Unlocking Exponential Impact: Strategies to Build a Thriving Community | Dani Weinsten

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Dani Weinstein is a community builder, strategist, and advisor enabling customer success through community leadership since 2008. Dani joined SAP in August 2022 as Director, Community Strategy. Prior to SAP he held multiple community leadership roles at two pre-IPO unicorns, Kaltura & Domo, building and scaling their B2B customer communities.

In 2008, Dani was a founding member of HP’s Social Care team and led the deployment of the award-winning HP Consumer Support Forums in seven languages over a 15-month period. The Social Care team became best in class at HP, earning two Groundswell awards during the last years of his HP career. Dani holds an MBA in InternaQonal Management and MarkeQng from the University of California, Davis, a BBA in finance from the University of MassachuseTs, Amherst, and a CerQficate of InternaQonal Business from the RSM, Erasmus Universiteit, RoTerdam, The Netherlands. He is married with three children and resides in Granite Bay, CAUSA

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Host: Hey Dani, how are you doing?

Dani Weinstein:
Good, pleasure seeing you again.

Host:
Good to see you again! How's things been going? Where are you based out of, by the way?

Dani Weinstein:
So, I'm in Northern California, about halfway between Lake Tahoe and Silicon Valley, kind of in the Sacramento area.

Host:
Nice, and right now some of the best weather we have during the year.

Dani Weinstein:
Yeah, lucky. That's really lucky.

Host:
So, I'm going to introduce you here. First and foremost, thank you for coming. This is Dani Weinstein, currently a director at SAP, a very large company. If you don't know, you should know. And right there, he is the director of community strategy, and he's going to be talking to us not only about what he does and how he contributes to his company, but also some of his ideas and philosophies on getting things done, being productive in what I would call this newer world, and a little bit about the tech ecosystem as well. So, thank you all so much for coming in and sharing all these things with us and being here, taking your time.

Dani Weinstein:
Thanks so much, I appreciate that. Yeah, so Dani Weinstein here. It's actually spelled Dan and pronounced Dani. I've been in the community world now going on quite a number of years, going back to 2008. I appreciate the invite for today's discussion. And so, you know, I think we really—it's an open agenda as far as what you want to cover. I'm happy to talk about my journey, how community plays a role in business, kind of what we're trying to do at SAP. But really, you know, I'd like to hear, let's say from me, as far as which direction you want me to start with.

Host:
Well, I think I'll start with a simple thing, which is, you know, what is a director of community strategy? What does that mean?

Dani Weinstein:
Sure, so in the SAP world, SAP is a global conglomerate, a very large company. It just had its 50th anniversary, going on 51 years. Roots in Germany, congratulations, it’s really been—and you know, they have a footprint everywhere. They're offered in 140 countries with 110,000 employees. And really, we are what I would call a brand that most people are not very familiar with. We actually touch 77% of every transaction in every vertical in the world. So, when you come into a large organization, a large account, and they have on the back end Oracle and Salesforce and Cisco, many times, a lot of the systems are hard to rip out. And we're the only solution out there really that actually allows many of these systems to stay and play and connect them together, plus add on to our own.

But we operate in a lot of different verticals—everything from supply chain to even capital management to ERP and so on. For me, my expertise has really been developed the last 15-16 years in community leadership. I was on the ground floor of the consumer support forums at HP. I spent many years in the HP consumer support business. So really, that was an organization where you had a printer or a PC or a consumer-based product, and you're looking for support—you're calling us, emailing us, chatting with us, or going to our website. I pretty much played a role in many of those different touchpoints throughout my career there. In the latter part of my years there, we created a brand-new social care team. The objective was to create peer-to-peer communities where customers could ask questions, get answers, and connect with their peers to share best practices.

Host:
How long ago was this when you started?

Dani Weinstein:
This was back in 2008. So, between 2008 and 2014, I was on the original three-person team. We launched and scaled seven language communities: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean. Again, global footprint. The orientation was really to deflect calls coming to the call center and have questions answered in our community. But more than that, we created an ecosystem where people could actually.. So, find that as a trusted source of information you would Google the information, Google your question, it would ultimately get into the community. And then with that, we also created a Super Fan program where we were able to, you know, curate and build up and promote and recognize our top contributors in the world. And we had a couple of very successful social support summits where we flew in our top, you know, 200 people from around the world to San Francisco one year, Orlando the next, recognized them for their contribution to the community. But that whole period allowed me to really learn the basics around, you know, managing community and how does it influence the brand, how does it benefit your customer base?

And so, from there, I went up to two unicorns, Domo and Prepio, in the data analytics space. I built up their community from the ground floor, their Superfan program, their advocacy program. I went through the IPO and had great success with Domo, and then from there I went over to Kaltura, another unicorn, pre-IPO, and started the journey there. And so, I joined SAP about nine months ago, a little more than nine months ago, in August of 2022, and was hired as their Director of Community.

