When you think of a brand community, you might imagine devout fans raving about your products across the web (or lining up outside your stores). But the reality is very different. The majority of brand communities today are less about ‘brand love’ and more about getting useful information. This makes them far more practical and valuable than most people realise.
In this talk, Richard Millington shares the secrets behind building brand communities that have saved FeverBee’s clients $10m+ in support costs every year. Richard will explain the technology to use, the powerful psychology behind motivating members to participate, and the key strategies to ensure your community thrives.
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors.
Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
Good morning. I hope everyone got a seat okay. So, in November twenty nineteen, I met with a new client for the very first time. And the first meeting seemed to go well, but right at the end, after everyone had left, after we'd been discussing how to build their community, the VP of customer support, she turned to me and she said, I don't really know why we're doing this.
But luckily, I'm prepared for questions like this. I'm prepared for people to question the value of a brand community. And so I begin to tell her. I tell her the story of Duolingo, how when they invested heavily in community to begin with, they thrived as a result of doing that.
I tell her about Giftgath, who moved basically all of their customer support to a community and saved millions of dollars as a result. I tell her when Instagram were acquired, they had more community staff than engineers. And I tell her about study after study after study, which has definitively proved that people in a community, they buy more than people not in a community, they advocate more than people not in a community, and they stick around for longer than people not in a community.
And throughout all of this, she looks at me with the politest smile you've ever seen, and she says, that's all BS. Right? Which threw me because it was kinda true. All the stories I've just said, they are true, but there's a little bit of BS in it.
We don't know the people building brand communities today. We don't know if a great brand naturally attracts a community or if a community helps build a great brand. We don't know if the people in a community buy more as a result of the community or if a community naturally attracts people that are more likely to buy more.
And some of the metrics we use for measuring a community are really interesting. So take customer support. One of the things we'll look at is a post like this on the Dropbox community, not the client, and we'll say, well, this person, they asked a question, and then they got a response, so they they don't need to contact support, which kind of makes sense.
But then we think about the thirty thousand people that saw the answer to this question and think, well, they also didn't need to contact support. So if we start multiplying this, and we know that support call costs, say, fifth fifteen dollars each, that's half a million dollars in saving in just one post.
The problem with this is that we don't know how many of these people would have contacted support or filed a ticket. We don't know how many of these peep people clicked on ten posts and then contacted support. We don't even know how many of these people are people and not bots.
But luckily, I'm prepared for this situation too, and I tell her, the only way you can really prove the value of your brand community is to shut it down and see what happens. And I tell her this because I know there's no way that she's going to do it, And I felt pretty good about that.
I felt she wasn't going to do it because if you shut down your brand community, you lose the momentum. You lose all of the people that have been engaging and participating, and people get annoyed that they can't find their community. But then she came up with a really interesting solution.
A solution that was so simple, I never thought of it before, which is what if we hide it? Or to be more specific, what if we deindex it from search results? So if you know it's there, you can still find it. But if you don't know it's there, you don't know what you're missing.
And that's what we agreed to do. For four months, we are gonna hide this community from search and see what happens. And, honestly, it is the most agonizing feeling in the world to wait four months to figure out if your entire career has been a sham.
And I and we promised right at the beginning, we weren't going to look at the data. It's gonna be an honest experiment. And so on June the first twenty twenty, I finally got to the point where I can pull all of the data, and I can see the metrics are kind of happening in the spreadsheet.
And I don't really know what's happening yet. So I go to create the graph, and there's this little green button that clicks okay to create the chart. And I clicked okay praying it really would be okay, and this is what happened. What this says is that, yes, the number of visitors to the community plummeted.
Search traffic massively down, but the number of support tickets increased massively. In fact, when we began looking at the data, what we found out was that there was a fifty eight percent increase, Fifty eight percent increase in support tickets during this time, and that had a knock on effect, which is not only was there a fifty eight percent increase, there was a thirty five percent drop in response time to support tickets because now customer support is being flooded with more questions than ever before.
We found that the customer satisfaction score dropped from four point three, which is generally considered good, to three point eight, which is generally considered bad. We found the community was deflecting a hundred and sixty three thousand tickets a year at a cost saving of three million dollars a year.
