence. You're going to create a space, and if you tap into something that people actually want to talk about and connect around, then they will fill that space with their energy, with their actions, with their contributions, and you can start that on day one. And frankly, there's no company that doesn't start that very early, because that early adopter group of customers is essentially your first community. Now, you may not have a conversational space for them to talk to each other yet, and that's okay. Like the. The starting to build community starts with building trust with those people so that in the future you could bring them together. But for now, it might just be you building relationships with each of those customers and listening to them and understanding their needs and. And organically that sense of identity will start to form. When should you actually launch a conversational space? Which, by the way, community could be events. So it could be an event you host in person or online with something with a beginning and an end, something that's asynchronous or, I mean, synchronous, or you can do the asynchronous, where it's like a forum or a chat channel, something that's ongoing and doesn't necessarily have a beginning and an end. So you can do those events. I like doing Events first actually, because they have a beginning and an end. So they're very easy to test and iterate. You're not making this really long term commitment. Whereas if you're launching a forum or a Slack channel or a Discord or a Circle or something like that, that's a really long term commitment. It's going to take a long time for that community to really take form within that conversational space. And so I wouldn't launch that until for one, you have somebody who's going to be able to dedicate themselves to leading that community space, to facilitating it, to driving engagement. If you don't have the capacity to have someone dedicate at least half of their time, if you're very early stage, but eventually it should be at least a full time job to facilitate in that community. You're probably not ready for it yet. Um, but what you can do again is start really simple. So I wouldn't start with like a really complex forum and ecosystem with lots of channels and spaces and structures and logins. Start simple with like I love like using a WhatsApp group or a signal group. You could use Slack if you want something with a little bit more structure, just somewhere that's really low barrier to get people to start talking to each other and start forming those relationships and that shared identity and those elements of community. Because if you have a really thriving chat group, for example, it will be easier to then translate that into more of a structured formal community later.
- [10:12]
Daniel Murray
I do like that you said that you should start off with events. I think they, a lot of people just try to force the online portion of it, but I think being able to, especially in this day and age, being able to connect people live is one of the most powerful things you could do, especially with people craving that right now, so.
- [10:31]
David Spinks
Exactly. People are really craving, especially in person right now. People are hungry for it. They're, they're over Covid. Even though it's spreading like wildfire. I'm sick right now from it. But everyone wants to get together in person. See, people live like actually have all their senses activated when they interact with each other. And so there's a massive opportunity right now to build in person experiences. I think that's what people really want also.
- [10:59]
Daniel Murray
I think it's a good way to show how intentional the audience you have is. Because if you host event and you see who shows up, you could see, hey, people actually care about what we're doing, our values, they have shared beliefs. You can see who comes into the room where if you set it online it's a little harder to see that. But if you. To get someone in a room is one of the hardest things to do as a anybody. So if you can, if you, you, if you build a great audience, it's way easier to get someone in the room. So you show that intention of your community that you build.
- [11:37]
David Spinks
Exactly. Yeah. The barrier to entry is higher. Right. It takes more work for somebody to show up to a physical event, but once they're in the room it's a much more immersive experience. In a Slack group you hope to get them in there for maybe five minutes to read what's in there and respond and then they're going to go on with their life. With an event you can get two, three hours of deep conversations with. And again you're activating all five senses. You're really building relationships and tapping into, you're building memories, shared experiences with them. It's so much more powerful than just passive online experiences. I actually think online experiences are really good in complement to those in person events where the in person experiences give people depth and an opportunity to really form relationships and feel like they're a part of something and then the online space just becomes a way of staying in touch in between those experiences.
- [12:30]
Daniel Murray
I think it's a great way to put it. I think too many people just focus on one or the other, but they are great compliments and it's also you want a way for people to be able to connect. For example, I just went to this leadership off site and I met a couple people but I forgot their name. And then I went to the Slack group that they created, found them there, started chatting with them on there. So it was kind of a good experience of having online and offline at the same time where I can go find them.
- [13:03]
David Spinks
Gave you a chance to follow up and have follow through which is a really critical part of forming serendipity in communities. I think a lot about how to engineer serendipity and the science behind serendipity is there's different stages. So you have a trigger, so you have to see an opportunity for a reason to connect with someone and then you have to have a connection to some potential value like oh, there's something we could work on or ways we can help each other. Third step is follow through. You have to follow up with that person on chat or email or however set up the next meeting and then you have the valuable reward as a result. And so having that online ecosystem makes it a lot easier for the people who Meet in person to follow up and follow through with each other in order to have these kind of serendipitous moments and create value for each other.
