Create Valuable Content With Company-Wide Collaboration

Moderating a Community of Six Million

In his past life, Todd Darroca was a TV host (who won an Emmy!) and a political PR officer. Nowadays, he’s Marketing Communications Specialist at Spiceworks, an internet company that simplifies everything IT for everyone IT.
Spiceworks is coming up on its 10th anniversary of building a community of IT pros and tech marketers, and have a pretty impressive audience under their belt. Their free online community includes over six million IT pros who call themselves SpiceHeads.
(And yes, with a name like Spiceworks, Spice Girls jokes have been plentiful, but the community named itself SpiceHeads, so they went with that.)

“It’s a cool little ecosystem where IT pros can connect with tech vendors, and vice versa to help each other with their days. We’re bringing fun back to IT and tech marketing and just having a blast doing it.”

With such a huge community of IT pros, moderation of online communication is extremely important. Spiceworks has a team of five or six who are always watching to make sure the community stays safe and no one is getting out of line, but they also empower the SpiceHeads to be a part of the moderation. “We’ve got several of them called ‘Spicy Peppers’ who help us watch the community, to make sure it’s fun and helpful, more importantly, for everybody out there.”
From the tech marketer side, Spiceworks has thousands of tech vendors that they’re talking to every day to help troubleshoot and add value to the experience. As for the content side, there’s always the question of ROI, which Todd and his team measure differently for various types of content. But the main goal of all of Spiceworks’ content revolves around, “Are we helping them? Is that content worthwhile? Is it interesting, useful, amazing, remarkable?”

Collaboration is Key

Spiceworks has a very open culture. There are no cubicle walls, just desks with small dividers. Everyone is always chatting back and forth and sending pieces of content that they are excited about (from other companies as well as from Spiceworks). They encourage anyone and everyone on the team to post to their tech marketing blog, the Spicy Marketer. “It spans the whole company. We’re getting them excited about content and it’s more than just a blog post, it’s really a cool experience, a value-add to our audience.”
Another way Spiceworks encourages collaboration is through an extensive content inventory. It’s essentially a warehouse of everything they’ve ever made so that everyone on the team knows what’s been created in the past. “That spurs everybody thinking about content and kind of saying, ‘Oh, did you think about this piece here?'”

Lastly, they practice “sneaker management.” They get up, get off email, and talk to each other about what’s going on and what content is being produced. Todd wants everyone at Spiceworks to have a piece of the ownership of their content, because content truly affects everyone at the company.
It’s true: Great content affects the person producing the content, and it also affects the person sending out emails, trying to get those emails opened and read by that audience. It affects the sales people who are looking for leads and are trying to figure out how to move customers up the funnel. It affects the data guy who is measuring audience growth while looking for ways to decrease costs.
The better the content, the better the results on every front. 

What did you want to be when you grew up?

“When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a cruise director.” Todd thought it was the coolest job to get to stand up on a stage and have lots of fun in front of an audience on a cruise. Spiceworks has an annual user conference called SpiceWorld—no, the Spice Girls are not coming—that’s the closest they have to a cruise right now. But Todd still gets to have fun with a cool audience online, so he figures it all worked out for the best.