And you have no idea how validating data like this is to me. But this isn't even the biggest metric. It wasn't even the one that was most impressive to the organization, which was this. It cost eighteen dollars to solve a ticket in support and about five dollars in a community.
And this changes the entire conversation. Not just is the community worthwhile doing, but how do we drive all of our traffic, all of our support requests to the community first before any other channel? I want to talk to you about two things today.
One is that we're not even scratching the surface of how valuable a brand community can be. And two, when we do try to do it, there are seven decisions that we have to get right. If we get these things right, everything else falls into place really, really well.
The first one is why are we doing this? A few years ago, some friends of mine that went to HMV, the electronic store that used to sell DVDs and all those kind of things, And they told them, you're not really selling much here anymore, so why don't you convert some of this space into a gaming center where people can come and play games against one another?
And we'll build this great community there. They'll hang out there, and they'll buy more of what you sell. And the first part of that worked really, really well. It turns out kids love having a place to hang out. The second part of that, as you might have noticed, not quite so well.
HMV doesn't really exist anymore. You shouldn't be building a community for people just to hang out and talk about the topic. All you're doing then is picking up the tab for what members were already doing. And in fact, there's four very specific reasons to build a community.
The first, as we've covered, is support. Communities are the ultimate tool to scale customer support. Every single person who learns an answer can help the next person. About a year or so ago, we launched the Geotab online community, and communities are a great way to get any oh, sorry.
Support is a great way to get any community started. It's the easiest need you can satisfy today, and already they're saving millions of dollars as a result of this community. But you have to do it right. A while ago, I moved my laptop from one room to another, and for no reason I could possibly work out, my webcam stopped working.
It was flickering. I couldn't work out the solution, and I called the Logitech customer support, and they went through a bunch of different solutions. And in the end, they said, nothing's working. Why don't you ask the community instead? I was like, okay. Let's do that and see what happens.
But when I went to the community, what was happening was all the customer support agents were going to the community and telling people to contact support instead. This is nuts. This shouldn't be happening. In fact, we're wasting so much time and the potential of the community when support agents are answering questions first.
But there was someone that had an answer. When I began looking around for this, really trying to figure out what the solution was, there's one random guy on YouTube, and I don't know what his motivation is, but he created a whole recording of how to do this.
He has better information than the customer support team. He saved me, like, a hundred pounds instantly just from this one video, which was to install some unofficial app. People in a community can give answers that customer support staff can't. They're using the products every day, and they can often give better responses.
And what's really amazing is that one hundred and twenty eight thousand people now have an answer to a problem that customer support can't solve. And not only does a community give you better responses than most customer support teams, it's also the preferred channel.
We do huge surveys of big brands trying to figure out what is your preferred support channel. And time and time and time again, the answers are the same. And community is almost always in the top two. Aside, virtual agents are almost always last.
Not sure why, but someone should look into that. Number two is marketing. Or to be more specific, a brand community, when it's done well, gives you amazing marketing assets. A few years ago, Quickbase managed to persuade a few dozen of their top members to leave reviews on trust comparison sites.
And as a result of that, they became the leader in every single category that they wanted to be in. Every single one. They generated millions of dollars just from doing this, and it's something that most of us wouldn't even measure or even try to do.
Or take Fitbit. They have these online forums where people can talk about how to eat well or manage weight or sleep better. And what's really interesting from this is that they look to see what are the most popular topics, most controversial topics, and then they get the expert nutritionist to create a definitive article on that.
And that generates a lot of search traffic, and a lot of that then converts into a purchase. It's not a huge amount just by one article, but it builds up massively over a period of time. Or take Sephora. We spent a year working with Sephora.
And when we began working with them, the community it's a fantastic community, but it's a place where people were just coming to hang out. But when we began looking at this community, they were generating amazing assets every day. They had people sharing reviews and testimonials and looks and everything that they were working on.
So why do we take this and pull it into the product pages itself? If you go to Sephora dot com right now, what you'll see in every product page is this amazing authentic content that comes directly from the community, and it converts a lot better.
I think people are generally tired of the airbrushed polished experience they get. Authentic reviews, questions, and images we found are far more trustworthy than anything else. Number three is success or satisfaction. The number one post that ever appeared in the Adobe Photoshop commute community is this one.
