We find, foster, and manage the conversations that build community and convert them into business value.
Outsourced community management that lets you scale. Multilingual community experts for forums, Discord, and Reddit.
Human, expert, multi-lingual social media community management built to create connection at scale. Community magic for social channels.
Build a safe, scalable Reddit strategy. Harness customer voice, engage authentically, and boost AI/LLM visibility.
Design, launch, or relaunch a community your business can rely on, with expert community strategy and consulting services.
Expert-led guidance and training to build skills community teams need to thrive.
Design and run programs that turn engaged members into advocates, creators and local leaders.
Turn your community into an always-on, human powered focus group.
Select and setup the right community platform for your business with independent expert help.
Find out more about the Standing on Giants team, our vision and values.
From past to present and everything in between.
Meet the people of Standing on Giants
About employee ownership at Standing on Giants
See our current vacancies and learn about our culture.
A business for people and planet, not just profit
Listen to 'A Little Bit Radical' - our top 40 business podcast!
Most social platforms reward performance.
People post the version of themselves they’d like you to see, brands post the version of themselves they’d like you to believe, and everyone quietly agrees not to mention the gap.
But Reddit doesn’t work like that. Pseudonymity, upvotes and communities built around a subject rather than a personality add up to something you won’t find anywhere else: people talking to each other as if no one else is listening.
As more of the internet fills up with AI-generated content, and audiences get more sceptical about what they’re reading, Reddit’s appeal comes down to something quite simple – it’s where the real people are.
Which is why discovery, consideration and post-purchase support all increasingly pass through Reddit. It’s the place where people are turning to get the real human and community view on a product, service or topic.
So, for Brand Leaders, Reddit poses a huge opportunity: to listen to customers, to engage with them on a human level and to learn the honest truth about what they want (and don’t want).
In this guide we delve into one brand, Sonos, who are winning on Reddit and look at the lessons that can be learned for other brands.
While Keith Nieves was working in Sonos support, he had been quietly making the case that the company should be on Reddit.So, when the opportunity arrived for Sonos to start using the platform to its full potential, he registered the name ‘KeithFromSonos’ because he recognised that people want to speak to humans, not faceless brands.
While KeithFromSonos was a valuable asset, things really started to pay off after an app update that landed badly with customers.Keith had been running regular Friday community ‘ask me anything’ sessions and, in the middle of the backlash, it was suggested they might want to cancel. But then they learned the benefit of leaning in (despite people advising against it).
This open attitude to community management flourished from there.Sonos created a public Trello board showing every reported bug, what was being worked on, and what had shipped, which provided an open window for customers to understand what was going on.And that human led strategy is still paying off:
Today, the team has grown from one person to five, all named individuals, plus a brand account used for ads.People from the product team have started showing up under their own usernames and what began as community management has turned into something closer to employee advocacy.Keith and the wider team at Sonos are now reaping the benefits from their Reddit strategy, and have a lot of lessons for other brands.
It’s the most common opening move and it’s almost always the wrong one, according to Keith from Sonos:
“Should the first step be let’s create our first company subreddit? I would say no, do not create your own company subreddit. The idea is to not own the conversation, but rather to be a part of the conversation.”
If your brand matters to anyone, there’s probably already a thread about it.
The biggest structural difference between Reddit and everything else marketers work with is the moderators, who are volunteers. You can’t pay them, and trying to breaches Reddit’s Terms of Service. But you can thank them, reward them and consult them, because they hold the keys to the whole thing.
“The moderator is my number one stakeholder. If I don’t help and facilitate this relationship or allow it to grow, I lose my job. If I don’t have this connection, I don’t have any.”
The same thinking shapes how Sonos behaves in the space day to day:
“We’re just guests at the cafe. We’re not keeping the lights on. We’re just hanging out just like everybody else. Ultimately we want to keep it as community run and owned as possible.”
Marketers are used to buying their way into spaces. But Reddit isn’t for sale. When Sonos wanted to engage r/CommercialAV, Keith messaged the moderators first, explained who he was, pointed at his track record in r/Sonos and said exactly what he was after.
“I come to you bearing the flag of user research… I promise I won’t be selling anything. It’s a learning mission.”
Lead with what you’ve noticed they’ve built, be specific about what you want and commit to their rules before you post anything.
Getting internal buy-in for Reddit is hard, because the place makes very little sense to anyone who doesn’t use it.
“Typically when I try to explain Reddit to someone who just doesn’t understand Reddit, eyes glaze over. Upvote ratio, percentages, too much. So you have to show them.”
The way in is listening, and listening needs nobody’s approval.
“You don’t need permission to listen.”
Pull together a report on what people are already saying about your category and take it to the teams who’d find it useful. That’s a demonstration rather than a pitch, and it lands very differently.
Keith’s model for the whole Sonos program is a bridge with traffic going both ways. Communications heading out, and feedback, insight and sentiment coming back in, then turned into something the business can actually use.
He steers clear of sentiment scoring and works from verbatims instead, weighted by upvotes.
“If folks are saying I’m having trouble with this, or I wish this product had that, cool, it’s great to hear that. If I see 20, 30 upvotes on it, huge, I need to be paying attention to that.”
