AUTHOR NOTE
This was originally posted on my WordPress blog, which I have deleted after migrating the blog's posts to this website in November 2025. Differences from the original are minimal and include: grammatical improvements throughout the post, text formatting changes, adding in more paragraphs to reduce the wall of text, and rephrasing the pros and cons bullets to fit better in the HTML table.building your community
A new blog series of mine dedicated to sharing out knowledge on building communities - both from 0 > 1 and stepping into an established community. I plan to include posts about setting up a new social space, community standards, and moderating in the near future; today I’d like to talk about how to start building communities in the first place. The hardest part is knowing where to start - understanding the benefits and downsides of existing communities versus building a brand new space can help.
During my time at Microsoft, I became the expert in building and bonding with online communities. I don’t really know exactly how it happened but I befriended people who did the same kind of work I did but for Intune, and I became quite friendly with the Windows Insiders team really early in my role - that’s likely directly related to my notariety as a community expert. I also had great connections on the Xbox Insiders team from my time on Xbox, including one who mentored me on their community building practices for Reddit.
I stood up the Edge product group connection forums to build relationships with the volunteer moderators and independent advisors for Microsoft’s Answers site as the first product group to pilot the effort. This led me to meeting up with the supportability team back over on Xbox and advising them of how to go through creating their own product space on Answers to build relationships with the same group of volunteers.
Before I exited Microsoft, I had advised the .NET team on how to stand up a preview community program. On the Xbox Ambassador team, I helped launch and admin their community Discord server in 2017, and I’ve owned/moderated a few different servers over the years since then. Unofficially, I helped out in two community servers dedicated to Microsoft in both consumer and enterprise spaces for the Edge team, with one server honoring me with a Community Hero role (mostly because of my shitposting skills 😂).
My point is, I’ve been around the community world in a variety of role levels and in this post I want to share some of the pros & cons of stepping into an existing community space as a company representative and standing up an entirely new space for your community to congregate.
Note: I will not be giving advice on how to market these spaces - it’s my honest opinion that word of mouth will help these spaces organically grow with you engaging genuinely and honoring your word as a company - or admitting when you are wrong and being honest about product changes. 🫰🏻
There are two different ways one should build or grow a community: either there is an existing community and you want to establish yourself as a company representative to build brand loyalty, or you are going to build up a new space to nurture a baby community from the ground up. There are pros and cons to both of these, but if you think your product doesn’t have an existing community you may be underestimating your users already - I have found communities pre-formed for unlikely products.
| Existing communities | New communities |
|---|---|
| Pros ~ People are already passionate about the product or company ~ Spaces likely have moderators who are trusted ~ Lots of candid feedback from the past can be dove into |
Pros ~ Unifies the community with the company ~ Direct control over admin and moderation tools for metric tracking ~ Can identify community leaders before promoting them |
| Cons ~ A lot of tech communities don't trust company representatives ~ Moderators or long-time members can have chips on their shoulders ~ Limited access to administrative or moderating tools to the space |
Cons ~ Engineering resources are needed to stand up custom platforms ~ It takes time to earn trust, candid feedback can be harder to gather ~ Need a lot of collaboration across the company to feel authentic |
Even though every role I’ve held so far was me stepping into an existing community, this doesn’t mean that I didn’t look to start new community spaces from scratch. One of the worst things about the Microsoft Edge community was that it was so splintered. We didn’t have one centered place where everyone could connect with the team, and we didn’t really have a way to track our biggest fans across all of the spaces we did have. I worked up a few plans to utilize things like Orbit.love to track conversations or repurpose some of our other spaces to organize the community better, but couldn’t earn dev time to help build the tools needed.
Let’s look further back then. When I worked on the Xbox Support Forums, we spent a long time building an in-house forums customized for the Xbox community because we knew that the Answers forum platform was not the space the community wanted to gather - Answers is a site designed for support, not community building, and we as the community experts recognized moving to that space would be a detriment. It took a lot of resources from another team, but we involved the volunteer moderators during testing phases to help curate the platform to the community they helped maintain.
