Post your questions for Mia below, and jump in to answer others!
Our regular Popcorn Q&A 🍿is convo time with People & Company and friends.
In this thread, we’re welcoming Mia Quagliarello, our new “Get Together” podcast correspondent!
Ask Mia about her incredible career in community building. She was YouTube’s first Community Manager, joining the team in 2006, just a year after it launched, when the office was above a pizza shop in San Mateo, CA. Today, Mia is the Director of Curation & Community at Flipboardand the Digital Community Manager for the Burning Man Project.
Mia and the P&C team will be responding here for the next ~1hr. We invite you to ask questions, and to also share your POV with answers!
🍿Tell us what you think, please!
Popcorn Q&A is new to us and we would love your feedback so we can improve the experience *with* you in mind. Do you have 3 minutes to share some thoughts? If so, click here. Thank you!
Teleporting in from Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Community work that's on my mind—thinking about how to gather people who facilitate virtual workshops to swap tips + mind meld. 🧠🍲
Hi! Yoko here from Sunset Park, Brooklyn (more specifically, in the same exact room as my fiancé Kevin Huynh 😛). I’m not a community organizer, but I’ve been active/lurking in online communities of all sizes!
Waving from Cornwall, UK 👋 thinking a lot about starting communities from scratch, Onboarding first users and the app experience of being a first cluster of community members
Hi! Ashley from Los Angeles. I'm actively building a community and learning new ways to help people feel more deeply connected, especially during these uncertain times.
tuning in from brooklyn! the community work I have on my mind is mutual aid and how communities that already exist are managing to build/maintain support with each other. also building a small queer community based in nyc!
Hey all! We are at 10:30 PT / 1:30 ET so we are going to wrap this thread! Thank you to everyone for their wonderful questions and to Mia for her clear, thoughtful replies. We loved it!
If you get a chance --> Tell us what you think?
Popcorn Q&A is new to us and we would love your feedback so we can improve the experience *with* you in mind. If you have 3 minutes to share some thoughts, please do so here!: https://forms.gle/RUkkXE2EkXradP7e6
Thanks Mia for doing this! In your mind, how have online communities changed since your time at YouTube, now that there’s a much lower barrier to creating content?
I remember talking to a bboy friend ~10 years ago who was sharing a theory that bboy dance styles were fusing because of the introduction of YouTube. With certain content bubbling up it was leading more folks to copy what a certain person was doing. Interesting to think about creativity when surrounded by a universe of content vs creative directions when you're more isolated from "mainstream" influences... 🤷♂️
A few of my favorites too! --> Substack, Instant Pot, Notion, Rapha Cycling, Facebook (NOT all of them - their investments in the power admins of groups is remarkable though!), Ampled (a music platform co-owned by its users!), Twitch, TED, Sofar Sounds...
Hi Bailey! Hello Mia. Lauren here. Thanks BOTH for sharing! Curious about the balance of formal planning to build community versus organically letting it BE "to see" ... currently trying to help a Non-Profit art+healing org here understand there is a space in the middle - would love to hear how you might talk about this...
Hey Lauren! Thanks for popping in. Good to hear from ya. I look forward to Mia's thoughts. My personal philosophy: is that "nurturing" is key to bringing folks together.
I don't expect participation to spring up without structure. Without prompting. Without an initial effort to give people the permission, confidence, space, and tools to contribute to a community effort. However, you also have to water the plants / feed the fire. People will surprise you. How can we make more that happen? Or codify what people come up with for the benefit of others in the community? 🙂
thank you, Mia. "Maybe your community is using your platform in a way that you hadn't anticipated or they can see something you hadn't noticed yet." super helpful to me.
Hi Mia! Thanks for doing this! I'd love to learn how you dealt with "drama" in the early community. People fighting, threatening to leave, people using the site for purposes certain community members may not liked, etc.
Oooo. (Hi Sydney! Thanks for all the support!). You must have read our book? Mia is featured in it on this topic! While she's answering, I'll share the excerpt here we wrote.
Rich insights will certainly help you pinpoint future leaders and make decisions that your community will celebrate. But your listening processes are perhaps even more crucial during challenging times. At some point, you may make a change or decision that is not well-received. Paying close attention to your community helps you monitor sentiment, detect your missteps early, and react appropriately.
Mia Quagliarello joined YouTube as the company’s very first community manager in 2006, when their small office was still above a pizza shop in San Mateo. As part of her early work there, she handled communication between the company and its users.
