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00:00:01
What is a Community?
64 Plays1 year ago
Dylan and Steve talk about what a Discord community is, what it is not, and how to figure out what yours should be.
Join the Nervous Discord server here: https://discord.gg/287jm9yMKj
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Transcript
Movie Scenes and Punchlines
00:00:00
Speaker
So one of my favorite things that happens in movies, especially from the eighties and nineties, is they will do the scene walks in on a joke. It'll be like the punchline of a joke and you never actually know what the joke is. So in trading places with Eddie Murray and Dan Aykroyd, Murphy.
00:00:19
Speaker
Not Eddie Murphy, Jesus Christ doing it, you idiot. There's a part where he goes to the club where they're playing squash or whatever rich people gave him their plate. And there's one of the women there and you just hear, she stepped on the ball. And then they all laugh, but you don't know what that has to do with anything. And it's such a like great moment. Cause in my mind, I'm like, what was the joke that the punchline is? She stepped on the ball. Like I just, I want to know. That's really good. There's a moment in, um,
00:00:50
Speaker
The Breakfast Club, when Judd Nelson's character is like climbing through the rafters of the building and he's telling this joke, but you never get the punchline.
00:01:00
Speaker
Yeah. It's like the ultimate shaggy dog joke. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. And I remember reading an interview with him and he's like, dude, people ask me about this all the time for decades. Now people have asked me about this. I was making it up as I went. There isn't, there is no punch line. There's, there is no punch line. The punch line is you guys are losers and you want the punch line. Yeah. No, I always love that in, uh, in movies where you walk in on a scene and like, it's not important to the actual story or anything like that, but then you get to it and you're like, okay, I kind of want to know what,
00:01:29
Speaker
what the joke was or what was going on.
Podcast Introduction and Episode Numbering
00:01:32
Speaker
Yeah. So the punch line is I'm Dylan. And I'm Steve. And we are nervous.
00:02:04
Speaker
God, we're done. All right. Nicely done. Nicely done, sir. So welcome back everyone to the fourth, fifth, or sixth episode of the Nervous Podcast. We're not sure how we're going to number these yet. Yeah. And it really just depends on how you're keeping track. If you're keeping track by actual number of podcasts, or if you're just keeping track of how many times we were funny,
00:02:25
Speaker
Who knows? This could be episode 78 or episode two. It really just depends on you. It really does.
Building Sustainable Communities on Discord
00:02:32
Speaker
And what we wanted to focus on today in the podcast is building a community because that is the hardest part of starting a Discord is building your community and making sure that you're doing it in a sustainable way. For instance, social media, Steve.
00:02:49
Speaker
Social media is broadcast social as, as I like to call it. And it is you creating this like very carefully curated, carefully messaged version of your brand and then broadcasting something out. And then you may or may not pay attention to the actual responses you get, but mostly what you're trying to aim for is like followers and reach and conversion rates and market penetration. And if you are.
00:03:18
Speaker
using something like brand watch or whatever, you know, you're measuring sentiment and things like that online, but you're measuring all of these things instead of actively participating in them. And the problem there is that the kind of engagement you get
00:03:32
Speaker
is not actually indicative of the content you're putting out. We've had a few different clients that have noticed that in the Discord servers that we've put together for them, the sentiment for their brand is noticeably more positive than it is on other traditional broadcast social channels.
00:03:51
Speaker
Well, the reason for that is on broadcast social channels, you're not sending that message out to people who want to hear that message. You're sending that message out to everybody, and then you're getting all the drive-by assholes who literally just log on to the internet every day to hate things. Which is a lot of work. And I think the hardest part about it with the broadcast socials is that you don't control your audience.
00:04:20
Speaker
in a way that is meaningful because anybody can come by and look and everything that a brand puts out on social media is immediately seen as some sort of an ad because its purpose is to engage to sell.
Creating Meaningful Connections on Discord
00:04:35
Speaker
And within a Discord community,
00:04:38
Speaker
you're able to drill down on direct interests of your community members that may or may not be applicable to your brand, but allow you to form a connection with them to further their, I don't know, embeddedness or some other word that means they love your brand a lot, but allows you to connect with them on a level that is very different because it's a community, not a stage you're standing on yelling at the masses.
00:05:04
Speaker
Yeah, with broadcast social, you're pushing something out to let people know there's a sale on your website. With a community social platform like Discord, you're popping into the server just to share a picture of your dog and commenting on other people's pets in the pet channel that you created for them. You're allowing people a space to exist where commerce is not required.
00:05:29
Speaker
You know, it's one of those things it's like it's like going to the library, you know, like the public library is like one of the last places in the world now that you can just exist without the expectation of commerce. And with Discord communities, even though you're building it around your brand, and there is some
00:05:46
Speaker
expectation of commerce, that expectation is not in every single moment. It's not in every single bit of engagement. And your community can just be in there and be themselves and be around each other and make friends and have important moments.
00:06:03
Speaker
So what that means is, is focusing on your community in your server is more important than converting them into customers, especially at the beginning of your community. So you wanna listen early and you wanna listen often. So if they say something that is of interest to the team building the product that you're using or the market that you're working in or a use case for your product that no one had thought of before, it's important to capture those moments and iterate on them.
00:06:31
Speaker
Yeah. And the thing to remember is that you're not trying to capture anything. They're already there. They're already there. They're already there because they're interested in your brand. They're interested in your product. So they don't need to be marketed to and sold to every minute of every day. You can focus
Launching and Growing a Discord Server
00:06:48
Speaker
on just giving them a space to enjoy themselves and giving them a space to get to better know you and your brand and your products at their leisure and at their speed.
00:07:00
Speaker
One of the things that we really advise against with clients is they want to have that server launch with like all the features imaginable. They want to jam-pack every single fucking bot and game and everything. Don't. Just don't. People literally just want a place to talk and hang out and then you can very, very slowly trickle out
00:07:21
Speaker
like additional functionality and additional features as your community needs. Not as they request, but as you find that they actually need. And part of the reason for not worrying about growing your community to this huge size right away and also launching with all the features is you end up with a ghost town.
00:07:42
Speaker
If you start off your server with just a couple channels where people communicate about different things, you know, like a product focused one, an off topic one, that's probably honestly enough for most servers to start out with, you can add different rooms as people start talking about different things. So if you have a bunch of people talking about sports ball, you can add a sports ball channel.
00:08:02
Speaker
So people can talk about that so that doesn't take over the off-topic channel from people who maybe aren't as interested in sports. And those are important things to kind of keep an eye on and make sure that you're doing so your community stays healthy and people don't get frustrated with not being able to find the messages that interest them.
00:08:20
Speaker
Yeah, one of my, man, one of my favorite Discord servers that we've built out for a client was David Cho's Munko server. And we launched that server with one single channel and no explanation of what was going to happen.
00:08:35
Speaker
And then we had an entire team of people watching as this server was open to the public, promoted through David's broadcast social channels, flooded with users instantly. And then everybody started speculating on what was going to happen.
00:08:54
Speaker
And what we did is we actually had an entire team of people listening and logging all of that speculation and then actually writing the narrative for what was going to happen in the server based off of the speculation of the people all dogpiled into that one channel. It was amazing. It was such
Organic Growth and Engagement Strategies
00:09:12
Speaker
a beautiful, beautiful way to create a community space.
00:09:17
Speaker
and to allow a community to create its own space without realizing that that's what it was doing. And then the beauty of it is, when you do something like that, where you're letting the community speculate what things are going to be about or talking about things, then when you do exactly what they said or something similar, someone in the community gets to be right. They get to say, oh, I told you this was going to be for this. And part of this is one of the guiding principles, which is guide them, don't lead them.
00:09:46
Speaker
So you don't want to be leading them anywhere. You want to be like, here's a map. Find your way to where I want you to find it. Don't hit them over the head with go here by t-shirt. Be like, hey, you did all of these things. Here's a reward discount on a t-shirt kind of thing, instead of just trying to get them to give you money all the time.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah, I mean like if you go, if you go spend a day at like Riot Fest in Chicago, right? And you buy a t-shirt for Jawbreaker at the end of it. Like when you go home and you are pulling that t-shirt out of the laundry, like what do you want to remember? Do you want to remember standing at the merch booth and buying that t-shirt? Or do you want to remember seeing the band and see every single band that you saw?
