 Hey everybody, this is another post collab talk tweet jam takeaways and I'm here with John. Hello. Hello. How's it going? It's great. And this was, how was your first collab talk tweet jam experience? I've really enjoyed it. I've always watched it happen and kind of wondered if there was more to it than just, you know, you asking and people answering. I didn't know. So I never jumped in, but I'm glad you reached out to me and kind of gave me the rundown on how simple it was because it was and I had a blast like not only making the answers, but just, you know, reading through what everyone else was saying and interacting with it. I had a blast, man. Well, that's that's half the fun right there. The side questions. I always like remind people the one thing is that anybody can jump in. So if you ever see it going on with the clap, clap, clap, talk hashtag and be like, what are they talking about? Go check out the blog, the questions, feel free to jump in and participate. It's not scary. No, but but just those side conversations is reminding people always include the question number, always include the hashtag because we track everything, we do some sentiment analysis around that with the tide graph tools. It's it's cool to have that, you know, historic documents of the documented conversation as well. Well, let's let's jump in today. We were talking about something that I know is perfect topic for you and I were both in this space, the evolution of community. And this was kind of sparked by the announcement a couple of weeks back that the formerly noted SharePointSaturday.org or SPS events is shutting down the centralized site. And that that just kind of prompted me. It's like, I don't want to talk for an hour just about that. But let's talk about what's actually happening with community. And that it came up, of course, it's an important question. But so a lot of it with a great panel was very active. We can always tell when we're getting a lot of Twitter activity in general, because you start to see the paid ads come in. You start to see outside groups, you know, we have for some of the topics we trend naturally or even globally on Twitter. But with that, yeah, so we'll probably get like three or four million impressions out of this one hour event. So some pretty serious numbers. But it around this this topic. So question number one, we started things off with, how did you first get involved in community? What is your origin story? I had to go comic book on us. So yeah, I love what's your start? Mine was gaming, PC gaming really the early days of the internet. I was like 16 or 17. I built a PC, you know, picked out all the parts, learned how to build it myself and then started playing Quake three. And and that was my my first game in community. And in gaming communities, if you've ever been a part of one, they give you the full gamut, right? Like there's positivity and there's some real toxicity. There's people helping each other and there's people hating each other. And so for me, it all started with gaming and this idea of like, holy cow, I could I could actually organize people virtually around things that I'm interested in. And so that all it was just an addiction from there for me. You know, I have to say that so in a little bit later that I've tried the timing of the products, but when Unreal Tournament came out, I was working for a startup and this is a great again. I think it builds on that comment on community building is so we were a startup. So venture capital backed just south of San Francisco. And at the end of the day, so usually about 6 p.m. They would the majority of people would leave the communities would depart. I live far across the bridge on the East Bay. And I'm like, I don't want to leave quite yet. I'll work later. And they started playing Unreal Tournament internally. And so you'd have the developer pods, these areas of the support pods and other parts of the building where you would hear teams and they were like talking together. And we would actually go spy on each other to find out where the other were in the map of things. And we would sit and play. And our CIO, Don Witt was hilarious that we had this giant screen of these massive monitors all put together for one giant screen. And he's always, that's my screen and he'd be playing there. And we're like, you know, well, we know where Don is because he's playing with this screen brother of everybody and go up and kill him on screen, you know, but it's like the first stream snipe. But yeah, exactly. But it was it was just a fantastic way for us to build community through that that joint activity. We're all doing that thing. We're all gathered together. It wasn't work related. It was the fun side of that as well. And where we built so many long friendships. I mean, still, that was in 2001. I'm still playing with the playing with games with in contact with people that were part of that original team because of so many of those kinds of interactions. I still keep in contact with three of my friends from way back when I was 16, one of them was 12. One was 17 and one was 14. Like we we still talk today. We we wish each other happy birthday. I still game with one of them occasionally. Like it's it's lifelong connection and very similar to, you know, the community that we're both a part of here. I feel it's that that same idea, right? You meet people around this shared idea and it does connect you over time. Well, there's a I think there's so many people that, you know, coming from as a SharePoint MVP and kind of come up with the SharePoint community and how vibrant