Event Replay: From Reddit to Results - A Community Engagement Playbook for GEO

00:00:00:05 - 00:00:30:12 Joshua Zerkel Hello everyone! Welcome to Community Tactics with gradual and today's topic. From Reddit to results a community engagement playbook for Geo. I'm Josh circle, head of marketing community here at gradual. In case you're new to gradual, it's where meaningful customer interaction happens and where those interactions are captured, connected, and made into usable context and insights across your organization. Before I introduce our guests, a quick note please drop your questions in the Q&A and we'll get to as many as we can today.

00:00:30:15 - 00:00:55:02 Joshua Zerkel After our session ends, you'll still be able to ask questions and share your thoughts in the forum. AMA. We'll be sharing that link later during the webinar. All right. With that, I would like to introduce our guests, Jeremy Gluckman and Anna Yuan. Jeremy is a leader in the corporate, tech and social impact sectors, with organizations such as amplitude, a seller, the Peace Corps, fever B Idaho, and most recently, dovetail.

00:00:55:05 - 00:01:24:17 Joshua Zerkel Jeremy brings expertise in managing and evaluating communities, engaging members, and driving impact dedicated to digital trust, safety and equity. Jeremy is rooted in values based leadership and building authentic relationships. Alongside Jeremy, I'd like to welcome Anna. She's a three time founder building agent AI that turns business intent into outcomes end to end. She previously built GTM and personalization AI that helped companies win customers like Apple, Google and Nvidia.

00:01:24:22 - 00:01:46:19 Joshua Zerkel Not bad and is now building scale a genetic and AI operator for go to market that turns business objectives into GTM outcomes. She believes the next decade of growth won't come from more tools, but from agent systems that think, reason and act. Welcome, Anna and Jeremy. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

00:01:46:21 - 00:01:54:04 Jeremie Gluckman I'm so excited to be here. Hi everyone.

00:01:54:07 - 00:01:56:29 Joshua Zerkel Jeremy, I know you have some things you'd like to talk through.

00:01:57:01 - 00:01:57:22 Jeremie Gluckman Yes.

00:01:57:28 - 00:01:59:17 Joshua Zerkel Let's set the stage.

00:01:59:20 - 00:02:30:07 Jeremie Gluckman Perfect. So this talk is going to take us through a bit of a level set on definitions. The shift that's happening, and then a few frameworks focusing on small lean startup teams, but then also large enterprise contexts as it relates to Reddit and how to measure the success of those initiatives. We're going to have a Q&A, throughout so you can post your questions and ask questions afterwards.

00:02:30:09 - 00:02:58:16 Jeremie Gluckman So in the old way, people would Google your product or service and land on your website, but conversations about your brand aren't happening on your website anymore. They're happening inside of ChatGPT cloud perplexity. All the lines. So adapting to this new normal, we're lens synthesize multiple sources, and maybe a customer or prospect lands on your website.

00:02:58:18 - 00:03:31:05 Jeremie Gluckman You need to make sure that you're not invisible. The reality is that 40% of LLM training data, comes from Reddit runner up. The 25% of that comes from blogs and articles. Help centers are huge landing pages and is 10% and then other sources and other 10%. So that means Reddit threads are shaping the answers, and your potential customers are getting information, by inference.

00:03:31:07 - 00:04:02:14 Jeremie Gluckman And unlike SEO, you need to build that where you need to build domain authority over you. Over many years, you can actually start influencing Reddit today. So that's really exciting. A little bit of a level set to on generative engine optimization, also called AI optimization or answer engine optimization. There many different terms, but really what it boils down to is for metrics, positioning is where you show up in an LM response.

00:04:02:16 - 00:04:33:07 Jeremie Gluckman Are you the first recommendation or the fifth? Then there's sentiment is whether the mention is positive or negative. So that's something that you'll want to monitor as you assess the impact of your, geo work. Because all of them synthesize sentiment across multiple sources. If Reddit's threads say that you're buggy or that you're not very reliable as a product or service, the alarm will pick up on that conflict.

00:04:33:09 - 00:05:03:27 Jeremie Gluckman Then there are citations. These are the sources that the lamp pulls from. So that could be Reddit. Blogs help centers. As we said, they are featured in a different percentage. But you want diversity there. So you want to make sure that you have a clear throughline across Reddit, your blog, help center, third party reviews. More citations means that there's more confidence from the Lem, which means better positioning.

00:05:03:29 - 00:05:44:06 Jeremie Gluckman And then finally, my mentions. It's, binary. It's. Are you named or not? If you're not mentioned, then, neo, everything else is irrelevant. Positioning, sentiment, citations. So when your monitoring mentions, it's very clear. It's like either your product or service was mentioned or not. So when you're thinking through how LMS query they synthesize across multiple sources, Reddit blog, your help center, they route maybe to your landing page, or they generate a landing page and then a response.

00:05:44:08 - 00:06:12:29 Jeremie Gluckman Most teams think one perfect landing page will solve geo. Actually it won't, because LMS triangulate. You need to make sure that your mentioned across multiple sources, so that it builds the confidence in recommending you. So your Reddit engagement feeds into that. Those threads get index. You take questions from Reddit and can create help articles.

00:06:12:29 - 00:06:39:16 Jeremie Gluckman Those get in that to write blogs, those get indexed. So, it isn't about one piece of content. It's about building an ecosystem pretty quickly. So with that, I will let Josh take back the stage. Hopefully that kind of set the stage for, anchoring this conversation. And, I know you have some specific questions for Anna, and I.

00:06:39:18 - 00:07:01:14 Joshua Zerkel Yeah. Thank you so much. I think for a lot of us, especially in the community space, this can feel somewhat overwhelming because we're already managing usually our own community. And then other, other spaces can feel like a lot. So how do you identify where to begin? Like where do you find the right subreddits or threads to focus your engagement efforts?

00:07:01:16 - 00:07:26:02 Jeremie Gluckman Good question. So really the framework boils down to three steps. And I'll let Anna chime in here too. But first step frankly. So you want to identify what subreddits to engage in then. And so I'm going to distill it to super simple terms. You identify the subreddit, you engage authentically. And with Reddit, authenticity is key. And then the third step is closing the loop.

00:07:26:03 - 00:07:55:01 Jeremie Gluckman So from the Reddit engagement, you inform your web content and across all those different, domains, even in your own community, you should be pulling inspiration from Reddit and that context to see threads and be consistent. So closing the loop across other web content. So you'll want to evaluate subreddits on three criteria their relevance. So does the subreddit discuss your use case?

00:07:55:04 - 00:08:31:11 Jeremie Gluckman Are your competitors mentioned? So relevance activity are those subreddits active is maybe there's a huge subscriber count, but not a lot of engagement on threads. And then moderation style. Can people and experts participate authentically? Some subreddits ban any commercial participation, and others welcome experts who provide value. So I'll let, Ana dive in a little deeper into the, the listening aspect.

00:08:31:14 - 00:08:40:06 Jeremie Gluckman But at a high level, you'll want to, once you have identified potential subreddits to engage in, run them through that framework.

00:08:40:08 - 00:09:04:16 Anna Yuan Yeah, that's super helpful. Tactical when you when you, when it comes to creating Reddit content right across different channels. But I wanted to just, you know, take a step back why I really wanted to engage Reddit to begin with. Right. So so this always has to tie back into what is your organizational goal at the moment or in the next three months?

00:09:04:16 - 00:09:29:06 Anna Yuan Because based on your organizational goal, your KPI, the strategy might shift right? So so is it yours to understand? Right. If we're spending time engaging subreddits or in engage Reddit. Are we creating brand awareness? Are we trying to understand what people are? Customer your your prospect or your target ICP are talking about in this space, right. So have that really for understanding.

00:09:29:08 - 00:09:53:00 Anna Yuan So so just give you example, when we started working with Jeremy at Dovetail, the organization goal is we wanted to, shift from, product like gross to sales, like gross into enterprise. Right. So we want to expand to enterprise in this one of the specific Monday that we work together is how can we really speak into enterprise language?

00:09:53:01 - 00:10:25:29 Anna Yuan How can I understand what our product can help a specific organization for each enterprise? Right. So, so rather become a really powerful signal engine to, for us to understand research on specific industry vertical and specific type of decision makers within that industry. And and we use then we use those signal systematically feed into when we start creating our target logos list.

00:10:25:29 - 00:10:48:23 Anna Yuan Right. When we start identify the specific that specific department who's going to benefit by using dovetail. And so so I think the first step for every single you know, what any of us to start thinking about, how can we really leverage, Reddit is to understand what is my goal and what do I want to achieve, and then work backwards.

00:10:48:26 - 00:11:11:00 Anna Yuan And then once you have that understanding, like there's a lot of tools, you can you can come up with search clusters. And then once you have that search clusters will easily find a subreddit that's very relevant to what you are trying to achieve. And then you can use the tactic that Jeremy has described to really engage and achieve that result.

00:11:11:03 - 00:11:42:16 Jeremie Gluckman Yeah. So when we started working with Ena, what I was able to provide the scale team was our ICP, our product and services area of impact. So product management, design, user research and leveraging the scale again system was able to scrape Reddit to identify and shortlist those firms that we need to engage in and proactively surface those threads directly to our social media team.

00:11:42:18 - 00:12:10:00 Jeremie Gluckman If you have identified a Reddit thread, I mean, taking it down to the simplest form, I can share my screen quickly and show you actually, as an individual, what you can start building. Once you've identified a, a thread. So, I'm kind of going off script here, so hopefully you can bear with me.

00:12:10:02 - 00:12:11:10 Joshua Zerkel Keeping it interesting.

00:12:11:12 - 00:12:39:05 Jeremie Gluckman Yeah. So let's say I'm an individual consultant solopreneur, and I want to be engaging in subreddits related to community management, which might be relevant for this audience if you're building communities here. I've built out a really simple Reddit listener, and this is the most fundamental, like basic version of what this can look like. But within relay and you can see here I've run out of credits.

00:12:39:06 - 00:13:04:25 Jeremie Gluckman I need to pay for that. But, you can identify a, put in a subreddit that you've identified upon, any Reddit post that is, submitted, you can run a quick prompt. So given the post in subreddit community manager, determine whether this person is looking for revenue, marketing, community and events consulting, or if they're looking help if they're looking for help.

00:13:04:25 - 00:13:29:12 Jeremie Gluckman Right? No. Nope. Telling them to contact me. I'll put yes or no. And so what happens here is it runs through cloud, which I think is the best line for, writing responses. And then it triggers an email to me that includes the Reddit post title, the Reddit post URL, the content and suggested I output. So what that looks like here is an email.

00:13:29:14 - 00:14:01:09 Jeremie Gluckman Someone posted hello everyone to subreddit Community Management and I have kind of a recommended response. Obviously you need to keep human in the loop for this motion. And it works kind of at my level as an individual solopreneur to manage, you know, and monitor maybe 2 or 3 of those subreddits that are relevant to my space and start authentically engaging, reworking the responses that are generated by AI and like actually putting in my personality.

00:14:01:12 - 00:14:31:08 Jeremie Gluckman And if you're building your personal brand and thinking through how you want to, build that authority, LMS increasingly cite people over faceless brands. Personal engagement is significantly outperforming corporate content. So you could think through a schema. And even if you work at a large enterprise, how do you empower your founder and CEO? How do you empower your employees to use consistent naming conventions across all of these channels?

00:14:31:10 - 00:14:57:19 Jeremie Gluckman Put out quotable, original research and benchmarks, have transcripts and talk tracks that allow for that consistency, even at the individual level, if they're engaging. You know, we all use social media in our free time, right? We're all we all have our own brands that we take to our employers. And what I was able to then, you know, the listening system that I just showed you is not a good fit for scale.

00:14:57:25 - 00:15:26:09 Jeremie Gluckman Like if you're monitoring dozens of subreddits and getting an email every time someone posts, that's not scalable. So where we were able to work with, scale again is get to a place where, based on our ICP and our account based goals, to move up market into selling into larger enterprises, get to a place where we can narrow down specific threats that are proactively reported to the team.

00:15:26:12 - 00:15:54:07 Joshua Zerkel That's great as it relates to the the workflow that you were just showing, you'd mentioned that that's that's really well suited to an individual like solopreneur or someone who's building their personal brand. If you are responsible for marketing or product or growth within a larger organization, how would you work with these sorts of insights to make them usable, actionable for, you know, people beyond just yourself within a team, but to make them really useful and actionable for the organization?

00:15:54:09 - 00:16:07:12 Joshua Zerkel How would you share these insights with them? Because I don't know that everyone in the org wants to get like a bunch of emails. What's the what's the best way to manage the process for for a team?

00:16:07:14 - 00:16:08:25 Anna Yuan Do you want to go first?

00:16:08:28 - 00:16:13:18 Jeremie Gluckman No, you can start. I have some thoughts, but you can start because I know. Okay.

00:16:13:20 - 00:16:47:04 Anna Yuan Yeah. So I think the, the biggest advantage for AI is now I can easily understand a big corpus of data. This including conversations on Reddit. Right. And what I can do really, really well is to, first of all, analyze those conversations, extract patterns and then help you to turn all of this pattern into actionable insight. Right. So so that's fundamentally what I can do in a split of six seconds.

00:16:47:04 - 00:17:14:02 Anna Yuan This days. So, so what used to be, you know, human Dan for eight for four hours of work. Now I can turn those conversation into patterns, into insight. And what we've been working with stop tell was and then we we we we 24 seven monitoring all this conversation. We understand the business objective of where that store wants to be.

00:17:14:04 - 00:17:51:21 Anna Yuan And then we can start turn those what we're hearing into insights and feed that into sales team feeds, into product team feed that into marketing team. Our customer success right. So so we build different workflow based on the type of conversation we have identified. Hey, this is actually someone who are asking a question about how to use dovetail and we automatically sent that into to to the customer support customer success team as well as product team because they are they care about what people are, how people are using it, what they say about it.

00:17:51:24 - 00:18:18:18 Anna Yuan And then if someone asks me, hey, I'm looking for a, new tool in this to help me to understand my customer better. This is a lead, right? We had that conversation to the sales team, right? So you can start build like our system will help you to start building this type of workflow automatically when we start surfacing conversations that relevant to your business object, right.

00:18:18:22 - 00:18:39:13 Anna Yuan So that's a very obvious way that we can do. And then in terms of, you know, long term, like all this incredible information is going to help you shape, like your product roadmap and your your sales strategy. Right. Where do you what kind of use case you want to double down that help your team to grow your product, to grow in that space.

00:18:39:20 - 00:18:45:21 Anna Yuan So those are the just a few examples. Well, what we are able to do based on the conversations.

00:18:45:24 - 00:18:55:08 Joshua Zerkel That's great. And of course this is all in addition to some of the EO and Geo additional boosts that come from doing this work on Reddit and other sources. As well. Right.

00:18:55:10 - 00:19:24:15 Anna Yuan 100%. And then, like Jeremy mentioned before, everything is actually interconnected, right? The the conversation you have detected is going to help your marketing team creating content. And that content in right turn feeds into your algo. And that's going to help you to boost your discovery through those channels as well. Right? So keep on like every single. No. If we find this stage, the most important thing that we can do is how can we interconnect all of this system together.

00:19:24:15 - 00:19:31:23 Anna Yuan So they become a self evolving self optimizing machine, help you to do every single aspects better.

00:19:31:25 - 00:19:32:18 Joshua Zerkel That's great.

00:19:32:21 - 00:20:06:03 Jeremie Gluckman Yeah. And so one thing about setting up systems to monitor these are no unknown channels. So one specific insight for example is like if a new product manager posted about building out, insights repository in notion, we were able to know that that was a high intent signal. And we could we could send those, and, you know, obviously monitoring across channels surface, those high intent, leads to relevant teams internally.

