Meet Becky
I realized recently that I’ve been in community a lot longer than I thought, starting with a small dialup in the 90s called CyberVille that we built from the ground up. It was meant to be a hyper-local version of AOL or CompuServe, and I was the guide who helped members find what they needed. It didn’t last a long time (I think less than a year), but that was probably what fueled my love of things online, community, and building connections. I sure wish I’d kept the t-shirt from that!
Currently, I’m the Head of Total Community at JumpCloud, which includes community, meetups, organic social, and influencer outreach. At my core, I am a builder (community), connector (people and resources), and an enabler (networking, awareness, outreach, insights, and yes, connections). Our team sits in marketing, and our goal is to build brand awareness for the company. We do this by building relationships with IT admins, regardless of whether they use our products. We focus on being a community of practice—which is a community for people in the same profession or who undertake the same activities. IT admins are at the core of everything we do, and while the community site is relatively new, listening to and connecting with them is not. Our team gets to do fun things like run monthly meetups in various cities and host a weekly live stream show where we talk to IT admins and make a lot of silly IT jokes to a loyal—and equally funny—audience.
Becky’s Posts
Week 1 - March 13: Community Management Foundations
Week 2 - March 20: Community Management Advanced
Week 3 - March 27: Connecting Community to your Business
About JumpCloud
JumpCloud’s mission is to Make Work Happen®, providing simple, secure access to an organization’s technology resources from any device or location. The JumpCloud Open Directory Platform gives IT, security operations, and DevOps a single, cloud-based solution to control and manage employee identities and devices and apply conditional access controls based on Zero Trust principles. Since launching in 2012, our global user base has grown to more than 180,000 organizations, with over 5,000 paying customers, including Cars.com, GoFundMe, Grab, Uplight, ClassPass, and Peloton. JumpCloud has raised over $400M from world-class investors, including Sapphire Ventures, General Atlantic, Sands Capital, Atlassian, and CrowdStrike.
My #Experts Focus
Community has been central to my work for a couple of decades now, in one form or another. It started as a hobby where I managed forums related to things I enjoyed, slowly taking on more responsibility until I was building community forums from the ground up—including configuring the software and setting up the entire site. Then one day, I saw a tweet (yes, a tweet) that changed my trajectory. A friend of a friend was looking for a community manager, and I discovered that my hobby could also be a real job with real pay and turn into an actual career! I love connecting people with each other and the resources they need, so this was—and is—perfect for me.
My #Experts focus this month will be Community Management. That can be quite the umbrella term. I’ll talk about online communities related to building relationships with an audience interested in a shared topic, brand, or company. We’ll start with foundational skills and then move on to more intermediate and advanced topics. If you have some burning questions about community, let me know, and I’ll try to fit them in future posts!
Note: This won’t include social media management, as many of us who manage community forums consider that a separate practice. Yes, that function reports into my team because I also have experience in social, but it’s a different skill set.
More About Me
Currently, I live in Raleigh, NC, with my kids. We’ve been here about 5 ½ years, coming from San Diego. We love how beautiful the area is. And since it’s a tech hub, it’s perfect for being able to stay involved in a variety of related activities. I’m on the board of two tech nonprofits: the Association of IT Professionals in RTP and Carolina Women in Tech Raleigh Chapter. And I’m a member of (and on the Board of Advisors), North Carolina Technology Association (NC Tech), which does a lot to advance the technology sector in the state—North Carolina is the second highest employer of women in tech in the US! I’m so fortunate to love what I do and have many friends in both community and high-tech who share similar passions.
My first post on March 13 will start with community management foundations for those companies who are looking to start and may need some direction in choosing software, how to get a general plan together, and where to look for helpful resources. I can’t wait to share and hear from y’all!
