Stop Making It Easy: How Friction Creates Belonging with Santiago Espinosa

The tech industry's default assumption is that frictionless equals good. Santiago Espinosa challenges that directly. Drawing on research from Oxford anthropologist Tamas David-Barrett and a real case study from his work with a wellness brand in Mexico, he shows how intentionally adding friction led to 1,000% more engagement and transformed a dead community into a thriving one. The question isn't whether to add friction. It's where.

Community Advocacy IS Earned Media — So Start Treating It Like It with Gabrielle Herrera

Community advocacy is earned media. We've just been too humble to say it out loud. Advocates are out there driving reach, shaping brand perception, and building trust that paid teams spend millions trying to replicate — and most community teams are reporting it in Slack. Gabrielle challenges community practitioners to stop translating their results into feel-good metrics and start speaking the language that actually moves budgets and resources. Your program is already doing the work. The question is whether leadership can see it.

Your Community Isn't an Engagement Tool — It's a Trust Engine with Vero Heino

Most community programs optimize for activity. But activity doesn't shape perception. People do. Vero makes the case that community's real role is as a deliberate system for shaping trust and influence — and shares practical ways to activate the right contributors, reduce noise, and connect community efforts directly to reputation and measurable business impact.

About the CMX Post-Summit Webinar Series

Summit may be over, but the conversations aren't. The CMX Post-Summit Webinar Series brings our CMX Summit 2026 speakers back for virtual sessions, so you can go deeper on the ideas that came out of the Fox Theatre this year. Each session features live presentations followed by a Q&A, giving you direct access to the practitioners shaping our field right now.