When I first saw this, I was like, what a waste of everyone's time. But then I began thinking about it. Which group of your customers are most likely to churn? Is it the people that have been using your software for years, or is it the people that are using it for the very first time?
The people facing that steep learning curve, the people trying to get going right at the beginning. Because if you can make that just a little bit easier and give them a place where they can ask the most beginner level questions to get answers, the retention rate is a lot higher.
So for newcomers, communities are amazing tools to use. Or take the Digital Ocean community. For almost any topic, any problem that you're struggling with, they have guides, they have questions, they have tutorials, all created by members of their community. It's an amazing asset that will cost them millions of dollars to otherwise create.
And the final one is insights. Communities are this amazing eternal spring of fresh insights. This amazing eternal spring of fresh insights. If you look at Okta, who we worked with for a while, Okta has a place where their customers can submit their ideas, and they can figure out exactly what is need needed.
If you're managing a product, imagine having a list of things voted by members on what they want to see and specifically what they want to know. Or take the Apple online community. Take a second just to read this. If you're at the front, you can probably read it back, not so much.
What occurs to you about this post? What stands out to you about this post? And just shout just shout out, anybody. What occurs to you about this post? Can anyone work it out? You don't have to raise your hand. Just shout. No. That's a good point. For SEO, that's a good point.
But thank you for anyone would like to guess? Two thousand people, two thousand five hundred individuals said they had this question too. And imagine you're managing you're managing a product or service, and you can see every single feature you have and how many people have a problem with it, and specifically what they're saying.
How useful is that information to you? So before you begin, pick one of the right reasons to build a community. Because if you get this wrong, everything else becomes far more difficult. Decision number two is which need will you satisfy today? And this should be something your members are reaching for already.
Far too often, we build these these ghost towns where we want people to come and chat about the topic, and people do generally want to talk about their industry or their field, but they don't tend to want to do it in a brand community.
A while ago, The Gap launched AthletaWell, which is a community for women to talk about wellness with other women. Let's try a survey here, and this might go horrifically wrong. Raise your hand and be honest, be really honest. Raise your hand if you're a woman and you'd like to talk about wellness with other women.
Okay. Now raise your hand again if you'd like to do it in a community controlled by the gap. So in thirty seconds, we've just invalidated this entire idea for the community that they've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars doing. And this comes up time and time again.
People don't do the right level of research first before they launch the the community. And if you get the concept wrong, if you're not satisfying the real core need that members have today in the right way that they want it, nothing else matters.
Even Simone Biles taking questions from members of the community right after the Olympic games can't save this community because the concept itself is wrong. And when we figure out what do members need from a community, we find the same needs appear at the top over and over again.
And we've got millions of surveys completed that we've done in this from hundreds of clients over the years, and it's almost always the same. People want good quality information, and sense of belonging or feeling a part of a group in a brand community is always dead last.
This is mythology that's happening that people want to belong to brands, to be a part of a brand community, and that does kind of happen with the outliers. It doesn't happen for ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of other brands. In almost every survey we've done, people want really good quality information.
And specifically, when we drill down a bit deeper, by order of priority, this is what they want. Information that's convenient, accurate, and from a trusted source. This is what we're trying to deliver to members in a community. Decision three is why will you be the best place to satisfy that need?
A while ago, I was doing interviews for a client, and I was talking to a member we wanted to participate in the community. And I was saying, have you heard of the community? He's like, yeah. I've heard of it. I was like, do you like it? He's like, yeah. I like it.
I was like, where do you go when there's a challenge that you want solved? He's like, I call customer support. Why? Because it's more convenient for him, because it's more personalized to him, it's more trustworthy. And a lot of organizations make this mistake as they create a community, and then they end up competing against themselves in some way.
Don't do this. What we want to do is think about what does that entire support experience look like? What is their unique needs that only the community can solve? And when we start thinking about this, we usually have a matrix just like this, where the documentation you have is the manual that teach you how to use the product.
The knowledge base, if you have one, is the FAQ, and then community and customer support are different. Community is where you go to ask the experts. Customer support in this new model is emergency support, support that you use if it requires private data, private information, or if there's an urgent issue that you need right now today.