00:20:06:06 - 00:20:58:27 Jeremie Gluckman The other piece is starting to draft standard artifacts. So that the team can, lower the time it takes to engage. So what is a standard response look like a quality authentic response look like in Reddit? Setting up, also, monitoring around what responses are generating the most upvotes. And then, if there are repeated questions and you start to notice trends, independently of like buyer intent signals, but maybe questions that are asked repeatedly that needs to be routed to create a help center article, because then that standard, and consistency across both of those domains, your help docs and Reddit will, improve.

00:20:59:00 - 00:21:38:18 Jeremie Gluckman Go outcomes. So to your point, there's as all community functions, an element of translation, and you need to work across all teams to make sure that they are bot in and understand why, investing and monitoring some of these channels that might not be directly owned, is more possible now with AI, but also, super critical because you are missing, a lot if you're just, leveraging your sales and, success calls or just your own domains and your, your own social media.

00:21:38:21 - 00:21:57:08 Joshua Zerkel Well, this is that whole community everywhere strategy that we hear a lot about currently, where you you have to be with the customers and the prospects are you can't force them to come to you because they won't. And so understanding where the conversations are happening, monitoring and engaging in ways that feel right for your brand, for your business, is super, super important.

00:21:57:10 - 00:22:22:06 Joshua Zerkel I want to invite everyone who is attending live to drop your questions in the chat or the Q&A. Will be happy to get to them. But I have one more question for the two of you. We've spoken a little bit about what happens when everything goes right. But what are some of the wrong things to do? Or the common pitfalls when engaging on places like Reddit that could affect some of the positive outcomes that we've we've been discussing?

00:22:22:08 - 00:22:46:18 Jeremie Gluckman That's a great, a great question. I definitely learned through trial and error because I was not a Reddit power user before going down on this journey, and I was not prepared for the moderation and kind of investment in some of these subreddits. So it's very critical to have your own voice, make sure that your profile, don't hide behind an alias.

00:22:46:20 - 00:23:13:01 Jeremie Gluckman That's where, especially if you're a customer facing professional, like having your own human presence that you've developed over time on the internet can be so critical, which seems so intuitive. But in a world where so much is artificial and generated, we're not we're we're in a, decrease in overall trust of online content, signaling things and simple things.

00:23:13:04 - 00:23:35:21 Jeremie Gluckman I know one time I kind of was in a rush and posted, a response that was, included an M dash, and then someone sniffed it out and was just like, I think this is, you know, this company spamming our forum. And, you know, you really could get banned pretty quickly. Pretty basic tips don't link to outside sources.

00:23:35:21 - 00:23:58:29 Jeremie Gluckman Keep it within Reddit. Don't invite people to a webinar. Don't send them a one pager that immediately flags like I'm trying to collect your info in a forum. So, also the power of GIFs. When I started using like GIFs with like actual humans and then added my face on my Reddit profile, I was a lot better received.

00:23:59:01 - 00:24:23:12 Jeremie Gluckman And be upfront and honest, I had on my profile kind of I was open that I was, a community builder for a software company. Right. So, it's up to you to find that line, be, you know, refine your writing skills, have your own voice, have fun with it. If you're going to get a positive response from people online, you need to be excited about what you're posting and how you're engaging yourself.

00:24:23:12 - 00:24:40:29 Jeremie Gluckman So make it interesting for yourself. And it's so easy to get caught up in kind of the the metrics and measurement game. But yeah, I think more that more and more what makes a brand and a company stand out is the humans that run it. Right. And that's why we're seeing also this, you know, founder led sales is a big thing.

00:24:40:29 - 00:24:53:15 Jeremie Gluckman Now, a lot of people are getting ghostwriters on LinkedIn. And if you don't have those skills, yeah, you can get help to just build your own voice and really be yourself. Right?

00:24:53:18 - 00:25:17:06 Anna Yuan Yeah. One thing. Yes. One thing I would add is, this is actually applies to any community social platform, right? So when you do go there, like share your thoughts or talk about specific things you want to speak, you want to be very focused. You want to pick one kind of persona and really, really hone on it.