It goes to the hardware, software and beta teams as a temperature check, not an instruction. That distinction is what got him a seat at the table.
“Post app update, I’m getting invited to hardware shipping meetings, to app update meetings, to software release meetings.”
Sonos went onto Reddit as KeithFromSonos rather than as a logo, and the thinking came straight out of his years on the support phones.
“When I first joined Sonos, the magic of Sonos was talking to someone on the phone. So the idea of bringing that energy, right? The person you talk to on the phone that is a person, not necessarily the brand.”
It isn’t a universal rule.
“If you’re Cheez-Its, do you really need to have a personal ‘SeanFromCheez-Its’? Probably not.”
What matters either way is that you’re there to take part rather than to broadcast. Reddit works out very quickly which one you are.
What a brand actually has on Reddit isn’t budget or reach – it’s authoritative context.
“Everybody’s got an opinion. But you have the keys, you have the goods, you can bring it to that conversation and say, actually this is how this product is, or this is the process that we took to get to where we are now. And there’s no one who can refute that because you’re the expert.”
When the Sonos app update landed badly, Keith didn’t post a statement. He kept the monthly office hours he’d promised, walking into the worst possible week to do it.
“You have to. I can’t not do this. If I don’t do this, now that I’ve started it and said, oh yeah, I’m coming back next month, right? Like, I can’t go back on that promise.”
Reddit doesn’t accept apologies as a substitute for changes. It does accept changes as a substitute for apologies.
Reddit has never been especially kind to CEOs, which is what makes well-handled executive engagement so valuable when it works. The new Sonos CEO went to Reddit early on, and ran his post past Keith first.
“It’s one thing when you spend a lot of your time plugging holes, talking to program managers and product managers, but then to have the CEO come into your DMs and be like, hey, I want to post something on Reddit. Is this okay?”
The point isn’t that leaders should stay away. It’s that they should go in through whoever holds the community relationship.
This is the principle that everything else hangs off, and it’s the hardest one to sell internally.
“A lot of folks get into Reddit looking for an immediate return on investment and that’s not going to happen. You almost need to look at Reddit as kind of like an insurance policy. When things go wrong and you’ve been there, you’ve been there building community, rain or shine, providing value, when things go wrong, they’re going to remember that.”
You’ll know the policy has matured when the community starts asking after you.
Listen first, and use the free tools. Reddit Pro costs nothing, and typing your company name into it will show you mentions across every subreddit where people are talking. Most brands have never bothered to look.Write a listening report before you build anything. No permission needed, no budget, no presence on the platform required. It’s also the most persuasive thing you can put in front of colleagues.Work out where you could actually add something. Not simply where your audience is, but where your specific knowledge would improve a conversation already in progress.Go to the moderators before you post. Introduce yourself, be specific, agree to their rules.Give it three months before you try anything ambitious. A quarter of consistent, honest engagement is roughly the minimum before a brand has enough standing to run something like an AMA. Build real karma, not manufactured karma.Don’t astroturf. Seeding brand mentions through fake accounts to game answer engines gets spotted more often than it doesn’t, moderators are alert to it, and Reddit is tightening up. The downside is far bigger than anything you’d gain.
You earn it slowly, and mostly by not marketing. Reddit users are unusually good at spotting a brand account trying to sell them something, and the response is swift and often public. Trust comes from showing up consistently, contributing something useful to the conversation, and being honest when things go wrong. There’s no shortcut. A brand that shows up for the first time only when it needs something will be treated with the suspicion that it deserves.
In almost all cases, join existing conversations first. A brand-owned subreddit only works if there’s already enough organic demand for a dedicated space, and even then it usually works best once the brand already has a track record of contributing well elsewhere. Launching your own subreddit before you’ve built any credibility tends to produce a quiet, underused space that does more harm to perception than good.
Message the moderators directly before doing anything else. Explain who you are, be transparent about your connection to the brand, and ask what’s acceptable. Most moderator teams are far more open to this than brands expect, provided the approach is honest and the intent is clearly to contribute rather than promote. Turning up and posting without that groundwork is the fastest way to get removed.
Yes. Both traditional search engines and AI-generated answers increasingly draw on Reddit discussions, particularly content that’s been upvoted and validated by the community over time. The most reliable way to benefit from this is the least exciting one: be genuinely useful and honest in Reddit conversations, and let that content earn trust naturally, rather than trying to seed or influence what AI models surface.
Both can work, and they’re not mutually exclusive. A single, recognisable spokesperson gives the brand a consistent voice and makes it easy for the community to build a relationship with one person over time. As a brand’s presence grows, specialist accounts for specific product areas or technical topics can work well alongside that central voice, provided each one is genuinely tied to a real person with real expertise, rather than a collection of anonymous handles.
If you still have questions, why don’t you have a look here.
Reddit is where people say what they actually think. Not the reviewed, moderated, brand-safe version. The version they’d tell a friend. It’s the place your customers check before they buy, and increasingly the place Google and AI answers pull from when someone searches your name.
Most brands have never looked, so The Brand Temperature Check is how you find out what’s there.
