Welcome to the LikeMinds Community Deep Dive series, where we speak to an exciting community marketing leader in each episode and get to know what makes them tick! 

We connected with the community maverick, Yurii Lazaruk, for this episode. Yurii has had a super-interesting journey that led him to his current role as Community Manager at Code Control.

He was a mathematics student at the National Technical University of Ukraine, after which he worked as a corporate credit analyst at OTP Bank for a while.

After this, Yurii moved into sales, running an online store for a while. He became a financial consultant for some time, as well. Yurii had long been involved in community development and growth, having founded the SEO Club early on and then the Sales Hero community. He’s consulted on community growth for many companies.

In his spare time, he likes to spend time with his family, including his wife, kids, and two dogs. They go out to eat interesting food, travel somewhere, lie around, watch movies, read books, or play games. 

At the back of his mind, Yurii never stops thinking about community. When he’s knee-deep in community building daily, he ensures he walks outside in the park. He’s realized that focusing on something is good, but letting your mind roam brings even better thoughts & ideas for the community.

Applying Lessons From Sales to Community

We wanted to understand more about Yurii’s life in sales as it may have added to his talent as a community-builder.

‍“I never liked selling to just make somebody buy something. I loved using sales to help somebody. If I saw that somebody had needs and I had something that could help them, I enjoyed finding that match. You can sell to sell, or you can sell to help, and I was always in the latter camp.”

Similarly, there are such connections in the community world as well because communities help each other. However, to help, we must first understand what people need by listening to them. And then maybe you’ll find that you have what they need, or you can connect them with someone.

‍“I feel like community builders are these automated connectors, who always know what other people need, and know either how to help them or who to connect them with, so they can thrive together.”

How to Engage the Members (And Build Community Right)

When building a community, it is important to distinguish an audience from your community members. Yurii admires a Chris Brogan quote about the difference between an audience and a community being in the way the chairs face.

The chairs face the speaker in an audience, while in a community session, they face each other. Standing on stage, you emit a certain energy to the audience. While speakers often try to engage listeners by asking questions, it remains a superficial interaction. 

When community members interact, there are, more often than not, deep conversations. The valuable aspect of this layout is the inclusive nature of sitting together and watching each other – it fosters genuine listening and connection with everyone involved. 

‍“So the great power, the great skill, is to let everyone speak. Even for those who do not want to or are afraid of speaking, ensure that you have this trust and safe space so that everyone can speak or maybe ask some questions.” 

In these conversations, embracing diverse perspectives becomes paramount. When trying to foster an inclusive environment, every voice should have the space to contribute to meaningful discussions. Yurii invites people to share worthwhile ideas and experiences regardless of their background. 

When he organized the Sales Expert Conference for 700 attendees, he asked his community who they wanted to hear. He reached out and invited speakers accordingly.

Words for Aspiring Community Builders

As we delve into the final segment of our conversation, we move to the expected trajectory of community building in the coming years. In the recent past, the community industry has experienced undulating trends – being a buzzword in 2017-18, seeing a resurgence during the pandemic, and subsequent fluctuations tied to the challenge of extracting ROI for businesses. That’s why Yurii compared it to the trajectory of Bitcoin prices - you don’t know when it’ll go up or down.

Aspiring community builders should focus on public speaking, empathy, and curiosity. “There are many ways to be right, and different people in the same situation will be right from their perspective, which can be totally opposite. Ensure you find the best possible solution that does not exclude anyone.”

However, he rightly observed that the community should have more of a brand outside our world. Out there, where marketers and salespeople require no explanation, we must work on positioning community building as equally essential and recognized beyond the community realm.

‍“You always have to explain what a community builder does. We have to talk more to the outside world and ensure everyone understands why the community is great and how it can benefit companies and people. Communities are everywhere, but people try to avoid it because they don’t understand it.”

Community-building should have a human-first approach; people need to stop seeing it as a complement to sales and marketing - just another way to drive traffic and make money. The more community builders like us clarify things, the better we grow.

Conclusion

We wound down on a lighter note by asking Yurii for advice he’d give today to his 12-year-old self. He didn’t have to think hard because he had a 12-year-old to whom he recently shared the tidbit below. 

“You have to be curious and open and approach everything to learn from it, not as a challenge that life throws at you and people are against you. Try to understand what you can learn from it and become better. Please do not compete with others but with your yesterday’s self and try to be a better version of yourself every day instead of trying to beat somebody else.”

‍About LikeMinds

If you have been planning to introduce community features in your app to boost engagement and retention, we are here to help.

LikeMinds elevates businesses in unlocking the true potential of their users through their in-app community and social network. Using LikeMinds, businesses achieve higher conversion and retention, by building custom community experiences in their existing platform unlocking community-led growth.

With LikeMinds, businesses get an easy-to-implement and highly scalable infrastructure with a fully customizable UI. All of this with a customization time of 3 days and a deployment time of 15 minutes.

Our Chat and Feed infra have pre-built widgets such as image carousels, PDF slides, short videos, polls, quizzes, events, forms, and more for user engagement and retention along with moderation capabilities to ensure frictionless community operations.