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.
Building richer, healthier online conversation
From past to present and everything in between.
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A business for people and planet, not just profit
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Standing on Giants exists because we think online interactions between brands and the people who use them could be a great deal better than they currently are. This page explains what we believe, what we are trying to change, and why we think it matters beyond the commercial case.
Most online interactions with brands are one-sided and transactional. They are designed for efficiency: resolve the query, close the ticket, complete the sale. Efficiency is not a bad thing, but when it becomes the only measure, people are not encouraged to engage, and often are not allowed to. The result is customers who feel processed rather than valued.
That design choice shapes everything else. Once an environment is built around transactions, it becomes difficult for anything richer to happen inside it, and both sides lose the benefit.
We have seen the opposite repeatedly. When people are given a genuine opportunity to engage, and an environment that makes it feel safe and worthwhile, they are remarkably good at it. They help each other, they solve problems the organisation could not solve alone, and they tell the truth about what is and is not working.
A community is not the software it happens to be using. If a brand closes a platform, the conversation does not stop; it moves to wherever the members already are. Community is what people do, so the job is to understand and support the behaviour rather than to own the destination.
Trust comes from consistency, transparency and visible action. It is the willingness to explain a decision even when the decision is unpopular. Members rarely expect to get their own way. They expect to be told the truth and to be taken seriously.
The most engaged members are often the most challenging ones. Honest criticism is a form of investment, and organisations that treat it as intelligence rather than as a threat get better at what they do.
There is a meaningful difference between consulting an audience and genuinely involving them. The second is harder, slower and produces better answers, because the people affected by a decision usually understand it best.
Open conversation only happens where people feel protected. Psychological safety, clear moderation and, where it matters, anonymity are not optional extras. They are the conditions that make everything else possible.
And trust is where the value sits. Brands that earn it get honest feedback, better ideas and people who stick around. Brands that do not earn it get silence, or they get the conversation happening somewhere they cannot see it.
A rich conversation goes somewhere. People explore topics rather than repeating the same query, opinions differ, and the contributions come from a genuine spread of voices rather than a small handful posting constantly. It sounds like people, not like spam, bots or generated filler.
A busy space is not automatically a rich one. A thread where every post is a complaint, or where everyone agrees with everyone else, is shallow no matter how much traffic it gets.
Healthy does not mean everyone gets along. Some of the most valuable conversations in a brand community are arguments. What matters is the manner of them: people arguing with the point rather than the person, tone staying friendly, and sarcasm and snark not becoming the default register. Harassment and name-calling are the clearest sign a space has stopped working, and they drive out exactly the people who were most worth hearing from.
A healthy conversation also has room in it for people who are not already confident insiders. Different voices are visible and taken seriously, harmful content is rare and dealt with quickly, and the language of the space does not quietly lock newcomers out through jargon and in-group shorthand.
In practice, that means creating the fertile ground in which better conversations between brands and their audiences can grow: the right space, the right structure, the right people looking after it, and enough patience to let relationships form.
Our role is to help brands tap into the human-powered side of the internet and to have conversations and interactions with their audiences that convert into closer relationships, bigger ideas, product innovations and much more.
Rich, healthy community conversation makes commercial sense, and we are not shy about that. Brands that get this right see it in loyalty, in repeat engagement, and in members who become advocates rather than one-off customers. Community also feeds insight back into the business: honest feedback, product ideas and early warning of problems, all coming from people who would otherwise never speak to a research team. Handled well, it strengthens trust in a way that shows up in commercial value.But the commercial case is not the whole story. Bringing people together around a shared interest has effects that reach well past customer satisfaction scores or revenue.
We are a B Corp and we are employee-owned. Both were deliberate choices, made so that the way we are structured reflects what we tell our clients to do: build something that serves the people inside it rather than extracting from them.
Three things would tell us we are making progress.
Brands recognise the commercial value of rich, healthy online conversation, rather than treating community as a cost centre or a support channel.
Brands embed that conversation into how they actually operate, so that what the community says changes what the business does.
A cross-sector movement builds, accelerating the adoption of a new standard for how brands and organisations talk with the people who matter to them.
That last one is bigger than us, which is rather the point.