that was that there are so many people that became friends around the SharePoint conference in 2009, like that specific event. And I have a long list of people that I met at that event that I'm still friends with and I connect with at least on a weekly basis. I love it. It's it's powerful. Well, question number two says with so many online events, what do you predict will be the future of in person events? So I have a different take on this. Like I think a lot of people are like, oh, we're going to go in person, full power. I just believe the future is hybrid. It can't be anything else. Like, of course, we want that in person feeling. I want to come and give you a hug. I want to I want to hang out and talk and drink and spend those moments together outside of the conference, right? The sessions don't matter. It's the being together. But I think what we will also see is that, you know, look at Microsoft, right? Look at look at Ignite or build pre-pandemic and look at their attendance numbers, right? And then look at their attendance numbers in the virtual world. Tenfold, magnitude tenfold numbers. Right. I think I think for build and Ignite, like definitely makes sense. Where I thought the difficulty that I have, my primary event for my business and I just love the event is the partner conference. So it was Inspire in July, formerly the Worldwide Partner Conference. You cannot do that event virtually. You just cannot do it. It's about P to P, partner to partner. And how do you do that? How do you build the business? How do you make the connections and do it in the virtual? I mean, you think about it this way. It's like there are, as I'm not disagreeing with you. In fact, we kind of started to have a side conversation on this topic. Yeah. I believe that the model needs to change. It's hybrid. But what that actually looks like, because you look at what's happening with online events now, you have 15 to 30 minute presentation. So much shorter segments than you're doing live. And so much of it in the Microsoft, you know, the OEM content that's coming out is so heavily marketing focused rather than true deep dives in on the technology, which is more of what the in-person event content was. Right. And so figuring out what that looks like and what that mixes and providing opportunities to interact while still providing that additional value for the people that show up in person. I mean, I just think that's where it needs to evolve and change. I agree. I think there's a there's a platform shift that needs to happen where how do we close the gap between the in-person and virtual experience? And I think there are. I have some ideas on that for sure. But I think the other part of it that actually came up in the conversation that someone else had mentioned was there also has to be a paradigm shift in how the employer and the company thinks about an employee's time at a virtual event versus an in-person event. Like I can think for myself at an in-person event. No one bothered me. I blocked the calendar. I'm gone. I'm there. Everyone respected that a virtual event. I'm kind of expected to keep working while attending, right? And so I think that that's a major piece that we have to shift as well to say, awesome, like we are happy to provide a virtual experience, but it needs to have priority in, you know, comparison to a in-person event as well, right? No, I completely agree. I mean, I even like the idea. I'm trying to think which event did this, where they had like the 30 minute segments of content so you could dial into that. And then the back half of the hour, they had a separate kind of like a roundtable feedback session. And so if you're watching this remotely, I mean, you could log into that and then you could go and jump off, do some things, check out the things, come back for the next content or stay and participate in the second half where it's an in-depth. It's a conversation. It's a roundtable discussion on that topic. So yeah, I agree. There needs to be something there. And maybe that's having helped with the North American Collaboration Summit in Branson, Missouri. The last two years, I helped organize and manage the online and in-room, the moderators for the hybrid experience. And it was fantastic having somebody physically in the room so that people online, if they ask questions, there's someone in the room that on their behalf raised their hand and ask a question so that they don't, you know, they feel like they're being responded to, that it's interactive. But likewise, it might be that you do the short in-person segment and then you allow then the conversation to happen with that online moderator for the people that are there. So I think I lean more towards that second part. Like I don't want to, again, I'm actually building something. I decided that this is the future and in my spare time, I'm trying to build an experience that will transform how this is done. And so I don't want to give away too much secret sauce, but imagine that the people attending and the people at home virtually both were experiencing in the same way. Maybe the person in attendance, instead of raising their hand and asking the question, asks it through an app, which everyone is now seeing, that then is relayed to the speaker who answers the question for everyone. And now suddenly, we've shrunk the gap of the experience a bit. And if we take a few other pieces of live event and think of how we can involve that digital person in the same way, now I think we're really moving towards something that people would use and would think of differently and would encourage participation with because it's not a cheap experience. It's not a different experience. It's the same experience that the person who's attending gets. And so I really think there's some great possibility there. And I think that the future has to be hybrid because you can't just ignore all the people that you've now brought into the fold and say, oh, sorry, we're going back to person. You can't afford it, not our problem, right? Well, there's, it's one other aspect before we move on to the next one. Like we're talking about, so we had rebranded our SharePoint Saturday events here in Utah. A couple of years back, we changed it to Microsoft 365. And then we moved it to Friday and doubled our numbers. But that's like a cultural thing here in Utah and people's weekends and how they spend their time. So it wasn't surprising to us that it increased the numbers. But anyway, with that move we talked about, there's a certain number of people that are presenting this thing. Look, we don't want our content to be recorded. We don't want it to be, we want it to be there for in the room. Like they're, so these are professional speakers, experts on it that they're like, if we give it all away for free, then no one's gonna hire me as a consultant on that side of it. And there's value add for having a certain amount of content and topics that are only there for in-person, but then making other, the keynotes and other sessions available for the online experience. That's another aspect of hybrid where you have to think about what is the experience and the value being provided to those people that are dialing in? What is the experience for those people and the value that you're providing that show up to that? And if you want to have that hybrid and not just say it's the same for everybody, then you have a difficult time getting sponsors, paying for the venue of doing anything in-person and then lose the value of the person, a person, or partner. Anyway, I love this, we can talk about this for hours, I feel like. That's a topic we could go in depth on. Well, the next one, so specifically going back to SPS events. So what will the community impact of SPS events shutting down? What will be the community impact? And does community need a centralized site or service to survive? So first question, SPS events closing down, like it brings a tear to my eye. Like, I love them. I, my best events were SharePoint Saturday events where I spoke to a room of like 35 people, right? It's intimate, it's personal, it's fun. You connect with them on a different level. And so for me, like it's a sad thing to see them go. Now, on the other hand, do I say that it's the end of events for community? Like, no, absolutely not. I think we already see other groups rising up to fill the place, right? Like before the pandemic, D365 Saturday was going hot, right, like all over the place. And there were a bunch of other like cloud Saturdays and Azure Saturdays. Sequel Saturday where we stole the model from. Exactly, right. Yeah, and so I think those things continue on and SharePoint Saturdays is like a, it's not a, it's not a dying, it's not a death. It's just a transfer of energy, right? Like it's the end of an era, but I do believe that something else will come and rise and take its place. And does community need a central location? No, it doesn't. I don't think it does. The only, I agree, because there are so many things that are out there and they're more and more like we had even gone and built our site, you know, outside of the platform because it didn't quite fit, you know, the model of what SharePoint Saturday was. And that was part of I think the beginning of the end of the change for that. But one thing that's lacking is the idea of like a centralized calendar for one. And then, you know, and I always define it as like the cross-pollinating of ideas and people and resources, the sharing of those across a community. Again, where do you collect all that information? And then, you know, three is, you know, to be able to have visibility over a broad range of things. Like I'm now checking the tech community calendar. I'm checking the, you know, some of the, like the user group activities. People have heard about things. There's, you know, meetup activities and things that are out there. I get event-bright imitations. So all of these pieces are all over the place. And so one thing that made one powerful thing about the SharePoint community, again, is that we had that centralized place to go to and see what was coming up. And that you knew that, hey, we wanna do something or, you know, we wanna make sure that it's part of this and is on that calendar invisible. I can feel that. So except for that. No, and I think that's fair. I think I do see the power in it, right? Having experienced it and scheduled several events in a year based on that one calendar myself, I definitely hear you. I think it's interesting though to look at like community and how the like centralized user groups have gone, right? Like the evidence of that is that it ends. And so how do we maintain that centralization from one era to the next, I guess is the problem. Because like, you know, the like DCI user groups, those all went away, right? Now SharePoint Saturday user groups going away. And it's not that they're going away. It's that they're, the energy is moving to a different place. It's an individual having a group. It's on meetup like you said, or event bright. And so does the community want centralization? I think is the question I asked because there are so many differing opinions and centralization requires regulation. And I think there's so many people who want to do it their own way and don't want that regulation. But there has to be, right. Cause if you're going to have, if I'm going to be responsible, whether I'm neutral or I work for a company, well, whoever it is, put it together. You have to have some kind of oversight, some lightweight governance around it to make sure that, cause what inevitably happens and think of this like the, some of the Facebook community, the topic, the community areas of Facebook, the teams are huge. There's like 40 to 60,000 people within like the teams community, the teams for education, separate, equally big, the SharePoint community, kind of all those things. And it without somebody monitoring what you quickly get is spam on that lit. So promotion, yep. Right. Well, we're doing, our company is doing this webinar, which may or may not be related to SharePoint. And so you have to have policies in place and regulate that, you're right. Yeah. So it's, I see like, you know, the Power Platform team is spinning up that user group thing, trying to do that, trying to give a central place. But having been part of that journey and now being able to talk about it candidly, there was a lot of people who just didn't want it, who were like, we don't care about your model. We're going to do it our way. And so I think, should there be it is one question and does the community want it? I guess it's another question. Yeah. Well, that's, hey, I think, honestly, I think it's cyclical. I think we'll see what this looks like and something will, I mean, you're right. Something is going to evolve and change and come out of this. And if there's great enough need, if there's enough confusion out there in the chaos, something will, you know, go back together. Big Bang went out and now it's, you know, come back together and we'll then explode to get out. So I mean, I'm of the opinion at the very least, you know, a community calendar. But then I know what it, the reality of what it takes to maintain that and add to it and get people promoting it so they're looking at it. So I get it. You know, I'm going to give a shameless plug for a friend of mine, Matt Wade, that Matt Wade on Twitter, he does a good job of actually trying to create a calendar of all the community events and all the Microsoft events. He has it on his website. He links it out. And so you can look him up. I'm sure it's pretty easy to find on his Twitter. He has the closest to a, what's the word I'm looking for? To an overview of all the events that I've seen. Well, and that is, and there have been others that I've utilized, Matt's as well. There have been other attempts to go and do that from time to time by different vendors. When I kind of got in this space before SharePoint Saturday SPS events became what it is. There were a couple other vendors, ISVs that were trying to do the same thing. So again, I think something will kind of grow out of that to fill that need. So the next question, number four, was what tools and resources do you rely on for building and supporting your community efforts? Yeah, so this one I answered a bit more as like a community builder. And I have a few different places and tools that I use and I'm gonna actually go and pull this up because I wrote it down, because I was like, when I wrote it, I was like, oh, I should write that somewhere. That's useful. So I think I use social media a lot for inspiration. It's really the conversation, the hype, trying to get you interested, right? I use the community websites for information. You have a problem, go here. That's where we get our problem solved. I create engagement programs for competition and collaboration. I use data for personalization. I use ideas for feedback and then meetups or user groups for connection. And so I think, you know, thinking of it from that builder perspective, there's all these different programs and tools and then also why I want these programs and tools involved in the community. And so I think those are the big ones for me. Yeah, it's funny. It's like, so I mentioned on there was some of my community beginnings, my origin story back into the early 90s and in late 90s was really involved with user groups and I had my own software startup and what we were trying to go and do and build. But the non-profit that I co-founded in 2002, and at the time you had all this, the social media, the network tools, some of the early versions of those and LinkedIn was brand new. I'm like, I'm in the like the five or 6,000 numbers. So I was part of the beta, so very early there. But there were different social platforms out there. There was one called Rise RYZE, which I think there's a shell of it that's still out there, HTML based, very simplistic. But it had bigger numbers than anybody else. It was huge at the time and all the great work that Adrian Scott did around that. But so what we, as we started to build this non-profit and we realized, well, we needed to have a centralized location for a website, a page for all of our activities. We needed to have the registration. It was a mess of a process to do any kind of call for speakers, because we all know. And so you think about kind of all those core pieces, a place to go that has all the information around it. Of course, promotion with all the social tools that are out there. So you either need a website, or like we did for a user group, we had our paid meetup subscription. So we kind of, we stopped using our website. We just did a redirect to our meetup and we're using meetup less and less now, where we have just other