Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Metrics!
20 Plays1 year ago
Dylan and Steve talk about metrics for your Discord server, why they are (or aren't) important, and why you should be really careful about trusting them.
Also, here's a link to the commercial they're talking about: Why Is A Good Man Hard To Find
http://www.nervous.net
Recommended
Transcript
Memorable 90s Commercials
00:00:00
Speaker
so there i was standing alone in the room oh my god you sorry yeah so sorry there's a every time somebody says so there i was it i have this there's this thing that pops up in my head and it's from like a some commercial from like the 90s there's this like person on these bad dates and there's some guy who's like so there it was there it was there it was in the congo I don't remember anything else about the commercial. at home I don't really remember what it was for or what else happened in the commercial or what the point was. I think it might have been a beer commercial or something. but Probably. Probably. But ah that that line of dialogue, every single time anybody says, so there I was for decades now, that has immediately just popped into my head.
00:00:55
Speaker
And the important thing that the listeners at home didn't get to see is Steve acted it out pointed for every so there I was there it was great I'm gonna have to Google the shit out of that when we're done here and if we find the commercial We'll put a link to it in the description and whoever the commercials for should sponsor us. Yeah, for sure. It'll be perfect. Oh Man, well, I'm Dylan ah And I'm in the Congo ah And we are nervous.
00:01:52
Speaker
Oh man.
Love-Hate Relationship with Advertising
00:01:54
Speaker
Advertising is such a funny, a funny game um because so much money and time is put to get eyeballs on a product and they have to figure out how to measure it. And I think it used to be, you know, they had the, was it the Nielsen ratings? I don't know. I even know how that worked, but some primitive technology to measure viewership and stuff like that. And it was, uh, if I remember correctly, it was literally like a TiVo style box that recorded what you were watching.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah. And yeah i didn't I mean, it didn't record the program, but it noted like, oh, this program, this channel, this time. Yeah. Yeah. And so it helped advertisers get like a metric on what they were doing. And that's important because they're getting people to give them money to make these. And that got Steve and I talking a little bit about like discord community and metrics. And Steve has an important message for everyone.
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah, that important message is all advertisers should be killed. No, no, that wasn't that that wasn't it. There was a different different message. i have a I have a really amazing relationship with advertising. I love and despise it equally at all times. And it is um it is truly wondrous to see the gymnastics that I do in my head to justify both sides of that always.
00:03:10
Speaker
One of the best part about that is the, I have respect for people who do advertising. I hate what they do, but then I see an ad and I buy something and I'm like, you bastards, you got me.
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah. It's like a very meta relationship where I'm like, Oh, you, you got me with that one. Dylan, you're better than this. You're better than this. Oh yeah. Absolutely. I will forever like have these conversations with myself where I'm like, Steve, you dumb bastard, you fell for it, yep but then I'll do it. yeah I'll still do it.
00:03:43
Speaker
Yep. And I'll do it again. I'll do it again.
The Deceit in Metrics
00:03:46
Speaker
So Steve, tell me about metrics and community management or communities. So here's the thing about metrics on Discord, right? on On any community, on any platform, to be honest. The thing about metrics is that metrics lie.
00:04:02
Speaker
Metrics never actually give you the full picture, but in the absence of concrete things to be able to take to the bean counters, a lot of times people will give metrics a lot more weight and worth and value than they should actually have.
00:04:19
Speaker
And it all comes down to what you want to measure and what success looks like. And it's really easy to get caught up in a vanity metrics like your follower count or your server size or any of those other things that people use to measure success of something. Yeah.
00:04:40
Speaker
And when it comes to community, it needs to be more about what your community is getting and participating in and less about how many of them there are.
00:04:51
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, and this is a general failing of metrics and in fairness to the people who are falling for this, it's designed for you to fall for this. So anytime you open up any kind of dashboard for something, you're immediately bombarded by a ton of information, all of which is the information that that platform is actively specifically trying to sell you on.
