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How dev-first companies streamline community to save time and stay proactive
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Sep 19th, 2023

How dev-first companies streamline community to save time and stay proactive

Word-of-mouth marketing, faster sales cycles, long-term customer loyalty—these are just some of the benefits a vibrant community offers up developer-focused companies.

But if you’re buried under an ever-growing pile of tedious and time-consuming tasks, it’s hard to focus on what makes an impact.

Learn how dev-first companies:

  • Save time on building and managing communities
  • Recognize and rally around high-value opportunities
  • Optimize community engagement to hit business goals

You can’t steer the ship when you’re underwater

Managing a dev community means dealing with a lot of moving parts (and usually with limited resources).

There’s the day-to-day admin work: onboarding, answering questions, driving discussions, reporting on performance. It’s a timesuck. And that’s just for the communities you own on channels like Slack, Discord, and Discourse.

The communities you don’t own—the ones spread across GitHub, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and other digital touchpoints—are just as essential to fueling product awareness and adoption. And each channel comes with its own grind.

Maintaining a bird’s eye view of community activity across channels is tough. Following up on it—in real time and at scale—is even harder.

You’re either struggling to keep up with the activity you can see or struggling to get visibility into the activity you can’t. Likely it’s both. And that doesn’t leave a lot of time to focus on turning dev interest into dev action.

So instead of proactively surfacing opportunities to grow your community and drive business impact, you get stuck in a reactive loop.

‘Good enough’ isn’t good enough

Most go-to-market tools are built for traditional strategies. But marketing and selling to developers isn’t traditional.

So dev-focused companies cobble together a mixed bag of technologies to suit their needs. They try to connect the dots between native tools—repositories, messaging platforms, support forums—and point solutions, such as social listening tools. The result is limited insights, siloed workstreams, and an inability to prioritize what matters most.

To save time, spotlight opportunities, and keep your community happy, you have to consolidate your view of product users, automate manual processes, and move with speed:

Track the entire user journeySpot the signal from the noiseTake action and automate
Connect all your critical user touchpoints in a single location.Identify and prioritize the people behind conversations and actions.Simplify and scale how teams stay alerted to and follow up on activities.

Our research showed that when dev-focused companies have the right tools, they can:

Go from reactive to proactive with Common Room

Common Room helps you centralize all community activity in one place, zero in on the most relevant people and activities, and take action on them in real time. That way dev-focused companies can:

  • Track community activity across multiple touchpoints and enrich data to resolve member identities
  • Simplify and scale community analysis and reporting to uncover valuable insights
  • Cut down on day-to-day tasks to spend more time on high-impact work
  • Stay alerted to business-critical conversations and actions in order to respond quickly
  • Prioritize and follow up on community activity that supports key business goals

The result is less manual work, higher member satisfaction, and more opportunities to drive better business outcomes.

Here’s how dev-first companies make it a reality:

Consolidate the developer ecosystem

First you connect all relevant data sources—digital, product, and customer—to Common Room. Data is automatically unified and enriched to resolve customer identities and provide visibility into cross-channel activities.

⚙️ Common Room comes complete with dozens of natively built and fully managed integrations for popular channels and business data sources. Plus, our powerful API and data importing options make it easy to connect data from other sources.
Image of enrichment

This gives you a single source of truth for your entire developer ecosystem across owned and unowned channels. You can easily drill down into conversations and actions related to specific community members and organizations.

🎤 “Because our community, the dbt Community, lives on so many different platforms, Common Room is kind of that foundational platform where we funnel all information about things that are happening.”

—Anna Filippova, Senior Director of Community and Data at dbt Labs

Discover community insights

Next you can dive into the insights you care about with comprehensive reporting.

AI-powered natural language processing detects meaningful concepts in community conversations and uncovers the sentiment associated with them so you can understand what has people talking and how they feel about it.