methods to reach the tool. We got our mailing list and we can just via social push this out there. But sessionize has become our de facto, yeah, for the call to speakers. Oh yeah, it's fantastic. Thanks a lot for sessionize. My goodness, what a great tool. I have to say, I have absolutely no idea what it costs. If you have a paid event, I don't know what it costs to use sessionize. That's up. $599 a year, which is not bad at all. That's not bad at all. It's going to do a massive event. That is a huge headache to take off of your mind. Take away that great pain. For free events, for nonprofit activities, you can get sessionize for free. And so you have to request it, but they'll provide that. So if you're doing a free community driven event, you'd be a fool not to use sessionize for your call for speakers and organize that, select that. Yeah. And then yeah, I mean, that's it. Social for promotion. And it's the word of mouth that is the most powerful tool there. But yeah, and I know that there are still some people that will, it's important if you're doing an event that you have paid sponsors for and you're paying for food for, if you're doing an in-person event. Event bright is also something that we use just to be able to kind of put some responsibility on people when you're registering for it. You get the reminders automatically for those things. I love that. I wasn't allowed to use it during my time with Microsoft, but I did anyways because it was such a great tool. I think even outside of how it's a communication engine inside of it where you can consistently communicate with your audience, the other beautiful part is they market it for you and they have an amazing marketing engine. You get a ton. If you're able to create any hype for your own event, their marketing engine will match the amount of hype that you are able to produce. And so in some of the events I have run on Event Bright, I've gotten thousands of extra attendees due to their marketing efforts. You have to say that that is one huge benefit of Event Bright. To some degree, you get some benefit, network benefit, the scale through Meetup. Only because whatever event you put on there that makes it visible to anybody within the system. And so you could just go and look at geography-based. What are all of the events happening in the next 30 days in the Salt Lake City area? And I could see, oh, I had no idea. That's really interesting. And so I've gotten participated in some of those things and promoted. So that's the benefit of going back to the benefit of having that centralized thing, but having it still disjointed. It's not centralized that's specific to a community and individual. That's a platform where they provide that. But for, again, for a free event, Event Bright, you can use it for free, Meetup, if there are some free capabilities, but if you have, they charge and the minimum is 50 bucks a month for like ongoing usage of it. So just be aware that there's a cost there. Let's see, so we're on question number five. Here we go. What help should Microsoft and other partners or sponsors provide to the community? So what help is essential versus nice to have? I think that Microsoft, I really tried very hard to create this idea of sharing the stage, sharing the platform. I created the community conference and Chuck on my team did community calls. And there's, I think that what Microsoft should recognize is they're big enough. Like if they spent less on marketing and more on community uplift, they would get a lot more for their return because you can see the direct outcome. If you go talk to anyone in the power platform community and you say, are you a part of this because of the activity of the community team or the marketing team? I would be very confident to say that nine out of 10 times they would not choose the marketing team. Now that's not to slight the marketing team. They do their job. They do what they're supposed to do. But I think that what we've seen is we've seen explosive moments within the platform when we have focused on community. Look at Samit. Look at Samit's story and Ignite 2018 and how that one individual story of rags to riches, of coming from nothing to standing on stage with Satya, it allowed so many people to see themselves in this idea of the platform and what it could do for them. I believe that that was our single most pivotal moment and that was not a marketing thing. That was a community thing, right? And so I think they should, and so there's a lot of great people there doing a great job trying their hardest to do it. I just think that the machine is not quite there yet. It's still very marketing focused. It's interesting. One of the things I love that I do is kind of a segment of my collab talk podcast. That is I do the MVP buzz chat. So I interview MVPs around the world from all different technology areas within the ecosystem. And the last few weeks, I've interviewed quite a few like brand new MVPs that just got their award and saw my open invitation to come and participate and be like, yeah, tell their origin story around that. And how many of those people that is like, well, what was your path? And the first place that almost everybody says is like, well, I got involved with my local user group. And after like a year, I got my nerves together to present just a short segment there to my user group. And that was in front of like 15, 20 people. And then I reached out and did that. They got on their path too. And that's the power of community around that. Totally. From Microsoft's perspective, two things. Cause I know you were just, we're at Microsoft and you saw part of this. And I'd say that the difference with Microsoft is when you have people like yourself in your former role that get community and get involved the right way, the right level and helping raise up others versus somebody at Microsoft in marketing. It says, hey, we got an opportunity here. Let's go do community. And they like take it over and try and productize it and KPI everything. And then it just, and then question, well, it didn't work for us. It was like, well, you did it wrong. Instead of just letting loose. But I'll tell you from having been out in the field and trying to get the local field off as a Microsoft, somebody to show up. So I helped run, start SharePoint Saturday, Utah, like almost, like eight, nine years ago. And only like the last in-person or two back did a local Microsoft person actually show up. And he showed up because he had just left the field from a partner and went to work for Microsoft and was still very committed to it. Very community centric, but that he understood that and was involved within IAMCP, which is the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners. So he was focused on the partner side as well as the community side. So he got it. But getting, we were never asking for funds. We were able to build it, but just getting Microsoft to be aware of it and then help us get the word out. We're not asking for a list. We're saying you, Microsoft. Push in the newsletter. Put us in the newsletter. Share, let the regional folks here in Utah that Microsoft employees know that it's going on and tell their customers that it's coming up. I mean, it's just like pulling teeth, trying to get this through. And so what I would change about this is something that this could be for any partner, any ISV, any consulting company that's in the community, get involved, not because there was a direct line from, I was involved in this event, therefore I did this much new business. Sometimes creating goodwill, there's a long-term effect. Attribution of those activities can be very difficult and take a long time. But I have so many stories that I have where partners that were never there physically but would send 250 bucks to sponsor and send some swag to give away. At the event that we're doing, or at the user group. How many times people have asked for, hey, what's the contact information? Or I have a question about it. They know the brand, they know the name because of their support for the community activities. And a lot of times, I mean, we need, you know, Microsoft and other OEMs and ISVs and SISs to step up and do the same thing. Help the community so we can keep doing this stuff and help us keep then those brands, you know, front of mind. They just need to recognize that community is not selling products or services. Community is selling a vision, right? We are bringing people together around a commonality, a vision of where we are headed together and what this means to us. And so if they can understand that their value at is not in direct sales or services, but instead of getting to be part of saying, I'm also selling that vision, I think there's a long-term benefit to being part of that where when you are in the community and trusted and give of yourself, people just say like, oh, hey, you know, that Kent, he's a good guy, like I'm gonna send him some business because he's always so helpful. And I've seen that a million times and oftentimes when people come ask me who are the partners they should engage with, it's not the big ones, it's all the ones who are in the community who are actively participating because they like to be there because they believe in the vision, right? You know, one of the most common things against community that I hear from partners and I've heard it from some in my own current company, although we understand we've got a lot of number of people, five MVPs, three RDs, very plugged in, we get community, they're very supportive of those that are more community minded. But I've heard this statement of that, I was like, well, you know, the people that write the checks, the decision makers tend to not go to community groups and user groups and these community driven events, which is true. However, when the CIO is going to write a check on a solution and he's trying to validate, do we know this? Who do they go to? They go to the individuals within their organization. Do you know this brand? Do you know their solution? Like, oh yeah, I know their company well. I've seen it. I know their MVP. I know their technical team. I've met them and talked to them at the last SharePoint Saturday. Like having those kinds of connections makes a huge difference. Again, marketing attribution is hard. So you have to be a bit more creative than saying simply because decision makers are not going to the event. Therefore, let's not go to the event. One, decision makers are informed by who? Who comes back to the business and says, I have this idea. We're going to do it this way. Then the decision maker has an opportunity to say yes or no. But where is their whole perspective created by, right? And so yeah, I laugh at that statement and I would. And yet I hear it all the time, all the time. So, well, so the next question six was, what are your best practices for growing community, whether locally, regionally or globally? Oh, this is one we had a bit of a side chat on as well. And I think we could go deep forever. I think you, again, I answer this as a community builder and not as a community participant, but I think it's about creating compelling experiences at each stage of community opportunity. I think there's like these, it's broken up into four stages, right? Discover, first you discover this community. So how do I create a compelling experience in the discover phase? Well, I help that user get to the information they need as quickly as possible. That's the most compelling I can be because when I have something broken, I don't care what your featured stories are or who your best users are. I just need to fix this thing, right? Then there's an onboard stage where now maybe your problem's fixed and I need to ask you to stay around, to keep you around. So how do I create experiences or incentivization that gets you to come back to me, right? So how do I get you to come fill out your profile? How do I get you to click on something in the newsletter? How do I get you back and do it in a way that seems inspiring or fun to you? Then from there, it's engagement and how do I get you further engaged? How do I get you to a user group? How do I get you to speak at a user group? How do I get you to answer another person's question in the community or give us idea in user voice, right? There's a next level of things. How do I make these fun? How do I incentivize or gamify those things? And then finally, how do I make you become a leader? How do I incentivize, right? So Microsoft does a great job at this with the MVP program, right? They have a pipeline to create influencers and they just badge them in the whole world suddenly respects this thing, right? And so that's, it's a pinnacle example. Salesforce does it too. They have an MVP program. I think that that idea of how we incentivize people to lead is probably the most important because you think about it, all community activity is gonna be hundreds of millions of people and your elite leaders will be, you know, a 10th of a percent of that if you're lucky. If that, yeah. No, it's, I always say that it's, when you're doing that, it's about developing advocacy. So if I'm building community for my company, which I do, I own my champions program and helping, we're expanding this and making announcements. You do a great job, by the way. I see your champions all over. Yeah, there's, because we have some people that are like individuals as individually, they just do a fantastic job around there. And we're trying to go in and try and do some more programmatic things, which, again, exactly to your point is, as a company, we're looking at, we're falling short on opportunities that we're giving our champions to go and to show off. Like we want to give them more tools that they can go and leverage to go and do more around it. We don't have to, you know, explicitly say, it's like, and we're doing this because AppPoint will sell more software around that. It's like, well, no, that's not the reasons around it. But we have that natural, through the community, anybody that goes and builds a community this way, like there's that implied back end of the sponsoring organizations around that. But it's the idea that a rising tide floats all boats. By helping the community and doing that, I love that saying. I love that you said that, I use that all the time. I love that. I love that as well. I don't even know the origin of that. I don't see that. I don't see that. Now we need to go look that up. But yeah, so it's the idea that you're doing it, again, because you're building goodwill. And there's so much, so many opportunities that will happen for you as the participating company. This goes back to the last question, with why Microsoft should try to find ways to do more to support community is because the benefits of it long-term, far outweigh the short-term costs or the limited awareness of KPIs for this quarter, for this month. And it's like, it's only an upfront investment, right? Like if you do it right, over time, you make less and less investment because the community learns the patterns and takes things over. And so you don't need it. And so you're, man, we could go on for hours again on this tonight. So I shared, I'll simplify then. So I did a blog post last week where I shared something that I actually developed from my nonprofit back in the early 2000s. I used, when I was at Microsoft, and I was part of the Microsoft Excellence Community, or the Management Excellence Community. So kind of the people managers, and I was actually the evangelist for MEC or the leadership team, which is called Melt. And so I developed an e-book and materials around that, but as the idea, how do you build community? What I recommend as a community member and as an organizer, I'm on the board of my user group, for example, is that one, bring a friend. No matter what the activity is, even if you drove 20 people to it already, go and find one new person that's not been there actively or has never been, find them, try, make that a goal to bring one person with you every time. Think about that. If you're a user group, if everybody had that goal to bring somebody with them. Right. So yeah, the second one is to get involved. Like have a role within that. And so volunteer for that. When people have a job, when they have a role, when they feel that they're part of it somewhere, like make up roles in a user group for that. Like, hey, you can do this. People then become committed. They stick around for that. You make that sticky. And then the third thing is as an individual is like, have a learning plan. Know what you want to get out of it. It's all right that, sometimes the topics are just not of interest to me, but I continue to stay involved because the community aspect, I learned something new that