00:05:14
Speaker
So what they're doing is they're giving you a whole bunch of information and they're trying to tell you, this is what's important and this is what you need to optimize for. Now, the thing is every single platform is different. Every brand
Defining Success in Community Management
00:05:26
Speaker
is different. Every social account is different. So the things that you actually need to optimize for are a hundred percent dependent on your goals, not on that dashboard.
00:05:36
Speaker
It is very, very possible that the things that you want to accomplish that are the most important to you in your community server are not going to be measurable in any specific way on whatever metrics dashboard you're using. It's very, very possible that you're going to have to cobble together some other way of measuring success in your server. And the only way that you can do that is if you define what success actually looks like for you from the start.
00:06:06
Speaker
Steve, I believe we've talked about this before, but one of the important things about starting a Discord server is knowing why you're starting a Discord server. Right. So you don't just want to start a server to have a server. You want to be like, we want to collect user data. We want to have them test stuff for us. We want them to be excited about new products. Whatever it is, you want to make sure that you're clear on that. And then you need to design your measurement tools based on that. Right. So if your goal is to have people talking about your product, you don't need to have a million people in your server.
00:06:40
Speaker
You know, that that's not going to help you reach your goal. That's going to create too complicated of a conversation thread for anyone to know what's going on. I mean, I think you have to be really smart about what is the goal of of this community. And I think you have to be really smart about how to measure the success of that community. And I think you need to be realistic about it, too. You know, if you are Budweiser and you start up a Discord server, then yeah, I think it's realistic to assume that you're probably going to have quite a few thousands of people want to jump into that server for whatever reason. you know If you are Rexxum Football Club or you are you know Hulu or Netflix, you know if you are some gigantic behemoth of a brand or organization, then yeah, it's pretty reasonable to assume that you're going to get a lot of people in your server. But is the number of people in your server actually a metric that's important or is it the engagement?
00:07:37
Speaker
Maybe it's both, but you have to not go into it assuming that every single number needs to be large. Yeah. In working with larger brands, I think that's one of the big things that we've had to really kind of steer people away from is this, this sort of false idea that success means every number is as big as it could possibly fucking be.
00:07:58
Speaker
who And it it is what's different about having a community server, like a Discord versus the broadcast socials is that on a broadcast social, you know, you maybe know only X percent of your followers are actually going to click on a link and go buy something. So you need millions of followers to make it.
00:08:19
Speaker
make money. yeah On a Discord server, especially if you're building one around your brand, your focus is on creating unique and great experiences for the members of your server to help them love your brand more, which then can lead to more sales. It's not a get rich quick thing. It's a get rich slow. It's create that community. yeah So what is success?
00:08:43
Speaker
I mean, and that's the, that's the real question, right? Like you mentioned with broadcast social, like it's a, it's a numbers game, you know, you're fighting the algorithm. So yeah, you do need like millions of followers because you're, you know, you're trying to get, you know, sales engagement, right? So you're trying to get sales click through. You're only going to get what, a half percent, 1% click through, like, you know, the average ah ROI on that.
00:09:06
Speaker
which means that if you've only got 10,000 followers, those numbers are not looking great for you. right um But with Discord, you're talking about a very deliberate kind of self-selected chosen engagement.
