Your favorite Wyze Community Managers will be coming to you LIVE to hang out over in Discord today at 4:00 PM Pacific! We’ll have discussions about Wyze topics, discussions about random other topics, witty banter, less witty banter, and PRIZES!
I actually had no intention to post anything about this since it wasn’t an AMA, but since my pal @Customer asked so nicely, I’ll do a little summary:
It started out with the Wyze employees talking with each other and not realizing we could hear them already. We kept hoping for accidental leaks or something embarrassing, but alas, we were disappointed. They promised they’d say something embarrassing later, but the closest thing I heard was that Gwendolyn admits that they spam their coworkers with SpongeBob memes all the time.
#1 rule = don’t tell Gwendolyn if you took the survey more than once because you’ll hurt their feelings.
They had this many responders:
Forums: 104
Facebook: 192
Discord: 61
Reddit: 37
SIDENOTE: There was data showing that the Reddit people like nothing and nobody (To be fair, this is half of why Reddit even exists though, so it’s just more of an indication the data is valid ).
SIDENOTE: Every Community is @UserCustomerGwen 's community. They check them all out.
286 people total agreed to answer “more Wyze questions” beyond the short survey, including demographic info.
Good spread of ages, though 35-44 was the most common.
Some things were skewed:
80% of survey respondents were men “which does not quite match with our knowledge of how many women are in our communities and stuff.”
"California. Florida. Texas and Ohio, were the most common states that people said they’re from.
“77% of our survey respondents were white, which makes sense because one of the things that we need to do for our communities is make them more accessible in appealing to people of different demographics. Because right now, we have a whole lot of white people, but not as many folks from other demographics. And that’s been kind of a big problem for us as we’re looking at this. So when we do our community surveys, it’s very important to us to get these demographic questions out because otherwise, we’re not going to know if certain groups are over-represented compared to the rest of our Wyze customers as an example. And this is also a good way for us to get information about what kinds of trends we’re seeing based on people’s different perspectives.”
“When we look at the education attain, we did not have outliers. The most common response was that folks had a bachelor’s degree.”
“Most people responding to the survey live in single family homes, in its usually in the suburbs.”
“So we have a big skew here. And one of my goals for upcoming surveys and community initiatives is going to be trying to bring more people out who do not fit these groups so that we can have a better balance and make sure that our communities are actually fun for everybody.”
SIDENOTE: Gwendolyn admits that they make mistakes
Gwendolyn is making changes to the survey about asking people what they consider to be their Home Wyze Community and believes this will help them have better data in the future.
SIDENOTE: Gwendolyn’s ADHD got them easily distracted by all the art and memes everyone was posting in the chat.
People on Discord are most likely to follow Wyze on other social media, while the group least likely to follow Wyze on anything else are the Redditors. BUT again, they only had 37 respondents so it is underrepresented. Most people find Wyze communities by searching online for them, but the page on Wyze dot com is helping.
“Surprising nobody, people are much more likely to recommend their home community to a friend or colleague. So, there were some majorly negative responses to that question for communities that felt less similar, All of our communities have their own culture and tone and approach and tools. Like everything is supposed to feel pretty drastically different and then people are supposed to self-select the community that feels best for them. That’s always been the plan as I was designing the community’s when Wyze first started.”
“Facebook and Discord tend to feel more favorable to each other; and the forums and our subreddit tend to feel more favorable to each other. But again, Reddit likes nothing. They even slammed their own subreddit. Again, only 37 people filled out the survey. So when you’re looking at that, a lot of people who would be answering are more likely to be people who are frustrated with something and they needed an outlet to express that and since we didn’t get more responses to balance that out, you end up with a decidedly sour opinion.”
Michael Re: his Subreddit: “It definitely does skew more towards complaints and some negativity. But I definitely think that there’s been a lot of improvements the last year, and change. It’s just, yeah, it’s a slow moving ship.” Also trying to change the focus, though some people are upset the company has gone against some of their requests and they like to hold a grudge longer.
BUT Reddit has been doing a lot great stuff with more frequent AMAs and Wikis, though a lot of the Reddit responders didn’t know those exist.
SIDENOTE: Gwendolyn has sour grapes over the fact that they weren’t allowed to have a MySpace when it was big, so they came in on the Facebook wave. Gwendolyns parents were concerned they wanted to be online all the time and tried to tell them “Gwendolyn. You can’t make a career out of social media. You need to stop being on there.” And now here Gwendolyn is with a career on social media.
FORUMS
For the forum, the people using the forum are more likely to be active participants in the forum and not very likely to be active participants elsewhere.
The reasons that people actually like our forums are the tips and tricks that people share, the ability to get help from members, and Wyze employees, and the wish list and roadmap.
The things that people don’t like about our forums are they don’t feel like there’s enough updates from Wyze staff. This is especially relevant for the wish list and roadmap.
Then there are the complaints and spam posts which you’re going to see as a trend through all of these. It’s one of the major problems of social media as a concept at this point.
And for the forum, the platform feels complicated for a lot of people who are less familiar with it and we did get some recommendations for different forums that we could go with and we are going to take a look at that but I doubt we’re going to do a whole new form redesign right now to be honest.
Reddit:
The people using the Reddit collector are more likely to be participants in the forum.
There were too few responses to pull many conclusions from that one.
The reasons that people like our subreddit are the AMAs and are community members helping each other.
The things that people don’t like about our subreddit are the lack of employee engagement and people who are frustrated when posting which is my sanitized way to talk about lots of people talking about the Reddit culture issues where people tend to be a lot more negative and as I saw in the community live chat here, somebody pointed out that it’s a more anonymous platform and that makes it a lot easier for people to just totally go off.
[Paraphrased:] Reddit is more difficult to get engagement on same day activities or events like this fireside, or get announcements out. It’s not as friendly to some of the positive initiatives and events to pick up steam, but more people go to Reddit when they have a problem. They get a lot of activity for the AMA’s, especially as people from the other platforms join in there for those. Reddit gets some of the most passionate users, and while there is negativity, they also have some really great users that are extremely helpful and underrepresented.
Someone said they were concerned about Wyze’s social spending/teams at Wyze, taking away from the research and development budgets or negatively impacting the ability to release products.
Community managers aren’t just sitting on social media all day. They are helping with bug reports, and testing things, editing, leading beta programs and helping other teams with various tasks. They interface with the community to help with all these things, but they aren’t just chatting with people.
Discord
Worst news of the event: @WyzeJimmy is no longer going to be the Wyze Discord Server Community Manager
Jimmy started the first new platform (Discord) in 4 years, but he’s been transitioning into working on growth with the wyze dot com and app side of things. And Jason and Gwendolyn are working on filling in that Discord gap where Jimmy is moving out of…though he promises to stop in still.
Jimmy was named very specifically in the survey as one of the best parts of the Discord server.
Sometimes the chats move too quickly
Sometimes the chats moved too slow
Channels can be confusing
SIDENOTE: Jimmy really wanted to get Discord to 10K members before he left. He said:
There was talk about Halloween costumes (Wyze cam/pan, Gumby, etc)
Wyze is turning 5 next month = October 24th.
Talk of festivities.
What do you want to see for the 5 year celebration?
Favorite Wyze device discussion.
What do you like the most about Wyze? Survey says Prices, quality, ease of use, community, and customer service.
Facebook Core
Respondents like that People help with issues
Like Ideas people post for using products
Like Employee engagement
Don’t like Complain posts
Don’t like Rules
Don’t like Fanboys
Facebook = very polarizing in general, so they try to give guidelines about what kind of things are appropriate and will remove people who break community guidelines.
SIDENOTE:@cyberdog_17 showed up late and was called out by Gwendolyn: “Cyber Dog’s in there just causing trouble. I see it.”
Lots giveaways of free Wyze stuff throughout
At the end Jimmy gave away a group of coupon codes that were first come first serve.
There you go, you can’t get a better summary of the entire hour-long fireside than I just posted, without attending yourself…but I covered all the best parts if I do say so myself.
Those Fireside Events are Fast and Furious…
