Using the Orbit Model to Demonstrate Community Value

Bryan Robinson (00:11:46): Hey, Aaron or Katie. Who knows?

Katie (00:11:49): It's Katie.

Bryan Robinson (00:11:52): This says Orbit Bot. Hey, everyone. I see that folks are coming on in. Setting up, it says over in the sidebar. Welcome.

Katie (00:12:02): What would Orbit Bot voice sound like, I wonder.

Bryan Robinson (00:12:07): This is a no fun allowed zone, Katie. No fun allowed. Team no fun allowed.

Katie (00:12:14): No, I don't believe that for a second.

Bryan Robinson (00:12:16): I am curmudgeonly and cranky and just no fun. No fun.

Katie (00:12:22): It's funny, I had never known the word curmudgeon until I joined Orbit. And then there are a few different of us that like to drop that word for fun.

Bryan Robinson (00:12:33): Well, I don't do it for fun because no fun is allowed. However, it is who I am. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Demonstrating Community Value with your Orbit Model. We're going to let some folks stream in. In fact, I'm playing music that I probably shouldn't have on a recording for later. So, you'll know that we're actually going to get started when I pause the music. The music is too loud. There are controls on it for each individual. You're not going to turn it down for everyone. So, if anyone wants to blast the music to themselves, they're absolutely allowed to. I'm going to turn on the ability for everyone to come in. There we go. So, that I don't hear doorbell anymore.

Bryan Robinson (00:13:09): So, I love this platform, Butter. I love it a lot. There's so many cool things we can do with it and I'll take you on a tour of that here in a second. However, when somebody joins the waiting room before an event goes live, there's a doorbell noise. Now, I'm an elder millennial, I like to say. I was born in the '80s, definitely not a digital native like younger millennials and definitely not Gen X in a lot of ways. However, the sound of a doorbell terrifies me. To this day, I hate the doorbell. My house right now, not by choice, just that they didn't have it when we bought it, doesn't have a doorbell, but Butter rings a doorbell for me to let me know that people are in the waiting room. And every time it rang, my heart fluttered a little bit.

Bryan Robinson (00:13:57): I was sitting here for 10 minutes and somebody joined 6 minutes ago and I was like, "Oh, someone's at the door." Anyway, welcome and let me know where you're tuning in from and what job you're doing. So, we do have chat. If you don't see it over on the right hand side of your screen, there's a button on the left. That's the chat button. So, click that. You'll be able to talk to me if you have the chat on the right hand side of the screen at that point. Let me know who you are, where you're turning in from, what kind of work that you do. I love to see Benya here. They were there for most of the day yesterday. Love that. Rara, I know you've been in the workshop so far today.

Bryan Robinson (00:14:35): Also, I'd be curious to know were you in attendance for the full schedule yesterday or at least some parts of it yesterday? What was your favorite talk yesterday? You can also just say that you liked the middle MC the most and that was the best part of your day yesterday. Those of you who weren't there for the middle part of the day, I think that's everyone's favorite part, to be honest. So, yeah. So, we're going to do that over in the right hand side. We're going to have some audience participation throughout this presentation. You don't have to participate. It's just going to be a fuller, richer story if you do. So, no pressure there.

Bryan Robinson (00:15:14): We're going to be talking about community value. We're going to be talking about some things that executives like to talk about. We're going to be talking about philosophy of language. I have a degree in philosophy as it turns out. So, you really can't escape a presentation from me without hearing a little bit about that. The talk is being recorded and is already going for that matter, as well as the eight minutes of me sitting in the room by myself. That was recorded as well. You won't see that later on. Over on the left hand side of the screen, we have a couple additional tools. There is this fun react area, which you can cover over and get a whole bunch of stuff on.

Bryan Robinson (00:15:48): So, when I say something really cool, you can hit the big brain button and you can let me know that I'm amazing. No, I'm just kidding overall. But yes, I see feedback and I love feedback. Anyway, we also have a queue. I don't think we're going to be doing too much on screen conversation. Although we might at the end. I'm hoping that I've timed this properly so that we've got some time at the end that I can do some live Q&A, as well as if you want me to dive into Orbit Dashboard or if you want to hear about how we do things at Orbit. I want to make sure that we've got some time for that. So, you can definitely use that, especially near the end. There's a note feature. I've never honestly used it, but you're welcome to use it. They are private. I won't be able to see those notes.

Bryan Robinson (00:16:28): Yeah. And we're going to do some chat throughout. So, I'm going to give a quick scan through chat right now. We've got community architect. I love that title. We've got advocate at LaughLab in Portland. We've got Poland represent, awesome, community and product manager. Love it. Favorite part of yesterday, getting distracted in the networking rooms. Yeah, that's awesome. I saw when you came back to the stage and were like, "Oh, no, I missed some cool stuff," but you got some cool networking done. So, I like it. Jacob from Detroit, Detroit was already in the house, Jacob. I'm about 20 minutes West of Detroit. I'm in the suburban Detroit area. So, super cool to meet you. Let's see. John O. Bacon, absolutely. That entire panel was great.

Bryan Robinson (00:17:17): Patrick from Orbit tuning in, thank you, CEO of Orbit. Love to see it. Let's see. Director of Developer Relations, Aisha. Hi, Aisha. Aisha was one of our presenters yesterday and I've had the opportunity to interview Aisha in the past and opening a game story in the Detroit area. So, even more Detroit representation. Indonesia, cool. So, instead of just regaling you with what you can read in the chat, I am going to go ahead and pause the music. Again, I do want to make sure that this recording is useful later on. If we decide to post it to YouTube, we're not going to get copyright strikes. That would probably be a bad idea. So, as we go, I'm going to do my best to keep an eye over on chat.

Bryan Robinson (00:17:55): There are some dedicated chat times that I will be focused over on chat, but for the most part, I'm just going to be keeping a gentle eye over there. So, feel free to post your questions. If you post a question and I don't answer, you can ping me with the queue button over there and I'll look over. That's fine too. Anyway, we're going to talk about demonstrating... I was going to say demystifying for some reason, demonstrating community value with the Orbit model today. We're not going to dive too deep into a lot of the nomenclature today.

Bryan Robinson (00:18:23): So, if you've never heard of the Orbit model, don't worry, I'm not going to be using too many words and concepts directly from it. Just the overall feel of creating high gravity communities is really what we're going to go with and then communicating those values back into your executive team.

Bryan Robinson (00:18:39): So, a very quick high level of me, I am Bryan Robinson. I am a Senior Developer Advocate here at Orbit. You can find out more about me @brob on Twitter. I'm at rob.dev on the internet. If you send a message to @OrbitModel on Twitter, I'll see it. I'm not the only one that watches that, but if you want to hear from me on there as well. I have been doing some form of web design and development. I'm a very developer centric person for about 15 years. And in about the last 10 of those, I've been doing some form of technical community building. I started doing things on the side with some local meetup groups in Memphis, Tennessee, as well as nonprofits that work in Memphis, Tennessee around it.

Bryan Robinson (00:19:25): And then past four or five years have been doing developer relations, developer advocacy, and developer education. So, I don't want to bore you with that. You can find out more about me at those links. Hopefully, the slides are all coming through A-okay for everyone over there, but we're going to go ahead and take a look at our overall agenda for today, which there's some Butter things I can do with the agenda, but I'm probably not going to do that very well. Anyway, we're going to be talking about community value. So, we actually need to start with, "Why do we care about communicating community value?" We're going to talk a little bit about the language we use. Language shapes our reality. So, we want to be very clear about that.

Bryan Robinson (00:20:00): We're going to identify some metrics. We're going to create some flywheel. If you were part of the Nexus program yesterday, you'll know that we just launched a new version of orbitmodel.com, which is our open source philosophical idea of what community building can be. And we have a whole dedicated section on impact, which is what we're talking about today and a big part of that is flywheel. You probably heard Josh, our CTO, talk specifically in the keynote about that.

Bryan Robinson (00:20:28): So, if that all sounds good, we're going to practice our audience participation. So, give me a thumbs up over in chat or use one of those cool reacts over on the left hand side and just let me know if this sounds all right. And hopefully, like I said, at the end, we'll have a little bit of time. I'll dive into any questions you've got. I love how it pops in those big graphics. That's super fun. So, yeah, hopefully, some Q&A at the end, maybe some live demos at the end as well.

Bryan Robinson (00:20:53): So, first and foremost, who cares, right? Am I right? Why do we care? We all know that this makes a lot of sense, but why should we care about communicating it? Well, here's the deal, right? Community is so hot right now. It seems like everyone either wants a community or has one and is trying to ramp it up. And every CEO in the world is realizing the power of community and we've also realized this might not be a good thing. It's a great thing, right? We all want jobs. We all want funding for all the different activities we're going to do, but it's super dangerous when your CEO is focused, right? Hey, community team. Hey, DevRel team. Let's go, community. Woohoo!

Bryan Robinson (00:21:43): So, I have two words to describe why this is dangerous and why we need to really care about communicating the value. And that is mismatched expectations, right? They're super real. For every CEO, like Patrick, who might still be in chat today, that super gets community, right? Obviously, Patrick is the CEO of a community platform here, but there are at least 10 more for each Patrick's of the world that think of DevRel and community in a very, very specific way. Marketing, excuse me. Oh, sorry. I just had a little something stuck in my throat there. So, when we do activities that meet our expectations but don't necessarily meet the expectations of our leadership, we fight a losing battle.

Bryan Robinson (00:22:30): And when we get metrics handed to us by leadership without any input from us, we fight a losing battle. And as humans, when we don't talk to each other and communicate, we're losing a battle and that's life lesson, right? Not even just community building life lesson, but life lesson as a whole, right? So, to fix mismatched expectations, we need to speak the same language. And to do that and to get on the same page, we're going to go somewhere that I don't think many community presentations go and that's 20th century philosophy and linguistics.

Bryan Robinson (00:23:07): And we're going to talk about not the friendliest of guys, but definitely a great thinker of the earliest 20th century named Ludwig Wittgenstein, very prominent philosopher and linguist in the early 20th century. In his seminal work, which is called The Philosophical Investigations, he claimed that in most cases, meaning is use. So, what he meant by that was that we realize now that there is no platonic ideal of a term that the meaning of terms is derived by our use of the terms. So, in theory, this means that how we use the words we use is as important as the words we choose. Unfortunately, this also means that we need to have context, right? If we don't have context, we're going to be talking about different things.

Bryan Robinson (00:24:00): So, to understand where he was coming from, you have to understand that leading up to this, we thought of language as a series of objective pointers to reality, right, to some other worldly ideal of something. So, there's actually, I said, platonic ideals earlier. I don't mean anything other than from Plato. Literally, from the Greek philosopher Plato, he had a concept that was basically when I say the word triangle, I'm actually referencing this thing in this other realm, which is the ideal form of a triangle. That sounds a little ridiculous nowadays in part because of early 20th century philosophy saying, "No, no, that doesn't really make sense."

Bryan Robinson (00:24:44): So, Wittgenstein posited that if I were to shout water, right, we all roughly know what water is, liquid, clear. Hopefully, you can drink it, all sorts of stuff like that. But the purpose of this utterance can't be known without additional context, right? Without rules. And so, am I answering a question? Did you ask what I want to drink and I said, water? Am I dying of thirst and I need water to survive? Am I issuing an order to go get me water? Without any additional knowledge, you can only guess. And that's why Wittgenstein like to also talk about language games.

Bryan Robinson (00:25:22): The rules of these games are the definitions and the syntax of language. The rules clarify the use, which as I said before, meaning is use. So, therefore, rules, the syntax, the definitions clarify meaning, right? So, what this means for us is that if we don't define our terms, then our leadership is playing a game of checkers while we're playing a game of chess. Sure, they're both taking part on the same board, but the rules are different, the pieces are different, the moves are different.

Bryan Robinson (00:25:55): So, let's warm up some more audience participation. I see there's some good stuff happening in chat already. I like to have the theoretical conversation. So, I'd love seeing that already, but I want to know, what do you and your executive leadership think community is? So, one answer for both of those. I have a timer set up somewhere. I'm going to see if I can find that button, but basically, I want to know what do you think community is and not what you hope your leadership thinks, but actually, what they think and what they've shown you either by saying it or by the actions they take.

Bryan Robinson (00:26:30): So, let's put a couple minutes on the clock and we're going to in chat type in some definitions. And we get some nice little music in the background while this goes on. Yeah, content is king. Yes. Context is queen, absolutely. Executive leadership thinks how we use customers to grow our reach. That does sound problematic. Community is not your users. I love that. That's absolutely the case. Daniel is talking, a community is a well-defined unit of culture of shared attitude. That's great. That's an amazing definition. Community is not your audience. We're going to come back to that, Ash. Great point there. Think about people sharing information and experiences. Absolutely, I think shared experience can form a community even without creating a community.

Bryan Robinson (00:27:28): Community is the feeling of meaningful belonging. Yeah, definitely, I can put in that way. Several users are typing. I love that. We got 50 seconds. Keep them coming in. Shared purpose, community should be togetherness. Also, don't forget, I'd love to see if you have an executive team, what you think those execs think your community is. It sounds like a lot of frustrating conversations, absolutely. Community is people who care about each other. Absolutely. Share things in common, helping one another, cheerlead each other and build each other up. I like that definition one. That's great. Giving more than you get, we are going to talk about giving more than you get, because I got a whole section of this presentation. I love that you brought it up.

Bryan Robinson (00:28:21): For my leaders, community means growth. I love that. We're going to talk about that. Here's the thing about that. And I love that you said that. I changed it, but it's still a work in progress. I was actually having a great conversation earlier today. Everything we do is a series of experiments. Even established communities are still looking to learn and still looking to find different ways of engaging with each other and doing the right thing and creating value for each other and all those good things. So, it's always a work in progress. Life is a work in progress. All right. So, I saw a lot of great things, a lot of things that I totally agree with. I'm going to go ahead and do my own little line up here. We've got our execs and we've got our advocates.

Bryan Robinson (00:29:09): I'm going to say, I like to talk about DevRels and dev advocates. I like to talk about community advocates as well. So, if you're advocating for a community and advocating to a community, you are in my mind, a community advocate, community manager, community builder. All those terms roll up for this term for me today. So, this is how I have seen and heard executives talking about community in the past. I've experienced this to a degree. And it's an audience that consumes our content and shares it, signs up, activates in the product. And yeah, I think there were a couple points that these are our content providers and community can be those things, but that's not the point that we know, right?

Bryan Robinson (00:29:47): The point that we know is that a group of people sharing a common goal. In DevRel, I like to think of it as learning and building. And we do that and we help them with our knowledge and our content and one-on-ones and whatever else we can seek to provide value for, right? And I hope that community in general is doing that as well. So, this is where I'm at with it. And I think it lines up to a few different bullet points here. Execs are looking for what we would call value capture. They are definitely thinking in terms of funnels, in terms of views, in terms of users. Some of those things, I definitely saw in chat as we went along.

Bryan Robinson (00:30:25): Advocates, we like to think of things in terms of, "What value can we create for our community? Are we seeing a gravity of our community? Are we seeing people wanting to stay around, be sticky in our community? Are we getting engagement on the value we're providing? Do we have members in our community, not users in our product?" I think I saw that too, right? Community is not users in the product and I really like that as well. So, these are two very different games. And like I said, mismatched expectations are a big problem when we're looking to get buy-in for what we want to do. So, how are we going to line up and all get on the same page, all be playing the same game?

Bryan Robinson (00:31:05): Well, we can insist on people using our language. We can make all of our execs go read orbitmodel.com. They should. That'd be great. But for the most part, I don't think that's a winning strategy. I think a winning strategy is to get on the same page where they're at and start winning them over via the language that they use. So, if we're going to do that and we're going to use our tools and methodology but their framework for reporting the value, we need to talk about a concept that a lot of companies really like and some people shy away from. And that is OKRs, objectives and key results. It's actually a great framework for aligning a big team on multiple team goals. So, you may have some of these. If you don't, you probably have some other goal setting framework.

Bryan Robinson (00:31:51): And I think that all these are important. So, figure out where you sit in your organization, but let's dive in on this framework specifically, on OKRs. And they are comprised of two different parts, right, the O and the KR. An objective is a big corresponding set, right? So, there's maybe two to five. I think some best practices are like, "Don't go all the way to five. Don't only have two." So, I don't know, let's call it three for the sake of argument. And these are big things that you want the entire team or the entire company to move towards. They're big goals. And those goals can then be broken up into key results. And these are the ones that typically had the concrete metrics assigned to them and they're typically what each team starts working around.

Bryan Robinson (00:32:34): So, let's take a look at a quick example. A big objective, especially maybe an early stage startup or even a mid-stage big company, we want to increase revenue. I mean, I know. It feels a little gross, right? But revenue pays the bills, you all. It's okay to feel a little gross, but we need to recognize that this is actually where the company is looking to go. I mean, insert capitalistic aside here, but here's the deal. OKRs are your best friend. I promise. So, let's see where this goes. So, if we have this one big objective, we can then break it up into key results. I'm glad that made you laugh a lot. That's how I feel sometimes. I've had OKRs in the past and they've been like, "I have to cover up a little bit," anyway.

Bryan Robinson (00:33:31): So, key results for an objective of increase recurring revenue. Maybe we've got self-service customers, right? This is a small number, but for an example, 100 new self-served customers this quarter. Maybe we want to see 20 people go from our mid-tier plan to our high tier plan and maybe we want to also bag five new sales whale, right? So, we could have five new enterprise customers there. So, this doesn't feel community related, right? This is sales, maybe marketing. It's not community, but these things can also correspond to the things that we're doing. And the things that we're doing can inform them in really strong ways and those ways are how we define our value inside of an organization that has to make money.

Bryan Robinson (00:34:25): There are other things we can do as well, but let's take this OKR as an example and let's do a little bit more audience participation. So, let us talk about these three key results, right? More self-serve customers, new plan upgrades, and new enterprise customers. I want you to take a moment and think about what you do and what you want to do inside your community everyday responsibilities that may funnel up to one of these key results. So, post them over in chat. I'm going to put a couple minutes on the clock again, if I can find my tools properly here. We'll move on to this section and we'll start a timer. And what are the activities that you do already? Not new things that roll up into this. I'll put those key results back on. Let's see.

Bryan Robinson (00:35:21): That make new dashboards for them. They align with three different OKRs. I love that phrase there. I like that a lot. That makes a ton of sense. You can help collaborate with marketing and sales. Mike, I'd love to know what activities specifically do you have in that. I'm being told that you can't hear me while the music is playing. I don't think I can mute the music for everyone. Better docs or video or blog with new customers onboarding product, absolutely. Education, education, education. Empowering customers to support others. In my work with community manager teams, I always tell them define the terms as results.

Bryan Robinson (00:37:02): I truly believe every community is unique in so many ways. We got some overarching themes that we can talk about, but everyone can have different takes. Programming that create content. That sounds awesome. Enterprise, definitely, more networking with developers, make companies more engaged, potential lead to a big sale. Yes, yes, yes. All right. Timer says ding, so let's keep moving. Yeah. So, I like everything I heard. So, some things that I've jotted down. We want more folks using the platforms. Hopefully, you also have a free tier, right? So, we can create useful or insightful or fun demos to get people in the door, right? So, I don't remember who it was.

Bryan Robinson (00:38:23): Maybe Warren said creating better educational materials, blog posts, et cetera. Absolutely on that. Want 20 people to upgrade? We need to do better, not just educating those early users, but educating deeper users, educating on features that are deeper into the product, features that allowed people to get so much value out of the product that they need to upgrade in a lot of ways. So, we do office hours at Orbit in our Discord, but we could also do potentially something like a power user hour, right? So, not for, "I'm exploring the platform." More for, "I need in depth. Let's go as deep down a rabbit hole as possible hour." You want to get five new enterprise customers.