The suggestion of kicking off a Discord server on the same team was met with resistance. I wasn’t the driver of the plan but supported and assisted taking it on as a social space; the application was specifically built for gamers and has a ton of good features for community building - it just made sense. But the decision makers didn’t understand the whys behind it, mostly because they themselves weren’t a true part of the gaming community they were tasked to own. What I’m trying to illustrate here is even if you have an existing community, there is very likely going to come a time in which you will need to build a new community space anyway.
I love humans. We will gather around a common cause often and the technology we use is no exception. From the company itself to your products, there are often existing communities talking about your work and the business decisions you make. I enjoy finding passionate people who built their community outside of official spaces because then your role will come with a pre-built community. You will often find well-established community members as moderators and there will always be historical chatter about your products - such great data to dig into for customer insights, and if the original posters are still around you have the opportunity to talk to them more about their thoughts.
Highly technical consumers simply don’t trust companies who step into their self-maintained communities; if you don’t know how to speak to that community, you come across as either tone deaf or a marketing drone. Sometimes you’ll get deeper into a community and find that some moderators, or even some long-time members, believe themselves to be gods. It’s good to do your best to work with them to tone down their ego, but sometimes you have to yeet the ones who are not willing to change.
The final hurdle that should be tackled when stepping into an existing community is gaining access to administrative tools and metrics for the established platforms. If you don’t have the proper admin/mod access for a lot of social platforms you have no way to really track how well your community is growing. This requires a really close relationship with the moderators of those spaces to either get access to or help with accessing the data. I find empathy is a top notch skill to build those relationships. 😉
Now, you’re a newer company or have a new product, or maybe you want to build a new space for your community to congregate. What platform you choose is highly dependent on what kind of community you have - you need to identify how your community communicates with each other, this is key to what platform you end up migrating to. Knowing this will help show your community how much you respect who they are and builds loyalty. Whatever you decide on, the best part is that you get to choose one that has the tools for the metrics you want to track for maintaining the health of the community. Some forum platforms have great customization options when it comes to metrics you can track, so really the sky is the limit.
Starting with a baby community offers you the opportunity to form close bonds with early community members, most of whom will end up being your biggest supporters worthy of promoting into community leader roles. However, what platform you choose is often based on how many engineering resources you can get; some platforms require developer skills and you may need to either hire an external vendor or pull an internal resource to build the space if you lack those skills.
imo, this is the best way to start building a community because you get full control of the experience and include early community members in forming a community together - you’re building loyalty (have you recognized a pattern yet?). Going down this path can help to quickly earn the trust of the community and give them the opportunity to share their opinions on shifts early. They see immediately when their opinion is part of shaping a community, but it can still take time to fully earn their trust.
The part of the process that I’ve noticed causes the most delays in launching a community space is the collaboration across the entire company that is required to launch a community platform. In the big tech world, you often need to work with product, engineering, marketing, comms, maybe fold in customer support/success, leadership, and (the hardest group) legal to get full buy-in on a new platform that represents your company. An experienced community program manager can navigate this and get things signed off with minimal compromises, but some newer to the role may need to compromise on their dream state a little. Understanding all of your platform options should help your story around why the company should invest in doing the work.
Investigating how communities function is my favorite thing to do starting out in a new role. I get to dig into new information and form new friendships. My time on both the Xbox and Microsoft Edge teams gave me lifelong friends thanks to how I inserted myself into their communities, and it all starts with data. After you get social data, then you get to dig into platform options, what metrics you can track, and build a community program with set goals all at once.
Next in this series, I’ll detail how to start up communities on various forums platforms, Discord, and Reddit. There’s an aspect of this process I didn’t mention here when you are also advocating for the user voice as a community program manager: social listening. I’ll talk more about the art of this skill in a future post.
Remember to be empathetic during your interactions with both your colleagues and community members, and you’ll find people will work with you instead of against you while building a new community or forging bonds with an existing one.
-🧜🏻♀️🦄