⚙️ Topics automatically surfaces conversations across channels to show you what’s trending, whether conversations are associated with positive or negative sentiment, and other key metrics related to them so you can dig into relevant discussions.
Image of topics

This helps you synthesize and measure community activity in real time as it relates to new feature releases, hosted events, and other crucial business initiatives.

🎤 "Common Room does the hard work of parsing through and serving up serious or trending topics so we can quickly understand what the community needs."

—Jared Jones, Head of Ecosystem at Moov

Activities can be filtered by category so you can quickly find and follow up on product complaints, praise, questions, and more.

⚙️ Auto-categories in Common Room automatically find, classify, and group together activities into predetermined categories so you can quickly zero in on business-critical activity and follow up accordingly.

This helps you easily surface activity that requires a response and quickly take action (not to mention inform product development).

You can then filter by key attributes—job title, location, industry, and more—to prioritize individuals and organizations that fit your ideal customer profile.

⚙️ Filters allow you to sift through individuals and organizations based on the attributes and actions that are most important to you. Filters can be customized to suit your needs so you can quickly find the people and companies you care about.
Image of filters

This helps you uncover essential business context and separate the most important activity from the rest of the chatter.

🎤 “Common Room helps us focus on the organizations that get the most value from our product. We know which attributes make someone a great fit for Replit. Before Common Room, I wasn't able to find and build relationships with these people."

—Lena Vu Sawyer, Head of Community at Replit

Once you know who to engage first, you can tag them to easily track and report on influencers, economic buyers, and other key personas.

⚙️ Tags enable you to assign designations to both members and organizations to more easily filter for the people and activities that matter to you for reporting and outreach.

This helps you focus on the people and companies that have the most impact on your community or are a great match for sales conversations.

Meanwhile, impact points help you understand which community members are driving the most impact based on their behaviors, from posts on Discord to repo stars on GitHub.

⚙️ Impact points show you the people who have the biggest impact on your wider community according to the actions they take across channels. You can customize and weight points however you wish based on whichever activities are most important to you.
Image of Common Room

This helps you see who has the most sway over your community and identify possible brand advocates and product champions.

🎤 "Common Room is the command center for the Temporal community. We love being able to get an overview of user activity at an individual and an organizational level.”

—Shawn Wang, Head of Developer Experience at Temporal

Simplify engagement strategy

After you know what to take action on, you can add individuals and organizations to dedicated segments.

⚙️ Segments let you add individuals and organizations to fully customizable views where you can track, report on, and takes action on specific members or entire cohorts over time. You can even turn segments into task lists of people and companies to follow up with via integrations with Outreach, Salesforce, and Slack.
Image of segments

This helps you track, report on, and engage VIP community members one by one or all at once.

🎤 "Common Room gives us the ability to better see and segment our community to ensure we meet members where they are, support them with the specific resources they need, and elevate the voices of the experts who want to share their knowledge.”

—Dave Nielsen, Senior Director of Community Relations at Harness

You can also make sure you never miss out on an opportunity with real-time alerts.

⚙️ Team alerts allow you to automate notifications in the channels where you already work based on preset triggers and filters.
Image of team alert

This helps you cut down on response time and make sure you’re always up to date on high-priority community activity.

Then you can follow up swiftly and at scale with automated workflows for everything from community onboarding to member tagging.

⚙️ Workflows let you automate common actions—such as tagging individuals or bulk messaging groups of people—based on customizable logic.
Image of workflow

This helps you scalably welcome, verify, survey, and message your community members to keep them happy and engaged over time.

🎤 "I'm very data-driven, and when it comes to community intelligence and workflows, I've never seen anyone do it as comprehensively or as elegantly as Common Room. Nothing else in the market is close."

—Jared Jones, Head of Ecosystem at Moov

To maximize the value and performance of your community, you have to understand what moves the needle most and take action on it—quickly and at scale.

Dev-first companies use Common Room to make sure they’re focusing on the right things at the right time.

Boost community efficiency and impact with Common Room

Ready to see how Common Room helps you save time, do more with less, and improve community ROI?