Now, SAP again has got a long history of community. Their online community, community.sap.com, was created 20 years ago, so we're now celebrating its 20th anniversary. It still has a huge presence in the ecosystem. There are more than three million unique visitors coming to that community every month. It's the most impactful property in the SAP.com digital ecosystem. And so, my role really is to help drive a vision for how we elevate the experience to the next level, working with the organization, with the digital marketing team, with the owners of different elements across learning and support, to create a better, more personalized experience for our customers.

So, you know, my real role is to learn and understand the workings, the operation. Well, you know, what are the business drivers? And so, where community sits today within SAP, we are part of SAP Learning. And especially in the B2B world, the number one reason why... you may ask, well, why do professionals spend time in community answering questions, or why should I go there? I'm an IT professional, I'm busy, I've got to deploy, you know, Delmore, Kaltura, or SAP. I don't have time to hang out in a community. The reality is, the number one driver for those professionals is they want to gain knowledge. They want to get better at their job. They want to get better at their game using our products, and one way to do that is to collaborate with their peers.

So, if I'm a human capital or finance manager, let's say at Deutsche Bank, and I'm managing an SAP instance of SAP, well, I want to connect with, you know, my peer at Credit Suisse or someone who's in the same role in another company who's also using the same software and say, "Hey, how are you, you know, what are your best practices on deploying this? How are you optimizing your investment in software?" It's really that trusted peer experience. And so, in order to do that, you have to create a community. And so, the community can exist in our online assets, but it also exists in, you know, other places. People have conversations on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on YouTube, GitHub. But also, there are in-person meetups, and so there’s a vast ticket system as well of SAP user groups in the Americas, in Europe, in Asia. So, connecting in person is also incredibly important. That’s part of the overall ecosystem.

But right now, my media focus is on how do we enable, and our bigger goals are... our goal right now within learning, you know, we see community as the enabler for learning. We’re trying to grow the population of SAP professionals by two million people by 2025. And so, in order to do that, we've got a great learning ecosystem. How many years now? You said three million, right? Well, the goal is to achieve, you know, two million. We want to have two million people actually go through a skilled learning course successfully by 2025.

Host: 

How many people are in the system right now?

Dani Weinstein: 

Well, right now, we’re expected to have 1.4 million active learners in our SAP system in 2023. The goal really is to shift from traffic to actually course completion at a much larger number in 2025. So, we see community as the on-ramp, the enabler, driving awareness for the learning journey. And it's time for people who are trying to gain knowledge, trying to get better at their job, they're trying to get certifications.

And so, as the Director of Strategy, I’m helping to drive that vision, helping to figure out what’s most important for us to invest in or spend our time on, what are things that can wait. And right now, there are a lot of things that have evolved over the years, and we have an opportunity to, I think, improve the digital experience. You know, so people come in, and many people who come to the community today are doing so through a Google search, um, and then they're either finding the answer they're looking for or they're asking a question.

But we don't really offer today what I would consider a world-class experience where, for example, you know, you come into our community and I know that E2 has been an SCP customer for five years, you've been using these products, and offer more of a personalized experience. So, I mean, Amazon does a great job with us. That's kind of, you know, the North Star where we're trying to go. Several years down the road, we should be able to know, once you sign in, I'm doing SAP, I've been with SCP for X number of years, I have these products, or, you know, what I'm a veteran, I've been around for 20 years, I've been using all these different portfolios. But with all that data, you can then serve up more personalized content. You could say, "Oh, you know what, other people like you who have been with us for three years, who've gone through this course, have also benefited from using this platform or taking the certification."

And again, that's what people want. People want direction, you know, how do I... they're looking for us for advice on how do I get better at my SAP game? You know, they're not going to have that knowledge, they're coming to us for that knowledge.

And so with connecting those systems, that's what we're working on for 2024 and 2025 — getting to a much more personalized experience instead of just a generic, you know, cookie-cutter, I've got a search, I've got to find the content, and then figure out what's going to work. Getting to a much more personalized experience that makes it not just beneficial but also makes it, um, it makes me optimized, right? I'm no fun.

This shift toward a more personalized experience is supported by community-building strategies that allow us to better understand and engage our users. The goal is to make the learning journey more meaningful and optimized, reflecting successful community-building strategies that improve user engagement and knowledge sharing.

Host: 

Look, a quick question on, so if we, if we go back to, um, like the very beginning, right? So it's 2008 and you're getting into that space and trying to get a grasp on, I think at that time, I'm sure there were online communities at that time, there's an understanding of what, like, communities — whether or not those online communities and big business were sort of, were connected in any way, or there was an understanding of the value. I'm not sure. Was that true at that time? Now it's very obvious, right? Almost all companies are essentially communities of one form or another to some degree. Actually, the most famous ones are basically very, very large communities, right? So yeah, sure, the idea of the idea that that value add, how was it perceived in 2008?

Dani Weinstein: 

So at that time, you know, we had a really strong, uh, support organization, particularly in the Americas. So again, we had, uh, you know, support probably several of the languages in, you know, email and chat and web and phone support.
And in the Americas, we won a JD Power Award for Best in Class support in 2006.
In 2007, they did not renew the award because we were missing a branded HP-owned forum. They didn't call it community for support, but we had one with the Compaq acquisition and ended up sunsetting it. And there were a number of legacy community reforms that HP had built back in the '90s that were serving large enterprise — so people had servers and storage and high-capacity systems like that, and really, much very tightly technical, very much for the IT professional.
So the business case was, we didn't get the JD Power award, we need to go create this forum. And so at that time, the two big heavy hitters in enterprise community software were Lithium and Jive. Now again, there were communities like Sony and others that had, um, you know, large branded communities around here, but certainly it didn't have what is, you know, today. Today, it's really a business requirement. At that time, I was listed with a big benefit.
At the time, the sales case was, well, how much is this award worth to the HP brand? How much more is it worth to the organization? And how much is it going to benefit our portfolio?
And so for the business, the business case really was centered on, we knew our web traffic, we did estimates of how much traffic we were going to get in the community and how many questions would potentially be answered in the community. And if they're not getting answered in the community, guess what? They're not going to be calling us as much, they're not going to be emailing us as much, and all those things were operation, too.
That cost money. So over time, it could actually show substantial savings, tens of millions of dollars. It took several years to get there in support savings by having our customers discuss the same questions, because again, many people have the same questions coming in over and over again.
Information in the community so that was the big anchor. But now over time, there really are forums and it's not limited to forums, but there's really four major business value pillars in a B2B world now. The quick wins in many cases are going to be around support. I find the information I'm looking for, I've got a question, I'm not going to call you for support, and those can be achieved relatively quickly. The second one is content creation. If you think about, I've got to create a knowledge base, I've got to create a library of articles, you know, I know that, okay, we have a new product release, people are going to have... ten. 

Typical questions on these products we have, well, someone's got to create those articles, you've got to create the content, you've got to go publish it. That costs time and money, resources in community—those same types of questions and answers are going to come about. And what happens is, you've got the capability where you ask a question, I answer it, you have the ability to market, "Oh, that's the right answer," it's now an accepted solution, and we verify it. So once that's the case, that can actually easily be converted to a knowledge-based article. So each of those articles becomes valuable pieces of content. And what's now happened is the community is becoming a farm to create this great content that can be harvested. So now you're actually driving efficiencies on content creation, and that can be used in, you know, case studies, you can be using your knowledge base, these limiting different places, so you're now saving money in content creation.

The next one is around how do you gamify your community too? Because again, most people are like, everyone's busy, I'm going to Google, I'm on my phone, I'm going to search my question, I'm going to find my answer, I'm going to move on. So they're what I would call consumers of the content, but they're not going to engage. That's about 90%—or it could be as much as 90%—of the population. And so with that, it's incredibly important that those eyes continue to be coming on the community. But then there's a population that is going to engage. You're going to like a comment, they're going to add a comment and ask a question, and they may occasionally answer questions as well. And that represents anywhere from, you know, it's a minimum 10%, it could be as high as 30%. There's a small population that I would call, or really, the gold in the community, and these are your super fans or superstars. And these are the people that are most motivated to be contributing in the community because they want the recognition to be—they want to be recognized as an expert.

Dani Weinstein: 

So they've got a lot of knowledge about your brand, your product, whatever it may be, and they want to be showing off in late on the leaderboards. So when you gamify, even when you gamify your experience, and again, most of the top platforms have this built-in, you can see that I'm the most liked author, I have the most solutions, you know, I'm the star of the month. They value that. But then, as you start to move up the rank ladder and you become a superstar, then you're getting more—you're getting a certification in a sense that from the brand, "Oh, this person is actually really knowledgeable about this platform." And then they can use that. That person is motivated by the recognition because they use that to go to their boss and say, "Hey, I've been our star in this community for six months, time, whatever it may be, or I received this cool award." They use that to demonstrate some, you know, sort of a neutral opinion from the company that, "Hey, this person is actually an expert."

Host: 

They become the most valuable people in the community because guess what? They're actually answering as much as 50% of the questions in the community. Are being answered by these folks. So that's actually driving a lot of efficiencies. But also, guess what happens? As you start to recognize them and you get more data around them, you realize these people are now—not just doing it for fun—they actually love your product, they love your brand, otherwise they won't be spending time there. They become advocates to promote your brand. They then go to your boss and say, "Hey, I'm doing my—I’m using this product to do a better job, and so we're getting more value out of this platform." But guess what? They're also telling that to their peers in the community. You start to connect these stars together. And so, if I'm at Citibank and I'm not hanging out with my buddy at the Credit Suisse, and I'm sharing the love about how much this is a cool experience, well guess what? That's influencing them as well.

Dani Weinstein: 

So this becomes then impactful to, especially in the world of B2B and SAS or software as a solution, where renewals are incredibly important when everything's in the cloud. There's a lot of data that shows if you've got these, you know, active members in community or even active learners, because learning is also just as impactful in a specific account. And you compare that to accounts that have no presence in community, no presence in learning, you're going to have a higher probability of upsells and retention. And those accounts that have actually people engaged in your conversations and community versus those that do not, that becomes a big value-added. It could be substantially larger than even the support savings, even the content creation.

So that takes time. It takes several years to develop that, but that's actually a highly valuable element of it. It took several years to get that return on building that community. Take your building community from scratch—it takes a couple of years. Usually, you're not seeing that impact until years two and three, because again, it takes time to cultivate the right of the community. If you've got a legacy community, you kind of know where they are. It's probably a shorter time to time to value. Yeah, if you're... if you have a pre-existing pool you can pull from then of course it's fine. Is there uh, like I'm sure there isn't a particular number, but probably is there, um, a ratio of um, number of customers to the number of people in the community where you start seeing a deceleration in uh, the number of calls per day or for your product? So let's say you have, um, two million customers, you need 500,000 customers before your the number of calls you have on your call center uh goes from, um, 50,000 to 40,000, like so this is arbitrary, you know, but that's sort of how I'm thinking about it.

To optimize this process, community-building strategies become crucial in driving engagement and retention over the long term. With the right community-building strategies, businesses can see substantial benefits not just in support savings but in stronger customer relationships.

Host: 

Right. So, and it takes two years to build that, right? Or a year to build that, but you'll see it and it's obviously pretty much, it starts to roll, it starts to roll fast. But right, really we're talking about, you know, several different things here. So the deflection piece, um, is a bit, a little bit, a little bit of a different animal because, um, again, not necessarily all of your customers have access to uh, support, but they do have access to a community, um, right? And maybe other people, and they can't, that do have access to it, uh, and sometimes they're supporting the same people, so it's sometimes harder to measure that. But the more the simple way to do it is really look at, you can do short surveys on your website or on your community that says, you know, did you, what's your visit today successful or did you find the information you were looking for?

Dani Weinstein: 

Uh, and then you follow it up with, you know, do you intend to contact support? So there's a measurable way to track the deflection and then you look at your whole number of unique visitors and you multiply by that ratio of okay, the number of people coming to our community 60, 70% of the people visiting now are finding what they're looking for, that's a great number usually, uh, you can derive deflection numbers from that.

Host: 

Um, as far as, you know, this the spread really, it's about promoting the value of Community, um, making the experience easy, making sure your content has got optimized SEO, um, all of the above. I think once you are reaching those levels and you start promoting it in every account, uh, the deflection piece will kind of take care of itself. The second one around the advocacy is a bit more challenging. That would take several years to reach because again, with programs in place, you gotta have recognition, you have to have milestones and reaching those different levels of community doesn't happen from one day one to the next.

Um, and then Alaska is there a way for, is there a way for the, is there a way for, because here you're talking about measuring outcomes based on the community surveys themselves, or is there a way to measure, is there, is there a location that's reflective of, of the outcomes? Like I was just using Health Center as an example, but do you like are you measuring, you know, sort of you measure here and there's an outcome and you imagine here there's an outcome and you measure how this affects that? Is there a, is it an equivalent of this where that you see, okay, fine the people who are in here are doing okay but it has a measurable outcome on on company goals on KPIs and in a different, in a different area?

Host: 

Yes, but it's very challenging to do that. What you can do is look at, um, you start measuring, um, you know, the people that are, but one of the ways to certainly address that is, you know, who are your Heavy Hitters in your contact centers, who's creating the most support tickets and making sure that they're aware of community and really helping to move them from the call center to, you know, to community, that's sort of one element to sort of mitigate that. Uh, second is also to find out, particularly you want to try and promote the community so that that's actually the first stop along the way before they actually open up a support case.

Dani Weinstein: 

And there's one of these ways to do that as well where before a customer is actually able to create the case, they're going through a series of questions of have you, have you looked at this article, have you searched your community, uh, and maybe sometimes I've seen some cases where you're actually forced to do that before you're actually allowed to open up a, um, you know, open up a support case.

Host: 

All right, but again it depends on the the policy of the particular company and how open your support taking system is, because in many cases it's fairly restrictive, um, and it may be limited to especially large, large companies, uh to a more senior, you know, IT professional and so what happens is those professionals that let's say they run a credit Swiss they have a whole team of people underneath them who potentially or come to them for help. You're you want to make sure that those folks in particular are aware of the valuable community so they can direct the people under them to use that first because then they're going to get less of a need to open up a case.

Dani Weinstein: 

So I see where you're going and again, it's, it's certainly doable but it's it's quite challenging to get to that level of, uh, of sophistication.

Host: 

Um, so so what's uh, because in my, in my mind if like if you have if you have that level of um because it does So you have multiple things, right? It's also kind of documentation for people internally, because you could get to a situation where you had experts outside the organization that have spent so much time and are still invested in the product that there are people in the organization who simply aren't as much, for one reason or another—who knows, right? In the call centers, or maybe they've moved on into different areas within the organization, taking their knowledge with them. But the people who are outside, they’re so invested in this for one reason or another and they stay for a long time. This creates an opportunity for impactful community leadership, where these external experts can help guide and mentor others. So the numbers and the amount of people who have expertise increase relative to the size of the community—more than you could hire or would need to hire, but you have the ability to hire, right? So you have that documentation piece, and you also have the expertise piece. And then the redirection piece, where you should be able to say, okay, if everyone at that lower level of our support is able to direct people to this, then the number of calls we make or the number of calls that are made to us—so an individual—have reduced by X amount. It might not be directly predictable, but it should be... maybe in a five-year or four-year period, an outcome where that's objectively true, relative to the growth of the company and the expectation that, if this wasn't there, then essentially the graph should come down. Where, you know, it should be a little less, and then that gap is where your value is, or where the value has been created. This would be a perfect example of fostering a community that works towards common goals and contributes to shared success.

At the core of this model is empowering community members to take ownership and act as contributors to the overall ecosystem. It's not just about having experts available but about creating a system where each individual can have a role in improving the system. This is a key aspect of collaborative community development that helps ensure the community's health over time. As more people get involved and work together, it increases the potential for building stronger communities where the impact is greater than the sum of its parts.

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Dani Weinstein: Does that make sense?

Host: 

Yeah, absolutely. Or, and you typically do see that as you see the number of registered members in communities grow. The traffic grows, the number of solutions that are created, the time to answer in community. You typically will see a direct correlation to what... you know, the increase in support may have been.

Dani Weinstein: 

Yeah, it has been retrievement. He’s done a great job—he’s one of the leading consultants out there. He runs a company called Fever B in the UK, and he actually worked with the company several years back, where they actually shut off a particular algorithm to, you know, to the community for a period of time, actually did a test to see what would be the impact on their contact center, and it was pretty dramatic.

Host: So, let's go—sorry, go ahead.

Dani Weinstein: 

No, I’m just gonna say, you've got the deflection, you've got the content creation, you have the advocacy phase. The last one is around what's the customer... so this is around ideation. In many cases, in the B2B world, you don’t get... there's really three flavors of conversations. There are, "I'm searching for an answer to either fix something or to figure something out." It's a Q&A. You have a question, I have an answer, it's very specific. The second one is, "My best practice discussions." It's like, I don’t have a question. I figured out something really cool—there’s like a new release of the platform, I went through all the release notes, but now I figured out something that’s not documented, and I want to share that with my peers. So I start this conversation about optimizing the value of this latest release. That’s sort of a secondary discussion. The third one is, "I’m trying to figure something out, and the answer is, 'Oh, we can’t do that today. Go submit a feature request.'" It’s about product feedback. And so, there's many different ways you can skin a cat on how to do product feedback, and one way is to actually do an ideas exchange where you can have voting.

Host: 

You crowdsource the voices of your customers around a particular idea, and you actually have engineering as part of that conversation. And that one, too, when it's done right, can add quite a bit of value to the brand. That’s also a very tricky thing to navigate because you don’t want it to become an echo chamber where there’s no action. No one responding. And also, you need to make sure you do it in a way where... and not everybody gets a chance to have a vote, meaning you want to gamify it so that customers who actually have shown value in the community—they're at like level five or six or seven—have now earned the right to, you know, create an idea. So that's not sort of, you know... they’re not gaming the system around voting, and also that the quality of the contribution to that idea has already been demonstrated by that person’s previous contributions in the community.

Dani Weinstein: 

So, let's talk about that game, because I’m interested in that. First of all, the gamification piece. The other piece is sustainability, and then also the controlling of perception a little bit. So I think you sort of alluded to it with, uh, making sure that people who are—and some semblance of qualification, which is also part of it—it's also difficult to determine and also a bit of a gamification derivative, right? Where rewards are given for positive outcomes. And then there’s a little gamification, some touches on sustainability a little bit, because obviously with rewards, people who want to stay—but also making sure those rewards actually result in outcomes that encourage you to stay right because all games get boring after a while if you know, uh, you know, if you win the game too many times or so it is. 

Host:

There's a nuance there where it's kind of like, is it a game, is it an objective reward system?

Dani Weinstein:  

And, um, the other part obviously is called controlling perception where, you know, if people have... if at the end of the day, it's just people have the freedom to continue to contribute, they also have the freedom to say things that you may not want them to say. So there's a bit of a management there. Um, you know, in a way it's also good because if they're saying it within the context that you can contribute to almost immediately, you can sort of come back to almost immediately and say, hey look, we can solve this problem, we do want this feature for you.

So those three pieces I think are interesting because it’s a very soft thing to have to deal with, right? And again, you want to have an open community that's welcome to everybody. The first few levels are typically about the quantity of your participation, you know, I'm signing in, I'm making comment, I'm liking stuff and answering questions, but really to get to, let's say, those quality levels, you have to start providing value. Meaning people are liking what you have to say or you're actually providing good answers, you're actually an author of an accepted solution because then you're demonstrating knowledge.

And once you have it, it filters out a lot of the noise. And again, people want to see they're moving up the ladder. They want to get badges for a region, certain levels. Um, and with that, you know, the community is not about having, okay, everybody has the same opinion. No, you want to have people that are going to be critical of what we're doing or what's happening within the platform, what needs to be done, in a respectful and professional manner. So there are rules of God. Yeah, there are, you know, rules of participation and security and privacy guidelines and so we're not, you know, people most companies not going to tolerate foul language or people abusing it or people harassing anybody else.

But it doesn't mean that they can't say, well, you know what? This release actually was terrible, I'm having a hard time with it and I think you should have done it this way. That fosters actually, you know, having healthy, dialed-in critique. I think it's welcoming.

Host: Right, and that's the way it should be. Um, now to your point about sustainability as they reach these highest levels, you then need to recognize those folks as your MVPs. And so you have, you know, annual awards at your conference around, you know, you're a customer champion, it could be at regional events. You want to start inviting those people for, you know, presenting at user groups or even on a podcast or even you start showcasing them. I mean, right, Salesforce does a great job of this, they have, you know, today Benihoff has his people in, you know, history for us and he's just showing the golden hoodie, you know, after reinforcement on video in front of thousands of people around the world.

Dani Weinstein:  You know, that's kind of the epitome of that kind of program and, you know, people there and again, there's all the experience that sells for 70ps around the world. There are probably tens of thousands of people that are striving to get to that level now. Not everybody's going to get to that level, but if you think about, you know, hiking the highest mountains in the world like Kilimanjaro, you know, what, some people are satisfied with getting to base camp one and others are going to be satisfied, again, base camp two. Oh, that's that was my objective. I mean, and that's okay and you have to have recognition milestones for reaching those important levels. Of course, you've got, you know, the top of the mountain but it also needs to be made clear that, you know, you're not an MVP for life.

There is a renewal process. It doesn't mean, okay, I did it for two years, like I kicked butt on it and now I'm done. Well, if you disappear for another year, it's like anything else, you're not gonna be a frequent flyer and, you know, when you're not, you're not with Delta at that level forever. You know, it's sort of, well, we missed you, sorry. You know, it helped to start over again or maybe they give you, you know, another year, they'll grandfather in for a year. But the point is that it does require a sustained level of, uh, you know, engagement effort.

Many ways to reward these folks again through giving the discounts of certification if they're coming to your annual conference, you get the front receiving. Um, you know, again, if there's a corporate, you know, having your top MVPs on stage with the CEO even for 60 seconds saying, hey these people are rock stars, we, you know, we appreciate you. Um, it could be a, you know, guest blogging on a corporate blog.

Some of them are passionate about running events, so they say, you know what? We're going to trust you to, you know, you're based in Chicago, we're gonna give you budget, you know, for, you know, order pizza, we want a beer, go at it because we know that they know their stuff and was saying, you know what, if you want someone from our company to show up, take notes, be there to support you, we'll have to help out. You want to run on your own, that's fine, but that's how you scale. You have to leverage the power of your, you know, community to do that.

So what kind of... is there a personality profile for people who do these? Are there all kinds, I guess all kinds of people? Like, is there, you know, who really gets to the top of these sort of communities?

And, uh, yeah, there's an openness of a location again. I think in the B2B world, you know, the common thread why people are coming in the first place is to get better at their, excuse me, at their job. But as far as the MVP personnel, people come from all walks of life. I mean, even if we go back to my HP days, which was more, again, in the consumer world, you know, the persona of our stars that we invited, that we flew to our social summit, it wasn’t the people your typical persona who worked at Geek Squad at Best Buy. I mean, we had the top, for example, you know, Cheryl, God bless her, I mean, she was the top contributor for answering desktop PC questions in the world. This is a 64-year-old grandmother, which... we had a full-time day job. She spent 30 hours a week answering questions in the community with another guy who was, you know, a corporate attorney.

The real key to this success lies in impactful community leadership. By recognizing the diversity of people and fostering an environment where everyone's contributions are valued, we ensure that we are fostering a community that thrives. Through the shared effort of all participants, empowering community members to take ownership of their role, the community flourishes. This kind of collaborative community development creates a space where everyone's strengths are leveraged to benefit the greater good. Ultimately, we are all about building stronger communities, where people can come together, collaborate, and succeed.

Host: 

Was she, uh, related to that in any way? Or was her job, you know, sort of like... she just did this because she had a passion for it?

Dani Weinstein: 

So that was her, uh... we know they got Erico, retired military, was on the Coast Guard. He was living in the Netherlands and he had, you know, six or seven HP devices. He was hanging out in his basement, and he was a night owl. He didn't answer questions all night. We had a 21-year-old kid in Poland who was a Microsoft MVP, was also doing HP stuff. Um, you know, the guy was a corporate attorney by day, doing, you know, tech questions at night. So, you know, all walks of life. Of course, you have these HP people who had knowledge, but again, it ran the full gamut of personas. It's just like anything else. You've got a hobby, whether it be around cars or cooking or travel, that you're really passionate about—that's what they wanted. They wanted to talk about that; that's where their mind was.

Host: 

So, in the case of, you know, going back to, you know, full circle B2B, it's more so, um, those people that have, you know, they're doing it very much as part of their job. So there's very much a correlation there, but they're also motivated by the recognition factor. They want to keep, they want to be, um, you know, they want that external recognition to get promoted. And so that's, I think, the biggest driver and that common theme for getting to, you know, they want access to executives.

Dani Weinstein:

We have sort of that today with our Mentors and Champions program at SAP, where the mentors actually have direct access to some of our top executives, and they’ve had it for a very long time. I mean, it’s fully evolved into more of an executive advisory board, but it still—there really are within, you know, a collaborative community development environment. Years ago, and again, all the things done, it just cost crazy money to implement. It’s really no matter how you, um, how you manage it, I think the common theme is—it’s all about the recognition of being, you know, having that knowledge around our platform and also the value that you can bring by actually getting us better ideas on how we can become better at making our product better. The goal has always been to focus on empowering community members and supporting fostering a community where everyone can thrive. This approach aligns perfectly with impactful community leadership that has stood the test of time. Ultimately, it’s about building stronger communities within the organization and beyond, fostering long-term growth and innovation.

Host: 

So, uh, we’re going to sort of go back to this idea of doing this in multiple countries because I was thinking, you know, I guess technology now is different than—but if someone from Japan who has a lot of contact could be providing a lot of value in Japanese, but they have the best opportunity to provide that value, and if they can translate it, then that’s a, you know, there's a maximum opportunity there for that person.

Dani Weinstein: 

Vice versa from other countries, cross-pollination across countries. Um, having people who were very high quality or have high scale of high interest from multiple countries come together, sure. Um, and then so just sort of had this like sort of global community of people for your organization that, you know, that contribute to the community. And I think it’s interesting, probably interesting for them, right, to come from doing this thing all of a sudden, they get, you know, flown out to somewhere that they’ve never been and ever thought they would be, going out to just because they’re contributing to the community, right?

Host: 

And having, having, um, organizations support that kind of stuff.

Dani Weinstein: 

No, and that’s, we have a huge opportunity right now at SAP to do that. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. One is, again, the HP days we had seven language communities. You know, again, the communities were in separate URLs, but same conversations, same UI, same experience. But this summit, we actually flew in people from China and Korea and, you know, various parts of Europe, um, U.S., and Canada to our summits. So they got to meet each other. And again, all walks of life, all different languages, uh, different cultures, but the common thing—they’re talking about, you know, the HP platform. You mentioned Japanese, which is quite interesting because in my Domo days, you know, Domo means thanks in Japanese. You say thank you very much, and when I created the community for Domo, we actually went a calling it the dojo, like a martial arts studio. And our gamification was a belt structure, so you start out, you know, white belts and you work through elements or black belt.

Now, we didn’t have black belt at the beginning. We had up to like five levels here. Like a blue belt was maybe five or six, and then we added more until you reached the black belt. Well, Japan was a very important market for our CEO, and we had Japanese fully available, I think 60 days after we went live with English. Well, guess what? We had a Japanese customer who was crushing it.

And when he’s answering tons of questions in the Japanese community, but guess what? He was answering every—he was also answering questions on the English community. I’m sorry, it was the same community, but he was actually answering questions on the English side.

Now, I thought the guy was fluent in Japanese. He was using Google Translate to create content, and it ended up hiring him as a... um, you know, a Domo employee in Japan. We already had, you know, 30 or 50 employees in Tokyo, and they ended up recruiting him because he was so good. But when he came here, we had to meet him in person. I was shocked—he didn’t know a word of English, and we’re sitting there in the same conference room on our map using Google Translate to have a conversation, you know. It was with audio, early days of AI—it’s about six, seven years ago.

This example highlights the power of community-building strategies that encourage cross-language interaction, even when language barriers exist. Platforms that foster such a dynamic approach offer tremendous opportunities for expanding global engagement, supported by effective community-building strategies.