This communication proved crucial when the product team redesigned YouTube’s “channels.” When the team launched the new design, they hit an unexpected nerve with their passionate users. Mia remembers how YouTube’s employees “were totally unprepared for how angry people would be.” As Mia recalls, “Your channel is basically your identity on YouTube. I didn’t realize how much people’s identities were tied up in these online identities. You messed with that, you messed with their space, you messed with their stuff.”
After rolling the release back, Mia and her team retooled their communication with the community. This time, they were proactive. Mia assembled a mix of people from the product and community teams together in one room, ready to respond to YouTube community members on social media and help users with their questions. “Not only did this make our coordination and responses more efficient but also we felt a collective responsibility to do the right thing by our users,” she says.
Mia’s instinct to be transparent, listen, and acknowledge key stakeholders mirrors fundamental principles from the field of crisis communication. “One of the things that is the death knell for a community manager is to not listen,” Mia points out. “Even if it’s a simple ‘Thanks so much for your feedback,’ you have to acknowledge people.”
Hi Bailey! amazing!! Thanks for pasting this! i actually have the book on my wishlist right now, was waiting for the audible version (I actually check audible literally every time the I hear Kevin's and your voice in my podcast player haha), but given we're dealing with a lot of this type of stuff right now, perhaps I need to just get the Kindle version!
@Hannah Ray - Curious. You had an editorial background too when we hired you to work at Instagram. How did you feel about the themes of the role and what we asked you to help with?
Good Q! It was definitely a slight shift for me too—going from a place (the Guardian) where the community role was about 80/20 editorial to advocacy/outreach. But I feel like the shift to IG made it more like 50/50. I was still doing a lot of editorial work such as interviewing community members, writing blogposts, planning calendars and editing copy. I feel like 50/50 is a good balance as the editorial can really scale the activation and outreach work you are doing on a more 1:1 level.
Also when we hired and grew the international community team at IG we hired a mix of those with stronger editorial and stronger community/growth backgrounds. It was interesting to see how the awesome people we hired were always able to learn and pick up skills in the other discipline. They are very complementary skills.
this is an epic reply. can you share more about how you tactically approached this: "we wanted to give niche communities the tools, support and encouragement to get seen and heard and show that the platform represented so much more than skateboarding dogs"
To add my tech-y ol' POV in here...I think you often have to look at two metrics.
1. Retention. A community isn't a community if its members don't keep coming back. This metric will show you how "healthy" your community is.
2. # of "Leaders." The definition of a leader will vary based on what your community's purpose and members do together, but organizers can measure the growth of their community by looking at the # of leaders they have in it. Is that # going up or down? Think chapter leaders for an in-person community, or perhaps "suggested users" or "admins" for an online one.
With any large platforms, you run into the gray area of what's okay and what isn't. Especially when it comes to the "isms" and "phobias". If the goal is to cultivate a diverse and supportive community, how did you deal with things that toe the line of what is appropriate, eg. a video or article that doesn't explicitly say anything bad about a certain community, but may casually imply things throughout. What's over the line? What's okay?
Hi Mia! What are some of the early memories of the YouTube community which you think got lost / changed as the platform grew — the elements you might want to recreate if starting from scratch again?
Yes totally! I feel like the money changed everything at IG too. A big challenge of starting a new community from scratch is thinking about how we preserve our goals while thinking about the different ways the community might grow. Surprise and delight is def something we kept in our minds for IG editorial too!
Finding new and quiet voices is a such a powerful role of the community manager 🙌
👋🏻Welcome, we are happy you are here!
To get started in the chat: Tell us where you are tuning in from today and share the community work that is on your mind.
Teleporting in from Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Community work that's on my mind—thinking about how to gather people who facilitate virtual workshops to swap tips + mind meld. 🧠🍲
Sup Kevin
Sup Yoko
Sup
(I'm sitting in my parents' kitchen in Los Gatos, California!)
Hi! Joining from Upstate NY :) Writing about communities for a blog called Commonplays.
Ahoy Maggie!
Hi I am Katie! Tuning in from Chicago 😊I am learning about communities I might want to be apart of help start around music and adventuring.
Hi! Yoko here from Sunset Park, Brooklyn (more specifically, in the same exact room as my fiancé Kevin Huynh 😛). I’m not a community organizer, but I’ve been active/lurking in online communities of all sizes!
Waving from Cornwall, UK 👋 thinking a lot about starting communities from scratch, Onboarding first users and the app experience of being a first cluster of community members
Hannah Ray my queen!!
