🚪 A more collaborative internet prioritizes community and the customer experience
A collection by Nico Gendron
William Mathews & Frontdoor
June 26, 2023
We're excited to share that we've now launched! 🚀 Frontdoor is an AI librarian that lets you curate knowledge on the internet, automatically organise it, and explore a rabbit hole of content from the best builders around you
We're gifting some pretty special NFTs 👀 to our earliest curators - join the club: https://www.frontdoor.xyz/
Background
Nico Gendron was the Senior Community and Technical Program Manager for Birdwatch (now called ‘Community Notes’) at Twitter. Community Notes is Twitter’s community content moderation feature.
She’s an expert at customer experience management and launching customer communities that drive business outcomes. She’s currently consulting. You can find her here and of course, here.
Heres what she gave us 👇
3️⃣ Tweets
1/ Zoe Scaman’s Deck on Decoding Community
I’m releasing half of the deck for open public sharing, which you can find here:
— Zoe Scaman (@zoescaman)
May 3, 2023
Nico: Community is an industry buzzword. But despite hiring community managers and prioritising community -first marketing initiatives, very few brands know how to harness community to drive tangible, business outcomes.
In her deck, “Decoding Community”, Zoe Scaman, a cultural strategist and trends forecaster who founded the strategy studio Bodacious, explores:
how community is defined
the shifts that are driving society (and the economy) toward a community -first mindset
how community -first brands drive tangible, business results through communal benefit and gain
I love Zoe’s definition of community: “A peer-to-peer network brought together through shared interests, reciprocal relationships and mutual value creation.”
I also think her definition of “reciprocal relationships” provides brands with a simple starting point: generate “two way feedback loops [between a brand and its customer community] … to converse and contribute in a way that feels meaningful and recognised.”
2/ Rehash Podcast, Interview on Decentralised Knowledge Sharing
🎙️ NEW EPISODE: S4 E13 | DECENTRALIZED KNOWLEDGE SHARING w/@sariazout@startupyworld
⏳ 3 decades of online knowledge sharing
🔎 What decentralized search looks like
🏆 Why human-curated content always wins— Rehash: A Web3 Podcast 🎙️ (@rehashweb3)
May 11, 2023
Nico: Rehash is a web3 podcast and one of their most recent episodes features Sari Azout.
Sari believes the internet of the future should look more like Wikipedia and less like Google search. Knowledge sharing should allow groups of people to collectively share, refine, and disseminate information via networks, especially social networks, that prioritize community over clicks.
One of my favorite quotes of Sari’s is: “The big intermediaries of information are just 100% optimizing for us to scroll instead of for the true human qualities of learning, connection, etc. [They’re] thinking about how to get us to click more and spend more time on these sites versus getting us to generate more consensus on truth.”
3/ Steak-umm on Research Funding
reminder to look into who funds the research you come across just as much as you do the sources they cite
— Steak-umm (@steak_umm)
Jun 7, 2023
Nico: Steak-umm’s Twitter account is an A+ example of a brand leveraging its social reach to drive connection and consensus among its customers. Nathan Allebach, the human behind the account, won Philadelphia Magazine’s 2021 ‘Social Media Pro’ award for “debunking conspiracies and bad science, delivering vital public-health info, and proffering processed-meat facts” via the frozen steak company’s Twitter account.
If you’re hungry for more, Kara Swisher interviewed Allebach on this episode of the Pivot podcast.
2️⃣ Articles
1/ Dr. Marcus Colins On story telling to Build a Community
Nico: Dr. Marcus Collins is a Clinical Marketing Professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, the best selling author of For The Culture, and most recently the Head of Strategy at Wieden+Kennedy New York. In this May 2023 article for The Silicon Review, Collins writes about the power storytelling has to supercharge communities, especially those rallied around political beliefs.
“Storytelling” Collins writes “is an act of community - the way in which we socialize the expectations of people ‘like us’ ... Storytelling allows us to share our truths, create communities of like minded people while encouraging engagement in the subject.”
2/ Harvard Business Review on Improving Customer Experiences
Nico: There are neat overlaps between this Harvard Business Review article and Zoe Scaman’s ‘Decoding Community’ deck. Most notably, a renewed interest in gaining and retaining customer loyalty via digital experiences (incentives, programming etc.) that showcase a brand’s in-depth understanding of their customers and the customer experience. But few businesses are able to drive tangible results. Why?
The problem: “‘Engineered insincerity,’ or using automation to simulate interest in who you are as a human being. Engineered insincerity shows up from brands in various ways, such as a constant flow of emails from a retailer that bears no understanding of your current situation, chatbots that use slang and informal language to make them appear human…”
A solution: “Balancing customer empathy with technology … We have found that the most compelling digital experiences start with a compelling understanding of the customer — who they are, what they want, what job they have to do, and even how they feel about themselves… Demonstrate that you understand how to help them be successful and confident at pivotal moments” in the customer journey.
1️⃣ Book
Amy S. Bruckman: Should You Belive Wikipedia
Nico: Yes you should!! But you need to read Amy S. Bruckman’s book to know exactly why. 🔮 Bruckman is a professor and the Senior Associate Chair in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, GA.
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