New Title

CF: Can you comment on your title? Corporate VP of community and ecosystems? What does that entail? What does that really say about what your role will be?

RR: It is kind of unique. Back then it was pretty simple: You had sales, you had marketing. And then we created this kind of business development piece in between sales and marketing.

Circa 2013, that was still kind of a relatively new concept. At events, you’d have marketing folks coming to sales folks. You didn’t have this dedicated accounting into dedicated community teams. Probably the most difficult challenge over the years is to explain what that actually means. Because it’s immensely difficult to quantify and attach an ROI to it. But I think what’s happened over time is when you look at organizations that are growing, they’re the ones that have invested in this community aspect of it, and this ecosystem part of it. When I’m looking around, even with all of the new job changes happening this time of year, there are a lot more of these titles coming out around community and ecosystem. So in my mind, I look at my skill set, I look at what I can contribute to organizations. And it comes back to that relationship with the channel. This channel has such a relationship part to it, a community aspect to it, the feeling like we’re one entity growing together. It’s something that is being invested in these days. And I think that’s where you’re seeing with these positions or titles.