Jono Bacon, Community Manager, Speaker, Author, Podcaster
is a leading community and management strategy consultant, speaker, and author. He is the founder ofJono Bacon Consulting, which provides community and management strategy, execution, and coaching. He also previously served as director of community at GitHub, Canonical, XPRIZE, OpenAdvantage, and has consulted and advised a range of organizations.
Bacon is a prominent author and speaker on community strategy, management, and best practice, and wrote the best-selling The Art of Community. He is the founder of the primary annual conference for community leaders and managers, the Community Leadership Summit as well as the Open Collaboration Conference. He is a regular keynote speaker at events about community management, organizational leadership, and best practice.
https://www.jonobacon.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonobacon/
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https://www.instagram.com/jonobacongram/
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:22] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For more details about the program, visit eckfeldt.com/thrive . That’s E C K F E L D T. com / thrive.
[00:00:57] Welcome, everyone. This is Scaling Up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host. And our guest today is Jono Bacon. He's a community strategist. He's also an author and a speaker. He's also a podcaster. I love I love having people on who do podcasts. It makes it more fun and engaging. But we're gonna talk about building communities. Jarno has been involved in many companies helping them build out their communities, helping them manage their communities.
[00:01:19] I'm excited about this, I think for service based businesses. It is real kind of challenge in terms of how do I build thought leadership, how do I build reputation, how do I build a following? And that's which I know is an expert in. And that's what we're going to talk about. So with that, Jonelle, welcome to the program.
[00:01:33] Great to be here. Bruce, thanks for having me on now.
[00:01:36] So why don't you tell us a little bit about your background in terms of how you got into the whole kind of community topic, the community space? How did that evolve? What have. Right. What are some of the things you've been doing in helping companies build communities?
[00:01:49] Yeah, I mean, I got into this business in much the same way that other people get into theirs through a pretty random path. I was I was 18 years old, living at home with my parents. My brother came home for a couple of weeks to visit and he introduced me to this. This operates this kind of emerging operating system called Linux for computers. And I bought a book on this under the first chapter. The book basically talks about how this platform was created by volunteers from all over the world that come together on the Internet to kind of build it together and then consume it together. Linux has gone on to basically power industry like Android phones powered by it. The cloud is powered by it. Electrical grids are powered by it all based upon this foundation of people collaborating together to build it. But when I read that first chapter back in 1998, it kind of switched on the light bulb for me that this is just a fascinating mixture of psychology, of workflow, of technology. And I was just really curious about figuring out how all of that stuff works. So I went on to organize various communities around technology in the UK. I also was a was a journalist and I ended up writing an article about an organization called Open Advantage, which was in in central England where I lived, where a lot of industry was moving abroad.
[00:02:55] So Open Advantage was a government funded organization to basically retrain those workers in technology. And at the heart of that was was open source software. So that kind of gave me some chops around consulting and kind of helping to understand people's needs. And like anything, one thing led to another. I went to work for an organization called Canonical, which basically is the creator of a system called ABANTU, which powers the majority of the cloud today, and then unto XPrize then on to get hub. And these days I'm a consultant, actually wrote a book called The ofCommunity about twelve years ago. And company is a great shout and say how do I apply these principles into my organization? And that's when I started consulting initially on the side, and then I went full time about three years ago. And essentially what I do is I work with a really broad range of companies, from banks to entertainment companies to, you know, remark kind of shared workspace companies to how do they build either a community inside of their business within the firewall or how do they build a community wrapped around a product or service so they can essentially use the crowd to generate additional value, whatever they're doing.
[00:03:56] So let's talk about kind of what is community. I mean, you're already kind of talking about different types of communities, but we're talking about communities in this context. What are you referring to? What what is the thing that we're trying to build or create around these products and services and businesses?
[00:04:10] Yeah. I mean, a community is basically a group of people who come together because they have a shared interest, passion or mission. So, you know, communities can include, for example, the Salesforce community, which has over a million members, in fact, as we record this. San Francisco's been decimated. Most of those that's come in to visit. But it can also be activism around a social cause or it can be a video game community or it can, frankly, just be people coming together cause they share a common interest such as Star Trek. I tend to break it into three basic models and I kind of walk through this in my in my new book, People Powered. The first is what I refer to as consumers. These are people who come together because they've a shared interest. And this is people who usually discuss something or they answer each other's questions. So against Star Trek fans were a good example of that. People who are fans of equipment or products and they put up a forum, relatively straightforward communities to build and they can grow quite significantly. The second type is what I refer to as champions. And these communities generate additional material that gets added to a stockpile that supports that community. So they produce blog posts, videos. They organize local events and meetups. They exhibit to exhibit at conferences and places like that. And then the third type is is a collaborative community where. People come together to build things together. Now that this can be subdivided into two types. The first is called an inner collaborate community where people work on the same project. So my examples earlier on of open source, a good example of that, where if you're a community member, you expect to be essentially on the same team as any company who's investing in it.
[00:05:37] And there's a careful balance in how you figure that out. And then the second type is called an outer collaborate community. And this is people who build technology that runs on a platform. So, for example, if your listeners have a product or a service and they want people to build additions to it, such as plug ins or modules or components, that's another type of collaborative community. And there's enormous value through all of these because, you know, it builds customer retention. It can build enormous brand recognition. It builds a closer relationship with your customers and your users. And I think when done right, you can just generate phenomenal value from it.
[00:06:11] Do you see a difference between kind of organic or spontaneous or self-organized communities versus communities that are kind of planned intentionally, kind of created around a product or service or, you know, company would give you some sense on how you categorize how you differentiate between those?
[00:06:29] That's a fabulous question, Bruce. It's essentially there are many examples of communities that kind of naturally spring up. A good example of this is Pokémon go when that game first came out. I mean, anyone who's got kids who are over a certain age, well, we'll know what this is all. Frankly, a lot of adults play as well. Is that the game sprung up and then there was all kinds of additional services and Web sites and things that support players of the game. Typically, when they spring up naturally like that, what happens is you get a giant burst of energy and then either the company behind that community or other people are just trying to figure out how to manage that and how to consolidate it so people can have a good community experience. And it can be tricky because it's kind of like improving a product in market. You know, it's a little risky to do that. You ideally want to improve a product with a limited amount of, you know, feedback from it helps them as a that roll it out to market. The ones that are intentional tend to deliver a much better experience at a much more efficient way of building a community. I'll give you an example. One thing that is a very common in the industry right now, people hire a community manager. They bring them into a business.
[00:07:29] And that means a manager goes out and does a whole load of speaking events. They write blog posts to do social media. They tend to overindex a lot them into managers, overindex on the promotional element. And that's fine because the natural inclination is let's get our community up and running. Let's get our brand out there. But what then happens is you're a new prospective community members come to your community and often have a pretty bad experience. It's a bit difficult to sign up. They can't quite figure out how to get started. It's not clear what they're supposed to be doing or what why this supposed to be doing it. So one of the critical elements is that you have a really simple onboarding experience when people join, because otherwise you can do all that promotion, spend all that money, and then you're essentially leaving value on the table because people come in, they check it out and then they get confused and kind of wander off and play their PlayStation. So when you're intentional, you tend to solve those kinds of challenges and you also tend to be much more efficient as well. Like most people don't throw 10 committee managers at a community. They tend to start out with a, you know, some of this person's time, some of that person's time, and you can get a lot more done that way.
[00:08:27] Now, talk to me about onboarding and appreciate that. I thought about that.
[00:08:31] Yeah, the whole the initial experience is gonna have a huge impact on kind of what your involvement or your participation rate is gonna be, what what defines a good or a well-defined or a well-crafted onboarding process?
[00:08:44] Yeah, this is something actually wander through people power, which is to me the first step in the last step of an unbroken process are always the same. The first step is, is you need to explain the value for the individual and why they should spend any time with your community. I tend to start out by breaking communities into personas because there's different types of participations, different types of value can generate in a community. People can write software, they can organize events. They can answer questions for people who use your product or service. They can coordinate content. They can do marketing. And as anyone who works in a business knows the culture and the dynamics of how, for example, an engineering team works is very different. The way in which marketing team works, certainly you need to tune the onboarding experience to that persona. So the first thing I would recommend is start out by choosing which personas you want to focus on. But then the first step of the onboarding experiences like why should someone care about you gotta make it really compelling about why that you should join the community. And it can be very tangible things such as, you know, I'm going to solve problems and I'm going to deliver value and I'm going to improve my career. Or it can be really intangible things like I'm going to meet some interesting people and have a lot of fun like that. All of those things matter. But then the last step with the onboarding process, once someone's generated a first piece of value in the community, they've answered a question, they've organized an event, they've done something is to validate that contribution. Most people in the world that we tend to forget that we're animals. And when you take away the you know, the computers and the screens, the microphones and everything. Most human beings, our brains are pattern matching machines. Right. So we need to be able to tie the pattern between effort and reward. And that's why we're very, very incentive, sizable creatures. So when someone does the. Very first thing in the community.
[00:10:21] It's really important to recognize that and reward it if it's good, because that will essentially buy you then having another go at it and then that's when they kind of enter into a long process of how we kind of build retention. And then between those two points, the first and second point is things like, you know, setting up the tools, learning the skills, having a place where people can go and ask questions and get help when that when, you know, finding something to do, things like that.
[00:10:44] So let's talk about sort of strategic value of communities. If I'm your leader inside a service based company, I'm looking to grow and scale it. How can I apply or where we're communities and community strategy is kind of applicable to my business plans and business growth.
[00:10:59] Yep. So I mean, obviously varies from business to business. I think the first thing I would recommend someone does is look at your business and say what are the ways in which we can harness an ecosystem in different ways? So for example, if you've got if you have, let's say you're a consulting services organization. Well, one thing that you could one kind of community you could build is a community of clients where you can bring your clients together, you can organize mixers, you can send them content, you can provide opportunities for discussion. You can have dedicated, you know, kind of user generated discussions, events, things like that. So this will be a very, very tightly curated, high quality community of your clients. So then when that they don't just get a value from you as a consultant, they also get the value of joining your ecosystem and they get other things out of that as well. And what happened? The real value of communities is a community is basically a network of minds that's got experience and time and talent. So when you bring your clients together and they can communicate with each other, assuming it's properly set up, then they can add value to each other within your environment without you having to do anything. And that's really the additive value of a community in that context. But let's say another example is you're running a service. Let's say you have assassinates.
[00:12:10] For example, you've got a product that's online. You could build a community of users of that product to provide help and support and guidance. You go to a community, people who are creating videos. People who are kind of exhibiting at events and things such as that. So there's what I would recommend is start by defining, you know, where do you see the potential for an ecosystem? And a good way to do this is to look at similar companies in your space and what they are doing or similar companies with the same type of product. So if you're a SAS company looking at other SAS companies, not necessarily just SAS companies within your particular market, but even if you don't see anything there, there's always someone who's first there's someone else isn't doing something doesn't mean that you can't do it. But the key thing I think is once you've identified that kind of community that you can build, the most important thing is to define what is the value we want to generate for our users, for our community members. And then look at the value and to generate for your business, because if you focus on the value of your business first, frankly, an up making a community that's quite boring and want to win. So yeah, and I need to find that value proposition for your users. That's what you expose as the first step of that. Right.
[00:13:14] Can you give us some examples of companies that have done a good job of sort of strategically intentionally creating a community, building a community that has value not only for its members, but for the business as well?
[00:13:25] Yeah, there's there's I mean, there's numerous examples out there. I mean, for example, Salesforce, Oracle, s.A. P, Fitbit, they've all built communities of over a million members who come together to provide not just support and guidance for how people use their products. And Salesforce is a good example. That products is remarkably complicated. I mean, it's actually relatively straightforward to get going, but it can do basically anything. You build the time machine ourselves. So people your support department could never provide the level of support to provide guidance for each and every one of those users and their specific needs. So Salesforce, Oracle, SFP, those kinds of companies are built massive communities that do that, but they also organize local events. Like I say, Dreamforce is happening in San Francisco right now. There's tons of local community events happening. Another example is a company called Frac Laudeo Systems. They actually build a product called an Axe Effect's, which is the guitar process. I'm a musician and they've got a rabid community who are excited about this product is again, very complicated. And people produce videos, provide guidance. They organize again, organize events, you know, things such as that. Another example would be would be Star Citizen. This is a company that wanted to build a video game. They raise $250 million in crowdfunding. They built a community, 1.8 million players. You get other communities that are more in-person in nature, like Harley-Davidson's set up 700 local chapters around the world. We've seen large consulting firms like McKinsey have done a great job in building client communities so that there's a raft of examples that are out there.
[00:14:50] Now, I know McKinsey also does have a really strong alumni community as well, but I think they generate from their alumni community the people, the previous employees that now are offered these various companies that end up coming back and hiring McKinsey for the work. So yeah, really digging through all the different potential leverage points.
[00:15:07] I think part of it here is the relationship that we're having with brands is changing. So, you know, 20 years ago you buy a product, you only engage with the company via the customer service number or their email address and then. What happened is companies wanted to inform their customers and prospective customers better, so they started them newsletters because customers like to have an email addresses and then, you know, more recently it's very common that you get a bundled digital experience with a product. You know, you go and buy a Lego set and you get the app that your kid can kind of connect to, does all this extra stuff. But I think it's important to remember that younger generations such as millennials are growing up in a socially connected and Internet. And so they're growing up with social media and they're growing up where having a relationship with other with their companies and their brands is what they expect. And this is not just having an impact in terms of what a fulfilling experience is between a customer and a company, but also where people want to work like people want. And now increasingly wanting to work in companies that, for example, support remote working and have these kinds of community initiatives. So I think that your listeners, while it may be sometimes difficult to identify like what is the immediate value we can generate today and apply resources to it. This is definitely going to be a trend that's moving forward that it's worth thinking about.
[00:16:22] Yeah, you've given a couple of case studies, you've mentioned a couple of companies that have built these sort of massive multi-million user communities, member communities. Do they always need to be there? Big is there is there value in smaller communities, I guess. Tell me, young, where how that plays with the differences. You know what the challenges are. But you talked to me about community size.
[00:16:41] Yeah. I mean, the size frankly, communities get more difficult as they grow because one of the reasons why communities work and have worked for thousands of years is that we are fundamentally social creatures and you know, we form together. If you just look thousands years ago, we formed together into villages and part. The reason for that was because we're stronger in numbers. You increase the level of security. Now, security is less of an issue for most of us or for many of us in the world today. So we can identify other values of that social grouping. And when you have a smaller social grouping, it's easier to get to know those people and to address those people like you. You've got a community, 100 people. You can basically, you know, pretty much everybody and you can make sure that everybody gets a fairly personalized experience. If you've got a community of a million people, it gets much more complicated. So there are many examples of smaller communities that have formed. I mean, I go, for example, I do talks all the time, companies, businesses at conferences where they have these little communities of a couple of hundred people. And then fantastically rewarding for people where it gets tricky is when you start spending beyond three or four hundred people, you don't have to systematize a lot more of what's going on. Right, sir? And the thing is, no one ever wants to get thanked or engage in an automated way. No one likes getting automated emails. No one likes getting automated Linked-In messages. Like anyone who sends an automated Linked-In message to someone. When you're connected to them, stop doing that. It doesn't work like that. So what happens is you get enormous value and small communities. And then sadly, what can often happen is as they grow and as they systematised more of the pieces of how the community operates, then sometimes it can lose that personal touch and people can then think, well, I don't really want to join this because I'm just, you know, one drop in an ocean.
[00:18:21] So talk to me about the what you actually do with the community.
[00:18:24] And we've kind of hinted at some things that are happening online. Terms of resources and connections and videos and things like that. You mentioned, you know, real eye r.l events, you know, things that are happening in person. What are some of the other things when you when you look at what a community can do or what kind of value are things you can offer your community, what's kind of on the menu or the things that you encourage people to talk about or think about?
[00:18:48] Yeah, I mean, like I say, a lot of it tends to depend on the specific community. So obviously, if you've got for example, if you interrupt around a technical project, then people will be able to contribute code. They'll be able to solve. They'll be able to report bugs, solve issues. They'll be able to discuss how the project should be structured and how it should be operated. But then if you have another community, let's say a community wrapped around a business or, you know, for example, is I can't say them because they're a client of mine, but there's a one for one of my clients basically runs kind of like a large marketing think tank. I guess you could say they have this community of about four or five thousand members and they come together for events that are like a main event every year. And then they have local chapters that take place around the around the world. And there's kind of a formalized method in which you apply to run one of these chapters, kind of like Ted X, but it's nowhere near as complicated as Ted X and and this consistent branding across these local chapters. But what they have, as well as they have webinars that they run every two weeks, they have content that goes out to their members. So essentially what happens is members pay a fee to join this community. And then there's also a kind of an online clubhouse where people can go and ask questions and people provide feedback into into into those questions and provide answers. So there's a real multitude of they've essentially evaluated what are the things that a marketer typically cares about? Well, they want to grow their skills. They want to increase the quality of their marketing operations, such as improving metrics and how they're being evaluated. They want to network with other marketeers and they want to understand their market better. And they've basically provided all kinds of collaborative community said. That relate to that.
[00:20:21] So how about is there anyone or any areas or situations where communities don't work so well or you advise? You know, you wouldn't kind of take the strategy or, you know, particular things that that can be challenging for certain types of communities that you want to avoid or make sure you're you're steering clear.
[00:20:36] So one of the one of the areas where I've seen community struggle more is, is when you have an industry where people are less inherently connected.
[00:20:47] Right. So, for example, I've worked with a few construction organizations, a combination of unions as well, as well as businesses who are in various types of building construction and general contractors and laborers generally onsite. They are occasionally connected by their phone. They primarily communicate with each other via phone and fax. So if you want to build a global community, people who are connected or even a regional community like let's say people just in the US or just people just in the state. It's very difficult to get those people connected to each other when they're just not really inherently on the Internet very much. It becomes more complicated now. That's becoming less and less of an issue because people again, growing up with younger general contractors, grown up with smartphones in their pockets and it's just becoming part parcel of doing business. But that's been quite challenging at times. So when I've encountered communities such as that were primarily focused on in-person and regional events and then kind of lightweight messaging such as sending people email and providing opportunities to people to respond via email like newsletters and things like that. The good news is that is the reason why communities are growing is because technology is becoming commoditized.
[00:21:54] So more and more people have got a cell phone. It used to be the case that people in developing nations primarily had feature phones that couldn't really do very much to make phone calls and send text messages. That's becoming less of an issue now. More normal people have got like Android phones that can join communities effectively, that can run Web browsers and apps and whatever else. And Internet access is becoming commoditized like it's a gigabyte of data in India is considerably cheaper than it is in the U.K. in the US, for example. So this is opening up a massive market. People are getting connected to the Internet and that in itself is making an opportunity for a much broader audience. And, you know, and it means that if you are, for example, someone listening to this and you're running a services company, you have a fairly small team that's completely maxed out with things that you're working on. You can actually when you structure a community, you can generate value that your team doesn't produce it. So if your team acts as like a facilitator and that gives you a potentially global reach and it's it's pretty phenomenal stuff.
[00:22:46] And tell me a little bit about kind of platform and technology. I mean, there's I mean, I know people do things on Facebook and LinkedIn and there's there's community platforms, you know, software that you use it to get around. This slack is becoming a big, you know, slack channel communities and stuff.
[00:23:00] What what do you kind of see, you know, either generally abstractly or more specifically with tools that you've seen coming out or people that have you. What works? What doesn't? What do you advise?
[00:23:08] So one of the most central elements that one of the most central decisions in building a community is whether people communicate because the community is effectively there's typically a like a clubhouse, like a digital clubhouse where people can spend time. Now, some people have moved to slack for that. Slack is not a good platform for building communities. It's really intended more as an instant messaging tool. And one of the reasons for that is because if I go into a slack channel, I say, hey, Bruce, I've got a question about something. And you say this is the answer. Somebody else could come on in two weeks from now and ask exactly the same question. And you're not online or somebody else isn't online. And they wouldn't be able to find our discussion. Right. They wouldn't be able to consume the value of our interaction. So the very best communities that you find, what they do is when people interact with each other, it gets indexed and then you can find it. Because the way in which people solve problems today, they type a question into Google or the type of question into DuckDuckGo or somewhere else. So I always recommend using platforms that are more like kind of kind of like forums with modern forums. There's a platform called Discourse, which I'm a big fan of. It's completely open source. It's used in a huge range of communities and it means that you can enable people to have conversations with each other.
[00:24:12] They can have interesting discussions. They can ask very, very direct questions and support queries. You can provide news. People can collaborate together on it and all of that stuff. Again, every interaction that you produce on it, it generates index to value that is indexed on the Internet by Google. So that means that thousands and thousands of queries about your community, about your. About how it operates, about your products. They get index and people can find them and consistently with discourse. I see traffic naturally growing as the community grows in terms of participants, the number of kind of window shoppers who are showing up to community without logging in tends to grow as well because it gets indexed. So I'm a big fan of those kinds of platforms like discourse. There are also, you know, I mean those engineering platforms which we can get into if you want to, but like get hub that are very, very popular events. Platforms like Meetup.com and Eventbrite are very popular. The good news is that you can basically start a community today with a whole bunch of free services. It doesn't really cost you anything. And you can make it out of somebodies time, too, just to get started. The key thing is being intentional and then following a recipe. And that's essentially what I put together and people powered.
[00:25:15] I got it. Yeah. So in terms of, you know, managing the community, what are some best practices like? Once you kind of figure out the technology, you've got kind of figured out your strategy in terms of enrolling people, getting people on once they get on.
[00:25:26] What do you need to do to kind of tend to your community and, you know, keep the weeds down and make sure everything is flowering? Graylands don't like. What does that process look like?
[00:25:35] Keep keep your garden healthy. Exactly.
[00:25:38] So the first thing I would always recommend is walking through the approach that I tend to use it with companies is see, first of all, define your value proposition for your individual members and for your company. You define the persona as they went to Target. Let's say I want people to provide support and guidance. I want people to generate content. And then what you do is you put together a set of plans to facilitate that for the next year. And this should be relatively lightweight plans, you know. For example, we want to set up a forum with discourse where people can go and ask questions and they can get help. We're going to integrate that into our Web site. We're going to start a blog where we can generate content and put it out there. We're going to really focus on social media and socializing our content and build growth. For example, start with a very simple set of goals. Identify who are the team members that you want to own those goals. So I have an owner for each one of those and other people will be involved in the facilitation of those goals. But you always want to have one person is ultimately on the hook for delivering them and then focus on a target quarter to get them delivered and then pick a small set of metrics that you want to track for each of them. So for example, with with a discourse forum, I would be tracking the number of page views to determine just overall growth.
[00:26:42] I'd be wanting to track as a metric in that called DOMA you, which is essentially the number of daily active registered users divided by the number of monthly active users. And it gives you kind of a stickiness number which you don't really want to be 20 to 30 percent. So that means that gives you a sense of how many people are generally sticking around and actually participating and then tracking the number of registrations. SEPIC A small number of metrics and part of the skill here is being able to look at those metrics and say what happened, right? So for example, you see a growing number of pages, but it put a kind of year number of registrations is going down. Then it means that the existing content on your forum is getting picked up on the Internet and people are consuming it. But people don't really have a reason to sign up and do something. So you need to give them more of a reason to sign up, give them more, explain the value of doing that. Now, the other thing as well as I would recommend that senior leaders in the business basically say this is an important part of how we do business. It might be an experiment you might want to present. This is we're going to have a community pilot. But what you want to do is set the expectation, your team, that they need to play a role in participating because people don't want to join communities just to talk to a community manager.
[00:27:44] They want to talk to your teams. So they want to talk to your marketing folks, to your consultants. They want to talk to your engineering team, to your product team. They want to talk to your leadership. And part of that, therefore, is building a habit in your team members that they show up every day. Ten, fifteen minutes, they go and check in, answer a few questions, share a few ideas around what they're working on and be engaging. And that takes time. You need to provide them with, you know, how to do that and how to use the platform and what they should be doing. People are going to be nervous about putting a foot wrong and saying something they shouldn't have said publicly. So it requires the executive authority without boots on the ground, support and guidance. And that's often what a lot of companies will have a committee manager providing support for. It takes about sixty six days to build a habit scientifically. So once you get your teams doing this for a couple of months, it then doesn't really feel like work. And what you want to do is you want to earn a browser tab, a weather check in, which is the check, their e-mail and they check their communities as well.
[00:28:37] Jonathan, it's been a pleasure. People now find out more about you, about the consulting you do about your books. What's the best way to get that information?
[00:28:44] Yep. So my Web site is John Erbakan, dot com J-O-N. Oh, Bakan like the delicious meat dot com. The new book is called People Powered How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business Brand and Teams that's available on Amazon and elsewhere. And you can find out more about it on the Web site and the consulting stuff on the Web site, too. And you know, all the social media networks. Luckily, I have such a stupid name that I tend to be Jonno Bacon on all the social media networks apart from Instagram, where someone stole my phone to say it's Jonno baking grab
[00:29:12] So there's the real the real John Ahlberg. And I was to do that.
[00:29:19] I think I'm gonna get an e-mail from a friend of mine saying you're he goes out of chat.
[00:29:23] Exactly. Let's go. I'll make sure all those links are on there in the shadows so people can click through it and get that information. It would have been great.
[00:29:29] I think it's you know, it's a fascinating aspect to building a tribe, building a following, building a community to help grow scaler business. It's a great way, certain businesses. It can really accelerate things. But I think it's even even within your internal teams, you know, particularly companies that are growing more more virtual. Now, you're gonna play a lot of these things, just not annoying.
[00:29:47] So there's so much opportunity out there. And like I say, this is going to be with the future of where businesses are going to be operate. And so it can give you a really firm competitive advantage if done well.
[00:29:57] So, Jana, thank you so much for taking the time today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Bruce.
[00:30:02] You've been listening to Scaling up Services with Business Coach, Bruce Eckfeldt. To find a full list of podcast episodes, download the tools and worksheets and access other great content, visit the website at scalingupservices.com and don’t forget to sign up for the free newsletter at scalingupservices.com/newsletter.