How to Build a Thriving Community with David Spinks

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, "Hoply 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 brains 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. Enjoy 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 fuck 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. Appreciate you having me. I want to first ask you, how did you get into the space of community building? How did that happen? I kind of think everybody's in the 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 that are 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. It 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. 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 was a very normal thing to do. So I could kind of see that this is the way that things would go, and then of course, it did. In social media, blew up in social media, and the internet became such a big part of how people would connect. 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. 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 I started up, 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 to recompatise, 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. I want to go into that question of, well, how would you define what a community is? Because I think some people think they have community and it's not a community and I think some people have community and they don't know that they have community. Yes, the definition question is a big one because everyone's calling everything that 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 answer? 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. What would you say the must have traits of a successful community are? There's a lot of different theories on what constitutes a community. And I try not to be overly purist and 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 a customer support for them, 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's 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. When do you think, 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 community of just people talking, but like in a place where people can, you can control the engagement, you can help people like a forum or some sort of things like that. 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 starting to build communities 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 organically, that sense of identity will start to form. And 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 the beginning and 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, the driving engagement. If you don't have the capacity to have someone dedicate at least half of their time, if you're a 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. 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 farming those relationships. in 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. I do like that you said that you started 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 stage, being able to connect people live is one of the most powerful things you could do, especially with people craving that right now. Exactly. People are really craving, especially in person right now, people are hungry for it. 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, I think it's a good way to show how intentional the audience you have is, because if you host a event and you see who shows up, you could see, "Hey, people actually care about what we're doing, our values, they have shared believe, you could 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, it's one of the hardest things to do as a, anybody. So if you can, if you, if you build a great audience, it's way easier to get someone in that room, so you show that intention of your community that you build. 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, within an event you can get two, three hours of deep conversations with people. 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 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. That is 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 won a way for people to be able to connect. For example, I just went to this like leadership offside, 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. So. 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 like 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 can work on or ways we can help each other. And a 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, and then you have the valuable reward as a result. And, 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. I think one thing that I get asked a lot is when they step when people start community is how do you start fueling that conversation in the community and how do you, should you see 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 out of here. It's 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 like, 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 alignments with the 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? And then you add a fourth person and they're going to see, wow, there's like people actively engaged here and 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 another 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 I didn't find it anywhere else so and I but I would have those conversations one-on-one with people and and so eventually you know I have the same conversation with 10 different people individually. It always clicks for me like wait, maybe I should just get us all together into a room. I think you 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 alignment there that there's something happening here there's a there's a fire to be started that if you just create the right space and bring those people together. And again, community emerges it's it's like a it's like a plant if you put their seed in the soil and 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 prove 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. 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 they 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. It depends on the purpose as well if you're trying to like build this extremely large ecosystem really fast and 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 they don't get a sense of who we are right who how do we identify as a group of people. 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. 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. You said you have a community for community manager community builders and stuff like that if I was looking if I was a company looking for a great community manager what is one of the qualities what should be looking for. A company like what makes a great community builder or manager. 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 members going to respect them as one of them. It doesn't have to be that way especially for 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 player. 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 as opposed to someone who is already authentically, organically immersed in that topic. So that's the one layer as the community engagement side, and then the other layer I would look for is their operational abilities, which like any other role, right? Like, 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 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. Do you think sometimes that's two people? Is it sometimes, is it always the person? Because some people person could be really good expertise, great community about it, and they just suck operationally or does that person have to be an operational mind-to-person? 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. 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 forum, some people who just focus on the data behind the community. There's a lot of specializations within community that people can take on. What are some reasons you tell people to make that investment in community? Because Marker's always are judged on, hey, what is the ROI of this community? How am I going to get value right? What do you say to people when they say why I should invest in this? I've stopped trying to convince people a lot of time we go to invest in community. I find that there are people who believe that it's a great channel and a great way to connect to people that is really important in the mix of creating content and doing advertising and SEO. There's a lot of this outbound approach and inbound approaches to marketing, but community just provides this completely different elements of how people connect with your brand and with each other. You can look at some of the most successful brands in the world, the apples of the world, or HubSpot and the B2B side. Community was so core to how they grew from their very earliest days. It's a DNA thing. Some companies really believe in it and get it. 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. There'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. I've spent so many hours working to bring more clarity and get more clear attribution for community channels. It's just super hard. Events can be a little bit easier because again, they have a beginning and an end. 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. Did they sign up for your products within 90 days of a 10-in-a-1 events? You can probably give that some attribution. In an online forum, is there participation leading them to spend more with your company? You can get correlation on that. Right? They say, "Well, the people who are part of the community spend two times more than people 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. 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 was Cloud Software in their early days. 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. It can also drive other parts of your business. We use the Spaces model within CMX. Spaces stands for Support, Product, Equosition, Contribution, Engagement, and Success. Community can drive all of those things or any of those things for your business. 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. Lift, 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 Wikipedia, a Wiki content contribution platform. You're going to have creator, sellers, people who are contributing the thing that makes your business work. Community is, you have to build community. It's a core part of what you're doing. If you have a product that isn't community, 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 a DDA shoes on. You're creating more brand loyalty and you're creating these shared experiences for people through community. I think the one you said at the beginning of that you don't try to convince people anymore. It's the same with brand, it's the 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. I think the people who get that win and the people who don't get that just keep doing what they're doing. I think it's true. The same with brand when people say, why should I invest in brand to me? I can give you millions of examples why you should do it, but if your whole thing is going to be get a sale tomorrow, I can help you with that. We've got 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 two to three million more dollars. They just like, this is beautiful. This is aesthetic. This is what we believe people want. You can test those things as well to see what people want. But 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. 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 and 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 ROI is on that to know that it's valuable? No, you just, just no. That's why I hate when people say data driven market or data. Because I think it's data informed. I think the whole thing about humans as humans are unpredictable. So data only tells you what humans did in the past. That doesn't tell you what humans are going to do. And you have to 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 are unpredictable. They're not not logical creatures. They make sometimes logical decisions but not all the time. So the last question I have for you is what is a community heal you would die on? I would die on. I think so, I guess two things. One is similar to what we're just talking about with measuring ROI. Also with measuring community, people try to find this like one metric that is going to tell them whether another community is healthy. And again, I think you just need to lean on your intuition and look at data as something that informs not the sides. 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. since 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. 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 that are like, all right, like what's the one metric we should be looking at? And I 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 do 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 your conversations you're already having and are ready and 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 a 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. I think that that one's crucial. I think I say the same thing about content creators too, because now that's like everybody wants to be a content creator, 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 going to 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? 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 and consciousness kind of stuff as well. And I'm my book, The Business of Belonging, which goes deep into all of these concepts here on how to build community for your business. You can find that on the website as well. Cool. Thank you so much for joining. I appreciate your time and your views on community. I think it was really refreshing to hear. Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't ready, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millenials Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.