Bryan Robinson (00:39:08): We need to build community champions inside those organizations. These champions are going to help close deals much faster than what sales can do on their own. So, a lot of things that we're already doing, we can go ahead and attribute up to an OKR that ostensibly doesn't seem to have anything to do with community, but we make it happen. I think it was in the panel yesterday and it might have been Mary Thengvall talking about it, about how we need to basically say... When layoffs are happening, we want all the other teams to be like, "Oh, no, you can't touch community. Community brings so much value to us as individual teams that no, don't touch them. Don't touch them all." So, let's see.

Bryan Robinson (00:39:57): Next up, I want to mention and this was mentioned earlier a little bit with executives view community as a place to extract value, to capture value. And you're not wrong to think that this is a very extractive process. Remember, overall, what we want to do is create value and then we can measure the value by saying, "Look at all this value we extracted. We didn't extract it. We created value." So, for me, I think that we need to think about again, value capture and value creation. And those two things line up pretty good, right? So, value capture is what our organization wants to get out the community.

Bryan Robinson (00:40:40): When you think about it, think about things like signups, maybe to a plan, maybe to an email, paid plans, blog posts, getting blog posts in the door like content creation, ticket deflection, I heard in chat earlier, social sharing. All these things that are very much pushing our agenda out there, right? And then with value creation, as community builders and community advocates, it's what we do on a regular basis. It's the stuff that honestly feels natural to us. And we create value in the community because it's just an innate thing, right? But it's also going to allow for when the organization needs to extract value, we've provided so much value in the beginning.

Bryan Robinson (00:41:19): So, we like to talk about value creation as knowledge, right? Education, blog post, knowledge-based videos, curation, not just curation of our content, but content that is just useful to everyone, right? Promotion of members, it's actually something that I don't think is talked about nearly enough. You have a community member that is doing new cool things on your platform or even outside your platform, raise them up. Use your platform to raise their platform. Creating inspiration, doing Q&A, doing demos, writing tips, working towards collaborative work with the community, lots of things that we can do to create value for our community.

Bryan Robinson (00:41:57): So, you might have noticed this list is longer, right? It's longer than the first list and that's because we want to make sure that we're creating more value than we seek to extract. And honestly, I've built a template for this. It's super early days and it's in Airtable. And you're welcome to give it a try and I'll walk you through it a little bit. You can go to brob.dev/ratio and there's an Airtable template that you can work from. It's a very like back of the napkin ratio work here, but this is the final view that you get out of it after you put in what you want to get out of your community and what the activities you are to putting into your community.

Bryan Robinson (00:42:37): So, the final score that you get out of this is a value creation score, a value capture score, and then a ratio of some sort inside of that. I like to think that a 3.0 ratio, a three X ratio is the minimum of what you want to do. So, what you can do is start with what you want to extract, because this is the dirty segment, right? This is the segment that we don't really want to talk about, but is again important for communicating our results, right? So, list out all of the things that you know that your company wants to extract from the community. We talked about value capture and value creation. Value capture just sounds so nice. It doesn't sound bad, right?

Bryan Robinson (00:43:21): Value extraction, that sounds painful and terrible. Maybe we'll do less of it if we think of it as some terrible extraction. So, each activity or each thing that you want your community to do is assigned a value. This is where we have this one to five scale. A value of one is something that's of minimal value. A value of five is super high value, right? And then there's also an impact score. This is on a slightly smaller scale impact. Originally, I said, this is the time I think I called it, but I want to make sure that I also account for money, because one of these things is sign up for a paid plan, right?

Bryan Robinson (00:44:01): So, the impact on that is a monetary impact as opposed to a time impact. But that also is from one to three as well. So, a self-serve purchase doesn't take much time, but it costs money. Engaging in Discord or in a live chat platform, it's typically pretty low impact. It takes a minute maybe, but it can be medium value. It can model behavior. It can create engagement. Entering a question in Discord or in a forum like discourse, maybe closer to an impact of two, but have a higher value. And you can see then this does a little division work and gives you a value to impact ratio on the right hand side. These all roll up into that first page to be what we're going to end up dividing things by. And then like the member activities, we also have a team activities page.

Bryan Robinson (00:44:49): And again, note the length of this list. The length of this list is longer. And hopefully, the value of this list is longer as well. So, we have the team activities. And then this time, I've broken it out by both value and reach, right? I want to provide value to everyone, but I want to provide high value to as many people as possible, but I don't want it to be necessarily something where I need to go viral, right? I don't want huge reach and no value, which is what viral thing would be. That would give me a relatively low score. Whereas also, I don't want to spend so much time helping just an individual that I lose sight of the fact that I need to be providing value to the community, not to just all the individuals in the community.

Bryan Robinson (00:45:34): So, I put these side by side. They multiply together to equal something and then the effort is the same. In this case, I think of it as a time period. So, does this take half a day's work, more than a day's work, a week's worth like per quarter or per time period that you run through this? And the goal of this is probably a quarterly framework, right? You run through this on a quarterly basis. That's oftentimes when we get new OKRs. It's oftentimes when we're planning our events for what's happening. And then yeah. So, attribution to OKRs is usually the tricky part. Absolutely.

Bryan Robinson (00:46:09): Also, in this area as well, there's an OKR section as well. Yeah, I'm super scientific. They multiply together to equal something. It's been about months since I put this Airtable together. There's a formula. It's in the Airtable. They multiply together. They become the numerator and then the effort becomes the denominator and then we get a value to effort. Yeah, exactly. I have a degree in philosophy, you all, and I work in development. I make computers do all this work for me and I talk about humanities instead, anyway. And to that point, I actually have a paragraph down here in my script, right? None of this is exactly scientific, but it's meant to be flexible for your team, right?

Bryan Robinson (00:46:52): So, once you've got your goals, then you can start mapping these things to the goals and then you can figure out, "What are the high value, high reach activities that I can provide to my community?" And then when I look at the extraction, when I look at that tooth extraction, I think as I saw earlier, yeah. Warren's saying, "Imagining a bad trip to the dentist." Then I can say, "I want these things, but I am providing this amount of value." I mean, I think you should get five times value. I think that'd be the way to go. So, this is a work in progress, right?

Bryan Robinson (00:47:22): I would love to see you all run through it and then let me know in the Orbit Discord, on Twitter, wherever it is, "Hey, did this work? Hey, the math is totally awful. Don't ever do math like this. This isn't statistically relevant. What are you doing?" All these are valid pieces of feedback that I will accept with some measure of humility, but yeah, I think this is just a good brainstorming framework. As you go through your activities, make sure that you are keeping your value capture to creation ratio above a 3.0. So, capture to creation lined up, always important, no matter what. So, let's talk about metrics. And at the same time, I also want to talk about flywheels.

Bryan Robinson (00:48:05): So, Josh mentioned that the new Orbit model at orbitmodel.com has an entire section about flywheels. And what a flywheel is... Oh, yeah. What the heck is one of those things? ... honestly, a physics machine that allows me to do a small amount of work and create a bigger amount of motion coming out of that. So, you can think about it in terms of this GIF. You can also think of it in terms of a stationary bike. When you pedal that small set of pedals, you get the front wheel moving. And when you stop pedaling, that front wheel keeps going for some amount of time, right? So, that's what we want to do. That's going to help us create long-term value and repeatable value inside of our organization.

Bryan Robinson (00:48:47): So, from a business perspective, we want to engineer a process by which the outcomes of those actions are the inputs for the next round. So, we're going to talk about that with some examples. In terms of storytelling, though, these are your bread and butter, right? These are how you're going to talk to executives and say, "Hey, look, when we do these things, it's going to have this exponential increase in X." So community is cross-functional. So, when we define X, now, we're talking algebra and I've already said, I'm a philosopher and a developer, right? This is no good. We are cross-functional when we define that X. Very rarely do we want to set a goal and set a KR in our OKRs, which are about things like community growth, right?

Bryan Robinson (00:49:33): Growing community members is one of those things that might get handed down to us, but if we grow our community too fast and without the strongest bonds, we're not going to have a good time. Aaron, one of our community advocates, talks about a previous place where they had Facebook ad for their community. It was done out of spite and it did very bad as you can probably imagine, getting people in that weren't really meant to be there. So, we don't want that. So, we want to align our metrics, align our flywheel with other teams. Again, we're going to get buy-in by working with these other teams, by convincing these other teams of our indisputable value.

Bryan Robinson (00:50:14): Yup, Aaron in the Orbit Admin Account. Sorry, my bad. You talk about it all the time. So, I'm going to use it too. It's okay. All right. So, let's start with marketing. It's probably what we are closest to, whether we are inside the marketing team or whether we are alongside it or anything like that. Oftentimes again, our leadership thinks of what we are as a function of marketing. So, we might as well start there and figure out what we want around this. So, audience participation again. I'm not going to say a timer, because I heard that the music was too loud on that.

Bryan Robinson (00:50:48): I have timer for each of these, but we're just going to spitball over in chat about the numbers that we care about that... Oh, that was too early really. ... that line up with what marketing cares about, right? So, marketing is tasked with getting oftentimes as many eyeballs as possible on the product. They're often in the beginning of a sales funnel. They're always looking for new content. They're always looking for more eyeballs. So, what are some metrics? I just advanced it. So, you've got cheat sheet. What are some metrics that your marketing team cares about, assuming you have a marketing team? But if you're at a product company, you probably do.

Bryan Robinson (00:51:29): So, one minute on the clock with no music playing, because I can't easily pull that up right now. What are things that your marketing team cares about? Brand awareness, absolutely. Signups, definitely. That's how they prove their worth, right? Their marketing funnel has led to signups. Email campaign open rates, yeah, that's a good one. I like that. That's the whole eyeball thing, right? I care about views. Therefore, I care when people open my emails. Money, sure, absolutely. I mean, don't we all love money? Money and leads, absolutely. That can be a thing. On input, as you're onboarding, funnel generating a smooth process, not a large volume process, a smooth one. I like that.

Bryan Robinson (00:52:08): On output, is the community falling in the right place in the marketing journey and are they being followed up upon? Absolutely, that followed up upon is a great piece too. And then yeah, secondary, after those things are considered, then we talk about volume. That's definitely on our side, right? We don't want that volume at the wrong point. For us, in addition to biz dev is talent acquisition. I don't have it in these slides, but at orbitmodel.com, one of our flywheel is completely dedicated to hiring, because the community is an amazing place to hire from. Not going to talk about today, but definitely something that is worthy of talking about.

Bryan Robinson (00:52:46): And then as you all continue putting things over in chat, I do want to make sure that we keep things moving. Things that I have definitely seen, again, eyeballs, lots of content views, top of funnel growth, getting as many people into that trial area as possible, external reach, content creators and partners. They want more people creating stuff with whatever the platform is, with whatever the technology is. Let's see. Perception to prospects of what's on the inside, yeah, that makes a lot of sense too. I like that one. And then when we look at it, what are some metrics that we care about that might flow up to this, right?

Bryan Robinson (00:53:26): So, if we're caring about views, we probably care about our total active members, right? That's something that you can get in Orbit, but you can also get just by doing a combination of everything in your community, right? We don't really again want this vanity metric of size, of growth, but we can throw this out there and say, "Here are our total active members. I don't want the 30,000 members that have at some point done something in my Orbit. I want the people who are currently active."

Bryan Robinson (00:53:57): So maybe I've got a community of 30,000 people total, but on a monthly basis, I've got a community of active people of 1,000 people, right? We want to grow the active community. We want to talk about the active community. We want to make sure that members are attending marketing events. Some of those marketing events need to be of the right value, right? We want to make sure that those marketing events are the high value events that we want to give to our community, but we also want to drive people there because we want that to be where they end up. We also want to make sure that members are attending community events. The bigger our community events can be, the more again audience we have there.

Bryan Robinson (00:54:41): And then we also want to find champions. We want to find content creators. So, again, if we build our active community, get people regularly engaged, that's going to float to these things, right? That's going to be something that is very, very important long term. Again, we want to activate these people. Actually, a great example of this is the event that is currently going on right now, right? Nexus is a user conference, right? It's not a community member conference. It's a user conference. So, that's a marketing activity, right? That's a marketing event.

Bryan Robinson (00:55:15): The dashboard I made in Orbit to track our registrations also showed our Orbit levels for the people signing out. About 50% were Orbit level fours, which in our nomenclature, the people exploring the community, right? But we also had about 50% in Orbit levels one and two. So, our community was going there and I could communicate that to the marketing team. I could say, "Hey, the community, which is actively engaged with us in general, is also coming." And that's a great thing and that's a great one-to-one relationship. I brought you an audience from the community. You're welcome. Moving on. And then what are some activities that we can do to increase these things, right?

Bryan Robinson (00:55:56): If we want more views, we need to create more space in our community, more events, more content, more value being added that give the ability to have these views. And it has to be of high value because low value content brings in low value eyeballs, right? And then we also want to have external events, go out to conferences and talk to people there. We want to talk about community curation to have people sharing our content. So, maybe we have our own community newsletter or maybe we're looking at things that are... Uh-oh, let's see. Oh, okay. You can hear me. Good, good. Sorry that you're struggling hearing. Again, this will be recorded. You can always come back and hear this and I'm basically reading right now.

