The rooms that
filled up.

A community of 300,000+ developers building on Facebook's Marketing API. On paper, one of the largest developer audiences in tech. In practice, a page that posted product announcements into a room where nobody answered back.

The page wasn't quiet because developers weren't interested. It was quiet because nobody was talking with them.

We started by listening, not posting. A competitive analysis benchmarked the community against Google Ads, AWS, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Developers: where they showed up, how often, what actually earned a response. The finding that mattered wasn't about reach. Google Ads carried nearly four times the followers and a fraction of the conversation. Presence isn't participation.

The audience research told us something else. This community over-indexed in the technical fields you'd expect, and just as strongly in arts, entertainment, sports, and media. These weren't only engineers. They were creative people who happened to write code.

Then we built the architecture. Owned channels consolidated and given distinct jobs. A content framework and editorial calendar so publishing stopped being sporadic. A push engagement plan with a real rhythm: introductions on Mondays, discussion topics midweek, case studies on Fridays. Moderation privileges streamlined, guest moderators onboarded from within the community, and a feedback loop that carried member suggestions back to the product teams who could act on them.

The best-performing content wasn't product news. It was the Employee Spotlight series: the people behind the platform, named and celebrated. When we ran the same play in the group with Member Spotlights, those posts made up 8% of the content and carried 32% of the engagement.

Developers don't want more announcements. They want a room where somebody answers, and where the people on both sides of the API have names.

That's Root, Design, Activate, Sustain, Amplify. We were running the Fiestalegre Community Flywheel™ years before we had a name for it.

One of the hardest environments to build trust on social media is one where every conversation is emotionally charged and closely scrutinized. Managing community engagement for a global healthcare company meant exactly that.

The objective wasn't to promote products. It was to establish the brand as a credible, transparent, responsive voice while navigating complex public conversations across healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture. We shifted the role of social from broadcast channel to relationship-building platform, partnering with communications, legal, medical, and brand teams to develop engagement frameworks that balanced empathy, scientific accuracy, and regulatory compliance. We built response protocols for sensitive topics, escalation pathways for emerging issues, and a discipline of timely, human-centered engagement over corporate messaging.

We monitored conversations to surface recurring themes, misinformation, and reputational risk, and rather than avoiding difficult discussions, we acknowledged concerns, directed people to credible information, and fed community insight back to internal stakeholders. Much of this work was about protecting and strengthening trust rather than chasing marketing metrics, and it delivered: sustained increases in positive engagement, faster response through standardized workflows, and far greater internal confidence in social as both an engagement platform and a source of strategic insight.

Trust isn't built by avoiding difficult conversations. It's built by showing up consistently, listening carefully, communicating with empathy, and proving through every interaction that there's a thoughtful team of people behind the brand.

One initiative we owned from strategy through execution was an integrated social and community campaign supporting the launch and adoption of Meta's flagship VR headsets. The objective: raise awareness among PC and console gamers, educate prospective customers on the value of VR, and influence purchase decisions across the customer journey.

We mapped the customer journey into distinct campaign phases and defined the role each channel would play at each stage, then aligned marketing, creative, product, and community teams around a shared calendar. Every launch moment, from product education to live demos to seasonal shopping pushes, worked as a coordinated ecosystem rather than a series of disconnected posts. The campaign was built around momentum, not a single launch event, with an early-year start that gave us runway to build awareness ahead of Facebook's F8 Conference.

When community is treated as a strategic partner rather than a publishing channel, it drives awareness, trust, and real business outcomes.

When Meta launched Facebook Watch, the question was never whether people would press play. It was whether they would come back, and who they would bring with them.

We ran community for Watch across the platform's slate: Returning the Favor with Mike Rowe, Red Table Talk, Tom vs Time, Ball in the Family, SKAM Austin, Loosely Exactly Nicole, and more. Different genres, different fandoms, one shared assignment: turn viewership into belonging.

The dashboard said decline. The comments said something else.

At the mid-season mark of Returning the Favor Season 2, the page had grown 46% while reactions, shares, and comments all dropped sharply. Most teams read a chart like that and start cutting. We read the replies.

Season 2 had introduced short "micro editions" instead of the full-length stories the community fell in love with in Season 1. Fans told us so, plainly, in the comments. Then the data agreed, with a wrinkle worth the whole season: micro editions that followed up on a previous honoree held 46% higher retention than micro editions introducing someone new. People will accept a shorter story about someone they already love. They won't accept a shorter introduction to someone they don't know yet.

When reach softens, presence is the lever.

We showed up more, in public, by name, and brand responses rose 156%, with sentiment holding at 81% positive. Here's what that bought: honorees began showing up in the comments for other honorees, unprompted. A member shared that an episode had decided her family's move across the country, and a county commission chairman replied to welcome her. A featured honoree joined the community group and kept posting progress as his nonprofit fielded over 700 chapter requests across every state and four countries.

The companion group launched mid-season and, in its first thirteen days, drew 42K approved members, tens of thousands of reactions, and 30+ potential honorees surfaced by members, several of which shaped the back half of the season. A group that finds your next story isn't a marketing channel. It's an ecosystem.

Second work sample: a Tom vs Time social listening report showing conversation ran nearly four times higher when the platform gave fans native assets to share, and that a Facebook Watch handle fans were already reaching for did not yet exist. Meet your members where they already are.

For Best Buy, we ran two things at once: a user-generated-content program and the reporting that told the brand what its community was actually doing.

The UGC program was a full operating system, not a repost habit. We built the sourcing methodology, hashtag strategy, and quality and brand-safety criteria, and the rights workflow behind it: standardized consent language, moderation checks, documented approvals, and clear rules governing what could and couldn't be used.

The Brand Love reports made the community legible to the business. Every month and quarter, we delivered the brand a read on its own community: conversation volume and sentiment, top engaged responses, competitor benchmarking, product-category analysis, and forward-looking recommendations. This is what operational rigor looks like: a system that runs, and the measurement to prove it works.