I wasn't looking for. But then of course I really go on focused on those things that I make sure that I'm there for the topics that I really care about. So I heard someone say a great piece to add onto that. Well, it's called active listening. And even though something may not be directly related to me, I can actually listen to it with my own problem in mind and I will be able to derive certain value because all problems are pretty similar, right? And are solved through similar patterns. And so thinking of it in that way, you can still find value even if you don't care what the topic is. So I had a very snarky response. I had a manager who just did not understand, did not appreciate community activities. And I was doing things on my lunch and on weekends and like my own time. And this manager said to me, he's like, well, I don't see the value and you participating in the community stuff. Cause I was talking about like something I was doing and I'm like, you know, and I already went back and said, it's like, that's my time. It's none of your business. What I do, how I spend my time and I'm learning and helping is like, so I don't see any direct impact to our business by you participating in that group. And my snarky response was, I remember this cause I chose my words and I said, I'm not so selfish as to think that I personally have to get something out of every interaction. So many times it's not about what I'm getting out of it. I have information, I have experience that can help others. And I know that I'll get something out of this over the long term, but it's all about helping others. I love that. And then brands could do a good job by recognizing that people trust people, right? And that kind of activity only lends to their further credibility. I would say that that manager did not like that response. Yeah. So the last question, so what are your community building plans going forward? Ah, yes, the exciting future. So I'm here at DocuSign now. I've been here for about six months. It's been an interesting landing journey and team building. So I have two people on my team. I'm set to hire three more in the next year. And we are setting a whole new vision for community and evangelism at DocuSign. It traditionally was not very much of it to speak of. And so we're rethinking a whole website right now. How do the products have information? How does user voice tie in? What's our gamification strategy? How will we host community video and blogs? And so right now we're getting to basically vision all that and put it together. And so we'll be building that experience through the winter here, hopefully for a soft launch early next year. And so that's kind of where I'm at. And then personally, outside of my professional realm, I'm a big gamer. I've always been, my origin story was there. It's something that's persisted throughout my life. And I've decided- Some of the first few live streams things, the things that I saw was you doing gaming stuff. So that was some of the first content that I saw of yours. Yeah, yeah. And I had this weird thing where for a while I decided that I couldn't do gaming content, that I'm a professional and I have to do professional content. And I can't be fully me because that's too much. I changed my mind recently and I decided, no, I'm going to do some gaming content. I'm going to be fully me. I'm going to bring full John forward. And so that's, I'm doing a lot of that community building right now around Xbox, around PC gaming. I got a little Discord server and a WhatsApp group and we talk about games every day and it just brings joy to my heart, you know? Well, that is great to hear and go and do it. And that's, I think that is a key element too with MVPs that I talk with and people that are very community-centric like yourself, is that we would do this stuff without the titles, regardless of the recognition, the other things that we've done, because it's core, it's part of us. Like I was doing interviews and I think it was one of the reasons I earned my, when I first became an MVP, I had done over 200 videos in a series called the one thing where I was talking to people, I was SharePoint related. I'm a tech guy and all of my, let me say, in almost 30 years, I spent one year consulting for, but working for a non-technology company, no, did not like it, did not like it at all. I'm like, now I need to get back in a world where people, so like, so that's, but personally, that's how, what I enjoyed. Like I've had people that had commented on like the volume of content that I write from time to time. And I was like, I write to relax sometimes and to get ideas out of my brain. So the voices stop, you know? Totally, totally. Well, John, really appreciate your time, take the time out of your day around this and thanks again for participating. Hopefully we'll see you at future Club Talk Tweet Jams. Thank you so much for having me. I will absolutely be at, I think I'm gonna, I'm just gonna say, I'll be at all of them from now on. Woo-hoo! Yeah, that's the spirit, just sending people. Again, even if they're, if it's not directly relevant, I'm sure there are questions, there'll be side conversations that come up. You'll be like, hey, I've got something to say there. That's what they're all. Christian, I have an opinion about everything, so it's okay. I can talk for hours on everything, no matter what I know about the topic. That's right, that's right. That's a personality flaw or maybe a personality trait worth recognizing. I don't know, either way. Well, awesome. Well, thanks a lot, John. We'll talk to you soon. Take care.