Community Signal

In this episode of Community Signal, Patrick talks to four past guests of the show,  Paula Rosenberg ,  Tim Courtney ,  Scott Moore , and  Daniel Marotta , who are all looking for new full-time career opportunities. We're hoping that by tapping into the collective power of our listeners, we can help them find their next big thing. We've never done this before, and here's how you can help: First, w...

As classrooms have gone virtual and people are spending more time online,  Duolingo  has seen an influx of students and educators on their platform. Luckily, Duolingo has a structured ambassador program to help those new users find their way and achieve their language learning and teaching goals. Kevin Reaves , a community support specialist at Duolingo, talks extensively about who these ambassado...

At this point, we likely all know someone that has lost their job or had to make budget cuts because of the COVID-19 pandemic. There's a narrative in the community industry that we must always be communicating the value we bring to the organizations we work for, but it's also worth saying that community has really showed up to fight back against this pandemic. The work of connecting and creating s...

Section 230 is a vitally important law for online community builders in the U.S. That's why we've consistently talked about it on Community Signal, and the growing threat to its existence. The volume of legislation being proposed, that would amend Section 230, is increasingly rapidly with 6 bills proposed in September and October alone. These bills will impact online communities small and large –...

"Let the people see what I have seen." This is what Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, said when  she insisted on an open casket funeral for her brutally murdered son  in 1955. Photos of Emmett's disfigured body circulated and encouraged many to join the civil rights movement. Darnella Frazier is the teenager that caught George Floyd's murder on camera and posted it to Facebook.  She later sta...

When you contribute to open source projects,  Dawn Foster  makes it abundantly clear that even if "you're there on behalf of [a] company, you need to do the right things for the community." In this episode of Community Signal, Dawn outlines the principles that she follows and shepherds as the director of open source community strategy at  VMware's Open Source Program Office . These principles fost...

On Community Signal, we've spoken to several professionals that have left the industry for other pastures. While their reasons are never exactly the same, there's certainly a trend amongst professionals in the industry, particularly women, who bore the brunt of online abuse. As Patrick says in this episode, "if you haven't received abuse then you're probably not doing everything you can for your c...

Amy Jo Kim 's work building social systems and online experiences for  The Sims ,  Rock Band ,  Ultima Online , and the  New York Times , to name a few, makes her an industry go-to when businesses and clients have questions about creating engaging experiences for gamers, shoppers, and more. Amy Jo is the author of  Community Building on the Web  (2000) and  Game Thinking  (2018). While some think...

If you're reading this, we're guessing that you are in the community management profession. Hi, how are you holding up? Between the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and too many other Black people, ongoing protests for an end to systemic racism and inequality, and a looming presidential election that has a lot riding on it, life has been more challenging than usual, to say the least....

How many virtual conferences and events have you attended recently? Now compare that to the amount of time you've spent playing video games during the past few months. Not giving too much away, Patrick and I would probably agree that we've spent more time on the latter. With screen time dominating our lives and in-person gatherings largely on hold, how can we rise to the challenge of bringing comm...

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act  has been a frequent topic of conversation on Community Signal. Its existence as we know it seems untenable given  Trump's recent executive order  and Joe Biden's criticisms of it. On this episode, community and social media professional  David Flores  shares some of the history of how Section 230 came to be. David worked at  Prodigy  just as they were...

For years, Facebook executives have persistently shut down efforts to make the site less divisive,  according to reporting  from  Deepa Seetharaman  and  Jeff Horwitz  of  The Wall Street Journal . As community professionals, we're tasked with helping people start and participate in conversations that matter to them. We're often held accountable by "engagement" metrics –– such as the number of peo...

Black Lives Matter . As community professionals and hosts, we have the power to cultivate thoughtful spaces online. We serve communities and, if you're a regular listener of this show, I doubt you're serving racists. Systemic problems can feel overwhelming, but small things make a difference. Your community and how you manage it, regardless of the size of it, can be a part of the solution. I encou...

People have gotten crafty when it comes to staying connected during this time of social distancing. Zoom calls with family and friends,  Animal Crossing weddings , and drive-through birthday parties are just a few of the ways we're showing up for the people we care about.  HER , a dating and social app for LGBTQ+ womxn and queer people, is also doing its part to foster safe socializing for its com...

We're several months into the COVID-19 pandemic and the daily loss of lives is still devastating and the longterm effects on our communities and society as a whole have yet to be seen. For many of us, the pandemic has affected our routines, our families, our work, and our livelihood. While some online communities have seen more engagement from community members (I love  this story  that mentions h...

Nicholas Tolstoshev  is talking programs. Brand representative programs, where brands pay you for access to your community. Ambassador programs, where you reward your best contributors. And empathy programs, where you help your coworkers see things from the eyes of your members and customers.  This discussion also ends on a note that we probably all need to hear right now, and that's the importanc...

Every community has its own shared language and for the Spiceworks community, that shared language revolves around IT. Made up of IT professionals and service providers that support them,  the Spiceworks community  convenes to share their collective expertise and find solutions. In this episode of Community Signal,  Sean Dahlberg , director of community at Spiceworks, shares how his team approache...

We started recording this episode about a week before its release, and since then, coronavirus COVID-19 has continued to spread across the globe. News and governmental guidance is being updated frequently and people in many regions are being mandated to stay home as much as possible in an effort to help  flatten the curve . The pandemic has obviously impacted online communities, too. In this episo...

As community professionals, the array of platforms, reading material, conferences, and thought leaders available to us only continues to grow. And if you've read or written a job description for a community opportunity recently, you know that there's often an expectation around technical literacy for everyone in the field. In a time when a lot of our day-to-day takes place in front of a screen, I...

Every company has the challenge of managing how to respond to customer feedback. But what if you're managing a crowdsourcing community and actively asking people for their ideas and feedback? How do you make sure that every contributor feels seen and respected for their efforts, whether their idea becomes reality or not? These are the questions that  Tim Courtney  and the team behind  LEGO Ideas  ...

Community pro  Andrew Thomas  was recruited by  Northwestern Mutual  while working at Shapeways. On this episode, he talks about what it's like to go from a 200-person startup to an organization with over 7,500 employees that has been around for over 160 years. With more teammates and internal knowledge comes the added responsibility of continuously learning, introducing yourself to new people, an...

Shannon Emery  manages both the external customer-facing and internal employee communities at Higher Logic. With so many tasks to manage and two distinct communities to nurture, how is a community professional to focus? Patrick and Shannon's conversation is about just that –– the strategies and resources that she relies on to stay focused and successfully manage both communities. These strategies...

As we've shared on many episodes of Community Signal, community professionals come from numerous career paths, educational backgrounds, and areas of interest. In this conversation, Patrick talks with  Matt Nevill , customer community manager at  Agilent Technologies , about his transition from engineer to community manager. As a one-person community team, Matt discusses how he partners with other...

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act  is a frequent topic of conversation on Community Signal. As Patrick puts it, if you're a community professional in the United States, "this is the law that places the liability for speech on the author of that speech, not on you as the [community's] host. It allows you to moderate and remove certain content while not assuming liability for what remain...

Data breaches, distasteful ads or marketing campaigns, offensive content left unmoderated for far too long… as community professionals, we've studied these situations when they arise and many of us have had to manage such issues in our own communities. In this episode, Patrick and crisis communications expert  Kate Hartley  discuss examples of micro and macro communications crises and how to best...