00:10:28
Speaker
Like what you need to do is you need to provide a journey for your customers to go on so that the product that they purchase at the end of it to them is a souvenir of a larger and more meaningful emotional experience and what happens in your server can be that kind of experience.
00:10:46
Speaker
And this leads to another important point, which is allowing organic growth. A lot of times when bigger brands want to start a Discord server, they have this idea that they need to have 10, 20, 100,000 users as fast as possible, because that equals success. Exactly. And for so long on social media, that was what was important. Oh, I have 45,000 Twitter followers. I must know what I'm talking about.
00:11:13
Speaker
when really, in Discord, having 2,000 dedicated community members is going to be more beneficial to your brand than having 100,000 people who just joined your server because it's the next big server. So always allow for that and make sure that you're giving people a reason to not only join your server, but to stay in your server.
00:11:36
Speaker
That is a
Brands and Authentic Community Building
00:11:37
Speaker
tough thing to do, right? I mean, it's really easy to dangle something shiny in front of somebody and get their attention really quickly. Holding their attention in a busy, loud world that we're living in is another matter entirely. And the best way to do that is instead of
00:11:53
Speaker
bring them in there to try and, you know, get them to rally around your product, make your team, the product, make the people that you have built to this company with, like let them be the product, let them be like the pillars of the community that you're building. I guarantee like any brand of any size has a handful of people that are, they are like the voice, they are the personality, they are the heart, they are the brains, they are the vision of this whole thing. Let them be.
00:12:24
Speaker
You know, there is no better advocate for your company than somebody who's in it and loves it. And a good thing about doing that, about allowing your team to be your product is
00:12:36
Speaker
different members of your team are going to connect directly with different members of the community. So this goes to some diversity things where Steve and I are middle-aged white guys, but that doesn't make us the expert on anything that matters. And if we want to build our community more and we have a team member who is not a middle-aged white guy, allowing them to communicate with our
00:12:57
Speaker
community allows people that are different from us to connect more directly with them versus just seeing two middle-aged white guys telling them you should do cool stuff with us. This is awkward because that's what we're doing right now.
00:13:11
Speaker
I gotta go. But I think allowing your team to shine and each team member to shine in their own way allows a better connection with your community and with your team and also avoids Papa Smurf syndrome. Yeah, I mean, and this is really important at a Discord community. And this is one of those things that a lot of brands unfortunately carry over from broadcast media, which is that you normally have a social media manager, you have a channel manager, you have one person
00:13:38
Speaker
who is the primary point of contact, who is the only person that has the login, who is the only person that makes the posts, right? With Discord like anybody on your team.
00:13:49
Speaker
should be able to do that with the correct permissions and guidance. And if somebody's posting an update about some new product that's for sale, let it be somebody on the team who actually developed it. Let it be the designer for that specific product, or let it be the shipping manager who came up with the idea for the product. You should let your team be able to have that sense of ownership
00:14:14
Speaker
you should let that sense of ownership extend outwards into your Discord community and let them see that your entire team contributes to your entire company.
00:14:25
Speaker
And honestly,
Ensuring Safety and Security in Discord Communities
00:14:26
Speaker
no one wants to hear from the marketing person about a new product. They hear from the marketing people all the time. Hearing from the designer of the new capsule wardrobe that your company is releasing is gonna be so much more interesting because that designer is passionate about what they just built and that's gonna come through and what they're talking about, whereas the marketing person is just gonna have talking points that they came up with.
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah. Fuck the marketing person. Sorry, marketing people. We love you. I mean, we do, but we also don't.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah, we also know that it's a job you have to do and we're sorry that you have to do it. I have so many friends in marketing that are gringing right now. Yeah. But also if you're in marketing, we love you and call us, we can hang out. Another part of this, and this is not going to be unfamiliar to anybody who's involved in any sort of content marketing, whether it's social media, whatever, is planning your content well.
00:15:24
Speaker
One of the important things, and this is for regular social media, this is for Discord, this is for anything, is keep it planned out four to six weeks at least. Even if you don't stick 100% to that schedule because things change or releases get pushed, whatever, having a living document of content will help your whole team be able to post what is important when it's important.
