Walking into an Existing Online Community with David (Historian) DeWald

Chris Detzel: Welcome to another peers over beers. I'm. Chris Detzel and I have a special guest.

David DeWald: I'm David DeWald, community manager at Siena Comm and co-host of community manager live a weekly live chat with can be other community managers.

David DeWald: Yes, that's very much. It.

Chris Detzel: We'll get into all that. But you know It's funny, David is. I've seen you on Twitter and Linkedin, I think, probably mostly on Twitter, and you invited me to be on one of your podcasts around her, I guess. Ah live shows

David DeWald: around how to podcast things like that. And I was like you know you. You mentioned You never had me on your podcast, Chris. I was like No, I haven't I really, you know. So what it makes it bad is, and the reason I kind of r you about it is that we both lived in Raleigh basically in the Raleigh Durham, North Carolina area, so we totally could have met in person and done something that's that's kind of why I read about it. But you know Covid hit what you do.

David DeWald: Yeah, Well, I live in Dallas, so I don't live in Raleigh. I never really. I thought you did. I thought you know I've been out there, but but but you know I find so when I first started this peers over beers. It was just a buddy of mine, and

Chris Detzel: i'd go over to his house and have beers, and we would just have these really cool, mics. He wasn't on video um, and we would have cheese and made some bread, and I don't know he did this whole whole thing, you know, and I was like great, you know. So it's to me hanging out with up here talking about community management, anyway. So

Chris Detzel: digress a little bit. Well, um,

Chris Detzel: you know I digress a lot. So you know, if you want to keep me on track. That's good, um, you know, but something that intrigued me that I think it was last week when you were having this conversation about. Ah, you know some of the stuff around your community, and and how you used to build communities from scratch, and we've had. We've I've had a lot of people on my podcast just in general Talk a lot about, you know. Maybe blogs written about how to build a community from ground up, and you know today, you know. But you mentioned that,

David DeWald: you know I started to go into companies, You specifically, David is going to companies that already had existing communities, and that you had to kind of inherent

Chris Detzel: the things that somebody else did. And then you know, start managing. Ah, those types of communities. So i'm intrigued to hear more. Maybe you can start from you. Know we we had a pre-show this very slight pre-show around. You know how you started communities, et cetera So tell me about that experience from

Chris Detzel: building from ground up all the way to where you're at today.

David DeWald: Yeah. So my very first first community I built from the ground up. It was for a video game called Dungeon Siege. It was produced by Microsoft in a company called Gas Power Teams, and I back in one thousand nine hundred and ninety, eight, sometime in. Wow! How old are you.

David DeWald: So back in ninety eight I decided to start a fan site for this game, and so I I threw it up. And if you know me online. My my kind of non-deplume, if you will, is historian, and it's because of that website. It was called the dungeon siege historian, and the the goal of the website was to just track it as it went through development, because we found out about it before, just as they started like working on it, and it wasn't until

David DeWald: like I think it was three years later, maybe two years later that it actually released. So we followed it from

David DeWald: in conception all the trickles of information that came out about it all the way through and over time as I would post, I would post as Admin. But people would just say, Oh, go to the historian. The historian knows that historian made a post, and so the historian kind of stuck

David DeWald: uh it's pretty cool. I like it.

David DeWald: Yeah, so Um. And that's why I'm historian on Twitter. Ah, but anyway, so I started this like so quickly. It's funny whenever you ask me to be on your podcast, whatever you send me a message through. Historian, I was like fuck. Is this like, Yeah, I mean, I've seen this stuff like I don't really know who who's this guy or person behind this? But you know what i'm. I'm historian on Linkedin,

so you can go to linkedin dot com

David DeWald: slash historian, and you get me. And you know it was. It was really I really did well with that name. I mean, that was it. If you said historian online, you would find me up until there was a book that came out called the Historian. It was a vampire book of all things, and it was very popular at the time. And so yeah, I got demolished by that.

