Community Building, B2B Style! 💬

While technology trends evolve and change, the need to connect with others and build a community has remained a constant! 💬

Hi everybody - while technology trends evolve and change, the need to connect with others and build a community has remained a constant! 💬
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In this fun chat, Zach Hawtof, Co-Founder and CEO of ⁠Tightknit, and I talk about his experience with community building and how organizations that use Slack can benefit from a deeper story here.

Along the way, we touch upon a bunch of topics from NYC vs. SF, product management, the importance of SEO, authenticity (and AI-based authenticity), and a whole lot more. Full video below:

You can also watch/listen on: 📺 YouTube, 🎙️ Spotify, and 🍎 Apple Podcasts.

Importance of Community in an AI Age

Over the past decade, there is a noticeable shift in how people interact with each other online. It is very transactional. The idea of forming close friendships, either in the real world or virtual world, has been upended by various things such as busy schedules, a pandemic where isolating oneself was promoted as the best cure, and digital devices whose sole purpose is to keep us glued to their screens to ensure we see the next ad.

This shift has been, ironically, less pronounced in the corporate world. To accomplish our day-to-day jobs, we are constantly just a few messages away from our colleagues where we utilize a combination of email / Slack / Teams / Meet / Discord / etc. to help communicate and stay in-sync. Our corporate conversations are a big part of our work community. This center of gravity can often be externalized to also allow your public users to participate in the same conversations. This is especially true if you have a product or service where product discussion, tech support, and product roadmaps can all overlap. These smaller communities don’t exclusively rely on external participation for their survival, but the external participants benefit greatly from being a part of an ongoing conversation. They see the genuine, human side of what happens behind the products and services one uses.

An example that is closer to home is the community forum for the product I am the Product Manager for, Firebase Studio:

A number of those discussions, while initiated by a Firebase Studio user, are between me and some of my colleagues as we discuss how to address the issue in question as part of our roadmap. This is beneficial to us as a product team. This is beneficial to users as they get more clarity on our thought process behind why we may or may not do something immediately. In a world where AI can do a lot of what you and I can do easily, these moments of human connection bring about a genuineness that is getting further out of reach.

Conclusion

Speaking of community, when was the last time you dropped by the kirupaForums? If the answer is Not for the past few decades!, I encourage you to drop by and say hello. You’ll be surprised who all from the past are still lurking and waiting for a chance to reconnect with you. At the very least, you’ll definitely get a response from me :P

See you all next time!

Cheers,
Kirupa 😅