Community Unfold: Episode 4
In Conversation with Carmen Taubman, Founder of Community Coach
In addition to being a friend and a The Community Assemble subscriber, Carmen Taubman is one of the most passionate community builders I’ve ever met. She started out as a community manager before she even realized there was an official term for the role. Developing connections between people is something that came naturally to her even from a young age. She even connected people during her University days who went on to get married! Although connecting two or three people with each other can be incredibly valuable, she began to see the true value of building communities when she started creating groups and developing a framework for others to develop connections.
And she fell into the world of community ❤️
She founded an e-commerce business in 2013, and at the same time, built up a Facebook group with over 5k members with zero marketing spend. The group wasn’t focused solely on her business but did consist of many members who were in the target market. That community became a major source of traffic generation for her business, without it feeling like she was hard selling her products (she wasn’t). In fact, over time the members in that group became some of her best salespeople as they had purchased her products and then would tell the rest of the group about how great they were and educate others on how they use the products.
You don’t need a marketing budget to build communities, and they can be incredibly valuable. I built that group with zero marketing budget and had thousands of people joined within weeks, all through the power of member referrals. - Carmen
Since then she has built communities for global multinational companies with a variety of goals, including to develop new products/services, develop external partnerships in the industry, increase employee retention (internal communities), and educating communities to increase the customer base longer-term.
In the wide-ranging video interview that follows, I turn the tables and ask Carmen to explain the power of building customer communities to me! We discussed the strategy for creating UGC in a community, how can B2B businesses leverage online communities to drive competitive advantage, super cool tips, and tricks, and much more!
How can B2B companies leverage customer communities?
How can B2B companies build a robust system for user-generated content?
Quick note: For those of you who prefer text over videos, we will have this entire episode in the text format next week. Carmen, herself will be contributing to the next week’s newsletter where she will talk about these topics in detail. Till then, I’d like you to watch these videos. Trust me, you won’t regret it! :)
Do you have specific tips for B2B companies looking to build online communities?
Hope this episode was insightful for you because, for me, it’s a winner already! A big thank you to Carmen Taubman for being a wonderful contributor and providing such amazing insights.