Quality vs. Quantity in Community Building
00:09:20
Speaker
You're talking about people who have jumped through a couple of different hoops so that they can actively be somewhere where they're an active participant in the community that you're building. You know, these are not casuals. These are not people who like may randomly see a post that you made on Instagram for a half second before the app finishes loading and it gets shoved down and never to be seen or heard from again. You're not fighting that massive tidal wave of information. they're The only information that's flowing in that server is the information that you and your community put into it. Yeah, and that is why knowing what success looks like
00:10:00
Speaker
is part of planning a server. So you want to know what your goal is and you want to know what success looks like. And success could be users, which I typically don't recommend having a goal of users because that can be artificially inflated really easily and it's not a good metric of a server's success. um You could do emoji reacts on announcements. You could do sales that are tied directly from like links in the Discord. Like there's a number of different things you can do, but you just need to know what that success looks like. And then from there, work backwards on how to measure that. And something Steve touched on that I think is important is like a big number is not always a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's
00:10:42
Speaker
It's the kind of thing where you can't look at this in the same through the same lens as you look at the rest of social. You have to really force yourself to focus on the quality of the engagement rather than the quantity of the engagement. and that's a really hard thing It's a hard thing to quantify. and like I appreciate the difficult position that a lot of community managers and and marketers are in.
00:11:06
Speaker
When they, they're trying to convince this company to start this discord community. And the company only understands like, we want quantifiable data. We want to know how many people bought this thing, or we never want to know how many people are doing this. And sometimes it's like, well, you know, you've only got like 6,000 people in your server. But the thing is, is that it's a very engaged 6,000 people. And what you're doing is you're building up a tremendous amount of goodwill. Well, how do you measure goodwill?
00:11:32
Speaker
You, you can't, you can't measure goodwill. What you need to do is you need to have people on your team who can recognize the quality of the engagement that's happening and then figure out how to kind of sculpt and shape that engagement into brand evangelists. You know what I mean? If you are a company like Budweiser, right? You've got millions and millions and millions of followers everywhere, but you've only got 10,000 people in your server.
00:12:02
Speaker
The goal then is to figure out how to turn those 10,000 people into the kind of people that only buy your product and run around telling everybody else how fucking great it is. Yeah.
Creating Brand Evangelists
00:12:12
Speaker
Because that is going to sell more of your product than all of the ads you're going to run during the Superbowl. Having a dedicated, rabid, evangelical fan base that wants to tell everybody about how much they love your brand, that is going to do you a ton of good in the long run.
00:12:31
Speaker
And yeah, that'll translate out to sales, but in kind of a nebulous sort of way. But mostly what it's going to translate out to, it's going to translate out to every time your brand pops up, it's going to cause a positive feeling in people. What that's going to do is that's going to do two things. One, it's going to help just gain that extra traction in the market. It's going to help gain that sticky kind of traction in the market. And two,
00:12:52
Speaker
it's going to put you in a much better position to whether the inevitable public fuck up that's going to happen down the line. You know what I mean? Yeah. When somebody on your social team says the wrong fucking thing on Twitter at some point, and then the hammer of the gods comes down on your social team, then having all of these people out in the wild who are immediately rushing to defend you, man, you're going to feel that love at that point. Well, and It's great because, and we've talked about this a little bit, people are getting in your servers that are trolls and aren't there for the right reasons. yeah And there's no better feeling than someone coming into your server and trying to raise some rabble and having someone else in the server respond to them in an intelligent and eloquent way before anyone on your team can respond.
00:13:42
Speaker
It's beautiful. That's an amazing metric. You know, that's like a really valuable metric for your team. Watch what happens when somebody comes into the server and tries to start shit. How fast does the community handle the problem? How effectively does the community handle the problem before your team has to intervene? Yeah. If you've got a, if you've got a community where somebody comes in, starts a bunch of shit and the community immediately just like handles it, pings your team and is like,
00:14:11
Speaker
Hey, this is a bad actor. They're not here for the right reasons. Like you need to get them out of here. And then other people are in there actively diffusing the conversation. That is the sign that you have built a really strong supportive community around your brand.
00:14:27
Speaker
The only problem is, is how do you measure that?
Creative Success Metrics
00:14:30
Speaker
That is like the horrible circle that you get in is that when you're trying to measure the success of your Discord community, how do you actually measure it when a lot of the good metrics are a little bit more nebulous and a little bit require a lot more like eyes on than just being able to pull up a graph. um Some of the things that you can use and I think actually are really good metric um that you can definitely see growth on and and get a focus on is like how many emojis are people using to react to announcements in your server. Because that tells you how many people are reading those announcements.
