From a young age, Carrie Melissa Jones has benefitted from the support of a strong community. By joining online music forums and chat rooms as a teen, Carrie was able to spark connections with new people, find her voice, and flourish into a leader. Today, Carrie is an author and the leader of a community for other community leaders. Hear her advice on hosting meaningful events and finding the people who will help you thrive.
Ranked as one of the top 25 CEO podcasts on Feedspot, Keep Connected with Meetup CEO David Siegel is a podcast about the power of community. For more details on other episodes, visit Keep Connected on the Meetup Community Matters blog.
We hope you’ll keep connected with us. Drop us a line at podcast@meetup.com. If you like the podcast, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts!
Learn more about Keep Connected host David Siegel’s experience as a leader and decision maker in his book, Decide & Conquer. Pre-order your copy today!
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How To See Yourself As A Leader With Carrie Melissa Jones
In this episode, we are talking to Carrie Melissa Jones. She’s an author, entrepreneur, community expert and most importantly, a special person. One of the things you’ll hear a lot about is her focus on quality over quantity. Bigger isn’t necessarily better so read and you’re going to learn why she’s such a special person.
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Welcome, Carrie Melissa Jones.
Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be talking with you.
We’re excited too. Carrie is the author of Building Brand Communities, the co-author of The Art of Community and the founding partner of CMX, the largest community conference. You notice the word community appears here quite a few times because she is Ms. Community and our readers are going to find out why. Let’s start with the why. Behind every community leader is a story about why community is something that became your passion clearly at an early age. Tell us about the why.
I got into this, not as a profession at all, which is how most people get into community building.
Those are the best professions, by the way. When you’re doing it as a passion and then it becomes the profession.
I was an extremely awkward kid and teenager. I was very shy to the point where like now, things would not come out of my mouth. My voice would not come out of my mouth when I was trying to speak or I would raise my hand in class and I would be shaking. I was very closed off and quiet. I didn’t think it would ever be any different. I thought I would always be that way but luckily, I grew up in Silicon Valley in the 1990s. My dad worked in tech in public relations and as a journalist. He got early computers so he gave me my own computer at a young age, which could have gone wrong.
That’s the dream of every introvert, an early computer. That way, I could talk to a screen and not to people.
Exactly but I didn’t fully realize that. I thought it was for games. Then, I discovered early on chat rooms and forums. For me, it was music forums that broke through how I met people online. I met hundreds of other teenagers online through that time and for the first time in my life, I felt like I could be myself. I could share who I was. I could be extroverted digitally and experiment with who I was and who I wanted to become. During that time, I met so many people. We became pen pals. We would give each other gifts in the mail and call each other.
From how far away? Was it around the world or just the United States?
I remember having one pen pal in the Philippines and my parents were like, “Why are you getting letters from the Philippines?” I’m like, “Don’t worry about it.”
Did you take on a different personality as an online person? Were you still awkward teenager Carrie or were you superwoman Carrie?
Who you are affects the community you build.
I think I was more myself than I had ever been in a group before socially. One-on-one, I was always very quirky, a nerd and a major bookworm. I couldn’t express that to other people. I was more of myself and at the same time, as a teenager, you’re questioning, “Who am I? What am I here for?” I got to go into one forum and express one part of myself and then express another part of myself in other areas. It was a time when I needed great experimentation.
Through that time, I didn’t realize it. I still couldn’t bring these skills and bring myself into my day-to-day offline world but I had some very close friends and one of them called me one night. I remember she was crying on the phone and said, “Can you come outside? I’m outside your house,” so I came outside. I was probably about fifteen. Normally, I would sit there and listen to her while she told me what was going on but she asked me how I was doing and for the first time in my life, I said, “I’m not okay.” I was going through a lot of personal family tragedies.
I remember thinking at the time, “I know how to do this. I know how to be open. I just haven’t done it with anyone face-to-face before and I’m going to do it right now.” We still talk about that night many years later, about how important that night was for our friendship. We became sisters at that point. She’s still my very best friend. I think for me, the real passion comes from this idea that I was able to be myself in some ways and perform the ideal version of myself and then I was able to take that as a skill that I practiced and then bring it into the real world. For me, that has always been what’s powerful about online communities. It gave me practice.
How did you bridge that gap from being that online persona of who you are? You weren’t being someone else. You were being more yourself than when you were in person to that offline. Was it baby steps? You worked hard and it was uncomfortable but every single time you did, it became a little bit less comfortable or it didn’t become less comfortable. It was always uncomfortable or did it happen quickly? What were the words that you had to say to yourself to motivate you to become that person that you wanted to be in person, which you are online?
I don’t think I did it alone. I think that night was the first step where I said, “I’m going to bring this part of me to the world.” I didn’t do it alone because my best friend, I remember a year later or so, said, “You should get involved in student government.” I was like, “No way. I cannot do that.” I had to give a talk to a group of 30 people in a crowded, hot room. I was shaking and I was scared the entire time. I didn’t get the position but I got good feedback and I had someone rooting for me. The next year, she said, “Go for it again,” so I did and then I got a position the next year. Always having people who believed in me to show me opportunities opened the door for me and kept pushing me to push myself but I could not have done that alone.
You got something more than that position the first time. You did, which was the confidence to be able to maybe fail, do it again and succeed. One of the things that you write and then you’ve talked about is how one’s personality as a community leader or in Meetup parlance, as a Meetup organizer, influences the type of community that you build. Talk a little bit about how an organizer can best personify themselves in their community or what their approach to their community should be based on their understanding of themselves.
What I mean when I say, who you are affected the community that you build, is that if you have anything that is unresolved, unhealed trauma, a sense of scarcity or a sense of confidence. On the other hand, all of that is going to translate to the community that you build in big and small ways. Sometimes, you can get around it over the short-term but what you see is that over time, if you have these unresolved issues, lack of confidence or if you’re nervous all the time, you’ll see that reflected in a turnover, of people not returning and you don’t need a lot of people to return. You need a very small group of people to return over time to start building a snowball of a community.
That’s what I mean. The greatest advice I can give to anyone is if you are lucky enough to be able to afford it, find a good therapist as a community builder because all my stuff around, “I’m invisible. I’m not popular. No one cares about what I have to say,” all of that came out in my work and it will continue to come out if you don’t resolve it. That will really impede how much of an impact you can have. That’s key. It’s to be self-aware in everything that you’re doing and it’s easier said than done.
That advice makes me think of two things. The first is about how when you start a company and you’re an entrepreneur. That company will have the DNA of the founder no matter what and it could be many years since a founder can leave. Take Steve Jobs, an obvious example with Apple and the culture of innovation or take Microsoft’s focus on research. The founder leaves this deep DNA imprint and whether you’re an entrepreneur as an organizer or a community leader of a company and they’re all correlated, it leaves the same thing. The best thing is self-awareness in life in general.
The other thing I was thinking about and tell me if you agree or disagree is another piece of advice I would probably give. It’s to know yourself and, therefore, find people who complement your skillsets. If you maybe lack some skills or confidence, find someone who is particularly more salesy or more outgoing. If you’re more of an outgoing person, find someone who’s more organized or able to handle operations, etc., as part of community organizing.
What did you do? What did you find for yourself when you were organizing your first communities? Knowing your background and your stuff, how did you find that manifesting itself in challenges that you may be had in the beginning? What things did you do originally in some of the first communities that you started?
I will say that a lot of this didn’t necessarily come out so much in the hobby communities that I built but because I was being judged by my organization, that’s when it came out for me. For me, it was a sense of being invisible, like what I have to say doesn’t matter. I would launch things quietly or try to keep things intentionally small in a way that wasn’t serving the purpose of the group or not believing in myself. I’m bringing on people or working with people who would try to heal those wounds that I would project onto them like, “You’re going to see me and you’re going to validate me,” and then get taken advantage of in many situations.
That affected me for a very long time. Frankly, the only way I’ve been able to come to terms with all of it has been years of therapy. I have a fantastic therapist. It’s therapy and constantly checking myself. I’m constantly asking, “Is this about my ego or is this going to be of service? Why am I doing what I’m doing now?” I have to check myself a lot because sometimes when you get into a state of comparison or whatever else it might be, your work is not what’s bothering you. It is any kind of issues you might have around, like not being popular or whatever baggage you bring.
Over time, I’ve started to cherish the individual relationships that get built in the communities that I build. I’ve run many Meetup groups. I ran one in Seattle several years back. It was a sewing Meetup event. I rented out a space at a WeWork and I invite people to this Meetup group. At the first event, only one person showed up, this one woman. I was like, “I could be very sad now that only one person showed up,” but instead, I thought, “I have this opportunity to talk to this one woman.” She had been sewing for 40 years and had her own fashion line. We sat down and ate dinner together and sewed together. The next time, we had three people and every time I do anything now, I think, “How can I make this experience great for one person, three people or however many people are there?” It’s not about the bigness. It’s always about the depth.
You had on so many things. I’m going to reiterate a couple of them because I don’t have any great ideas myself. All I could do was reiterate the smart things that you said. The first is questioning your motivations. It’s interesting because I think most people’s motivations, unfortunately, tend to be ego-driven. Meaning they want their name to be out more. They want to be bigger, more well-known, more powerful or more influential.
Interestingly, your motivation was almost the opposite and that you wanted to not be too well-known, not have too much ego and not have too many people here. Both sides need to overcome those motivations and ask themselves, “What’s in the best interest of my job? What’s in the best interest of what I’m trying to accomplish?” I think that’s so awesome. That’s one point.
The second is around thinking longer-term and not seeing one person showing up or three people showing as much as a building block. It’s a building block because everything starts with a single then a pair and then growth from there. It’s so easy to get caught up with numbers. Frankly, numbers are also disproportionate potentially to value. In fact, we’ve done a lot of studies at Meetup and found that the optimal number of people that are in a Meetup event is 8 to 10 people because of the fact that there could be a depth of relationships that occur when you’re in that, let’s say, even 6 to 10-person type range. Even one-on-one is very valuable but that’s a relationship, not a community.
I think the world, especially in the United States, in particular, we’re caught up with big. Big cars, big houses, big everything. Bigger is always better. I think in the case of most things in life, bigger is not necessarily better and you have that awareness. I think it’s a great thing. Let’s talk a little bit more about online communities because you’ve done so many online communities.
Although Meetup has always been known for in-person communities, we’ve embraced online as part of the pandemic and there have been over four million online events during the pandemic from zero. How do you make an online event optimally effective? You’ve run so many different types of online groups. What’s some of the secret sauce for online experiences? Also afterward, talk a little bit about how one can effectively transition, if one chooses to do so, to have both online and in-person.
There are a couple of things at play that are universal. One is that there are some major strengths to online gatherings that face-to-face gatherings can never duplicate and we very rarely talk about their advantages. Number one is accessibility. It is far more accessible for people and not only people who are neurodivergent or who have physical needs that are different from the normal or whatever that means. It’s so accessible and also, from a geographic standpoint as well, which is something I’ve heard a lot of organizers tell me. They’re like, “We opened up our group. We’re no longer Milwaukee-specific,” or, “We’re no longer San Francisco-specific. Now, anyone can come.” That’s a major advantage so we’re playing toward that universally.
The second is the mix of synchronicity and asynchronicity that gathering online allows. You have both the synchronous component of this is where you create the great experience for people and that should depend on what you do depending on how many people are there but then you also have the after the experience of how you will reflect on that event and how you will use that event as a jumping-off point to encourage people to create more relationships afterward.
It’s critical between events.
It’s so critical and it will often happen in spite of leaders, as people will go and find each other but it should happen because of great leadership. There’s also the capacity that we have to be completely creative with anything that we’re doing. If we’re not happy with the online gatherings that are taking place, no one’s going to come and magically show us the formula. We e have to create the events that we want to attend.
Now, I want you to magically show us the formula.
It’s not about the bigness. It’s about the depth.
In a sense, there is a formula, which is that you need to know what your values are, your purpose of what your community is, also what you’re gathering about and you need to know what constraints you’re under. Sometimes, having a lot of people is a big constraint that you’re under. Having very few people is a constraint that you’re under. Your technology is a constraint. Working within those constraints with the people that you’re gathering with your unique values and purpose, you can create anything that you want to see exist in a world.
I’ve run workshops with ten people in them where we get together. We do “would you rather” questions. We do sketching together or solo journaling Meetup events. It’s all kinds of things. We get stuck in a box of thinking like, “This is the way it needs to go. The agenda needs to be 35 minutes of intros.” Throw all of that out. It’s not serving us. We wouldn’t be in the loneliest era of American history if it were working.
If you have a whiteboard, that’s great. I have gigantic papers and a lot of markers. I let my mind wander and think, “These are the values.” Let’s say they’re trust, commitment and creativity. Our purpose is to increase equity for women in organizations. I think about like, “What are some of the things that someone who cares about those things and has those values would want to do with other people?” I’d start drawing and writing. I’m a terrible drawer I should say but it comes naturally.
Values-driven agenda setting. Tell me some of the values that you hold in your communities that you’ve built and be specific about a specific community, which could be alive now or could be not. That’s okay too and how the values directly impact that.
I run a community for community builders with my online courses. My personal values are my company’s values. They are integrity, equity and ingenuity. Everything that I do needs to be in integrity with my other set of values. That’s why values are so important to me. Equity is making sure that those who show up feel heard and seen and ingenuity is that this is something that people haven’t experienced before. That doesn’t mean it has to be completely off the wall. Maybe, the difference is the level of presence everyone has for that event.
Those three values guide everything that I create in my online community and in the events that I run. I think about it with equity. If I’m thinking about relaunching the online course, for instance and rebuilding the community, I’m not going to go by myself into a room and say, “Here’s what I’m going to launch. Enjoy once it’s launched.” I’m going to take as much insight as I possibly can. I’m going to ask for tough feedback. I’m going to get on the phone with people and tell them like, “Was there ever a time in this experience where you felt like you weren’t seen or didn’t matter whether you participated or not?” That’s how I’m going to approach re-doing everything. I constantly refer to those values. I have a sheet that has the values written out on it and how they map to all the activities we do.
The visual of having those values in front of you all the time is so important in making sure that it’s the anchor for so many of your decisions. We have six core values at Meetup and what we did is we asked each person to take the value that resonates the most with them and put it as a giant tag on their chair. It says, “I’m all about leading with integrity. I’m all about trust and transparency. I’m all about stepping up.”
I thought of the idea because, in some organizations, people put their Myers-Briggs, ESTJ or etc. so I was like, “Let people have the value that most resonates for them.” It helps to have it palpable and in front of people so that it serves as a basis for decision-making. What’s the best business-related decision that you’ve ever made in your life? When I say business, I mean non-personal. What’s the best non-personal-related decision that you’ve ever made in your life?
I guess I would say setting boundaries with past colleagues and leaving when those boundaries were not respected.
Without sharing details, can you elaborate a little bit on what boundaries were important for you to set and how did you feel comfortable saying, “That’s it. Even though each little baby step, maybe only baby steps but there was a line and you passed the line and therefore, I’m no longer comfortable?”
To be clear, I was not comfortable ever saying I was ready to leave but I did it anyway. For me, my boundaries were about being respected and getting acknowledged for the work that I did. I put a timeline on it. I said, “If this doesn’t change within six months, I’m going to go.” I went on a very long backpacking trip with my father, my now husband and my brother. That’s when I realized like, “We’re coming up on six months. How do I feel?”
I had forgotten that I’d set this boundary but I was exhausted and was out in the middle of nowhere in the Sierras. I was like, “Nothing’s changed. This is where I’m happiest and I need more of this in my life.” I was so stressed out that I was at a friend’s wedding. I was nauseated and vomiting because I was so stressed out running and doing the work that I was doing so I came back and quit.
I want to riff on that for a second, which is the value of artificial deadlines. One could say, “Artificial deadlines are artificial. We don’t like things that are artificial.” In reality, artificial deadlines are what some people call time boxing. It is extremely important in the decision-making processes because what it does is you set a certain period of time and you say, “I’m going to use this time and I’m not going to make a decision but I’m going to reflect on whether or not I should be making a decision.”
It reminds me of a process that a startup does that I think is amazing as part of time boxing and setting an artificial deadline. Every single month, they meet as a company and they say, “Should we completely pivot our business model? There is so much sunk cost fallacy out there that I put so much time into something. How could I change my business model?”
By forcing that conversation every single month, it leads to smarter decision-making and a willingness to pivot to combat the fact that it’s very oftentimes difficult to pivot. Forcing mechanisms are extremely valuable in decision-making so thank you for sharing that. It’s a great example. I have a book coming out. It’s called Decide and Conquer. It’s about best practices in decision-making and talking about building a decision-making framework to help people make decisions both during a crisis and not during a crisis.
When does the book come out?
It’s on pre-order now but it’s coming out on March 8th, 2022. How many communities would you guess that you’ve observed in some way, shape or form? What would you guess? Throw out a number.
Hundreds of thousands, maybe. I do research on them. I’ve been studying them myself and I’ve been part of so many.
That’s incredible. You’ve seen thousands of communities so you have probably seen some organizers that have made some mistakes and you probably have seen some consistency in some of the mistakes that they’ve made. I tend to love learning from my own personal mistakes and I also try to learn but you can’t learn as much from other people’s mistakes, you can still learn a little bit.
Tell me some of the things that you’ve seen as consistent challenges that organizers will go through. You already mentioned one, which is not necessarily understanding themselves well enough in order to see how that reflects on the actual community, which is very thoughtful. Are there any other mistakes that you frequently see in community organizers?
I think this goes back to what we talked about earlier. What I see over and over again is a focus on bigness and size over-focusing really deeply on making sure that the individual members feel like they’re part of something that matters. This manifests in a variety of ways. One of which is that people feel like, “We have a tradition of doing a monthly Meetup event so we always have to do it and we’ll never change it. That’s all we’re going to do.”
What you see a lot in online communities is the same stale content going out week after week or people just posting things to post things. I feel like this is so rote and mechanistic. You see that a lot and that’s why I think so many online communities close or die out over time because the leaders are treating them like they didn’t get big enough so, therefore, they don’t matter. There was a fantastic piece. The Wall Street Journal did a whole, “How To Fix Social Media.”
Clive Thompson, who’s a writer for WIRED and is an author, wrote about how our issues with social media are speaking about what needs to happen for social media to be fixed. One thing that he writes about is that he spends a lot of time in online communities. He said that in a lot of online communities, you don’t see the toxicity that you see in the larger social media context with exceptions.
For the most part, when you go into an online community, there’s a leader there or an organizer who cares. You feel like you’re being welcomed. There are other people who are contributing to something that you care about and you’re not seeing a lot of the negative effects. He says that our focus on bigness is the problem and social media plays on that human desire to be seen by so many people.
Social media plays on the human desire to be seen by so many people.
“I had 250,000 likes. How many did you have? You only had 250,000? I had 400,000.” My teenage daughter and her friends say different things.
One of my friends is a dad and he was bragging about his daughter going viral on TikTok. I was like, “What are we reinforcing?”
Why the obsession with big? When in reality, everyone’s searching for meaning in their life and for real depth of connections, I think. Ultimately, I believe that people care about that. Is it because it’s so measurable and you can’t measure meaning but you can measure the quantity and you can’t measure quality? That’s one reason that I would think. Do you have any other thoughts on that?
I think a big part of it is our culture’s obsession with measurement and being able to see our impact. One of the things I say to community builders all the time is that you might not ever see the impact you have and it’s something that my co-author Charles Vogl has impressed on me. It’s that every relationship you build or every action you have has a ripple effect and you don’t frankly have the right to see all of those ripple effects. That’s people’s private business but I can guarantee you that every interaction is a butterfly effect. I think we’re so obsessed with measuring what can be measured and that means that we’re going to optimize toward what’s being measured because that’s what we can see. That hurts us a lot as a species.
If someone lacks confidence and has an external locus of confidence, maybe they get their confidence and sense of self from outside rather than inside then what better way to get greater confidence by empirical proof that you succeeded? When in reality, getting X number of likes is empirical proof that you succeeded. It’s empirical proof that lots of people said that they might have seen your post when who knows how many people did see it and what they did do with it. Ultimately, things do stem from how you define what’s meaningful for you and whether that’s defined by outside sources or internal sources. That’s what I’ve always perceived.
That’s beautiful. I could feel that. I was doing research on people running Facebook groups and had come across this Reddit thread from an organizer who said, “I don’t have any friends in real life and I’m lonely but I started a Facebook group where we just name things. Two thousand people have joined it and I feel like my life is worth something.”
There are statistics that I’ve read that 25% of people or 1 in 4 people don’t even have one trusted confidant. Not a parent, not a sibling, not a friend, not one. One in four people don’t have that and that’s terrible. Before I ask you a series of questions, I do have one last question, which is there are probably so many hidden gems out there of communities that are like, “Look at what they’re doing. Look at how they’ve done it.”
They could be in super nerdy niche areas and that’s all great. Are there any communities that you want to call out and say, “Give them their props,” and why? No one would have heard of or even necessarily been interested in it but why? One that I think of, to give you a second to think about is the Harley Davidson community.
They are a number of people that have built deep and meaningful communities because they happen to be Harley Davidson riders. I’m not only not a Harley Davidson rider but I’ve never ridden a motorcycle even in my entire life. It’s probably because my father was a neurologist and told me how it was dangerous to do so. For those people who do decide to ride motorcycles and prior to them making that decision, it’s an incredibly deep community that changes tens of thousands of people’s lives. What community would you call out? It could be a tiny one too, that they’re doing it right.
I love the example of Harley. My parents are both Harley riders. They’re in it.
They got the leather.
A lot of it. There are a couple of examples. One is an online community that’s not running anymore in the way that I participated in it but the organizer’s name is Tanya Geisler. She does coaching around the impostor complex. She specifically calls it a complex, not a syndrome because it’s not something you can be diagnosed with. She ran this year-long program. 2019 was the last time she ran it and that program changed my life. I credit her in the Building Brand Communities because it was one of the very rare times that I’ve seen a leader truly embody and create these connections that have become lifelong connections for so many of us completely digitally and this was before she had to do it digitally. That’s one example that comes to mind. She still runs a free Facebook group so that’s still available to people and she’s fantastic, generally.
The other thing that comes to mind that’s constantly inspiring to me are small groups of people locally who worked together to preserve a park or get a trail made or whatever it might be. I’m working now with Mary Burke. She was a gubernatorial candidate for Wisconsin in 2016 and narrowly lost but in the meantime, she built all these muscles around social and campaign organizing. She now lives outside of Madison, Wisconsin and a bunch of her neighbors got together to preserve some natural landmarks in the area.
She said that they formed this group where, finally, the neighbors had some reason to talk to each other in this very rural area. When they succeeded in their mission, she said, “I miss that group. I forgot how much I miss it.” I was like, “I think it’s time for a reunion.” Little groups like that take someone being really passionate about organizing people but those are the ones that stick with us and make a huge difference in our physical worlds as well.
Those are two great examples. Please tell me that Tanya knows the impact that she had on you.
She’s credited in the back of the book and I sent her a copy. I’m constantly talking about her and to her.
I’m glad because it’s important. Even though we don’t have a right to necessarily know our impacts, one of the things that I personally try to do is if someone has had a meaningful impact, tell them about it and share that. Writing a book is helpful for that because then you can put the acknowledgments.
You can write an email.
Email works too. You don’t have to write a book to express gratitude. We’re going to go through some rapid-fire questions to learn a little more about you and your perspective on things. Here we go. When was the first time you saw yourself as a leader?
The first thing that comes to mind is running my own lemonade stands and cookie sales as a kid and getting all my friends to be part of it with me but I was the ringleader.
If you’re one of those people, thank you because I’ve had so much enjoyable lemonade and cookies from people like you. If you could access a time machine to go anywhere at any time, where are you going?
I think I’d like to go to East Tennessee in the 1800s and I specifically say East Tennessee because that’s where my ancestors are from. Also, if you’re looking at the history of East Tennessee, it was Union and not Confederate. The state was split. I would be there and I would learn from my ancestors and how they lived. They lived in Appalachia. How did they do that? I’d like to hear their music too.
Name something on your bucket list.
It has changed a lot since the pandemic but prior, it was to travel to Wales, where my farther back ancestors are from and see how they lived. I’m very obsessed with genealogy and how people used to live.
You know yourself better when you learn more from your ancestors. As we talk about DNA, everyone has DNA in them and we’re inevitably influenced by who came before us. I think it’s a wonderful thing to have that inside of you. Here’s the last question. How do you want to be remembered?
Every relationship you build, every action you have, has a ripple effect, and you don’t frankly have the right to see all of those ripple effects. That’s people’s private business.
I want to be remembered as someone who, when people were around them, felt safe, welcome and comfortable.
You have probably helped thousands of people feel comfortable. It comes down to who you are and being a person who maybe didn’t necessarily feel that way and wants to make sure that every person in this world doesn’t necessarily feel the way that you had felt at one point in your life. It’s a testament to you for taking something that was a challenge and turning it into a way that you’re helping thousands of people. It’s so enjoyable learning from you and talking to you. Thank you for your time.
Thank you so much for all the work you do as well. It’s incredible what you were able to enable people to do with Meetup. I have so much respect.
Thank you.
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Thanks for reading. What an exceptional person who took challenges and turned them into her life’s passion. The three biggest takeaways, probably for me, were you are what you do and who you are impacts every single thing that you do. The second is around some of the power that online communities can have for people in terms of accessibility. The third is the impact of values on your community, on your startup and on anything that you do, anchoring everything in core values. Please subscribe to this show because our goals are not to be the number one show in the world but to have as much of an impact on people as we can. That’s the goal. If this had an impact on you then we’d love for you to learn more. Remember, let’s keep connected because life is better together.
Important Links:
- Carrie Melissa Jones
- Building Brand Communities
- CMX
- The Art of Community
- Decide and Conquer
- How To Fix Social Media – Wall Street Journal Article
About Carrie Melissa Jones
I’m Carrie Melissa Jones — a community builder, entrepreneur, and community management consultant.
I believe in the power of online community. It has helped me through some of the most challenging times in my life. Today I help create community strategies for presidential campaigns, non-profits, small businesses, and the Fortune Global 50.
Last modified on December 13, 2021