- [13:57]
Daniel Murray
I think one thing that I get asked a lot is when they, when people start community is how do you start fueling that conversation in the community? And how do you do you. Is should you seed it with certain members? How do you start getting actual content in the community so people don't arrive and say, oh, there's three people chatting in here. This is lame. I'm, I'm out of here.
- [14:23]
David Spinks
Three people. Some of my favorite communities in the world are three people. It's about the right people who actually genuinely want to be there. So I personally think it's a lot less about seeding the perfect content and knowing exactly how to set it all up and so much more about finding the right people who have a genuine motivation to contribute, who meet a certain bar of quality or alignment with a community. So are the things they're contributing going to be at a high level? Are they going to be authentic? Are they going to be true? Are they coming with a giving mindset and not just trying to extract value? And if you create that even with three people, that's going to be super powerful because now you have really high quality people actively engaged in exchanging their wisdom with each other and supporting each other. Who wouldn't want to be a part of that? Right? And then you add a fourth person and they're going to see, wow, there's like people actively engaged here in the things they're sharing. I'm immediately learning from, like that that's you essentially create a center of gravity that pulls people in and other people want to be a part of. So again, I would focus on getting those right people in. And a lot of the time it's solving your own problem. Like some of the best communities I've seen built and then I've been able to start is just a conversation that I was craving, that I didn't have a space to have and, and I didn't find it anywhere else. So and, but I would have those conversations one on one with people. And so eventually, you know, I have the same conversation with ten different people individually. My, it always clicks for me, like, wait, maybe I should just get us all together into a room. I think you'll all get along really well. And that is the art, that's the intuition of a great community builder is knowing that people will get along, that there's a alignment there, that there's something happening Here there's a fire to be started that if you just create the right space and bring those people together again, community emerges. It's like a plant. If you put the seed in the soil and it's fertilized well enough and it gets its nutrients, you don't have to do anything, it's going to just grow and then you have to prune it and make sure it's healthy and get weeds out of the way and stuff like that. But it's going to emerge on its own. And it's the same thing with the community. Get the right people in the right environment, the right resources around them, it's going to emerge. You can't stop it.
- [16:49]
Daniel Murray
When for you, how do you set those like barriers to entry? Because you can also some communities just let anybody in the forum, but there's also some that like you said, are very curated, you know, the right people in the right room. So how do you decide between that barrier to entry into the community, who should be in and who shouldn't be in?
- [17:14]
David Spinks
It depends on the purpose as well. If you're trying to build this extremely large ecosystem really fast, then you might just want to let everyone in. But it almost always fails when you just let everyone in and it grows really fast. There's no sense of shared norms or culture. Members don't really get to know each other. They don't get a sense of who we are. Right. How do we identify as a group of people? And so I would almost always start by curating and just making it invite only. And a really simple way to do that is again, start with the few people that you know that you think are going to be a really good fit and then leave it open for them to be able to invite others who might be a good fit. And you know, that's. If you're building just like an interest based community, you can be very open and organic like that. If you're doing a customer community and you're only limited to your customers, then start with the people who again are genuinely motivated, who are going to bring really high quality conversations, who you already have trust and relationships with, where there's already kind of this foundation of social capital in a way, start with those people and then you can grow it organically from there.
- [18:28]
Daniel Murray
You said you have a community for community managers, community builders and stuff like that. If I was looking, if I was a company looking for a great community manager, what are the qualities? What should I be looking for? A company like what makes a great community builder or manager?
- [18:47]
David Spinks
Yeah, There's a few layers to what it takes to do this work. You have the communal layer of is this person going to be a great writer, a great communicator? Can they really connect with people and empathize with people? Do people feel drawn to them? Are they a great facilitator? Do they understand how to start conversations, manage conversations, how to manage conflict, how to build communities that are inclusive and identify the things that are making them uninclusive in ways that are inequitable or unjust? So that's the work of actually interacting with humans and that's critical for this work. One element of that that's really hard to navigate, but you're going to have to is the extent to which they have an authentic connection to that community. Specifically, are they a member of that community? Do they understand it? Can they speak their language? Are the community member is going to respect them as one of them? It doesn't have to be that way, especially for a mature community. Bringing in people who are more operational and less like one of the members can be okay, but there's going to be a learning curve. For someone who has no experience in the space. Say it's a community for basketball players and they've never played basketball or watched a game of basketball in their life. It's going to be hard for them to get up to speed on how to connect with those people and understand them and as opposed to someone who is already authentically, organically immersed in that topic. So that's the one layer is the community engagement side and then the other layer I would look for is their operational abilities, which like any other role, right? Like what are they able to set up the systems in order to manage communities as they grow and scale? Can they track things properly? Do they understand how to look at analytics behind communities to understand how the community is growing and evolving? Do they know how to run community surveys to collect feedback and see if the community is healthy? Are they able to communicate cross functionally with the rest of the team and understand how community integrates with marketing and support and product and all the other parts of the business? Because community is a very cross functional role. So yeah, those two sides is kind of the front end, community engagement side and then the back end more operational side.
- [21:01]
Daniel Murray
Do you think sometimes that's two people or is it sometime, is it always the person? Because some people person could be really good expertise, these great community builders and they just suck operationally or does that person have to be an operational minded person?
- [21:18]
David Spinks
And same as any other role, right? If you're a brand new startup, you're going to hire one person to do a lot of things and they're probably going to be doing more than community. Unfortunately, a lot of the time community managers end up managing support and social media, which they really don't like doing, but they get forced to anyway. You know, if you're a really small team with very minimal resources, people wear multiple hats. But if your community becomes mature and your company can really invest in community and make it a priority. I know teams that have 20, 30 people on their community team that are highly specialized. You might have people who focus on events, some people who focus on ambassador programs, some people who focus on online community and forums, some people who just focus on the data behind the community. There's a lot of specializations within community that people can take on.
- [22:09]
Daniel Murray
What are some reasons you tell people to make that investment in community? Because marketers always are judged on, hey, what is the ROI of this community? How am I going to get value out of it? What do you say to people when they say why I should invest in this?
- [22:30]
David Spinks
I've stopped trying to convince people a long time ago to invest in community. I find that there are people who believe that it's a great, great channel and a great way to connect with people. That is really important in the mix of creating content and doing advertising and SEO. Like there's a lot of this kind of outbound approach and inbound approaches to marketing, but community just provides this completely different element of how people connect with your brand and with each other. I mean, you can look at some of the most successful brands in the world like, like the Apples of the World or HubSpot and the B2B side, like community was so core to how they grew from their very earliest days. So it's kind of a DNA thing. Some companies really believe in it and get it and I think to some extent you have to believe in it. It can't just be a pure ROI question because community is complexity, man. It's an infinite amount of interactions and relationships. It's going to be really hard to prove that having this highly engaged community led to this increase in renewals or this increase in leads. And I've spent so many hours working to bring more clarity and get more clear attribution for community channels and it's just super hard. Events can be a little bit easier because again, they have a beginning and an end. So you can see what kind of action you want people to take after attending an event and see if they take that action within 10 days or within 90 days. Like did they sign up for your products within 90 days of attending an event? Okay, you could probably give that some attribution in an online forum, is there participation leading them to spend more with your company? You could get correlation on that, right? And say, well, the people who are part of the community spend two times more than people who aren't. But it's correlation. You don't know if that's just because they're your more valuable customers and that's why they participate in the community. So there just has to be a belief that building this long term shared identity, sense of community is something that's going to be a competitive advantage for you. It's going to help you own a category in a way that no one else can. The way HubSpot did with inbound or the way Salesforce did with cloud software in their early days. Like they built an entire community and identity around being the first cloud software company. It's just honestly a fundamental different way of looking at business and how to build trust and reputation with people. And it can also drive other parts of your business. So we use the SPACES model within cmx. So SPACES stands for support, product acquisition, contribution, engagement and success. And so community can drive all of those things or any of those things for your business product. They can help build your product. For some companies, your entire product is built by a community like Airbnb. All the rooms are provided by hosts, Lyft, all the cars are provided by drivers. GitHub is the entire community ecosystem. Anything open source, anything that's a marketplace, anything that's collaborative consumption, anything that's like Wikipedia, like a wiki content contribution platform, you're going to have creators, sellers, people who are contributing. The thing that makes your business work community is you have to build community, right? It's like a core part of what you're doing. And then if you have a product that isn't community, like say you're Nike, you have the opportunity to build community around the identity, like how Nike does with their run clubs, for example. You're not showing up to a Nike run club with Adidas shoes on, right? You're, you're creating more brand loyalty and you're creating these shared experiences for people through community.
- [26:31]
Daniel Murray
I think the, what you said at the beginning of that, you don't try to convince people anymore. It's the same with brand, it's same with creating valuable content. It's the same with. It's these things that you have to do a long time to build trust, build relationship. Relationships don't happen overnight. They happen through continuous work and showing up daily. It's not that. And I think the people who get that win and the people who don't get that just keep doing what they're doing. So I, I think it's true. I think the same with brand. When people say, why should I invest in brand? To me, I'm.
