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Mike Davis

Joined Apr 15, 2021

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Last activity Jan 29, 2025

Zendesk LuminaryUser Group Leader

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ACTIVITY OVERVIEW

Latest activity by Mike Davis

Mike Davis commented,

Community comment User Groups

Hi Stephanie!

 

Thanks for the note . I'm the User Group Lead here and appreciate you giving the extra nudge I needed to get some 2025 meetings on the agenda. Keep your eyes peeled for those. We'd love to have you attend!
 

That said, we too use Gather and Guide at our company and would be happy to connect with you on our experiences. Feel free to shoot me an email at michael.davis@workiva.com and we can setup some time to chat. Looking forward to it!

View comment · Posted Jan 29, 2025 · Mike Davis

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Mike Davis commented,

Community comment User Groups

Thank you for reaching out, Stephanie, and for joining! I'm the User Group Leader for this group and appreciate your comments. Its on my list to get some 2025 meetings on the agenda so your timing is good and gives me a much needed nudge.

 

That said, we also use Gather and Guide at our shop and I'd love to connect with you on your questions and use cases. Feel free to email me at michael.davis@workiva.com and I will be happy to setup some time.  Thanks again and holler if you need anything else!

View comment · Posted Jan 29, 2025 · Mike Davis

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Mike Davis created a post,

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Hi all!

 

First, a huge thanks again to Amanda Oka and the Reporting & Analytics User Group for joining us this month in our combined meet-up. It was both a stellar turnout as well as a great conversation + learning opportunity. For those that missed, here's a recording of the meeting. Below is a brief summary as well.

 

Hello and Welcome

We made some quick intros and hellos, especially to Amanda, User Group leader for Reporting & Analytics User Group, and to our members who joined us since February, including Chandra, Holley, Tym, Prudence and Jennifer. Hello again! Its great to have you.

 

Gather + Explore

This is the topic that brought us all together, and why we combined forces. The conjunction of community and reporting is not something that is new. For as long as there has been communities, there's been data too. The native tools offered by Zendesk to report on communities in Gather can have many uses. We chatted first on how our teams use Explore today.

 

Metrics!

There are as many metrics available as there are grains of sand. Okay, well maybe not that much, but you get the point. But what you gather is paramount in determining what you report. Communities often have common metrics of interest to stakeholders and we talked about some of the biggest ones, which included:

  • New Memberships
  • Active Members & % New Active Members
  • Views, Visits and Top Content
  • Engagement - by topics & type and by content
  • Moderation Rates
  • Searches and Clicks

Tip Sharing

Last but certainly not least was some time for sharing tips around reporting & analytics. 

 

Amanda's tips

  1. Create standards
    -use common terms for consistency
    -set your town
  2. Create flow
    -know your data story
    -the data should be loud and clear
  3. Create action
    -highlight your insights
    -simplify

Mike's tips

  1. Don't overthink it
    -start out-of-the-box and tweak as you need
    -give it smell test
  2. Become familiar with it
    -know your data
    -be quick to the draw
  3. Make it accessible
    -build dashboards for audiences
    -evangelize your data

Final thoughts

We closed with time for final Q&A and had some great group discussion on tactics to both get started with a community and get users re-engaged. Tips here included welcome emails and re-engagement campaigns for members.

 

Thanks again to Amanda and company for joining us. We look forward to partnering up again in the future!

 

See you at Relate?!

 

While I don't have the specifics lined up just yet, next month the Community Manager User Group will be coming to you from Relate in sunny Las Vegas. I will be attending so if you too find yourself at Related, I'd love to say hello and invite you to join us for our meet-up. More details on that to be published our User Group page and in email, so stay tuned!

Posted Mar 27, 2024 · Mike Davis

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Mike Davis created a post,

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Hi all!

Next week Amanda Oka and yours truly will be hosting a collaborative meet-up with Community Managers and Reporting and Analytics User Groups as we discuss the interplay between Gather and Explore.

Ahead of this meeting, if there are any questions you'd love to discuss, please share them below in a comment and we'll do our best to cover those during the meeting.

And of course, if you've not yet registered, here's a link to our meeting. Hope to see you all there!

Posted Mar 06, 2024 · Mike Davis

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Mike Davis created a post,

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Hello and a Happy Valentine's Day too you (and Ash Wednesday if you celebrate it).

Community Manager Appreciations

Today we held a small but sweet meetup of our Community Manager user group. In the wake of last month's Community Manager Appreciation Day, coupled with Valentine's Day, we kicked things off by sharing our appreciation for our family, co-workers past and present, and our community members for allowing us to do the voodoo that we do. I'll be honest, we got a little sappy, but I enjoyed it.

Planning for March event

We also talked about what we'd like to discuss in our next meetup and hands down the topic was narrowed to reporting of community (Gather) data in Explore. Here's a link to register for this event. Hope to see you there!

👋 Hi, Leslie!

And last but not least, happy upcoming retirement to frequent flier Leslie Bailey! We always appreciate your candor, Leslie. We look forward to hanging with you for a few more months.

P.S. Did you know that Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday have only been on the same day 4 other times since 1900? 1923, 1934, 1945 and 2018. What's even weirder is they will be on the same day again in 2029 but not again in the 21st century!

Edited Feb 14, 2024 · Mike Davis

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Mike Davis created a post,

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Calling all community professionals, enthusiasts, and allies! Yesterday, January 22nd, was Community Manager Appreciation Day. Its a great day that highlights the often unsung heroes of your teams. As a community manager myself with a team on the front lines, these folks are near and dear to my heart.

And wow, 2024 is kicking off fast! I wanted to take ample time to get things going this year and celebrate each other and our teams too, so hey, why not hold our first meet-up on Valentine's Day?

Whether a community manager, old or new, or just on the periphery, we'd love to have you join us Wednesday, February 14 at 11:00 am CST as we take the time to acknowledge the hard word, sweat, tears, magic, etc., that community teams put in each day. We'll keep it open and have plenty of room to share stories, ask questions, and get to know each other.

Looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and making new friends. Hope to see you there!

Posted Jan 23, 2024 · Mike Davis

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Mike Davis created a post,

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Hello fellow community professionals and enthusiasts!

First, a huge apology for my epic delay on getting these updates to you, and also for missing a meet-up for August. We did meet in July and again just yesterday. I'll get you a link to those recordings ASAP but below are some highlights.

July Meet-up: State of Community Management recap w/ special guest Nicole Saunders.

During this meeting, we talked about the State of Community Management report which gets published annually by the peeps at Community Roundtable. We were joined by Zendesk's Director of Community, @..., who also contributed to this year's report.

What's in the report?

  • Broken in 8 “key findings” areas
    • Strategy
    • Leadership
    • Culture
    • Community Management
    • Content & Programs
    • Policies & Governance Tools
    • Community & AI
    • Metrics & Measurement
  • Also includes models and frameworks for assessing communities and a course too
    • Maturity Model
    • Engagement Framework
    • Skills Framework
    • Technology Framework
    • Community 101

The report also provided a “key findings” area, broken down into these 3 elements.

  1. Create definition to level up your community program
    The  need for a strategy is not new, but still remains a common thread in defining success
  2. Evangelism may be a hidden task, but it’s also a secret weapon
    Often community teams are small, and in order to make the impact known you have to advocate for yourself
  3. Times are hard, but it’s not just communities that are tightening their belts
    Communities are not being trimmed down across the board, and in fact, many are thriving

Key takeaways

  • Even under the current economy, the best communities are expanding, not contracting
  • CMs continue to evangelize and build small wins to gain even more community support
  • Community and content strategies have loads of intersections
  • AI is here to stay, and is NOT the enemy of communities but an ally
  • Its likely not as hard as you think to use metrics to prove the ROI of your community, you just gotta look

It was a great convo, and a pleasure to have Nicole on the call. Looking forward to seeing where communities are headed into 2024.