And if we drive people to community first, it frees up a lot of time for your customer support team as well. And we try to think about what is the unique positioning statement of that community. What is the thing that none of your competitors will be able to compete against?
What makes the community unique in any other way? And we think of it like this. With survey results, we know the verb and the value or the noun that people want. But what is a superlative? Is it going to be the quickest place to get responses?
Is it going to be the place to get proven information? Is it going to be the place where the top experts discuss the most cutting edge issues? What is going to make that community completely unique from anything else that's out there? And they often we do these bad positioning statements.
If you've ever seen a brand launch a community, they often describe it like this. Community is an exclusive group dedicated to empowering leaders by sharing world class expertise. I don't know what's happening here. World class expertise, exchanging insights, and revamping industry best practices.
What do you think about this? Do do you think it's good? No. No? Why? Why not? Yes. A lot of cliches and buzzwords in there. We changed it to something a lot simpler, something that people can remember, which is a private place to solve your toughest problems.
And suddenly, it's easy for people to think, this is why I go to this community instead of anywhere else. And getting that positioning right is critical. Decision number four, selecting the right technology. With technology, you can spend zero dollars. I I use dollars because most of my clients in dollars.
You can spend zero dollars or you can spend millions of dollars a year. And we find that most of our or most organizations make one of two mistakes. Either they spend way too much on a community platform they're not gonna get enough use out of, or they don't spend anywhere near enough.
And there's a quote I came across just the other day, which was, there's never enough to do it right, but always enough to do it twice. I don't know who said this. I'm pretty certain this is one of the quotes that Winston Churchill didn't say, but there's always enough to do it There's never enough to do it right, but always enough to do it twice.
And you generally have three three options here when you're thinking about which technology to use. The first one is the enterprise level platforms. This is where you have Chorus, you have Salesforce, and Insided as well who are somewhere around here, think. Great platforms where you spend around maybe fifty to three hundred grand a year, but these are like the Rolls Royce of community platforms.
They have groups, they have images, they have knowledge bases. It's like an entire customer support experience. Just below that, you have the forum based platforms. These are like the bulletin boards. They usually begin at around ten grand a year and go up to around seventy grand a year, but that varies a lot.
And these are excellent if you're just below that level. The good options here are Discourse, which is probably the most advanced form out there today, or Vanilla, who also like a pretty good experience on the you on the user experience side. Then finally, you have the white label platforms like Circle, Tribe, Highbright as well, and this can cost you usually a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars a year.
So why not just use Facebook groups? Facebook groups and other social media tools are fantastic if you want to test an idea, if you want to get things off the ground. They're not so good if you want to make sure your group suddenly doesn't disappear, or you're not so good if you want to have any control or export data or do any of things that you want to achieve over the long term.
So as a general rule, if you're a big brand with a big audience, go with an enterprise platform. If you're a small brand with a big audience, go with a forum. And if you're expecting a small audience, usually go with a white label platform that's relatively inexpensive.
Decision number five, selecting the right person to run the community. I have had so many conversations over the years, which we paraphrase a little bit like this. And imagine I'm the client here. We're like, hey, Rich. Great news. We've decided to launch a community for customer support, and we've decided that the need is going to be getting quicker responses than anything else.
I'll be, that sounds like a great idea, mister client. I am happy for you. The client will say, Yeah, that sounds like a great idea, and we're going to use a big enterprise platform for that? I'll be like, Yeah, it sounds good. It sounds good.
You and I are like hive minds. Then they'll say, Yeah, we're going to get Marcus on his summer internship to run it. And no. Not only do far too often we get people with limited community experience to run our communities, but we often get people with almost no experience to run our communities.
And you can't have an inexperienced person responsible for your biggest customers or employees. And you shouldn't be dragooning someone else from customer support to do this work as well. It doesn't work out well. And community managers are the linchpins that make everything else work.
Years ago, someone that worked for me in managing my my community left, and I wanted to see what happened if she wasn't replaced, if there was a natural experiment here. And it's critical that if you lose the person managing the community, the community quickly dies.
And community is critical. When we work with Okta, one of the things we try to do is make sure that anyone that posted a question, if they didn't get a quick response, it will get escalated to engineers or customer support teams who could jump in and answer questions.
