Breadcrumb Notes from CMX Summit 2023
The following notes were gathered from the CMX Summit 2023, an event for community professionals in Redwood City, California.
I grouped notes into some themes in no paticular order, hopefully each are little nuggets that stand up on their own and can be interpreted as a helpful tip or thought for community managers. Speaker attributions and people to follow linked below1!
Just my takeaways and not a reflection of the actual talks necessarily.
Do Things That Don’t Scale
Personalized video welcomes are a great way to show you care and are genuinely interested in providing value to your members.1
Arrange coffee chat pairings. Ask at sign-ups what they hope to get and match them and manually pair them based on what you think will work. If it seems like too much work or you can’t scale that, there is also a new AI startup that seeks to do this: Intros.ai1
Breakout rooms following a livestream event can help attendees digest what they just heard and help foster relationships between members.1
Group Dynamic Considerations
User Groups
A higher number of user groups than we may realize are actually ran by people with product interests vested or related to the community content.2
Role of PM in Community
Better to be as specific as possible about the role of pm in community and give product structure in how to engage in the community.34
Promote Champions of Different Backgrounds
Empower community members to become leaders and rely on those with different life experiences and backgrounds to help you bring in new demographics of people who identify with them.5
Design and Strategy
Symbols and Icons
Symbols or icons that can be digital or physical of your community on swag or in digital space profiles can help engineer moments of serendipity when chance encounters happen.6
Design Considerations
When designing for community take some time to ask what can go wrong if we scale or if budget dries up.
e.g we now have 1000 people who need NDA and we don’t have a good process.34
Simple Tools
You don’t need fancy tools or specific agendas to connect and build community. You can start by targeting groups you want and hosting IRL meetups to gain insight, network and relationships.7
Conflict and Resolution
Open Conversations
Don’t forget they will talk about product elsewhere if they are not talking to you. 34
Conflict Management
Conflict in your community is not a bad or a good thing but creates opportunities for you to bridge conflict between members, connect deeply with others and/or to step back and examine the conflict from different perspectives.89
Conflict Personas
With conflict we can think of 4 personas: Trolls, Heroes, Victims, and Bystanders. The challenge is to step back and understand the conflict through the eyes of these various archetypes and not necessarily jump into a role yourself but consider the humans behind them and ask how you can facilitate resolution.89
Attributions: