Standing on Giants ads

Hope everyone's having a good week so far. 😊 ☀️ Choosing the right community platform is one of the most common questions I deal with as a community consultant, and honestly one of the hardest to answer without context. In my 15+ years of working in this industry, the platforms have changed a lot, but the challenges businesses face in choosing the right one haven't. So many options out there, each pulling in a different direction, and the "wrong" choice can cost a team a lot of time and money down the line. As part of my research work at Standing on Giants, I've been diving into the platform landscape and put together a view of 10 leading community platforms, covering what each one is built for, who it suits and what to watch out for. It's a high-level starting point. Platform selection involves a lot (!) more than a roundup can cover and the right fit depends on your community's purpose and strategy, your team's capacity, your tech stack and more... If you're in the middle of that decision and want to go deeper, that's exactly the kind of project we help with at SoG, but if you're just starting to map the landscape, hopefully this article saves you some time. 😊 👉 https://lnkd.in/e8pSZfYa Have a lovely rest of the week!

What did Reddit make of Emma Hayes and her Chalkboard? ITV spent a fortune building a rooftop studio in New York for the World Cup. Then they sat Emma Hayes, a coach with 15 major trophies, in a corner of it that looked like a kitchen. Handed her a chalkboard. Gave her 70 seconds. We read 276 Reddit comments to find out what football fans actually made of it. The verdict was more interesting than you'd expect. Almost everyone agreed the analysis was the best thing on air. 70 seconds of Hayes explaining exactly why England kept playing out from the back beat the rest of the panel across the whole match. The kitchen? A near-unanimous disaster. The jokes started before half time. The chalkboard? Genuinely divided. Cheap and disrespectful vs. refreshingly low-tech. The thread never settled it. And then there was the meta-layer, the debate about the debate itself, which revealed something uncomfortable about how we talk about women in sport online. The two most upvoted comments in the thread sat within three votes of each other. One said she was the best pundit on the coverage. The other asked why she'd been put in a kitchen. Both right. Full breakdown on the blog, link in comments.

The recent 'Hot Girls Read' story from Booktok on TikTok and Instagram has made some waves across the community industry, creating questions about community ownership, loyalty and integrity. I've gathered some of my thoughts on how the event applies to other kinds of communities and the evolving ways in which we need to manage them as CM professionals - https://lnkd.in/e76_An8i

Three years ago, Oatly did something on Reddit, Inc. that I still think is one of the best examples of how to engage on the platform. They ran an ad. But not a normal ad. They posted a Megathread (the format Reddit uses for massive community debates) and just asked people to argue about oat milk. Comments fully open. No over zealous moderation. And turned out Redditors were all too happy to argue about oat milk. 🔥 9,037% comment engagement rate. 🔥 The Creative Director at the time, Kevin Lynch, said afterwards: "Such change doesn't happen without plenty of criticism and debate. The feedback kept our community management team busy, the positive as well as the negative. It was exactly what we had hoped for." They wanted the argument. They welcomed the people who hated them. And it became the biggest conversation about oat milk Reddit had ever seen. Oat milk iced latte selfie partially related 🥛 ☀️

SEPHORA's recent closure of the Beauty Insider community has been talked about a lot in our industry, with good reason. I wrote about it last week on this platform, but you can find an expanded piece with some more of my thoughts below. Enjoy! Thanks again to Richard Millington for sharing some great data around his work with them. https://lnkd.in/eXA9e3D5

As promised… let’s #GetReal together and talk about what this campaign is really all about. 👀 Beyond the trend and aesthetics, what genuinely excites me is seeing how online communities move together in real time. Today, a campaign no longer lives only on a billboard, in a magazine, or inside your inbox. Standing on Giants lives through conversations, creators, fandoms, and digital spaces powered by real people coming together around shared interests and moments. That’s what makes campaigns like this so fascinating to me. They become more than marketing. They become part of internet culture. So… which story from this campaign would you like me to cover first? Let me know in the comments 👇 #HumanPoweredInternet #OnlineCommunities