- [27:09]
David Spinks
Yeah.
- [27:09]
Daniel Murray
Like I can't. I, I can give you millions of examples why you should do it, but you, if your whole thing is going to be get a sale tomorrow, I can.
- [27:18]
David Spinks
Yeah.
- [27:19]
Daniel Murray
Help you with that.
- [27:20]
David Spinks
Yeah. We've gotten to this point in business where it's all so extractive and all about attribution and knowing exactly how this contribution, this thing you're building or this thing you decide to invest in exactly what the ROI is and we've lost the intuition for what people actually fucking want. Apple doesn't know whether the shape of the curve on the corner of their laptop is going to translate to 2 to 3 million more dollars. They just like, this is beautiful. This is aesthetic. This is what we believe people want. And you can test those things as well to see what people want. But, but yeah, like design Brand is a really good example where I can't tell you what the ROI is of improving your design and the aesthetic of your website. You have to just believe in the power of design. And I think community is in many ways similar of if you have this thriving community of people who believe in your mission and who love your product and want to talk to each other and are trading ideas on how to use your products better and are just organically advocating for you because they feel like they're a part of something. Do you need to see the data on exactly what the ROI is on that to know that it's valuable? No, you just know.
- [28:38]
Daniel Murray
That's why I hate when people say data driven marketer data, because I think it's data informed. I think the whole thing about humans is humans are unpredictable. So data only tells you what humans did in the past that it doesn't tell you what humans are going to do. And you have to be be. You have to be do unpredictable things like humans to stand out. You can't be would do what everybody else is doing because that's the logical thing. And everybody will do it because it's logical because five other people did it. And it's proven you have to do unpredictable things to stand out. Because humans aren't predictable, they're not logical creatures. They make sometimes Logical decisions, but not all the time. The last question I have for you is, what is a community? Hill you would die on hill I would die on?
- [29:27]
David Spinks
I think. So I guess two things come to mind. One is similar to what we were just talking about with Measuring roi, also with measuring Community. People try to find this one metric that is going to tell them whether or not their community is healthy. And again, I think you just need to lean on your intuition and look at data as something that informs, not decides. And so I recommend that people get a portfolio of metrics that they look at. So it's not just total number of posts or total number of comments or total number of members. It's all of those things. It's your monthly active members. It's looking at the quality of those contributions. It's doing interviews and running surveys. So I just don't think there's one metric that's going to ever tell you whether or not a community is healthy or not. And frankly, a lot of the time, you don't even need data. You can feel it. It. You can use your heart to know whether or not a community is healthy. So I find myself dying on that a lot when I have clients that are like, all right, what's the one metric we should be looking at? And have to do a lot of kind of unlearning around this idea that there's a one metric that matters when it comes to community. And then the other thing that came to mind is just build communities that bring you joy. It's kind of like same in the world of business. Sometimes people build businesses because they see it as an opportunity, but they don't feel joy from it, and they kind of force themselves to do it anyway because it's an opportunity. I think community is much the same way. Community becomes pretty easy to build when it's something you genuinely crave and find joy in yourself. You're going to want to show up every day and have these conversations, probably because they're conversations you're already having and already enjoying. But when you try to build a community just because it's an opportunity and you don't feel a genuine care for the people that you're bringing together, and you don't feel genuine joy out of being in that space and participating in it. It's going to feel so hard to get it going. It's going to feel like a job. And I don't think that's a very effective way to build community.
- [31:35]
Daniel Murray
I think that that one's crucial. I think I say the same thing about content creators too. Because now there's like everybody wants to be a content creator is don't just do it because there's a hole in the space for a certain niche. You have to. If you want to survive for two, three, four years, you have to legitimately be passionate about what you're talking about, what you're creating. Otherwise you're going to burn out. Because on days that are hard, you're gonna start hating what you're talking about. So generally having passion about anything you create is so important 100%. Lastly, where could people find you and what you're doing?
- [32:14]
David Spinks
Yeah, just go to davidspinks.com you can find my newsletter there. I publish a regular newsletter on community and human connection and business and self growth and improvement in consciousness kind of stuff as well. And my book the Business of Belonging, which goes deep into all of these concepts around how to build community for your business. You can find that on the website as well.
- [32:37]
Daniel Murray
Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining. I appreciate your time and your views on community. I think it was really refreshing to hear.
- [32:46]
David Spinks
Appreciate you having me.
- [32:48]
Daniel Murray
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the cool marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.