David DeWald: But anyway, yeah, a little hurtful. Go ahead

David DeWald: uh you know it's all right. But uh so uh, I used to have the historian Org as my website, because the dot com was taken, and that kind of thing. Now it's just my name,

David DeWald: you know I I started that community built it from the ground up at the time game spy, which is now Ign. Said, Hey, you're doing a great job. How about we host it for you under our planet? Rpg: which is, we're playing games. And so I became, You know,

David DeWald: dungeons, each historian under planet Rpg: and then eventually the site, you know, had another site merge into us there and then our site got bigger again when we became planet dungeon siege, which was completely id. And you know, type things. So it just grew. It lasted. The The website lasted for the fourteen years until Ig and shot them down. Um! I left it after about eight years, and it just continued running on, and at that time

David DeWald: know there wasn't a name for community management. And so the title that I kind of gave myself was community liaison, which isn't that far off

Chris Detzel: That's Us:

David DeWald: Yeah. So. But now it's corporatized manager, senior manager, director,

David DeWald: Exactly. Chief community officer. Yeah.

David DeWald: But but yeah, So now it's. It's formalized. But I built that from the ground up. So that's kind of where my bread and butter if you ever, if you, if you know rich Millington as community management at fever. B same story, he started a fancy for a video game turned it into a career. So

David DeWald: you know, it's the path that a lot of early early community managers took. They They worked for video games, and then they turned it into a career. Some of them still work in the video game industry. So they're I don't know Ilinger. He did that

David DeWald: yeah same thing. I mean his end before the lock podcast. And before the lock is is a gamer term, which means that you know, i'm going to get my comment in, for the moderator comes in and locks this thread because it's off topic inappropriate. So in before the But I didn't know that that's pretty interesting.

David DeWald: Yes, yeah. So And before that that's where that came from. I'm sorry I took that, Brian, if you ever have never explained that anybody I just did. But yeah, so ground up I built it. How a lot of our early community managers got our start was fan communities for something that turned into something bigger, and we just made it bigger. And I did that for a lot of years. I'd go to a company and kind of start a community from nothing which means

David DeWald: interacting with all of the departments within the company, finding out who my stakeholders are, what their needs were from the community, what they could offer the community in exchange for what they wanted, and just

David DeWald: figure out the best way to build it up, you know. Is it around the products. Is it around? Use cases? How do you do it in just figuring that all out? And I realized that

David DeWald: well, you know, I did have a stint as a community manager early in days of taking over an existing community. Um, it was different because it was video games and a lot different than you know. Corporatized stuff like you said so. I realized I had this gap in my my skill set of not being able to take over

David DeWald: um an existing community and work with it, and I've had some successes, and I've definitely had a failure. You know I can absolutely say that where it wasn't successful, and I didn't talk about the failure more. I'm i'm interested.

David DeWald: So I won't name the company, but it was an existing community, and I was hired in, and just the way that it was structured.

David DeWald: One department kind of owns the platform itself. So I didn't have a lot of control over what I could do as far as changing things and making them better. And you know I didn't have a lot of good.

David DeWald: It was just a role that wasn't in the right department is basically what it was, as I was as a community manager. But community manager position was in one department where it really should have been another, and I was really ineffective. It was hard to show my success, because I could change things a lot to improve them. So I really turned into this glorified moderator position, where I just kept the community clean, and couldn't do anything. And eventually, you know, you could say that it was

David DeWald: performance on my part, the copy let go. You could say what they said, which was, Hey, we're reorganizing, and your position

David DeWald: Well, I mean, what's the lesson learned? I mean. I

David DeWald: try to own the platform as a community manager at least have a strong say, and what it what you can do with it. Um, you know, you should be the bottom line, and where I am today at Siena. Um, we have kind of a cohort of people that are involved with our Mycena community. Basically,

David DeWald: So you know, there's myself who kind of manages the community quote unquote, and I kind of own from a corporatized sense

David DeWald: product owner of the community. But we also have the knowledge team that's in there, and they have their piece in the community that they manage and they handle. We've got the learning, you know. Team our our uh that would be, you know, uh what some people would call training is in there, and they have an Academy and stuff like that.

David DeWald: Yeah, and they have their piece, and they manage that, and and you know so.

David DeWald: But you know, when the clock stops, if it's. If it's a good look and field change of the website. If it's a functionality, change that impacts kind of my area, then I have kind of say in there, and I can say I don't like that, or I like that. But let's change this. Um. A good example is that you know we have customer success in our community, and they're looking to ramp up some events and the component that we use in our community for events.

