The Pillar Summit is the first course of its kind, designed specifically for those working on branded online communities.
There is a major difference between amateurs building communities for their hobbies and professionals building communities for brands.
The Pillar Summit is designed specifically to tackle the major issues brands face when developing successful online communities. The course is a hands-on, tailor-made training course covering key skills both working internally within the brand and working with external audiences to ensure the community is successful.
The course was created due to the consistent and predictable failure of too many branded online communities. Until the Pillar Summit, there was nowhere for brands to learn how to develop successful online communities. Too many were repeating the same mistakes with predictably, dismal, results.
The Pillar Summit aims to change this, beginning with the Professional Community Management course.
Who teaches the course?
Richard Millington
Richard is the founder of Pillar Summit and Managing Director of FeverBee, the highly successful online community consultancy, which boasts the world’s most popular blog dedicated to the subject, read by 15,000 community specialists every month.
Over the last 11 years, he has worked directly on 12 successful online communities and contributed to the success of dozens more; with clients including the United Nations, Novartis, The Global Fund, BAE Systems, RSPCA and a number of large agencies, entertainment and youth brands.
In 2010, in response to the industry myths being perpetuated about online communities, coupled with the lack of available training for Community Managers, Richard developed The Pillar Summit’s Professional Community Management course. This course trains community managers how to develop their communities throughout all stages of the community development lifecycle.
The course embraces his philosophy that successful community management extends beyond technology, which perpetually changes, while the principles of social science remain the same: people are still motivated by the same stimuli, still react in similar ways to similar situations and still build relationships.
Helen Lynch
Helen has worked in online communities since 2003.
Originally specialising in Teen/child safety online; Helen worked in IRC chatrooms for various UK ISPs before spending 3 years in the community and content teams at Habbo, the world’s largest social game and online community for teenagers.
In 2008 Helen moved ‘agency-side’ working with award-winning agencies like Outside Line and youth engagement specialists Livity; creating content, moderation and community policies and procedures, social media marketing strategies and training for community and social platforms for a variety of B2B and B2C brands.
Clients have included Amdocs, Christian Aid, Coke, DFID, Disney, LG, Microsoft, MySpace, NSPCC, Paramount Pictures, Penguin, TopShop and Yell.
Alison Michalk
Alison teachers the Australian Pillar Summit course, which is run in association with Quiip.
Alison is a respected practitioner in the online community management industry, founder of the Australian Community Managers Group and Australia’s Online Community Management Conference, swarm (@swarmconf).
Alison blogs on community management issues at Quiip and her recent speaking engagements include Parliament House, the Australian Museum and guest lecturing at Sydney’s Ad School.
In mid-2010 Alison launched Quiip, an Australian-based business providing 24/7 outsourced community management services to a wide range of private and public sector clients.