Host:

So, to your point, yeah, we are living in the global digital world, and you’ve got to be able to break down these barriers. Great ideas and great knowledge and superstars can come from anywhere in any walk of life, and I don’t care what language they speak. The common thing goes back to, well, what’s the conversation about? It’s about your platform or if you’re the community about cars, it’s about cars, or it’s about travel, or it’s about, you know, whatever it may be—cooking. It’s all that common theme. That’s where their passion is. So, you’ve got to, you know, take a step back and realize that that’s what they are talking about.

And you want to be able to play, you know. Our job is really, how do you lower the barriers of entry so that there’s minimal friction? It’s easy to find information I’m looking for, it’s easy to sign in, it’s easy for me to ask a question—all of the above. And that’s kind of the stuff, you know, we’re working on those basics right now to improve our experience this year. And you know, 2040 on, it’s about the personalization stuff.

The way we approach impactful community leadership is all about facilitating these connections, guiding the conversation, and ensuring that everyone feels heard. It’s about fostering a community where diverse voices are welcomed and where there’s a real sense of belonging. With empowering communities through this open dialogue, people are motivated to share their ideas and learn from one another.

Over time, we’re focusing on collaborative community development because we believe that when members actively participate in shaping the community, the entire experience improves. We’re not just about growing the community; it’s about building stronger communities where people can thrive together and drive collective success.

Dani Weinstein: 

No, that’s one thing. If you’re bringing something in, that’s another thing. So yeah, and again, I’ve worked with—I know all the top vendors, so they’re, you know, again, early days of Enterprise Community was Jive and Lithium. Today, Lithium is, you know, a company called Koros. It was an acquisition by Vista Partners of Lithium. They also acquired, um, I think, Spreadfast and a few others.

But the net-net is, there’s a handful of Enterprise Community vendors today such as Koros, Inside, um, Higher Logic, you know, they acquired Vanilla. Discord, um, and there’s a number of, you know, smaller players that really I would say the lot, you know, the ones that could support the large Enterprise that have localization, that have the security requirements, privacy, are those the ones that I mentioned. Each and every one of them has a pretty robust built-in gamification platform.

It’s up to you how you decide how you want to create a ladder. Um, in fact, we’re having this conversation right now internally about our SAP community because it’s been around for so long, and we’ve had different things in play. So again, I wanted to do something that was in line with our call with the Domo culture because we had this influence of, you know, this Japanese influence because of our CEO.

And so that’s why I came up with the belt structure idea. Because you can create—you can name it anything you want, and you can have your graphics for it. That’s pretty straightforward as far as deploying it in the system. The key is in the backend—you have to determine, all right, what’s the requirement to reach level one, two, three, four, five? Is it, you know, answered ten questions successfully? Is it showing up, you know, for every day for a month? Is it, you know, all those things?

Right, and that’s never revealed to the customer. You simply communicate it’s quality over quantity. Um, it’s adding value, and so with that, as I said, most of the platforms I mentioned can have the capability to—they have the built-in gamification as well as the patching system.

So, you know, there are a lot of matches that are automatically, uh, awarded based on, you know, I’ve had my hundred posts, I received my 100 likes, uh, but then there’s other ones that are custom—they’re based on a certain event. Oh, I presented a user group, I attended Dreamforce, I went to Sapphire for SAP.

It’s important to recognize the value of community-building strategies in ensuring long-term engagement in these platforms. Successful platforms don’t just focus on points and badges but also align with strategic goals for community-building strategies, fostering relationships and knowledge-sharing across different user bases.

Host:
You know, was a, you know, SAP's Mentor for the year of 2023. All those things you can actually award event-specific badges that are unique to that particular event, so it's a combination of both. And that's also part of the game. That's the currency you use, it's the ranking ladder with the badging, but then it's also the, you know, the quarterly, the regional or the annual awards, or events that you formally recognize people at your event saying, "Hey, you're awesome because of this. Thank you."
And now, again, it's all about they want, you know, you need to show your customers some love and recognition for their knowledge and they really, that goes, that goes miles.

Dani Weinstein: 

Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing with us a little bit about community and how that works in our large organizations and thanks for doing it for so long and teaching us a few things here and there. So if people want to show you some love, if you're, you know, if you find out where you are, reach out to you, asking some questions, learn some more from you, where can they do that?

Dani Weinstein: 

Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn. So it's just, I believe, just my full name. So, Donnie Weinstein.
And if you go to Twitter, it's dannyboy's triple seven, so d-a-n-i-boi triple seven.
And I'm just double-checking my URL on LinkedIn here, but that's, those are probably the two best places to get a hold of me.

Dani Weinstein: 

Yeah, so it's just, you know, linkedin.com/in/d-a-n-i-w-e-i-n-s-t-i-n, no spaces, no dots. And if not, then, you know, reach out to Recursive House and find me.

Host: 

Thank you so much for coming out and thanks for sharing. Have a good day.

Dani Weinstein: 

Thanks, man. Appreciate it. It's been a pleasure.

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