00:15:47
Speaker
Yeah. And I think the living document part is like really like the key phrase there, you know, plan four to six weeks out, but also plan for that to change, you know, plan for things to be able to like change and adapt, plan to have to move things around because, you know, some current event.
00:16:04
Speaker
completely effed up your plan there to push out X, Y, or Z at this certain time. Plan to be able to respond to things. Plan to have delays in your production pipeline. No matter what you plan, something is going to go sideways. So always remember that this is a living document. It's going to change. It's going to need to be altered. And sometimes things are just going to
00:16:28
Speaker
not look right two weeks out after, you know, you're going to put something in that doc two weeks later, it's just going to suck. You're going to be like, yeah, this is a terrible idea. And just yank it. Part of having your content planned out in advance is
00:16:43
Speaker
giving your community the straight dope, the truth, what's going on. Instead of the super polished press relief, I'm a big Warhammer nerd. I play a lot of games. I build a lot of models, that sort of thing. And one of the things that has happened with a lot of the weird weather that's happening in the US is their distribution pipeline is fucked.
00:17:03
Speaker
But the only thing they have is a press release on their website that just says, hey, our pipeline is fucked. Or due to unforeseen circumstances in the weather in certain parts of the world, it's all that legalese stuff. Whereas if there was a discord I could go on and someone from their logistics department was like, man, I'm so sorry. That weather, we were not ready for that weather. One of our warehouses roofs broke. Everyone would be like, oh, I'm much more understanding because I know directly what happened. And I heard it from the dude who does it, not just a press release that says, things happen. We're not as good at what we thought we were.
00:17:33
Speaker
um and then i'll let you do the next part steve what what was the next part the consistency of regular communication that you just highlighted on our magical sheet i just wanted to throw you under the bus professionals we are professionals oh man
00:17:57
Speaker
So you schedule four to six weeks of content. Assume that a significant chunk of that content is going to get edited, changed, or thrown away at the last minute. But planning that all out does is it allows you to maintain consistency. And the thing about Discord
00:18:15
Speaker
It really does rely on consistent communication. Now here's the thing, that communication, again, does not always need to be about your fucking product. Okay. Like if you pop into that server and then for an entire two days, you mentioned none of your actual brand or product. And all you guys are talking about is some TV show that just ended that everybody's all bent or borked about. Great.
00:18:38
Speaker
You know what I mean? If you get a full two days of like serious active engagement in your server because everybody hated the Game of Thrones finale, like fantastic. That is magnificent. What that is doing is that it's actively building stronger ties with your community and reinforcing the fact that everybody is there because they want to be there.
00:18:59
Speaker
And that leads us directly into one of the most important things in a Discord, which is going to be our first brief touch on safety and security. Because Discord is a new and different place for a lot of people to communicate, whether you're a brand or you're a customer. And it's important to make sure that you're setting your users up for success because your users being successful will then make your brand successful.
00:19:22
Speaker
What this means is using the tools that exist within Discord and the Discord ecosystem to create a safe space for users so they don't have to worry about potentially getting a spam message or getting scammed or anything like that. And the best thing about Discord and how robust it got during its web three times is there's a lot of bots that can help you keep users safe.
00:19:48
Speaker
Yeah, the thing about broadcast social is you can block somebody. It's kind of a weird sort of negative space way of customizing the experience that people are having with your brand on that platform.
00:20:04
Speaker
You can block them, but that doesn't mean that other people are not seeing it. And everything becomes this sort of like nebulous thing where it's not really your responsibility. It's just like this giant void that everybody is yelling into. With Discord, it is very much your responsibility to create a safe and welcoming space for your community. In the same
Promoting Positivity and Handling Negative Behavior
00:20:26
Speaker
way that it is your responsibility to create a safe and welcoming space for your employees within your company,
00:20:32
Speaker
You need to think of your Discord exactly the same way. You are responsible for everybody who's there. So making sure that all of your moderation and security settings are set up tight, making sure that you've got, depending on the kind of community that you have, making sure that like your profanity filters are on, making sure that people can't post links where they're not supposed to be posting links.
00:20:53
Speaker
making sure that people can't post links to certain areas that are known, bam, dens, things like that. Just making sure that you've got all of your settings kind of locked down is really tremendously important to giving people a space where again, they can just come and hang out and be themselves and feel safe and be able to engage with your brand in a way that's like comfortable and low key and not just, I'm being marketing at, oh God, why am I getting all these links?
