This is a very timely question as it's something we're in the midst of as well! With our recent AI features, we've been piloted a sort of "1-2 punch" when it comes to the community which seems to be working well.
We have regular "AMA" sessions led by our product managers. I use "AMA" lightly because they are more so a webinar/live demo format where we encourage questions in the chat and for people to come off mute to ask questions.
We transitioned our invitation from simply within our community/email to in-app with Amplitude to target specific personas and that has made these 400+ attendance-getters.
Also important to have PMs, SEs, other internal SMEs answering questions in the chat!
We post the recording in the community as well as any unanswered questions with answers. We also share follow-ups with AMs and CSMs if their customers had pertinent questions or showed interest in learning more.
2. We take the same AMA topic and schedule a more informal "Talent Talk" a couple of weeks after the original webinar. This is customer-led and we tap into engaged beta testers or other early adopters. The format is 15-20 min of a "show and tell" of the new feature and then open it up to conversation.
Staff has a much lighter role in this one, where we really just make sure anyone who wants to talk gets the chance to
We record these on a case by case basis, depending on the topic and the type of content being shared (i.e. if it's a lot of proprietary information or showing their direct data, we don't record)
We post a recap of highlights, what we talked about and links to product resources discussed in the community afterwards. This is an opportunity to bring that product promotion piece in and throw some UTMs on links to see what traction we get.
Hi Gabby Esposito - our team is exploring formalizing these as well! Right now we do a monthly "Talent Talk" (we work with Talent Acquisition and HR teams), which have always been customer-run. What we did most recently that worked well:
We picked a topic and a speaker (we actually used a panelist from our recent customer event)
We handled the logistics of setting up the Zoom, registrations, promotion through the community
We structured it so that the first 20 minutes or so was our community member walking through their use case with sharing his screen/slides/etc
Then we opened it up to everyone for additional questions and conversations, encouraging people to raise their hands and come off of mute to make it feel more personal and less like a webinar
Our team acted as the host/moderator with making sure people who raised their hands were able to speak, we helped keep time and move topics along, and essentially ensured our champion was able to focus on his expertise and delivery and not the logistics
As a follow-up, we posted a summary of the conversation and the recording and encouraged continuing conversation in the threads
We are working on identifying future topics and speakers through surveys and aggregating data in our community. Ideally, we will have an evergreen "ask" where champions can submit ideas for office hours and we will have a pool to pull from for these virtual events. We also hope to use a similar model for in-person user group-type meet-ups as well!
I am just starting to explore this! We use a Salesforce report and workflow for opting in and tracking references, but I am hoping to build an Agent in Glean that will build off of the SFDC report and fold in a sort of sentiment analysis using Gong recordings and CSM/AM notes (and eventually customer community data). This would mainly be internal for helping our AEs/AMs find the right fit based on the customer and what their sticking point seems to be. Is this a similar use case as to what you are considering?
