---
title: Let Your Community Build You — 1.5 Million and Counting
description: A solo session at Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2011 on how Spiceworks built its 1.5-million-member IT community. InformationWeek covered it three weeks later.
publishDate: 2011-06-23
canonical: https://www.mandalivia.com/talks/enterprise-2-0-community/
---

Tabrez Syed appeared as Vice President of Products at Spiceworks. The session ran at 8:30am in Room 312 of the Hynes Convention Center.

From the conference listing:

> Spiceworks used word-of-mouth marketing to build the world's largest online community of IT professionals — all 1.5 million of them. Community managers stuck to a simple principle to succeed: The community belongs to the members. We're just stewards.

Three weeks later, InformationWeek's David F. Carr wrote up Spiceworks' approach to community, citing the talk and quoting from an interview:

> "We've baked community into the workflow IT people are in from nine to five," Syed said.

A slide deck was published on the conference site but was never archived; the download index survives, the PDF does not.

## The record

- [Press coverage: "Social Shopping Comes To Enterprise IT"](https://www.informationweek.com/it-sectors/social-shopping-comes-to-enterprise-it) — InformationWeek, July 13, 2011
- [Press release](https://www.spiceworks.com/press/releases/2011-06-20/) — Spiceworks, June 20, 2011
- [Conference agenda](https://web.archive.org/web/20111031010623/http://www.e2conf.com:80/boston/2011/conference/) and [speaker list with session abstract](https://web.archive.org/web/20110624004907/http://www.e2conf.com:80/boston/2011/speaker-list/?speaker%3Damy-wilson) — e2conf.com, archived
- [Presentation download index](https://web.archive.org/web/20110623194442/http://www.e2conf.com/boston/2011/presentations/) — e2conf.com, archived (deck itself not captured)