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00:00:01
25 Plays1 year ago
Dylan and Steve talk about a really unique community they helped concept and build for contemporary artist David Choe.
Join the Nervous Discord! http://discord.gg/uwFfB5387v
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Transcript
Fiber Festival Reflections
00:00:00
Speaker
So this weekend, last weekend, as you know, Sarah and I were at a fiber festival in Northern Colorado selling yarn from Sarah's Yarn Company. And it was interesting for me to walk around and see all of these booths of people who just lurked surly. Like this was their fucking job. All they, they wanted to sell some stuff, but it seemed like they didn't want you to come into their booth. Yeah.
00:00:25
Speaker
And I'm very much like to talk to people. And so I spent a lot of time shaming people into coming to our booth if they just walked past it or motioning them in and interacting with them. And it was fun to see because we were very busy. We had a very good weekend and we had fun. And so many of the other vendors that we talked to were like, man, this was not as good as it had been before.
00:00:49
Speaker
um And
Vendor Engagement vs. Discord Servers
00:00:50
Speaker
I think that's something that happens that actually I've been thinking about Discord because that's my life now and how so many servers start because they're like, we should make a Discord server. And then they started a Discord server and then they do absolutely nothing to try to bring people into it or give them a good reason or make it a fun experience to join. I think you kind of hit it already in that you specifically mentioned that you and Sarah had fun.
00:01:16
Speaker
And yeah like that alone brands, small businesses, whatever will open up a discord server and they immediately think of it as all right, here's more fucking work instead of approaching it as this exciting new little adventure side quest thing that they're doing. Cause you know, I mean, like the discord is not your business, you know, your business is your business. The discord should be like a very fun addition to it.
00:01:42
Speaker
And it should provide you with a place to grow your business, get ideas, interact with your customers without taking you outside of your comfort zone or making you feel like it's something you have to do, like social media. Right. You can allow it to be a place where your fans, your collectors, your customers, whatever can also exist without the constant expectation of commerce.
The Chestnut Angora Rabbit: A Furry Innovation
00:02:05
Speaker
Yeah. You know, let it be that big comfy chair at the library. You know what I mean?
00:02:11
Speaker
just kind of let it be a more natural place for people to gather. I used to work the international toy fair in New York every year. And what you just described with that fiber festival, it's exactly the same as toy fair. And here, these companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars to be at this trade show that is ultimately going to make or break their sales for the year. And they're just sitting down at their booth looking pissed.
00:02:39
Speaker
It was always just so disappointing. And I'm like, you make toys, you make fucking toys. Like, come on, man, at least pretend to enjoy yourself. So the next thing I think next festival we do, which is coming up, I think beginning of June, maybe I think I'm going to try to talk to Sarah about getting some booth babes just to really misogynize up the fiber industry.
00:03:01
Speaker
And by that, I think you mean cats on leashes? So actually, then we can get into the meat of this. There was an Angora rabbit farm that came and brought a rabbit. So that was the highlight of my weekend.
Discord Server Opening Strategies
00:03:15
Speaker
Magnificent. And they actually, this lady, they had developed a new color of Angora rabbit because most Angora rabbits are just white.
00:03:24
Speaker
ahhuh And so she'd spent the last five years, I think it was, developing this new chestnut color. And part of the rules by the rabbit fanciers of America or something like that is that when you're developing a color, you can be the only owner of those rabbits. So even though she had other people that were raising them, she was technically the owner. And before it got approved as an official colorway of the Angora rabbit, she owned over a hundred rabbits.
00:03:54
Speaker
And she had like, I think she said she had 60 of them at her house. Wow. And then when they went to the like judging, which was like three judgings in a row at different events and the judge into like four hours, she brought 50 rabbits of her own and then another like 150 rabbits showed up.
