Episode 48: Find calm with B2B Tech Communities with Piper Wilson

In this episode of the Find Calm Here Podcast, I chat with Piper Wilson. With 15 years of experience in the community industry, Piper is a passionate connector who’s excited about bringing people together and helping them feel like they belong.  

Following her experience in a writing community, she has worked as a community manager for several companies and is now a community professional with Grazitti Interactive, a global provider of SaaS (Software as a Service) and Community Management as a Service leveraging cloud, mobile, and social media technologies to reinvent the way you do business. 

Since 2008, Grazitti has been helping companies power their businesses with marketing automation and cloud innovation services, and its enterprise search platform. 

As a global consultancy, they have strategic partnerships with technology pioneers like Marketo, Salesforce, Google, Alteryx, Microsoft, Adobe, Lithium, Optimizely, Acquia, Shopify, and Jive. They combine these platforms with our innovative approaches to provide effective, result-oriented solutions to their clients.

In this episode we discuss: 

8:39 We discuss the differences between managing communities that are focused on business to consumer (B2C) versus business to business (B2B) including in the anonymity people can have in a customer-facing environment and how that conversation varies with community members and can range from light conversations to toxic and potentially harmful conversations with members.

12:15 Piper shares her experience in learning how important it is to ask as many questions as possible when starting out as a community manager. She shares 

17:25 We discuss community platforms including Khoros and Vanilla forums, features and navigation of platforms.  

21:37 Leadership guides a community manager 

23:01 It is common for community managers to feel like introverts and how a community can feed our soul as fellow community-lovers. 

About Find Calm Here - 

Deb Schell is the founder of Find Calm Here LLC, an online consulting agency supporting entrepreneurs, founders, creators, and speakers as they build, launch, and grow a paid online membership. As a community strategist, Deb helps clients find calm in the community-building process through the CALM Method of Clarity, Awareness, Learning, and Motion so that they can lead with energy, confidence, and purpose. She brings together entrepreneurs who feel overwhelmed with building, launching, and growing their paid online membership and offers strategies that can be used on any online platform by offering a great member experience by helping