Key takeaways from CMX Summit 2022: Thrive

Last month, we attended CMX Summit 2022: Thrive. We had an amazing time connecting with old and new friends at our booth, attending incredible sessions from community leaders across the industry, and supporting a few of our very own Roomies in their own sessions. If you couldn’t attend CMX Thrive or missed our sessions, don’t worry—read on for a full recap of our key takeaways.

A Complete Picture of Community Led Growth: A Story Told by Common Room and HubSpot

This session is moderated by Jessica Hobbs, Director of Community Programming at Bevy. She is joined by:

• Linda Lian, Co-founder & CEO at Common Room
• Courtney Sembler, Director of Hubspot Academy

In this talk, Courtney shares how Hubspot Academy attracts, engages, and delights community members, and Linda completes the picture by explaining how Common Room’s community intelligence can quantitatively demonstrate business impact.

Here are three things you should know:

1. Community leads to new business. One Common Room customer found that the customers that attributed to 10% of their net-new revenue from 2021 originated from a community surface area before they were ever seen as a sales or marketing qualified lead in their CRM.
2. Community engagement accelerates business. A different customer found that 70% of their community-engaged deals close within 90 days, compared to only 40% of their traditional sales and marketing qualified leads.
3. Product champions drive business impact. One customer measured the impact of their product champions program and found that of their customers, those who had an ambassador at the organization had 3x more monthly revenue spend.

Asana & Common Room: Use Data to Tie Community Work to Business Impact

This session is moderated by Jake Randall, COO at Common Room. He is joined by:

• Joshua Zerkel, CPO & Head of Global Engagement Marketing at Asana
• Josh Bricel, Data & Analytics at Common Room
• Savannah Peña, Marketing Analytics Manager at Asana

In this session, leaders from Asana and Common Room sit down for a virtual fireside chat to discuss the important role metrics play in community building. The biggest takeaway? Don’t be afraid of metrics! As Joshua Zerkel puts it, it’s important for community teams to tell the story about what’s happening within the community and go beyond the “warm and fuzzies.” That is to say, it’s great when your community brings people together to connect and have meaningful experiences, but the business also needs to understand what your program is doing and how it's impacting the bottom line. Metrics bring this story to life.

How To Create Memorable Community Events

This panel is moderated by SueJean Kang, Senior Events Manager at Bevy. She is joined by:

• Rebecca Marshburn, Head of Community at Common Room
• Kaila Lim, Community Experience Manager at The Org
• Piper Wilson, Consultant & Strategic Services at Higher Logic

In this session, a panel of community leaders discuss how they create memorable experiences and share tips for planning your community events. Our very own Rebecca Marshburn sums up her strategy with one question: How can you infuse thoughtfulness into an experience end-to-end? She goes on to explain that events are just a form of storytelling. So, her tip for event planning is to storyboard them—walk through your attendee's experience from the moment they enter your event. Storyboarding isn’t just for designers; it’s a tool that will help you find gaps and address areas that you forgot to be thoughtful about.

Working in Web3: Insights for the Web3 Curious

This panel is moderated by Rebecca Marshburn, Head of Community at Common Room. She is joined by:

• Josh Grose, Head of Growth at Common Room
• Krystle Blough, Head of Community at Boto.io
• Lori Goldman, Developer Community Lead at IndyKite

This panel dives into what it’s really like working with web3 communities and how web3 community management is different from web2. Josh Grose shares a common pattern he sees with new community managers—they jump in and start with standard engagement and growth metrics, but they need to be ready to move beyond that quickly. Web3 communities have a lot more noise than web2 communities, so looking at all-up engagement and growth won’t necessarily reflect your community’s health. Josh recommends that you create cohorts of folks who are really interested in the project and get them into their own channels to connect with each other. From here, you can start measuring the sentiment of your smaller community of advocates and champions. This will give you better insights into the health of your community and help to filter out the noise.

For more insights, connect with 1000+ community and DevRel leaders in the Uncommon community. If you’re interested in a solution to help activate the power of your community, check out Common Room. You can get started for free or request a demo to see the platform in action.