Hi! Ashley from Los Angeles. I'm actively building a community and learning new ways to help people feel more deeply connected, especially during these uncertain times.
Welcome! How'd you find out about this / Get Together?
I found out about you when I was researching community building resources and bough the book. Love what you're doing!
tuning in from brooklyn! the community work I have on my mind is mutual aid and how communities that already exist are managing to build/maintain support with each other. also building a small queer community based in nyc!
@Peyton if you feel like sharing any links from your favorite mutual learnings in here, I'd love to see and read those! 👀
inspiring piece about mutual aid's role and some history by jia tolentino: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/what-mutual-aid-can-do-during-a-pandemic
a toolkit put together based on a webinar with AOC and mariame kaba: https://gdoc.pub/doc/e/2PACX-1vRMxV09kdojzMdyOfapJUOB6Ko2_1iAfIm8ELeIgma21wIt5HoTqP1QXadF01eZc0ySrPW6VtU_veyp?
a mutual aid how to by american friends service committee: https://www.afsc.org/blogs/news-and-commentary/how-to-create-mutual-aid-network
and i'm participating in mutual aid with https://bedstuystrong.com/ !
TY + ILU
Hey all! We are at 10:30 PT / 1:30 ET so we are going to wrap this thread! Thank you to everyone for their wonderful questions and to Mia for her clear, thoughtful replies. We loved it!
If you get a chance --> Tell us what you think?
Popcorn Q&A is new to us and we would love your feedback so we can improve the experience *with* you in mind. If you have 3 minutes to share some thoughts, please do so here!: https://forms.gle/RUkkXE2EkXradP7e6
Thanks Mia for doing this! In your mind, how have online communities changed since your time at YouTube, now that there’s a much lower barrier to creating content?
Love this answer. Thank you Mia!
I remember talking to a bboy friend ~10 years ago who was sharing a theory that bboy dance styles were fusing because of the introduction of YouTube. With certain content bubbling up it was leading more folks to copy what a certain person was doing. Interesting to think about creativity when surrounded by a universe of content vs creative directions when you're more isolated from "mainstream" influences... 🤷♂️
Hi Mia! In your experience, what's unique about community building around music?
Mia also wrote a sweet article that helps you find hidden gems and new tunes hiding on the internet. https://medium.com/@miaq/music-discovery-for-internet-nerds-2bf1b56b62f2
What brands do you think are doing community well and why?
A few of my favorites too! --> Substack, Instant Pot, Notion, Rapha Cycling, Facebook (NOT all of them - their investments in the power admins of groups is remarkable though!), Ampled (a music platform co-owned by its users!), Twitch, TED, Sofar Sounds...
whenever I hear Instant Pot I always am mindblown haha
Thank you! SofarSounds is GOOD.
Thank you so much, Mia! Love Peloton.
Hi Bailey! Hello Mia. Lauren here. Thanks BOTH for sharing! Curious about the balance of formal planning to build community versus organically letting it BE "to see" ... currently trying to help a Non-Profit art+healing org here understand there is a space in the middle - would love to hear how you might talk about this...
Hey Lauren! Thanks for popping in. Good to hear from ya. I look forward to Mia's thoughts. My personal philosophy: is that "nurturing" is key to bringing folks together.
I don't expect participation to spring up without structure. Without prompting. Without an initial effort to give people the permission, confidence, space, and tools to contribute to a community effort. However, you also have to water the plants / feed the fire. People will surprise you. How can we make more that happen? Or codify what people come up with for the benefit of others in the community? 🙂
yes, yes, yes - thank you Kevin.
HI LAUREN! Rad to see you here :)
you guys are so great to offer this, and yes, it's like popcorn! love it.
thank you, Mia. "Maybe your community is using your platform in a way that you hadn't anticipated or they can see something you hadn't noticed yet." super helpful to me.
Hi Mia! What do you think are the "essentials" when it comes to building community online?
Hi Terrell! Thanks for joining and for all of your support :)
Hi Bailey! 👋 Right back at ya! :)
Thanks so much, Mia!
How do you pinpoint your people online and vet them from behind a screen?
Love this answer so much! 🙌🙌🙌
Hi Mia! Thanks for doing this! I'd love to learn how you dealt with "drama" in the early community. People fighting, threatening to leave, people using the site for purposes certain community members may not liked, etc.
Oooo. (Hi Sydney! Thanks for all the support!). You must have read our book? Mia is featured in it on this topic! While she's answering, I'll share the excerpt here we wrote.