00:25:17:09 - 00:25:41:14 Anna Yuan Right. This is also something we learned the hard way. So we work with larger companies and they have different products and also will use one profile, talk about five different products. And this really confuses and or any, any, you know, I, I all they do is pattern detection, understand who you are, what problem you're solving, what specific use case.

00:25:41:16 - 00:26:12:28 Anna Yuan So so when you do come up with a strategy for, you know, for a company to have multiple product line, different services, you want it to create multiple accounts. Every single account really talk about one thing. And repetitively, while not part of the way in the content, but really have that focus, right. So this way I am know that hey, Jeremy is the perfect person I can quote from when it comes to community building for for for software, our high growth software companies for specific use cases.

00:26:12:28 - 00:26:35:06 Anna Yuan Right. So so that gives you that gives you the leverage to become much more strong signal. When I am looking at how you're contributing in this space. Right. So that's something incredibly powerful. And this actually also applies for LinkedIn applies for any other, channels that you are sharing your content.

00:26:35:09 - 00:26:37:02 Joshua Zerkel It's great. Yeah.

00:26:37:05 - 00:27:01:14 Jeremie Gluckman And I'll add like we used tooling to map out content opportunities. But there is definitely, a whole exercise you can run with your team to understand what are those, queries that people are asking, and then adapt your question based on real, prompts to lens. There's an element of, workflows and processes, but also ROI and measurement.

00:27:01:14 - 00:27:27:01 Jeremie Gluckman And I think at a high level with, go, you want to be again running tests across positioning, sentiment citations and mentions. So build out a simple EO tracker and test 25 to 50 questions monthly and track. Where do you appear? Review those descriptions. Are they positive, neutral or negative? Which sources are the lens pulling from?

00:27:27:01 - 00:27:42:21 Jeremie Gluckman Is it read it blog help center and then are you named or not? And over time you can build a case for these efforts. And this engagement across the business is helping us, be more relevant in how people discover products and services today.

00:27:42:23 - 00:28:00:02 Joshua Zerkel This is super helpful context. This is I think if you are building community or if you're in go to market in any way, you need to be aware of of this strategy and start thinking about how you and your team can implement. Because if you don't, it sounds like you're going to get left behind pretty quickly and people won't find you where they're looking for you.

00:28:00:04 - 00:28:17:08 Joshua Zerkel So I want to say thank you to Jeremy and Anna. That's just about all the time that we have. However, this is not the end. This is just the beginning. So if you have questions, I invite you to continue the conversation in the forum, AMA Jeremy, and it will pop in there and answer questions over the next few days.

00:28:17:12 - 00:28:26:07 Joshua Zerkel So please feel free to contribute. There. Jeremy and Anna, where would you like people to find you online?

00:28:26:10 - 00:28:38:04 Anna Yuan Well, you can find us on LinkedIn, Anna, Johan and Scout identity. And also just feel free to shoot me an email at Anna at scale. Again, tech dot I always here to help.

00:28:38:06 - 00:28:39:14 Joshua Zerkel Thank you Jeremy.

00:28:39:17 - 00:28:59:23 Jeremie Gluckman Yes, I am Jeremy Gluckman on LinkedIn and happy to connect with everyone and anyone. Hop on a call. I'll drop my calendar, a link on the AMA thread and I can't wait to connect. Still learning here so would love to leverage the hive mind and build it with AI together.

00:28:59:25 - 00:29:16:09 Joshua Zerkel Thank you both so much. We are all still learning together, which is why I'm so glad the two of you shared your information today. I want to say thank you to everyone who was in attendance. Thank you to Kyle in the background, helping us make sure everything ran smoothly today, and we'll look forward to seeing all of you in a future event.

00:29:16:11 - 00:29:19:25 Joshua Zerkel See you then. Take care everyone. Thank you so much.

00:29:19:27 - 00:29:21:13 Anna Yuan For hosting us.

00:29:21:16 - 00:29:22:06 Joshua Zerkel Thank you.