September Meet-up: Community Outreach & Campaigns

During this meeting we touched on some of the successes, failures, and shared tips on outreach efforts with regards to communities.

What have ya'll tried? What's worked or not worked?
Most of the conversation here stemmed around email campaigns targeted largely at either to existing members, or invites to non-members, though we did talk about getting some face-time at in-person and virtual events to also promote communities. What worked best was simple, short, and personal emails. What didn't work great was lengthy emails with too many choices and non-human feel, or too large an audience for too small a community.

Metrics & Benchmarks

The most common metrics used were pretty basic for email campaigns, i.e. open rates and click rates. These have the benefit of having industry standard benchmarks, which were roughly 20% open rates and 2% click rates. Slightly more sophisticated metrics were conversation rates, and engagement rates, meaning those who joined and/or engaged in the community as a result of a campaign. There is a desire to set benchmarks here too but less industry standards are known.

In other news, I've booked out our meetings for the rest of 2023. As we draw nearer to those events, I'll update them with the topic of discussion.That said, I'd love to know what sorts of topics you'd like to chat about so definitely let me know here or send me a note. Here's the dates for our meetings for Q4.

Key takeaways

My biggest takeaways I shared were:

  • Don’t be afraid to fail - Its ok if a campaign doesn't work like you expect, just keep trying; regroup, analyze, and try again
  • Be patient and don’t go big too soon - when starting out, it can be easy to want to invite everyone you can but you need to develop the community incrementally; you want their first experience to be a fun one
  • Automate, but keep it human - automating email sends is a huge time saver, but don't sacrifice a human feel; find a healthy balance
  • Keep it fresh, fun, and for everyone - try and keep your email copy up-to-date and have your own unique flair; and try to make sure there's something in there for all the varied personas you are sending to

It was a great conversation and enjoyed learning what others are doing, and it continues to reiterate that we are all experiencing the same problems--in short, we're all in this together [insert hand holding gif here].

Q4 event dates and times

Last but not least, I'm booking out our meet-ups for the remainder of the year. Here's the dates and times for those.

  • Oct. 11 at 10:00 am CST
  • Nov. 8 at 10:00 am CST
  • Dec. 20 at 10:00 am CST

I'll get these events added so you can start registering and as we draw nearer to the meeting dates, I'll updated with the topic of discussion. That said, I'd love to hear what ya'll wanna talk about. If you've got suggestions, just let me know below or send me a note.

Thanks all and keep up the good work! You rock!!!

Posted Sep 14, 2023 · Mike Davis

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Mike Davis commented,

Community commentAnnouncements

Hi Francisco!

Thanks for the question. And no worries, I'm sure we'll catch you at our next event later this month.

I hear ya. So much of community management is learning as you go. But luckily there are many who paved the way and have shared their experiences.

I'm in the same boat, i.e. looking at all the disparate resources and materials available to end users and what might be missing and then serve them up on the community. One tip there is to find the easiest item to get implemented that will have the biggest impact, especially one you have control over, and start there. Important here is to determine a measurement that will show its success. If you are able to prove that, it will be easier to tackle the other items in your list that you might not fully own and need assistance from others on.Let me know if you have any questions here.

As far as resources, over the years I've found the following thought-leaders and sites to be the most helpful.

  • FeverBee - I've taken their community strategy coursework, and psychology of community. Lots of great stuff to help you get started. And I can't emphasize how important a strategy and plan is.
  • CMX Hub - I've taken their Community MBA course but really all their stuff is good. They have loads of virtual meet-ups happening too.
  • Commsor - A business that is all about communities. You can't go wrong here, and they offer many courses/classes at all levels.
  • Vanilla/Higher Logic - I really enjoy the webinars that they put on. I always come away with something.
  • Gainsight Community - This is a fantastic resources in the realm of digital-to-scale methods as it relates to customer success

Outside of those websites, thought leaders I enjoy and...err...borrowed from are Richard Millington (he's got a few books), David Spinks (also has books), Adrian Speyer (his book Accidental Community Manager is great) Brian Oblinger, Carrie Melissa Jones, and Jono Bacon (I really liked his book).

Hopefully that helps some. Definitely give me a holler if you have any questions. Thanks for reaching out and best of luck to you!

View comment · Posted Feb 28, 2023 · Mike Davis

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Mike Davis commented,

Community commentAnnouncements

Thanks for this, Nicole! I'm happy to provide a recap of our meeting.

As mentioned, the topic was all about digital-led strategies, and communities are playing a pivotal role in this space. We broke these down into 3 areas:

  1. What is digital-led?
  2. Current trends
  3. The future of digital-led

What is digital-led?

You're probably asking it. Well, simply put, it's the use of digital technologies and materials to support, supplement, and scale customer success and services. An easy example of this is automated self-service offerings like chat, documentation, videos, trainings, etc. We see communities an integral part of CX and they are primed to lead the way here. It's important to note too that this is not at odds with human-led interactions with customers but rather it aims to optimize it.

A tip to get started is to look at all the human interactions you have along customer journey and ask if they can digital and/or automated, such as sending a newsletter to clients.

Current trends

One of the biggest trends we see are communities going beyond support and allowing for even more self-service and autonomy. Customers want to do more things on their own and have these sorts of things at their finger tips. Why not give it to 'em in the community?

Another trend is that community data is, or should be, part of your customer health data. Community managers know the value the community brings and hard work has made it easier to quantify that. But that's not to say its all there or perfect, as we had some great discussions around the need for accurate user data, but that being said, just being part of the conversation is a huge step.

And furthermore, we see that product teams and community teams are becoming more aligned. Customers crave transparency in what's going on with your product. They can and do provide feedback on your community and its seems a natural place to have interactions with those that make the products. This is a long time coming for many community managers and a welcome trend indeed.

The future of digital-led

First, some folks in the community profession experienced job loss during the "great resignation" as companies went all-in on communities and then decided to drop it like a bad habit later. Now things are settling and we sense a rebound coming.

We also see communities being not just an integral part of the customer journey, but part of the overall business initiatives. People further up the totem pole are taking notice and community is being talked about at higher and higher levels. With moves to digital, this won't likely slow down.

With that same embrace of more digital technologies, we see CX being immersed in digital tactics more and more, and communities will continue to be at the forefront.

And lastly, data is always king and the desire for community metrics will not wane. Instead we see a need to for this data to be made available where your stakeholders are working so they can have it at their fingertips.

Closing

I always enjoy getting to chat with everyone and I look forward to our next meet-up. Open to suggestions on what topics ya'll would like to discuss in March. And thanks to Zendesk for making it happen. Have a great day, all!

View comment · Edited Feb 08, 2023 · Mike Davis

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Mike Davis commented,

Community comment User Groups

👋 Hi everyone! My name is Mike Davis and I'm the user group leader for the community manager user group. Here's a link to our chapter.

A bit about me
I'm the Digital Experience Manager at Workiva, a cloud-based software company based out of Ames, Iowa, where I'm located. I manage the Workiva Community, as well as many other digital and customer experience aspects. I've been in the customer success and community space for a decade, and a Zendesk Admin for the past 3 years. On a personal note, I enjoy running, watching movies, reading classic novels, and eating sour candies.

About the group
The community manager user group is all about and for, you guessed it, community managers and professionals. We meet (or hope to meet) monthly, virtually, and discuss topics in and around the community space. From beginners to seasoned vets, all experience levels are welcome, even if you are not using platforms outside of Zendesk. It's a community of community people. What could be better?

Feel free to hit me up on here, or in LinkedIn. And thanks for providing the space as well @.... 🍻

View comment · Posted Nov 09, 2022 · Mike Davis

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