With the pandemic now behind us, community-oriented businesses are still trying to strike the right balance between traditional and virtual community build. It’s clear that there’s a renewed love and appreciation for in- person community experiences yet virtual is something we all need to embrace and enhance throughout our business models, no debate there. One thing that all communities need to remember is that the best ones are those that are truly loved by their members. That’s the key to community success and longevity. A great example of such a community is LeadDev. They’ve adopted a set ..read more

Does the pandemic feel like a distant memory already? For many organisations, they're still finding their way around the new playing field. During the pandemic few organisations were quick to adapt and adopt different ways to engage with their audiences, at least successfully, but those that did planted very strong community seeds that are now paying rewards. Influence group led by Michael Owens and Michael McCarthy is one of those very organisations and this post summarises the key takeaways from a very thoughtful conversation with Michael on what has been their approach to stay connected to ..read more

Sarah Porter is the CEO and Founder of InspiredMinds!, a global community working in emerging technology and Artificial Intelligence. In just 5 years, this community-led business has grown to a community of over 200,000 people across 167 countries. Sarah and I had a very interesting chat as part of our series on "Online Community Stories" and talked about how InspiredMinds! rose to achieve such incredible growth and success. Truly this has to be one of the most inspiring chats I've had - not only because of InspiredMinds community success, but because their visions and goals go beyond themse ..read more

Most companies find fostering engagement among virtual event attendees challenging. But it doesn't have to be. Our good friend Sasha Frieze from the Business Narrative shared some really interesting tips and concepts through a live conversation on how organisers are able to foster engagement. Here's a summary video of the session and below you can check out the summary ..read more

We have been drinking the online community juice for a very long time, and through the many years of working and speaking with leaders in the B2B Media and events industry, I wanted to highlight recent communities that are loved by its members ..read more

When it comes to virtual events, the work doesn't stop once the event takes place. That's when it all begins. You can get as much as 2x or 3x the number of registrants to your virtual event. You just need to ensure the content produced as a result of your event is repurposed into multiple bite size chunks to drive those registrations through blogs, social, email and your own community. The key is to take the long-form content and break it into small chapters or “episodes.” Content takes the shape of a story that follows a plot and slowly reveals more to the viewer with each episode ..read more

When it comes to virtual events, the work doesn't stop once the event takes place. That's when it all begins. You can get as much as 2x or 3x the number of registrants to your virtual event. You just need to ensure the content produced as a result of your event is repurposed into multiple bite size chunks to drive those registrations through blogs, social, email and your own community. The key is to take the long-form content and break it into small chapters or “episodes.” Content takes the shape of a story that follows a plot and slowly reveals more to the viewer with each episode ..read more

Creating content isn't always easy, but  it doesn't have to be complicated or costly either. By costly I mean, you don't have to be hiring production companies to do this for you ..read more

We've been keeping our ears close to the ground and over recent months we've come across these six companies that have really embraced change and made a positive shift in the way they run their virtual events. Companies that have pulled out all the stops to ensure their digital events are way above the standard. In our opinion they've put a stake in the ground to secure a market segment they felt very confident was theirs with physical events and recognised that if they wanted to claim the same spot with their digital events, they needed to raise the bar and deliver a digital experience beyon ..read more

Many people are falling out of love with the use of social media. It's becoming more common for people to start unfollowing friends and some companies are even putting their social media advertising spend on hold - either caused by an ethical misalignment or more recently public protests against platforms. Users are shifting the attention and use of these social media channels for other purposes other than connection. The platforms that promised to connect us started to capitalise on our desire for connection, belonging and curiosity. Algorithms started to control what we saw in our feeds, d ..read more