Talk with Jordan ft. Mike Silberg — Community in SPACE

The SPACE Model. 5 impacts every community should make.

Welcome to another Hi-tech on the Low blog post. My guest this time is Mike Silberg. Mike is a Business Development and Community Expert with a passion for the new world of online communities — founding a new community or collaborating with existing communities is a force to be reckoned with.

Mike, do you want to introduce yourself?

Well, it’s funny. My first degree was in accounting, economics was always my passion, but I also studied sociology, because economics isn’t just about money, economics makes the world go round. Money may be a motivator, but what having money makes us feel — that’s the real motivator.

So, it’s the decision-making process.

When you think about it, 85% of the Noble Prize winners in economics were psychologists, they’re not economists. Today we call them Economical Behavioral Scientists.

How did you get into communities?

I always felt that I missed by not being a part of the pioneering generation, so I went and studied in the Negev. When I finished my degree I found myself as a spokesperson for KPMG pitching to government officials. That when I started to understand and use social media. Later, I joined Yesh Atid, and they were the first party to really leverage social media. From out of nowhere they got 19 mandates (of 120).

At the time, my senior was Roei Deutsch, who later became the founder of Jolt. My girlfriend at the time and I were 30 years old and here is these arrogant 22 years old that we learned so much from. After the campaign was over he started Jolt, by bringing in around him a secret group. Many people who were around Jolt in the beginning, were also the target audience — and that helped them build their company, and these secret groups later became customers and advocates for the company.

When they launched, they hired a few of us as freelancers to work with them. So basically this secret group did pretty much everything for Jolt — we were a think tank, consultants, customers, freelancers and advocates.

The takeaway from this is — the people taking the highest risk, in the beginning, are not your investors but your end-users, your first clients and your employees — they are your most valuable assets. These are the people investing in you the time and faith, sometimes for a low financial reward or return value, but they stick with you, believing in you.

Are they all part of the same community?

Well, that depends on the size of the company. You can see, Microsoft and Google are doing DevRels — developer relations, to communicate with the market and bring it together.

That’s an issue I have with the DevRels and “relationships”. It feels binary. You only have direct communication with the company, instead of the entire company’s sphere. A community is a lot stronger.

A lot stronger but very fluff. Think of it like a date that starts to call you the next day her boyfriend. Let’s build and define our relationship before we jump into the community level. It’s like on Facebook — are we a community or are we a group? That why we should start with partnerships. Communities can be very intimidating, so you want to slide into that, let it form on its own. A community is not the goal, it’s a means to an end.

What end would that be?

That’s one of the most important things I ever learned. In 2017, I was working as a director of business development manager for a financial service for start-ups, and the community. I went to the MidBurn and I was blown away. People fought for the 12,000 tickets that were sold out in 4 minutes for 800 shekels a ticket. People then had to work 4 or 5 months to build their camp displays, you have you bring your food and everything and you can’t buy anything. So you paid a lot of money, you get to go to a closed area and you put in a lot of effort, and in a week everything will be destroyed and people go for it. It really blew my mind away and I decided to understand how to harness the power and the community.

The first CMX summit was the first real event for community managers and had 100–150 attendees. In 2017 ~277 people. Many people from big tech companies like Facebook, Google and HP were sent there by their organization to learn what communities are.

So they didn’t understand the value of communities.

When I was talking to a guy from HP, he said that instead of 10 expensive developers, they bring 150 people for a sprint innovation day. These people are innovators, they’re not motivated by money but by challenges, and people need to be included, that’s a big reward for them.

They do it for the benefit of what you see going forward.

These are people that are passionate and want to be involved, the reward isn’t the main reason they’re engaged, but even if you do get paid for a sprint innovation, it's less than 10 people that are immersed in the company. Imagine that you have one person that facilitates, 150 brains with a fresh view of things. The community manager’s job is to facilitate these sentiments and create a synergy that will generate a valuable result.

In CMX I learned about the “Space Model” that includes the 5 impacts that a community can create but remember — methodologies are just boxes for us to organize things in our brain. The space model is for companies large enough to have a community for one part.