Bryan Robinson (00:56:49): And then we want to create value for the people who are doing the things that we want them doing. So, if you're creating content, I want to promote the heck out of you. I want to give my platform to you as a content creator and boost that up. And then we can create a flywheel around these things. So, if we've got a UGC, which is actually a terrible phrase for a community event, right, a user-generated content flywheel. We've got somebody like community member, Peggy, writes an article on new feature. That article gets shared in the organization's newsletter. Again, we're providing value to Peggy at that point as she's providing value to us. And we also share it in the Discord. So, we're giving her our platform.

Bryan Robinson (00:57:26): And then Neil, who is a community member, sees the article and learns about cool new feature. Neil appreciates that value he gets from the article and wants to write about another feature. And now, he knows that the community team wants to boost him up as well. So, then Neil shares an article in the community and talks to the community team and gets featured in the newsletter. And then Neil's article is featured in the newsletter and the community member Walter sees that. And then we go back to step three, right? So, it creates this motion that encourages folks to do these things that we're hoping to see them do. And in the end, that's what we're here to do, but we're also here to boost people up and that's why I like to focus on this one, right?

Bryan Robinson (00:58:06): We boost the community content creators up so that they have their own platform as well. Another marketing flywheel that we could talk about is word of mouth sharing. Again, getting eyeballs and getting trustworthy eyeballs on content, right? So, let's say a new feature gets released. Instead of just blasting it out to everybody, we could send an email to all of our core community members, all of our Orbit level ones with details, easy promotion stuff, calls to action like, "Hey, share this out," and then not all of them, but some of them will do that.

Bryan Robinson (00:58:41): And let's say, Peggy again, who's one of our great Orbit level ones, shares it to her Twitter following. Many of our Orbit levels two and three follow Peggy, because they appreciate the content that she puts out and they see the post. They read the post and then they share it. And by doing that activity, some of those level twos become level ones, because Orbit levels are based on activities in a lot of ways. And so, as they keep doing this, they become a level one. And then the next time we have a feature release, the level ones have grown and this process begins again. So, again, this speaks to the eyeballs. It speaks to the metrics that we don't necessarily care about, but showcases how the use of community and the use of community done well can go forward there.

Bryan Robinson (00:59:24): So, we're running low on time. So, I'm going to cut audience participation a little short, but feel free as we go along to talk about metrics, to talk about activities that you can do around sales in chat, but we are low on time. So, sales. In chat, what are metrics that your sales team cares about? What are metrics that you can tie your community stuff to from sales and then what are some activities as well? So, I mean sales want sales, you all. I'm not going to sugarcoat that. More money coming in, right? But to get sales, they need form leads and they need champions inside of companies and they need all these sorts of things. So, what we can look at here and there's a whole bunch of more metrics that they end up caring about, right?

Bryan Robinson (01:00:03): They want lots of leads, both warm and cold. They want company champions and they want active prospects. And all these things are things that we can care about too in the end. Yeah. So, again, I'm running low on time. So, I'm moving things along a little faster. So, here's some things that are actual things that we can talk about, right? A lead can also be considered an Orbit level one and two. Whether or not they're paying money into the product or not, they are active participants in the community and they're getting tons of value out of us to get to that point, right? Leads can also be users in the community. What we have at Orbit is a tag inside of our Orbit workspace. Whenever you sign up for Orbit, you also come into our community workspace and have a tag of user on you.

Bryan Robinson (01:00:53): So, that's how I can also tell about Nexus that about 50% of our registrations were both community members and users of the product. So, super good to have for your sales team as well. So, you could see active members in the community that are also users of the product. And again, that's that upgraded path. Champions inside of org, so you could take a look at active members inside target organizations. So, inside of an Orbit workspace, we've got that organizations tab. You can see all the organizations possible and you actually have your sales team produce a list. These are the ones I care about and then we can talk about how we can view those as well.

Bryan Robinson (01:01:30): Prospects, we want to take a look at the number of activities from organizations. We want to take a look at the number of members from organizations to do that. We can also talk about having members themselves tagged as prospects inside Orbit and then we can also watch their community journey as well. And then community activities that can bolster these things, office hours are a great opportunity. I like to talk about the Magic Leah when I talk about how leads come from office hours. Leah is one of our account execs at Orbit and we host office hours every single week in our Discord, every Wednesday at 11:00 AM, not today, but most Wednesdays.

Bryan Robinson (01:02:08): And Leah is there almost every week and she's a great presence in that. She's one of my favorite account executives of all time in 15 years of doing various things like this. She understands community. She's just there to provide value when she can. But a few weeks ago actually, we had a sales offsite. So, Leah wasn't there at the beginning and we had a question actually come up that was perfect for Leah. About 30 minutes in, somebody asked a question about... I think it was an integration thing or maybe it was something about our paid plans coming up. And I was like, "That's a great question. I don't have an answer for you. I really wish Leah were here because she would be the perfect person to talk to about that."

Bryan Robinson (01:02:50): And legitimately, 30 seconds later, Leah appeared. I didn't go reach out to her and say, "Hey, there's a question." She just happened to finally get free from what she was doing at the offsite and she came in. She was able to answer their question and then they reached out to her to continue the conversation later. So, she didn't hard sell or anything like that. She just let the person come to her later on and then was able to continue that. I don't know if that person has become a customer, but I think it's a good value that we provided in that as well. And that Leah happened to just magically appear like that, which was mind blowing to be honest.

Bryan Robinson (01:03:25): We also want to make sure that we're keeping an eye on active monitoring of our community and seeing people who are growing into those leads and seeing if there are people who are asking specifically to talk to sales in some way like, "Hey, how do I figure out this thing that's a paid feature?" I can send you over there. We also want to have a Q&A program and make sure that we're nurturing people as they come in and having lots of help available. And then we want to also have lots of one-on-ones with our champions to help them become the best internal team possible at a company. And then to talk about one quick flywheel here, which is the partner champion flywheel.

Bryan Robinson (01:04:01): Again, all these flywheels are on orbitmodel.com and I apologize for talking so fast now but I do want to get through these. So, developer Peggy tries the product. She joins the Discord community. Then we have community builder Buzz who nurtures Peggy's community journey through events, through community support, through engagement, through talking, through one-on-ones, through whatever is part of the activities this community does. Peggy's organization gets marked as a prospect by one of our account executives, Alan, not a real person. And then based on the love score that Peggy has generated on her own, she's marked as an internal champion.

Bryan Robinson (01:04:36): So, Buzz in a respectful way can introduce Peggy to Alan, especially when Peggy's like, "I really want to use more features. I'm having problems getting buy-in," right? Then we can send Peggy over to Alan. Peggy then helps Alan navigate the complexities of the internal politics at large corporation X and then on is able to close and onboard Peggy's team. Peggy's teammates don't join this partner champion flywheel. They go to another flywheel that's the new customer flywheel. That could be us getting these people into the community. It could be us getting them into a deeper dive flywheel to learn about new features. Lots of great things like that as well.