David DeWald: Not good so. But it was on my roadmap to fix it. You know It's like you can post events. It kind of works. It's not great. It doesn't tell anybody anything, but on my roadmap to fix. They came in and said, We really want to start doing events, but we need to kind of have a good way to do it in the community. So it went from down the road on the roadmap to Let's get this taken care of.

David DeWald: Yeah, so let's go. Let's go backwards real quick. Yeah, this is very intriguing. I want to kind of go back to you. Joined Siena. Was that an existing community that had already. Yeah, you know. Okay.

David DeWald: So we'll talk about that, you know. And and in the kind of stuff you have to go through and figure out and do and the challenges.

David DeWald: Yeah. So my predecessor, Heather,

David DeWald: was is an amazing community, and she's out still out there. She's still working very organized and kind of left things in a good spot um to pick it up that all the information was there. I just had to find it and use it. Um! The challenge was is that I didn't always know the processes she had in place, and who she worked with in those processes. So during my first year it was really I got to figure all this out, and where it is and what it is, and how it works.

David DeWald: And because of that some of the processes really broke down, and you know I don't know if if I could have done anything different to to change that. But

David DeWald: it was a failure on my part that these things didn't hold up over time. I don't know if it's a failure right like It's just well, nothing just said, No, I mean,

David DeWald: yeah, I mean, and and it didn't help that there was a gap. So she left the company, and then three months later, I was high up. So you know those processes were breaking down before I got there, because, you know, nobody was doing the you know, touch bases and check things and and doing the Cm stuff.

David DeWald: Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know the internal C and stuff within the company. And so it took me a while to kind of get up to speed and get understanding of where things are. You know, in the time that i'm doing that i'm also looking at the community and seeing where it can be improved, and what changes we can make. So you know,

David DeWald: just you know what I've been working on is kind of you know. It's a very much a support community. If you have a question, you get your answer, and you're gone, and that's not very sticky, and i'm going to cough. So excuse me no worries. And

David DeWald: so you you kind of Ah, you know you want to broaden it beyond that, so that it becomes a little more sticky that there's more content than question. Answer. And I've gone, You know you want a question, and

David DeWald: I answer, and oh, he, there's another question that I know about. I'll stay around to answer that discussion, or something, or a discussion or something. Um, And you know we had an ideation piece that was built in that that you know people can submit ideas and do that, and that process of call it, you know, getting those ideas together, and something into to look at that had broken down before I enjoy it. Uh, It's a tough one. It's a really tough one to kind of make successful.

David DeWald: Yeah. And And so that's one of the things that I'm. I'm kind of right in the middle of I've got everything in place, kind of even today. I got an email that kind of put the last couple of

David DeWald: items in place, so that I can kind of roll that out to the audience. You know my my audience, and hopefully be successful with it. Is that on the platform the the aviation, or is it a separate platform?

David DeWald: No, i'm on salesforce. If anybody's curious how salesforce is Experience Cloud. It used to be communion, but we won't. We will pick on them for changing the name, because they didn't know what to do with community cloud. But experience cloud makes sense because it's more for an experience than a community sometimes.

David DeWald: Of course, i'm sorry

David DeWald: in the eight hundred pound gorilla, but it's a little bit of a beast that work with Sometimes it's a beast, you know. I don't like I, I tell folks is when you look at community platforms. If you want to feel like you have to develop an entire platform. That's basically it. You got to get a partner to do all that you need a developer in general to kind of manage at least

David DeWald: part time, you know, to do things that you want so right. It's a tough one.

David DeWald: When I was on Jive. I was like, you know, when Jive was a yeah when Jive was a thing, I was a developer on jive. So if it didn't work, I would build it. Yeah. And in salesforce I just haven't built up that skill set to be able to do that.

David DeWald: Well, it helps that I started way back when as a web developer, it does.

David DeWald: Yeah, I mean, when you have that kind of brute it makes it easy to to say, Okay, this is broken. Maybe we can pass it, or it doesn't work the way I want it, and we can change it. A lot of a lot of using community platforms is working around

David DeWald: the limitations and and figuring out ways to do the thing.