And a lot of people think that anyone can do community work. And if you look at this, the responses, I mean, they're not bad. They're okay. But now compare this to someone that's been doing this for over a decade. Compare this to someone else that works for Okta as well and has been managing online communities.
Do you notice a difference in response? Do you notice a difference in empathy? Do you notice a difference that she's welcoming, that she's making a personal connection with that member? The difference is huge, and it does make a difference because great community managers don't just treat a list of questions as problems to make go away.
They treat every single interaction as this amazing unique opportunity to build a better bridge of understanding, to change how people feel about the brand, to change the kind of quality and expectation that people have. And it does make a difference. Colleen Young. I think Colleen Young is probably the most naturally gifted community builder in the world.
And if you can read this post, she works at the Mayo Clinic. But see if you you can read this post and what occurs to you in this post. What is she doing here that is particularly impressive? Just shout out if if you can.
I promise I won't be rude this time. Yeah. She's connecting other people. If we get more specific, what she's doing is that first she at mentioned someone, which is nothing that the engineers did before. And then she's identified it's their first contribution to the community, which is a really useful thing to do.
How does she even know that? Third, she has specifically referenced the question itself. And fourth, she has at mentioned tagged in other people to respond. She knows it's not her job to answer every questions. It's her job to get members to answer each other's questions.
And imagine how you feel if you are tagged in as an expert to answer a question. You feel like an expert. Right? You want to be engaged. You want to participate. And this doesn't seem like it's that difficult, but she's also provided useful information as well as well, and then she's asked for an update.
And that is particularly amazing to do because then the next person knows whether it helped or not. What's what makes her amazing is that she's done this seven thousand times already, and this is a result. There's a reason the best community managers today are being paid a hundred and fifty or two hundred grand because they're worth as much as good engineers as well.
Decision number six is finding the right time to launch the community. Before you launch your community, you should have a line of people waiting outside to use it. And one of the mistakes we make is launching a community way too early. MyConsultancy hasn't done this in about six years now because there's a process that we go through to make sure before we launch the community, there's a huge number of people that are ready to use it.
And there are very specific metrics that we use here. One is that before you launch, you should have thirty founding members and at least ten discussions with three answers. And if we don't get to that number, we don't launch because we know that something has gone wrong in the research phase, something has gone wrong that we have to fix.
And the way we get to that number is first by having staff and founders reply to the early discussions in that community, like we have with another of our clients here, US Pharmacopia. And now we know at this kind of stage, it's ready to launch to the world.
We proved that the concept works. And then once it is launched, we stagger that promotion over a period of time. So every single person gets a good quality experience, and no one gets that empty room experience. And finally, decision number seven. How do you motivate people to participate?
Take a second to think about how weird brand communities are. When you go to the local supermarket, do you offer to stack the shelves? Do you come home from a hard day of work and offer to do unpaid customer support? But that's exactly what people are doing every single day in a brand community.
And so the reason is why they're doing that. And they often people think about this from a financial perspective, which is what can we give them. But what we found time and time again is that people are motivated by more unique needs, like recognition.
We've run one of our clients a while ago, we had the CEO of the company write personal messages to members of that community, a CEO of a hundred million dollar organization, by the way, write personal messages to top members. It cost us nothing, but it really helped get people more engaged in the community.
Or status. With Sephora, we launched a private group just for the top members of that community. There are seven hundred responses to hear. People love the status that they get with this kind of community. Or we have special access. And I found actually access is probably the most powerful influence in in engaging people in their community.
When you get people in a special group when they're engaging with staff, that's incredibly motivating. And finally, we help members become better at doing what they're already doing. If people are already creating videos for us, we might have someone that will teach them how to create even better videos, and they love becoming better at what they're already doing.
Because people in a community, they're never working for free. They're working for a feeling that money can't buy. They're working for for a feeling they can't get anywhere else, that feeling of recognition, that status, that experience. And at the end of the day, what we want to get is around eighty five percent of questions answered within three hours.
Because if we know if we can get to that level, if we can get all the motivations working to get to that level, we know that the community is going to thrive. I know that we're just out of time, so if you want to learn more about me, go to feverbee dot com.
And if you want all of the resources and templates and all those kind of things, go to FeedBee dot com slash BuildYourCommunity. Tuning Fest, thank you so much.
