Hi There! I hope you enjoyed your weekend. Welcome back to another post of the Ask Ash series, where I interview WatchMojo Founder, & CEO Ashkan Karbasfrooshan and ask questions on various topics, ranging from what is going on in the news, to career advice for students & entrepreneurs.

Today, I wanted to talk about community engagement. It is one of the most important things that a business can have. Considering that the WatchMojo brand has a community that has millions of subscribers, community engagement is something that is very relevant at WatchMojo.

I asked Ash about his viewpoints on Community Engagement, and what he would recommend to someone who wants to connect with their community more.

1. What are some ways that WatchMojo engages with its community?

If you read my first book course to success, it actually starts off talking a lot about the importance of stakeholder mindsets versus a shareholder-centric one. When you look at important stakeholders, your community is one of those. For WatchMojo, what is the community? The community could be: 

– Montreal, the physical community where we operate in.

– YouTube as well as other digital platforms on which we operate in.

– The creative community that we rely on, which obviously spills over into this stakeholder of employees. 

– Hollywood so to speak, which is the community we cover through our programming.

So we have different ways to engage each one, one of them for example Mojo Gives, the other is “The Academy” (which is more or less where you fit in!)

2. What is one thing you would tell a business owner if they wanted to increase their engagement with their community?

I think part of one’s responsibility is to be engaged with the community but it does have to a) feel authentic and b) be part of your purpose. So ideally that’s you as a founder and CEO, but if not, then ultimately you have to find individuals in your organization who will live up to those two requirements. Otherwise, it’s neither sustainable nor credible.

There is another practical dynamic: I love to help others, to give back… but it is a bit weird if as the CEO of WatchMojo, I am fully immersed in helping everybody else, all the time. As much as I want to roll up my sleeves and be in the thick of things myself on the front lines, I realize that I also need to recruit others in the organization who could help me sometimes on the front lines. I don’t actually like that about being the leader of an organization that is relatively speaking successful, but I understand the optics and dynamics. 

3. How important do you believe community engagement is?

It’s super important but I also think there’s a lot of ways to give back you don’t need to be out there you could help a lot and realistically by being true out there you also draw bad apples so oftentimes the most active people are sometimes not the most visible ones.

Lastly, if you want to submit questions to Ash directly, you can do so by clicking the link here: https://watchmojo.com/suggest/AskMojo%20-%20WatchMojo’s%20founder%20Ash