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good one. I think another good one, I mean, they're there are like some, you know, more traditional ones that you can push out there that will help you understand engagement, right? Like push out coupon codes, you know, that are good in your online store, because you can track the usage of those. The nice thing about coupon codes versus like a specific product is that at any given moment, you have no idea what your customer base is looking to buy at that specific moment.
00:15:36
Speaker
But a coupon code means they can go in and pick up whatever thing they want, whatever thing they've been eyeballing. Make it an attractive coupon code, but not like you know absurdly generous coupon code. Just enough to kind of nudge people over because that that also gives you a sense of like how many people are at any given moment in this community are just eyeballing something in my store.
00:15:59
Speaker
That kind of thing is is great and encourage them to share it. yeah Like, Hey, here's coupon code for everybody in the community. Like, feel free to pass it along to your friends if you want. We're just throwing this out on like a random Tuesday for no reason. Like don't make it an event. Just throw it out on like a random Tuesday and be like, Hey, you know, everybody in the server has just been really great these last couple of weeks. We really appreciate all the help, all the feedback.
00:16:20
Speaker
Here's a coupon code for 20% off. Feel free to share it with your friends if you want. Thanks. It's good for the next week. And then just see how that does. You can do similar things too. If you're hosting an event in your server at the end of the event, you can be like, Hey, and everyone that was here at the event, you know, we're going to put a coupon code in the chat.
00:16:39
Speaker
good for a week and it's whatever percent off just to be nice or whatever and then people will get excited about that because they're getting rewarded for participating and it'll give you an indication of how many people actually are watching your events because they have a reason you have that metric of people clicked on the link to get the coupon code or they use the coupon code or you know whatever you decide to use it for. But I think that is another really good one. Yeah, and I think that also kind of leads into make sure when you do something like that, it's part of like a call to action. yeah You know, you want to say like like Steve said, like everyone in the server has been so cool this week, really appreciate all the feedback. Click on this link to use this coupon code or something like that so you can track it through website visits or something like that, or like a coupon code showing up on Shopify or whatever sales platform you're using.
00:17:32
Speaker
I think the biggest thing that we're trying to say is number of users doesn't matter. The growth of your server only matters if the goal of your server is to grow. The important thing is to figure out what metric matters to you and then find out how you can measure that in a way that isn't, I guess, manual and is easy to view quickly. You don't want it to be something we have to count up the number of posts someone did. You need a way to look at it and be like, oh, 600 people reacted to this. Good.
00:18:02
Speaker
Yeah. And just don't ever assume that just because a number is available to you, that that number is relevant to you. Yeah. You know what I mean? There's a lot of metrics that just do not matter to every single possible community. There's going to be a lot of metrics that are available to you through Discord's dashboard, through, you know, all kinds of different third party dashboards. There's going to be a lot of metrics available that just don't actually matter.
00:18:30
Speaker
And don't try and chase them. Don't be scared off by them. Don't be discouraged by them. Just, you know, figure out like what is really important to you and stay the course.
Focus on Meaningful Metrics
00:18:41
Speaker
So in conclusion, metrics, figure out what you want to know and figure out how to measure it. Don't be distracted by metrics that don't actually match up with your goal of your server.
00:18:54
Speaker
And don't write beer commercials that are so catchy that people remember the taglines in them decades later, but can't remember what fucking beer it was. This episode has been brought to you by whatever beer that was. Enjoy responsibly.
00:19:10
Speaker
Thanks guys. Thanks for listening. Subscribe, like, tell your friends. Yeah, please. That'd be great. We would certainly appreciate it. I have kids to put through college and Dylan has more Warhammer models. You got to get some more war dollies. This is very true. Yep. Thanks guys. Talk to you later. Bye.