David DeWald: So I use not to digress. But I used to use whenever I was at Rick Cell, a company called Intelligence. Now they're bought by a variant, and the beauty about that platform is, I had a developer that could just go in and do a lot of really cool things,

David DeWald: you know. But you know the problem is is, you know, when you upgrade you can't upgrade. But um! But you could do some really cool stuff, you know. Um, and and I love doing that. So. I had a whole roadmap I build just for him, you know, and including myself. But it was. It was pretty crazy. So that's the beauty of it. There are down there,

Chris Detzel: you know downfalls to it, especially if he left.

David DeWald: But, uh,

David DeWald: yeah, so broken down processes, not knowing who my, you know, internal champions were, so to speak. I mean. I knew who my internal champions were, but I didn't really know who my internal contacts were. Um, I did have a nice long list of people that were out full in the community. I did not have any idea what they did

David DeWald: or what they were helpful for. It was just like here's my list of people that help me in the community, you know. But it I didn't have anything that said. Here's what they do, and here's where their knowledge lies, and here's where they can help you. Um! So I had to connect those dots, and you know I had. At least I had a list to begin with right, so I wasn't like I was starting from scratch. I had a place to begin with, and I had kind of a a road I could follow.

David DeWald: Um. And so that's pretty much what I've done for the past couple of years, and you know we're starting to make changes. It's it's not you know, always as fast as we would like, and it's maybe not always in the way we'd like. But you know we get there, and we do what we can,

David DeWald: but it's been. It's been a great experience kind of to dig in and pick something out that somebody else built it like, I said, it does help that, you know. Heather

David DeWald: did a wonderful job of getting it set up and getting it, and and she went through the you know experience of. They were on Jive, and they had to move to salesforce. So she, you know, had built it once, then had to kind of rebuild it again. So you know

David DeWald: I have a lot of uh, you know,

David DeWald: appreciation for what she did, and understanding that it wasn't easy.

David DeWald: Yeah, I mean, I think

David DeWald: we all do our best with what we have one, and maybe the things that we know. And you know you just do what you can. You know. Sometimes there's limitations like budget and things like that, or you know, depending on who you're under. There's not as much buy in.

Chris Detzel: Is there anything that you would have done like looking back,

David DeWald: you know. Is there something that you would say, Yeah, I would do this differently. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So So I waited a little too long to kind of connect. Internally, I was more focused on figuring out the processes and how the platform works, and

David DeWald: you know what I could change to make improvements that I thought I made, and I did not um really connect with people internally outside of you know, my team, my marketing team, and that has kind of put me a little behind the ball which made you know this when I said the ideas piece. You know I need to kind of internal stakeholders that could actually influence

David DeWald: the ideas you know that could say, Oh, that's a good idea! Let's let's see if we can work that into the product. I didn't have those she did, and I just didn't know you know who they were. I mean they were there, but I didn't know who was, who and what they knew, and how they could help, and

David DeWald: I didn't pursue that quickly enough. I should have jumped on that, and it might have made things a little easier to implement some of this stuff down the road. Yeah, you know, I could have probably had this ideas piece three months ago if I had already had my ducks lined up.

David DeWald: People you know that I knew to connect. But you live and learn, you know. Yeah,

David DeWald: it's It's just one of those things I would do that, you know. Get your internal stakeholders know who you need to talk to. You know who the internal champions are, or people who are interested in being in the community as quickly as you can, and then kind of incorporate that into learning the community. How it played out. Why, it's structured the way it is. It didn't help

David DeWald: that. At the same time I was on boarding. They were in the process of redesigning the look and feel of the website of the community. So there was that going on as well. So there was just a lot of things in motion, and I made

David DeWald: choices based on what I thought was correct, that in hindsight I know that I probably should have chos a little different.

Chris Detzel: Yeah, I think I think the internal buy-in internal relationship building understanding who does what and and what they're already going through and what they're doing is probably, you know you hit it right on. I think that you know, when you go into organization in my mind the first thing you do

Chris Detzel: start calling people right like and start having these thirty-minute conversations. Something I tell people all the time is

Chris Detzel: when I start an organization. The first thing I do for the next two weeks is I just get on the phone. I have some ideas of who I need to talk to, who I want to talk to, who's already going to be bought in, or who's not, even if I don't know them. I've got specific rules, you know, like I know Pm's going to be a big opportunity. I know that you know the Ps team potentially support. Not necessarily, the you know. So I start talking to those folks and the smart people that are going to help me, but also at that higher level. So I think

Chris Detzel: I think you're absolutely right. I mean that to me is kind of like you that way, you know they can bring it, hey? I'm doing these things. But the other thing I would tell organizations, though, is that when you hire a community leader.