Bryan Robinson (01:05:15): And then real fast, I want to always talk about caveats with sales. You need to train your sales organization, right? They need to be respectful, but they also need to be active in the community, right? They shouldn't be out there hard selling in the community, but they should be providing that value to the community. So, that when somebody in the community needs something, they feel comfortable reaching out to sales. That itself is a huge galaxy brain outcome. Community member X reached out to account executive Y, amazing, that gets so much stuff done, right?

Bryan Robinson (01:05:48): And also, for non-community sales, the sales team does need to onboard the customers to the community. The community is a huge value-add, as well as a way for us to keep all these flywheel in motion as well. Do you use a flow chart to make sure flywheels are cooperating and not interfering with one another? That's an absolutely great question. It's something that I need to think about. We don't have any idea of flow charts, but I could definitely see that as a concern, right? You want to make sure that sales champion flywheel is not interfering with marketing flywheel, which is not interfering with customer success flywheel, which is another one that we've got.

Bryan Robinson (01:06:28): I'm going to go ahead and open the floor to questions and say that this content is available on orbitmodel.com for this flywheel. But basically, this is talking a lot about ticket deflection, talking about growing advocates inside of companies, getting community content created, as well as how to reward folks for doing the activities that help everyone else in the community as well. So, ticket deflection is the flywheel for this one. A product user comes into the community with a question. It's answered pretty much immediately by a community member. Catherine is then publicly given positive signal. And again, we can also talk about the other reward mechanisms there too, like swag points and all sorts of great stuff like that. But if nothing else, the human connection's important there.

Bryan Robinson (01:07:15): Conrad then remains in the community, hopefully is presented with additional value from the community builders. And then when Quentin asks the question in the community, Conrad is there to answer and Conrad then gets the positive signal and the flywheel starts again, hopefully, with Quentin as well. I don't currently have this linked, but I bet you, I can get this linked super fast and posted, but absolutely. Oh, I also have some slide, but let's talk about questions. What questions do you have while I grab a share link? Viewer for anyone with link, copy, and we'll share this out later as well I'm sure.

Bryan Robinson (01:08:01): Let's see. Scrolling up real fast, priority flow chart. We've been talking about. Absolutely, it's an important thing. I use one of the data flows across the value journeys and it was always a big problem within the Orbit Model. I'm building now for my own audience, but have ideas on how this should look. Yeah, we don't have something like that, but absolutely. And then let's see. Anything you can share on attribution? So, that's going to be a cultural thing as much as anything else, right? Attribution is super important. I think you can use platforms like Orbit to showcase that journey and make sure that you're always documenting every step along the way.

Bryan Robinson (01:08:42): As you have these flywheels, if the outcome is a member does X, you can tag those members, right? And then you can generate a report that is members tagged X did these activities and then these activities could correspond to answering questions in the community for deflection. They could correspond to entering the lead funnel. They can correspond to creating user content. I love all the animals that have popped up in this slide deck immediately. That's amazing. So, yeah. So, I think attribution is what metrics you're looking at and which flywheels and then finding ways inside your platforms to document that.

Bryan Robinson (01:09:20): And that's oftentimes in an Orbit workspace, it's going to be with some of our reporting. It's going to be with some of our tagging and with our activity types in a lot of ways, because these are activities we want to see. One-on-one meetings with sales folks should be documented in Orbit, right? Work with your sales staff, have them put their member calls inside Orbit. You can figure out some integrations with Calum there or just have them go at an activity. Yeah, lots of things like that. And again, it's a collaborative effort. All of this is a communication, right? And again, to go back to the first, when we don't communicate with each other, we lose the game.

Bryan Robinson (01:09:58): So, all of this is to be taken as a general framework that doesn't take the place of communication. It just hopefully helps us communicate with the other teams in a way that they understand and are looking for as well. We are absolutely losing the room soon. Thank you so much everyone for being here. I do want to mention, I'm still sharing screen, there are a few other workshops happening. So, next up is going to be go-to-community strategy for a pitch deck. We're going to talk with Kurt Kemple later on about growing and measuring your community with Orbit. We're going to talk about increasing participation for newcomers and veterans in your community, which is actually super, super popular.

Bryan Robinson (01:10:37): And I think that's going to be a really great one, because we all want to see more engagement, right? And then also, how to do this in open source, which is honestly a big thing to go through. So, all these are going to be great. You can find out more about them, orbit.love/nexus. You can use the little pound sign to get to the workshops if you want to and I appreciate you all being here. Reach out in Discord to me, if you have any questions or on Twitter @brob as well. So, thanks so much and I'll see you around the community, you all. Also, just hang out here until you get kicked out, which I think is going to happen momentarily. I think actually, we've fixed the issue where we only had one going at time. So, if you all do have any additional questions, shoot.

Speaker 3 (01:11:33): The amount of note taking that I have done has my fingers, which were already hurting, hurting more.

Bryan Robinson (01:11:41): I'm so sorry.

Speaker 3 (01:11:41): It was incredible.

Bryan Robinson (01:11:42): Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, I'm sorry that your fingers hurt, but I appreciate that there's some insights. So, that's great. So, hopefully, now, you've got the slides and hopefully, I didn't just completely destroy your fingers for no reason with the slides coming afterward.

Speaker 4 (01:12:03): Bryan, thanks so much for your presentation. Is there a Loom or something like that that shows your workflow for the tagging? While the presentation was excellent, I would just love to see inside of Orbit how that works almost like you have the great Zapier templates. I think something like that for the flywheel, unless I'm already missing it, apologies, would be so, so helpful.

Bryan Robinson (01:12:28): No, you're absolutely right on that. I feel like we got a blog post somewhere, but I'm going to go ahead and talk through a little bit of it. This is also going to be a little bit easier in the near future. We just launched... And let me reshare in a way that I can see everything I need to see... automations, which are a paid feature and get rid of some of the Zapier stuff that you would have to do to do this. So, some of this could be done externally, right? But a few of the things we have and important to note, I'm using demo mode inside of our Orbit workspace, because otherwise, I'd be sharing information. And I actually probably am about to a little bit accidentally. Let me go to my own personal page. This is me inside of the Orbit.

Bryan Robinson (01:13:11): I've been a fan of Orbit for a couple years, only an employee for about six months, but you can see here, we have all these tags down here. So, some of these things came in via some automated process. So, 100 days participant. This was before I was with Orbit, when they did their 100 Days of Community project at the end of last year. It was a Twitter thing. So, they monitored a hashtag. And as people came in and tweeted with that hashtag, they tagged them. And then inside Orbit, we can track that and we can track the overall historical growth of these members in reports as well. So, I could create a report and I might do that here in a second. I feel bad we're keeping people from the next one, but yeah. So, that's one.