00:21:21
Speaker
And part of that, and this is the easiest part, we don't have to go any deeper into the safety and security because that will be an entire podcast coming up in the future, but promoting those positive experiences. So when something negative happens on the server, instead of making a big deal about it, if it's negative enough, get rid of that person. They don't need to be a part of your community if they're not going to be positive.
00:21:45
Speaker
someone comes in and says oh man this is so great thank you so much for sharing that information with me about whatever is going on in the company or I'm so excited for this new t-shirt highlight that you teach your community how to act by how you interact with them so if someone's being positive interacting with them is good if someone's being negative being a troll you don't want to engage with them because that just encourages people to get that negative attention
00:22:08
Speaker
Yeah. And, I mean, empower your moderation team to just get rid of those people. Again, like you don't need them there. This is one of those things where, you know, you need to curate a space. Now that doesn't mean that like anytime somebody's like, man, this t-shirt fit kind of funny. You're just like, fuck you out of the server. Go. Band hammer. Bam.
00:22:28
Speaker
You know, somebody's like, Oh, this t-shirt fit funny. That's an opportunity for great customer service. Oh, sorry. Like how to, how, how should it have fit? What's wrong with it? You know, we send you a replacement. Yeah. Or send a, send a, Hey, cool. Send an email to this person or go to this link and go through our support thing there so that people know that you're actually listening when people have a problem. It's more of the trolls. You just want to be like, fuck you out of here.
00:22:55
Speaker
Yeah. Somebody comes in and they're just like, Hey, let me say a bunch of vaguely racist dog whistle kind of shit. Just get, don't argue with them. Don't engage with them. Don't try and turn them around. Don't try to gently worry guys. No, just get rid of them. Sexism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, get them the fuck out.
00:23:17
Speaker
Yeah.
Benefits of Moving Brand Communications to Discord
00:23:18
Speaker
And then part of it too, and this is the part that is going to be, I think the hardest thing for a lot of companies to wrap their heads around or work with, is transitioning from your broadcast socials into Discord. Because ideally, perfect world, you would move most of your brand communications from broadcast social media into Discord.
00:23:41
Speaker
And the way to do that, the smart way to do it is to keep your language consistent. So you don't have to train someone how to write Discord messages. It's just the same thing.
00:23:52
Speaker
just put it in Discord and the best way to finish this transition is to continue to update your other channels, your broadcast socials, but put it in Discord first because that shows your Discord community that they are very important because they are your dedicated community that wants to know more about your brand. So you tell them first, then post it on your social, your other socials and invite more people to join your Discord so you can grow your Discord at a steady rate.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we're, you know, we, we certainly don't expect everyone to just give up on all of the other broadcast social media channels that they're using. But as we all know, the fight against the algorithm is a losing battle these days. And the return that you're seeing on what you push through broadcast social is just dwindling dramatically from day to day to day. So.
00:24:46
Speaker
You don't need to give up on this, but definitely understand that if you really want to build a thriving, robust Discord community that is going to become your primary point of connection for people to connect with and interact with your brand, then you need to make sure that they have a reason to come to your Discord first, and that the other channels, the broadcast channels, are literally just there to shout that message out to reinforce it to the casual observer.
00:25:16
Speaker
But yeah, so I think that's the basis of kind of getting started and building your community on Discord. As always, you can shoot us a message at hello at nervous.net and we'd be happy to chat more about fun Discord things and help you make a plan on how you can bridge the distance from broadcast social media to having a community server on Discord.
00:25:38
Speaker
Also just a heads up if that plan involves ukuleles in any way shape form or fashion We will cheerfully give you a 10% discount on your services a hundred percent a hundred percent a 10% discount Yeah, we love ourselves ukuleles here at a nervous and if you work with us for too long We might end up sending you one. So just watch out distinctly possible
00:26:01
Speaker
That's our new, that's our new promo. Start a Discord with, start a Discord server with Nervous, and after six months, you've received a free ukulele! Woo-hoo! Sold! All right, everyone, have a good rest of your day, and we'll chat again soon. See y'all on Discord.
00:26:40
Speaker
Bye!