David DeWald: You know It's

Chris Detzel: making decisions of, you know, especially whenever you start from scratches, platform, or redesign, or anything like that like you were talking about.

David DeWald: Why Why not wait until the community leader is there to help? Kind of do That's what they do. It's their jobs, you know. Well, yeah, you know. Sometimes they can't just put stuff on. Yeah,

David DeWald: you go. Yeah, if it's already going fair enough, you know, like, yeah, this community person heather leaves in the middle of the redesign. I mean, you got to finish it, but right,

David DeWald: you know, and and you know, and it's like it said, because of the way that the community structured disinfected a lot of people. It wasn't just, you know the community part of it, but you know the support piece of it was making changes, um, you know, and the knowledge, you know, Knowledge team was going through kind of their own change, and that they were going from, You know more traditional knowledge to you know not the Kcs, which is Knowledge Center service. Yeah, um. And so they were doing their own changes. So it wasn't. There was a lot of moving parts,

David DeWald: and you know you do what you got to do to kind of make things flow. Um! And there was another thing. Oh, the other thing that I think I learned along the way is, there would be times because i'm not familiar with the platform that I would go to the team. That kind of manages the platform, and I would say,

David DeWald: Can we do this, you know? And they would say,

Chris Detzel: everybody's still there.

Chris Detzel: The what's happening?

Chris Detzel: Oh, there we go. Can you say it again?

David DeWald: Oh, yeah, I see.

David DeWald: Yeah. So I would go to them and say, Um,

David DeWald: can we do this on the platform, and they would look at it as a perspective of. Is this possible with the way it is configured today? And the reality was is that if I had said I wanted to do this

David DeWald: they would have helped me figure out a way.

David DeWald: Had to go. And

David DeWald: yeah, and that was a communication difference, right? It's me me being kind of exploratory, and then saying, No, it just doesn't do that rather than me being more directive, and saying I would like it if the community could do this. Let's figure out how to um, and that's something that Ah, it took me. It took me a year to figure out. Ah, that you know. If I If I want this, I just gotta say I want this

David DeWald: um and that's kind of where we are today. I kind of instead of you know. How do we do this, or can this be done? It's more of this is what I wanted to do let's figure out how to make that happen.

Chris Detzel: That's good. Um, are you? You on the marketing team?

David DeWald: I am. I'm, in the marketing team in a small subsection called digital Marketing,

David DeWald: and that handles everything from ah advertising, you know, on the Web and the emails and the website, the front dot com website. It's probably a really good place if you're going to be in marketing. That's kind of the best place to be for our community, because, you know the dot com, and the community often

David DeWald: kind of leverage each other, you know. So I you know, and they're looking, feel, and and you will typically inform our look and feel if we yeah see a one to one. But when they make changes we have to look at it and say, is this something we can incorporate, and you know, brand guides to. If the brand guide changes,

David DeWald: we have to go in and change colors or

David DeWald: gradients, or whatever we're working on. We've got to keep that in mind. And so marketing usually is the driver of that.

David DeWald: Yeah, it's It's interesting because I don't know about your organization. But you know, Mark. I mean I report to the Cmo and our digital kind of piece. We also reports to the Ceos, who are kind of peers. Ah, in some ways, or pretty much. But

Chris Detzel: it's interesting that you brought that up, because when you have a support community, for example, the things that you're trying to solve are support like questions. So maybe it's case, deflection, or whatever. And

David DeWald: the marketing cares about top of the funnel, you know, in most organizations, and Maybe they care about the customer, but they just care about getting case studies and references and stuff, which is something the community can help with. Absolutely,

David DeWald: yes, absolutely. But um, but it's hard, too, because sometimes for me it feels like you know, I care about the customer, and I want the customer to get the most out of you know product. I want them to adopt it more, you know, over time. They become more advocates. They,