Rich insights will certainly help you pinpoint future leaders and make decisions that your community will celebrate. But your listening processes are perhaps even more crucial during challenging times. At some point, you may make a change or decision that is not well-received. Paying close attention to your community helps you monitor sentiment, detect your missteps early, and react appropriately.
Mia Quagliarello joined YouTube as the company’s very first community manager in 2006, when their small office was still above a pizza shop in San Mateo. As part of her early work there, she handled communication between the company and its users.
This communication proved crucial when the product team redesigned YouTube’s “channels.” When the team launched the new design, they hit an unexpected nerve with their passionate users. Mia remembers how YouTube’s employees “were totally unprepared for how angry people would be.” As Mia recalls, “Your channel is basically your identity on YouTube. I didn’t realize how much people’s identities were tied up in these online identities. You messed with that, you messed with their space, you messed with their stuff.”
After rolling the release back, Mia and her team retooled their communication with the community. This time, they were proactive. Mia assembled a mix of people from the product and community teams together in one room, ready to respond to YouTube community members on social media and help users with their questions. “Not only did this make our coordination and responses more efficient but also we felt a collective responsibility to do the right thing by our users,” she says.
Mia’s instinct to be transparent, listen, and acknowledge key stakeholders mirrors fundamental principles from the field of crisis communication. “One of the things that is the death knell for a community manager is to not listen,” Mia points out. “Even if it’s a simple ‘Thanks so much for your feedback,’ you have to acknowledge people.”
Hi Bailey! amazing!! Thanks for pasting this! i actually have the book on my wishlist right now, was waiting for the audible version (I actually check audible literally every time the I hear Kevin's and your voice in my podcast player haha), but given we're dealing with a lot of this type of stuff right now, perhaps I need to just get the Kindle version!
When you're curating content for Flipboard, how do you manage information overload?
What got you hooked into community building? How did you turn that interest into a career path?
Hi Mia! As YouTube's first Community Manager, what was it like to build the discipline / team from scratch?
@Hannah Ray - Curious. You had an editorial background too when we hired you to work at Instagram. How did you feel about the themes of the role and what we asked you to help with?
Good Q! It was definitely a slight shift for me too—going from a place (the Guardian) where the community role was about 80/20 editorial to advocacy/outreach. But I feel like the shift to IG made it more like 50/50. I was still doing a lot of editorial work such as interviewing community members, writing blogposts, planning calendars and editing copy. I feel like 50/50 is a good balance as the editorial can really scale the activation and outreach work you are doing on a more 1:1 level.
Also when we hired and grew the international community team at IG we hired a mix of those with stronger editorial and stronger community/growth backgrounds. It was interesting to see how the awesome people we hired were always able to learn and pick up skills in the other discipline. They are very complementary skills.
this is an epic reply. can you share more about how you tactically approached this: "we wanted to give niche communities the tools, support and encouragement to get seen and heard and show that the platform represented so much more than skateboarding dogs"
What are some metrics you use to think about the “success” of a community?
A resource to throw into the mix here! ⚾️ I came across this framework on successful organizing by Marshall Ganz, Harvard Kennedy School lecturer.
When is organizing successful? Ask:
1. Did we accomplish the goal?
2. Did our community grow stronger?
3. Did the individuals involved learn and grow?
https://kiwimonk.com/successful-organizing/
To add my tech-y ol' POV in here...I think you often have to look at two metrics.
1. Retention. A community isn't a community if its members don't keep coming back. This metric will show you how "healthy" your community is.
2. # of "Leaders." The definition of a leader will vary based on what your community's purpose and members do together, but organizers can measure the growth of their community by looking at the # of leaders they have in it. Is that # going up or down? Think chapter leaders for an in-person community, or perhaps "suggested users" or "admins" for an online one.
With any large platforms, you run into the gray area of what's okay and what isn't. Especially when it comes to the "isms" and "phobias". If the goal is to cultivate a diverse and supportive community, how did you deal with things that toe the line of what is appropriate, eg. a video or article that doesn't explicitly say anything bad about a certain community, but may casually imply things throughout. What's over the line? What's okay?
Hi Mia! What are some of the early memories of the YouTube community which you think got lost / changed as the platform grew — the elements you might want to recreate if starting from scratch again?
Yes totally! I feel like the money changed everything at IG too. A big challenge of starting a new community from scratch is thinking about how we preserve our goals while thinking about the different ways the community might grow. Surprise and delight is def something we kept in our minds for IG editorial too!
Finding new and quiet voices is a such a powerful role of the community manager 🙌