Bryan Robinson (01:13:58): Beta invite is something that we do manually. So, when we invite people to certain betas, we put beta invite on there. We haven't done that recently, but that was something from last year. If you view the docs, we tagged you with doc viewer. Because again, some of these things, you get from activity types as well. So, I could run a report that is activity type of viewed docs, right? But if you haven't done a viewed docs activity in the timeframe I set, you will not appear in that report. So, this way, I can track everyone who's ever viewed the docs, no matter when they viewed it. Let's see what else we have. We just launched the new LinkedIn integration. We had people who were really wanting that. And so, we went through and we tagged them that way.

Bryan Robinson (01:14:41): Nexus is an automated thing. So, when you registered for Nexus, we had a Zap hooked to that form and we tagged you inside of our workspace with Nexus. And that's how I'm able to generate reports and do that. And also, user is another Zapier, right? So, when you sign up for a workspace or for your first Orbit account, you also run through a Zap. We use Segment to track that data and Segment sends to Zapier and Zapier connects up to Orbit. So, I have a user tag as well. Let's see if I can do this on the fly. I could go generate a new report that wants to see the activities.

Bryan Robinson (01:15:24): Actually, I'll show you what I do on a weekly basis. On a weekly basis, I check a seven-day report. I actually go in and I have a select date range that I really care about. And then I say, "All right, we have 798 active community members in the past seven days," right? That's an important stat. I want to talk about that stat. I put it in my slides. I also want to talk about the active users in our community because we're a product company. And while I care about community builders in general, I'm able to translate that to company value by talking about the users that are active. So, I can come in here and I can say, "All right, member tags user, 9,000 people have been marked as a user because we have 9,000 users in Orbit," right? In the past week, 434 are active members in our workspace.

Bryan Robinson (01:16:12): And then I talked about prospects a little bit. Our sales folks, our account executives also have a tag that they can use called prospect. This is a manual one. They go in and they identify people and they move them through that process. And then on a weekly basis, I can attribute... We had 33 of your prospects active in the community. And then what I also do with them is I calculate a little back the napkin math to show how active our prospects are. So, I check their activities. I divide that by the number of prospects and I get a ratio of our prospects. I have a 2.1 activity per member ratio. Again, not a statistician, not actually in business intelligence, but it's a back napkin way of saying, "Hey, our prospects are active members."

Bryan Robinson (01:17:03): Usually, I used to do this. We had too many metrics in our weekly all hands. I used to also show that for our users and our members. And I was actually able to show members generally have the lowest ratio. Users have the next highest and prospects oftentimes have the highest ratio. And that's good information to have and that's again, showcasing community value to our sales team, to our execs. Not that we have that much communication. We know. These are the things that Patrick and our exec team know innately at this point. And then I was going to say, so one of the things we just launched is the automations. They're in beta. They've been available and these are on the low end paid tier, the growth tier.

Bryan Robinson (01:17:54): And so, what you can do with these is you can create an automation that you can choose a trigger. And we're going to make more and more of these things, because this is super powerful. I'm super excited about it. Where you can say when a new activity is added to a member, a new member is added to the community or a new note. I'm not sure about the use of note, but maybe. So, I can say a new activity that matches these criteria. For every single person that has a tag of user, I could have an automation fire when they do activities. Maybe that sends a Slack message. Maybe that fires a web hook to some third party that I've created. And maybe that just adds a tag, right? We used Zapier for this, right?

Bryan Robinson (01:18:45): But if I said a new activity is logged to a member and the activity type matches Nexus, then I want you to add a tag to the member of Nexus. We use tags way too much and we're not super great at keeping them clean, but we have three apparently, not great, but I can then add Nexus as a tag to any member that does that. So, if you didn't attend Nexus yesterday but you came to a workshop today, we're going to export all the emails addresses out of Butter and put them as activities in Orbit, right? I can now mark you as having attended Nexus, even if you didn't attend yesterday, even if you didn't register ahead of time, but you somehow showed up in this Butter. I can then also mark you that way as well. So, this is that auto-tagging feature in a lot of ways.

Speaker 4 (01:19:45): And this is really from a CSV, right? So, you're going to take those emails out of Butter. They'll go to a CSV and then this will run that process.

Bryan Robinson (01:19:53): In this case, absolutely, because that's what we get out of Butter. I don't think Butter has an API at this point. There's a beta API that I know Aaron has played with, but yeah. That's what's going to happen with this. With our registrations for Nexus, we use Zoom to do it, but instead of using Zoom, we could have done the same workflow. We could have basically imported this into Orbit and had the tags automatically happen there as well. Let's see. Can you add conditions to that as well if tag Nexus is older than three? Not currently. I'm honestly copying that right now, because that's a great piece of feedback. This is still pretty early days. We've had some of these systems in place for a little while. I can't add a new note for some reason. That's interesting.

Bryan Robinson (01:20:41): Yeah. So, not currently. I want a lot more granularity in the way that we're handling this, but this is like let's get it out there and get it in use so we can see actually how people are going to use this. I can automatically remove tags based on member actions as well. Yeah, I had a conversation with one of our product managers last week and we're talking about things that can happen in bulk too, right? So, automations are meant to happen on this one-off basis, right? Action happens, do this thing. Yeah, I guess that does make sense actually now that you've said if action has performed, remove X tag, because we have a welcome workflow that we use and we have it backwards right now to get around this where we add a tag as opposed to what I would like to do is remove a tag.

Bryan Robinson (01:21:35): So, absolutely, that makes sense as well. And I'm copying and pasting that to my notes doc as well. But yeah, there's also the idea that sometimes you want to remove a tag from a lot of people. And there's some bulk stuff that Kelly, one of our product managers, is specing out a little bit right now. I don't know if you'll see the live day, but definitely, something that we're thinking about there. And you all, I appreciate everyone sticking around. I don't know if automations can do the setup for active campaigns in Maropost, so if you know how to implement... Interesting. Hit me up in Discord on this, because I don't have a good answer on that, but I'd love to figure some stuff out.

Bryan Robinson (01:22:18): Also, I'm not going to lie. It's super hot under my lights and been doing it for over an hour and I want to make sure. There's also all these other great things. I don't want to steal Jillian's thunder because she's talking about pitching community, which is also important. So, again, thank you all, especially those of you who have stuck around until the end here. Lots of great insightful comments, lots of great insightful questions. And if you do want to chat, discord.orbit.love or hit me up on Twitter @BRob and we'll talk more, because I love talking to folks. And I'm copying and pasting this as well. See you later. Let's see if I can figure out how to stop this.