David DeWald: you know, buy more. They, you know, rules are generally a higher rates, whatever you you know. So there's a lot of really good, but it's really focused in on that customer base. And when you're marketing a lot of times it's hard, because there's some of this right? So you're like, Well, we should do some campaigns on our existing customers, maybe with an upsell cross to opportunity, you know, and and we start tracking that kind of Well, no, we need to look at top of the funnel. Anyways, I say all that, and especially with support communities. And you are like, hey? You're in a good spot

David DeWald: you probably are. But how about documentation? And whatever dot com, how about Academy? How about support? You know the all those or digital sites did? Yeah, yeah, you know, they don't, really. And I find even at my last organization, but they really didn't, and I know i'm getting off on the tangent here. But um! But they didn't really see

David DeWald: those sites. Is that important? They think it's important, but it's not something they have to really deal with, and they'll just kind of throw, you know. Hey, we're changing our logo. We're changing this, you know. Make sure you do it to kind of stuff, but I don't know we. I guess we're pretty.

David DeWald: Siena is kind of two companies in one we have Siena, and we have another one called Blue Planet, and it's the same company. But we kind of run independently, and we

David DeWald: so there's two of everything, but our support is all together, so like. So if you want support, it's all in one portal, you just go there. But when you leave Blue Planet site you drop into Siena almost immediately it's it's Cnn: So what we did is we we created kind of an interspersial, so that when you leave Blue Planet on a link there, you land on a page that's still blue planet,

David DeWald: you're in the community, but it's just kind of a blue planet car about. And then once you leave, that's pretty. You're into the greater community, and so that's kind of how we did that. But because of those kind of interconnections I interface with

David DeWald: the you know, the the learning team for the planet as well as the learning team for Siena, because you know it's they're separate, but they're still together. They're both learning, and they share a spot in the community, and that that works pretty much with everything their marketing team I interface with to help promoting stuff. So even though i'm not part of them, they, you know, interact and and you know, knowledge, they have a different knowledge team. And the cena does like, I said. Support is kind of all the same,

David DeWald: because it all lands on the same interface, and to them it doesn't look any different. And then we have customers that are with both. Right? So

Chris Detzel: yeah,

David DeWald: he just depends. But I have been very successful in kind of

David DeWald: putting fingers in all of the separate departments. So I have a contract. When I have a knowledge issue, I have sport contacts. When somebody has a support issue, you know. The the account itself is, you know, getting registered and getting the accounts is yet another team that you know I have to interface with, and just you know I we We do these meetings where we kind of all get together, and we say, here's what we're working on. Here's what we're doing, what's going on. And then, you know, we have yet another meeting. That's

David DeWald: here's what's going on with the whole of salesforce not just community cloud or experience cloud. But also what's you know? Service Cloud. What's going on with, You know other stuff, and we we do these kind of meetings, so that everybody kind of knows what's going on the same page, and we ripple that out. So what happens in there? I'll share with people in my,

David DeWald: you know group, and when we make changes, even if it's a different team making a change, and I think it'll be beneficial to people. I'll tell them. So,

David DeWald: yeah, you know, it just rolls out.

David DeWald: Well, David, I know you have. Ah get going here shortly. But ah, definitely thank you for coming. This has been really eye-opening to being really helpful to think about. You know It's been fun coming into a community that you're already part of, or that you that you're not starting from scratch, and you have to kind of just start imagining things about that. So I appreciate it.

David DeWald: Yeah, I'm glad to be here. You know the the really the takeaway from this is Ah, you know you're going to make mistakes. It's not going to be perfect. Ah, just own them, you know, and not everything will work so just own that, too, and keep trying stuff, you know. Ah, you know it just,

David DeWald: you know. But like I said to own it, you know, if you, if you mess up, just go to somebody and say, All right, I messed up,

David DeWald: you know. Yeah, I made a mistake, and you know more than likely to like. Okay, let's see what we can do to fix this. Ah, and and move forward. Shit happens, man. Well, thanks for another. Peers over beers and thank you. Everyone for coming in. And David thanks so much for coming. I'm. Chris Dansel and David Dwal.

David DeWald: All right, David. Thanks so much. Yeah, take care, man. All right,