S — Support — Support is very easy to measure. The biggest investment in communities by big tech companies was in support. In 2014 Salesforce had 3 million members in their support community instead of 300 low-wage helpdesk employees answering questions on the phone. Imagine that instead you have people that love the product, want to help, want to have an impact, good community managers were harnessing this and were constantly engaging, strengthening, and pushing the community forward. The motivator there is the “Trail Blazers” — people that want to be seen, are leading the support communities. So these “Trail Blazers” that are actually paying customers, are helping other customers and you can save the expenses of most of the helpdesk.

So you can leverage the fact that the community that is already highly engaged.

It’s tricky. Communities have the mindset of reciprocity. You always must continue investing in the community. Community cycles and spirals start from the mindset of giving. Someone answers your question, you almost feel compelled to answer a question back, and after doing that the first time, you feel so good, that you start to do it more often.

So for example, if someone calls me up and asks me a question or wants my opinion on something, I ask them to do it in my community so I can help not only him on the phone, but everyone else who may be facing similar challenges.

You have a bigger impact.

But you can see so many communities and groups fail because they don’t have an economic mindset. They only give and they feel depleted. They gave so much and don’t have any more to give. You have to have an impact that will cause the other side to give back and do it again and again and again. It’s a long-term game. Marketing is a short-term game that I always compare to fossil fuel. You pay a certain amount of money, get leads, and no one remembers it. A community is more grassroots. It’s all about numbers. You help the community out enough times, eventually, someone will help you back.

Let's get back to the space model — S is support, what’s next?

P — Product — some companies have a business model for selling open source products developed by their communities.

A is for acquisition — helping you get more users or ambassador programs. The best example is AirBNB because their ambassador program began by accident. The head of EMEA was working doing a referral program. He learned two things: People that came through referrals were 4 times more likely to sign on to AirBNB, 83% of people had higher appreciation and satisfaction, and 16% life span value.

And the term is Advocates. You need to find people that are there from the start, not people you need to cultivate. These people are ready to go from the beginning.

C is for content. Instead of hiring people to create not very authentic content, you have MGCs. Member Generated Content that is more frequent and much more authentic. You lead by example and write a few pieces yourself but also teach your community members how to create content, create content for you.

E is engagement. One of my favorite examples is Adidas runners. They sell shirts, running shoes, sports garments but we’re not trainers. They figured out in Adidas that people buying their products were in so sports so Adidas created this sports team with a trainer and their clients, and via a small investment — some trainers, and they also customers that were especially active and a strong emotional relationship between the brand and the Adidas runners community was formed.

You have to understand that not every member of the community is an ambassador. Some maybe just supporter. The main need is PLM — People Like Me. Innovators are introverts and can’t be ambassadors. You must make sure everyone has room and finds his place.

You can almost see it clearly how the first community to start is the support community and how when the support community gets recognition new communities start to spawn.

Can you give a single tip before we sign off?

Try to create a system. You have to understand the methodology. You can find our community puzzle in YCB — that’s our group and we share it like now. When you break it down, you can understand what you missing. When it's built by a method, the community fluffiness can very confusing, like Alice in Wonderland when she asks the cat which road to take, but she doesn’t know where she wants to go. So the cat tells her that it doesn’t matter what road she takes. People open communities, as an idea without knowing where they’re taking the people. If I simplify the puzzle it will include:

• Understand the purpose of the community — where are we going
• Understand who is going to be the core team moving this community forward
• What experience is going to happen
• How do you come in and leave the community so that community grows
• How do we talk about the community outside the community
• Our KPIs — our success measures — how do we measure that we moving forward.

That’s the basic to get started.

Thanks Mike, I learned a lot from this podcast. Join Mike at IS-CL summit 2020 that focussed on community building, and you can enjoy most of the content online for free, YCP is in Hebrew and community pros on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the SPACE model, listen to my podcast “Talk with Jordan ft. Mike Silberg — Community in SPACE”

Jordan Kastrinsky — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-kastrinsky-9b8b2370/

Mike Silberg — https://www.linkedin.com/in/haggaianson/

Join our community:

Front Team website — https://www.front-team.com

Our telegram channel — https://t.me/front_team