Welcome to the Community Coach newsletter, a value packed read
for community builders who just want one AI tool that does everything...

In this packed to the max newsletter…

📚 Community 101: How to build a strong culture

🤖 This tool uses machine learning to reduce toxicity online

🎱 Battle of the AI tools: ChatGPT vs. Perplexity vs. Claude vs. Gemini

🔥 Inspiring community builder: how you can replicate a genius tactic by Blank Street Coffee for your community

👋 Answering your questions: “How do I get started to become a community manager?”

Community 101: Build a strong culture

Building a strong community culture is essential to encourage a sense of belonging and investment (either time, money - or both) from your members.

Here are three ways to build a strong culture:

1) Through rituals and traditions
2) Recognise valuable contributions
3) Celebrate milestones and achievements

Let’s take a look at some examples of how to build a strong culture for each of these.

Rituals and Traditions

• Member Spotlights regularly highlighting exceptional contributions or stories and celebrating them - make your members feel special!

• “Wednesday Warble”/ “Feedback on Fridays”/ “Throwback Thursdays” etc - encourage your community members to connect with 2-3 minute weekly update with medium of choice such as videos, voice notes, one written paragraph, a photo etc).

• Weekly/monthly "Ask Me Anything" sessions with community leaders or experts

• Events/ meetups around holidays or special occasions such as the “End of year community highlights” events - you can present awards and reflect on the year

Recognize Valuable Contributions

• Implement community points or a reputation system for active participation. Just like Reddit has Karma points. Make sure you don’t create a toxic environment - a lot of consideration needs to happen here - including asking yourself: do you want members to be competitive or collaborative?

• Award digital badges or ranks for specific achievements (e.g., welcoming new members, providing quality answers). Facebook does this automatically in Facebook Groups.

• Feature "Top Contributors" or "Hall of Fame" in your community

• Offer exclusive perks or access for highly engaged members

Celebrating Milestones and Achievements

• Create online parties or live-streamed events for major community milestones (e.g., hitting meaningful community goals, anniversary celebrations etc)

• Organize community-wide challenges or competitions with prizes or recognition

• Commission custom artwork, merchandise, or digital assets to commemorate significant achievements (I’ve done this with great success in the past!)

• Collaborate with members to create a "Community Yearbook" or "Time Capsule" documenting your community's journey

• Invite members to share personal stories or testimonials about how the community has impacted their lives

By including these types of rituals, recognition systems, and celebration methods you can encourage a strong sense of connection, appreciation, and shared identity.

It's also important to involve members in the ideation and execution stages. Creating these alongside your community members further strengthens the community's culture and ownership.

Using machine learning to reduce toxicity online

Perspective API (not to be confused with Perplexity AI - two completely different tools !) is a free API tool by Google that helps make online conversations more productive and respectful.

It uses machine learning to automatically detect toxic language like insults, harassment, and hate speech in user comments and posts.

This tool has been trained using a data pool of millions of comments from a variety of sources, including comments from online forums such as Wikipedia and The New York Times, across a range of languages.

Crowdsourced raters were selected to teach the model if these comments were considered toxic, and scores were assigned.

Thanks to all that hard work, you can now plug this API tool into your community to reduce toxicity automatically in your own community.

The tool can scan all comments in your online community and assign a toxicity score to each one.

You can then set custom thresholds to automatically hide or flag comments that exceed your defined toxicity levels, reducing moderation workloads while maintaining a positive, inclusive environment for your members.

This API can work with:

• Discussion forums and comment sections on websites

• Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. (via their APIs)

• Messaging apps and chat platforms like Discord, Slack, etc. (via APIs or integrations)

• Custom apps and platforms (by integrating the API directly)

You can also test out the tool on their website for free - type or paste some content and it will present you with a toxicity score for free. You can customise the toxicity threshold settings also by creating a “custom demo”.

This is a positive step forward to using tools to assist community managers with otherwise time consuming moderation tasks, along with ensuring online communities are safer spaces for their members.

To learn more about the training data and methods behind this tool I highly recommend reading the documentation.

ChatGPT vs. Perplexity vs. Claude vs. Gemini

It is a common question: which AI tool is better?

I happen to agree with this Twitter thread below… it’s best to understand what each tool brings to the table, and focus on their strengths.

Last week I started experimenting with Claude, another ChatGPT alternative. As George mentioned in the tweet above, he uses it for social content, so I thought I would try it out too.

I decided to ask Claude to compare some AI platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini) and provide me with advice on which tool to use for what scenario. Here’s the response:

ChatGPT and Claude are more generalists.
Perplexity specializes in conversational/strategic areas.
Gemini targets coding/technical use cases.

So far I have found Claude to excel at providing me with the most up to date long form content (which would explain why it’s considered great for social content as it’s current and topical).

I also found it very easy to have a conversation with and was able to improve the initial outputs with quick and easy follow up prompts.

After spending a week trying out Claude, I do find the tool to be underrated (and perhaps underutilised)? I was genuinely surprised at the quality of the responses. If you’re curious to try Claude out, here’s their site:

Inspiring community builder
Blank Street Coffee

I wouldn’t say this is a typical “community builder” story, however I am often inspired most by things that are outside of the community building world.

Blank Street Coffee introduced an awesome concept for their customers - the “Create a meeting for matcha”.

You create a calendar invite through their website to arrange a meetup with a friend and have a matcha at your local Blank Street cafe…

All under the guise of one of their fun “reasons for meeting” to ensure you wouldn’t get “caught” by calendar snoopers at work.

They provide tons of fun reasons for your “meeting” (you can shuffle through the cards until you find one you like).

Once you select a reason you can choose to define more details like who should receive the calendar invite plus time/location etc.

This is a genius marketing tactic by Blank Street coffee, but I can also see it working for community builders too.

There are a few common threads here for how Blank Street Coffee are bringing people together:

• The love of matcha

• The love of taking a break from work and catching up with a friend (at Blank Street coffee of course)

• The love of poking fun at corporate lingo/ politics/ calendar snoopers

I wish Blank Street coffee would go beyond this marketing - imagine if they hired community managers to bring matcha lovers together beyond just these one-to-one “meetings”!

Key learnings to apply to your own community

• What is a unique way you can encourage members in your community to connect either in 1-1s or in small groups - in an engaging way? What is your equivalent “meeting for matcha”? Make sure it speaks the language of your community members,

• Check out tools to help with the above such as:
  For Slack: Donut ($$$), Cheaper options - Catchup rocks, Shuffle.ai 
  For Discord: Intros.ai (it also works for emails)
  Platform agnostic: Curated connections (check out my Youtube video on this tool)

Answering your questions

“How do I get started and become a community manager?”

Great question, this tweet of mine summarises the steps I would advise for someone looking to get into a career of community management.

Got a question for me? DM me on Twitter and ask away. Your question may be answered in a future newsletter (and I’ll reply to everyone who asks).

Until next time,

Carmen
Community Coach

P.S - I’m almost at 100 subscribers… I might actually hit this number very soon!

Huge shoutout to Martha Essien, who tweeted about my newsletter. Any mention supports me get the word out there and help more community builders.

If you are interested in a free mentoring session with me, REPLY to this email and let me know what you’re looking for help with! Please also add links to your community/ website/social media to add any context and so that I can review this beforehand.

I’ll be selecting 5 community builders to offer a free mentoring session with me. I’d love to select some builders who are passionate but finding it difficult to build/ struggling to find the guidance needed.

We will go through your community together and discuss any current challenges, what improvements can be made and advice I can offer from my years of building communities.

Connect with me on Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn.