{"id":2944,"date":"2015-04-23T10:00:46","date_gmt":"2015-04-23T18:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/?p=2944"},"modified":"2015-04-23T10:18:10","modified_gmt":"2015-04-23T18:18:10","slug":"community-growth-advice-nichole-elizabeth-demere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thinkapps.com\/blog\/launch\/community-growth-advice-nichole-elizabeth-demere\/","title":{"rendered":"Community Growth: Advice from Nichole Elizabeth DeMer\u00e9"},"content":{"rendered":"

In one form or another,\u00a0Nichole Elizabeth DeMer\u00e9\u00a0has always been involved in customer engagement and growth hacking.<\/p>\n

As a kid she\u00a0taught herself HTML from source codes and as\u00a0a teenager started ranking in\u00a0the top 10\u00a0in Web Crawler for certain search terms \u2014 right around the time the concept of SEO began to\u00a0emerge.<\/p>\n

Today\u00a0DeMer\u00e9 heads up community growth for\u00a0Inbound.org<\/a>, and pitches in as a moderator at\u00a0Growth Hackers<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Product Hunt<\/a>. She was gracious enough to take time out from these multiple roles\u00a0to answer our questions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

How’d you get your start?<\/h2>\n

I started doing SEO when I was 12, before I knew that there was such a thing as SEO \u2014\u00a0but maybe there really wasn\u2019t at the time.<\/p>\n

I was fortunate that I had access to computers as a little girl because I grew up in a tech-savvy environment, and when I saw that other people were creating websites, I wanted to know how they were doing it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

My uncle showed me how to access source codes, and from there, I taught myself HTML, built web sites, and figured out how to get them to rank in search engines. (I was happily ranking in the top ten in Web Crawler for \u201chome page.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Throughout high school, I worked as a web designer for local companies that wanted to start building an online presence.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0in 2000, when it was time to go to college, there weren\u2019t any majors associated with what I was doing online, so I had to consider other options.<\/p>\n

So, what did<\/em> you study in college?<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n

I studied Psychology because I wanted to better understand myself, and I studied Industrial-Organizational Psychology<\/a> because, as an entrepreneur, I wanted to better understand how people think about the workplace and organizations.<\/p>\n

I became specifically interested in job satisfaction<\/a> and spent several semesters of independent study focused on it. I wanted to ensure that when I owned a business one day (and I did – I co-owned Inturact<\/a> for six years), that my employees would be happy and productive.<\/p>\n

(If you\u2019re interested in learning more about I\/O Psychology, check out resources provided by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\"Nichole<\/a><\/p>\n

And how did you end up in customer success,\u00a0growth, and community management?<\/h2>\n

I\u2019ve always been passionate about bringing people together for a common cause.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Above all, I consider myself to be a curator. Curation has been a stepping stone into community management<\/a> because it\u2019s allowed me to build meaningful relationships with influencers and thought leaders by sharing their content.<\/p>\n

Customer success<\/a> is similar to community management in that it seeks to help customers be successful with a product and to turn those customers into brand advocates.<\/p>\n

I was doing customer success when I worked with Trevor<\/a> at Inturact<\/a>, and didn\u2019t realize that there was actually a field for it until I watched a webinar about it by Lincoln Murphy<\/a>. I was delighted to learn that there was a body of research around it, that I could spend time learning from the people who had paved the way.<\/p>\n

Do you find yourself applying I\/O Psychology to\u00a0your work today?<\/h2>\n

Having studied Tests and Measures<\/a>, Psychometrics<\/a>, and other statistics has helped me to understand the processes behind hypothesis-driven growth marketing used to help scale communities.<\/p>\n

As a growth marketer, it\u2019s imperative to understand the principles of Tests and Measures in depth.<\/p>\n

To borrow from Wikipedia<\/a>, the principles are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Standardization<\/b> – All procedures and steps must be conducted with consistency and under the same environment to achieve the same testing performance from those being tested.<\/li>\n
  2. Objectivity<\/b> – Scoring such that subjective judgments and biases are minimized, with results for each test taker obtained in the same way.<\/li>\n
  3. Test Norms<\/b> – The average test score within a large group of people where the performance of one individual can be compared to the results of others by establishing a point of comparison or frame of reference.<\/li>\n
  4. Reliability<\/b> – Obtaining the same result after multiple testing.<\/li>\n
  5. Validity<\/b> – The type of test being administered must measure what it is intended to measure.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    (To learn more, check out\u00a0Psychological Testing and Assessment: An Introduction to Tests and Measurement<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

    \"Inbound.org\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    What has been your most successful growth strategy at Inbound.org so far?<\/h2>\n

    Some of my favorite community-building growth tactics that aren\u2019t necessarily specific to Inbound.org include:<\/p>\n