00:04:13
Speaker
And end this and by showed up you mean like they fucked and then they had baby rabbits like yeah in this band of like 72 hours Yeah, they're like dribbles. Yeah, it was amazing. The rabbit was super soft and it was just it was interesting to hear that story. That's funny So I'm Dylan and I'm Steve and we are nervous with the weirdest cold open ever
Creating Memorable Grand Openings
00:05:00
Speaker
So here's the thing about Discord servers is that there's a very clear path to opening one exactly the same way that everybody else opens one, right? You go in, you set it up, you get all your channels set up and you name everything and you get it all prettified and branded and all that stuff. And then you make a big announcement on broadcast social and send it out to your email list with an invite link. Or you can have more fun with it. And you can be a little weird with it.
00:05:30
Speaker
And you can give people a little bit of room to make this an experience more so than just another place that you're going to spit out advertising jargon. Putting up a Discord server reminds me of opening up a brick and mortar store.
00:05:46
Speaker
yeah And I only know about doing that as a performer doing grand openings, but the stores that have like, you know, it's a corporate store and they have a very standard way they do grand openings tended to have people come up because they wanted to shop, but they maybe were never going to go back again. They just knew there were going to be deals, so they showed up.
00:06:04
Speaker
Right. The stores that made their grand opening an experience, like it was an event and you went and there was
Building David Cho's Munko Community
00:06:10
Speaker
performers and there was music and there was crazy shit going on. Those are the people who experienced that are going to come back and be like, oh, my God, I remember when you're hearing that weird fucking Dylan guy pulled a card out of his ass. We should shop here more often. You know, like things like that are going to get people to stay. So it's not that you have to be weird, but embrace the weirdness that you can do to make your community exciting to be part of.
00:06:34
Speaker
Yeah, I mean i I did used to own a brick and mortar store and an art gallery and I can tell you that just having interesting things that you thought people were going to purchase did absolutely nothing.
00:06:47
Speaker
The thing that got people in was the events, essentially. And it was finding ways to emotionally connect with people and build an experience that they could talk about later and have a ah deep emotional connection with. like One of the events that we did for for Valentine's Day is we did a Lonely Hearts Club Valentine's Day movie night. right So what we did is we actually did a viewing of Say Anything.
00:07:15
Speaker
And then we hired a local chef to craft individual TV dinners for everybody who came and served them on like actual, like little foil trays and gave everybody like, uh, vinyl records that we had spray painted stencils of John Cusack's face on. I think the thing is then is what we're going to talk about today and give some examples on a server we worked on is what is your chef made TV dinner? That's going to bring people back.
00:07:43
Speaker
Yeah. Find a weird and interesting way to take something that everybody's already familiar with, you know, Valentine's Day, and then make it fun and unique and make it fit what you do in a way that allows people to form an emotional connection to your your brand or your community. So let's talk about Munko.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, this was a great project that we worked on for the artist David Cho, who has a reputation, well-earned for being largely batshit crazy. He is one of those hyper creative people who his, every waking moment of his life is like a high speed, full throttle, top volume art project. Go big or go home. Yeah. I mean, go insane or go home, I think is like a little bit closer to it.
00:08:34
Speaker
But he, um, he wanted to start up this like kind of NFT based art community project thing, uh, based around his Munko character. And we were brought on board to help out with that. The interesting thing too about it was it was built around his Munko character, which hilariously, like both Steve and I have those vinyl characters in our houses. So it was a, it was a good fit there because we already liked it. And.
00:09:00
Speaker
the thing they wanted to do was build the version of Munko that people received based on a personality test that they took. Yeah. It was a really fun, interesting art project. you know Everybody got to to basically create a custom Munko that reflected
Munko Discord Server Phased Creation
00:09:20
Speaker
who they were in that moment in time. And they wanted the community to be equally unique and equally kind of of the moment.
00:09:29
Speaker
So we spent a lot of time talking to their team and trying to figure out kind of different ways to go about it. And the things that we sort of ended up implementing, I personally think is some of the very best work that we've ever done. And I would love to take credit for all of it, but It was a really good team that we were working with and they were really open and really receptive to a lot of the stuff. And they brought also a lot of great ideas to the table. So, Steve, give me a quick rundown of phase one, because basically there was, I think two phases really of the discord. So phase one was they put an invite out on social media.
00:10:10
Speaker
Yeah, so the first phase was we built out the server and they sent the invite out on social media with no explanation at all of what it was. It was just.
00:10:21
Speaker
go here to be Munko. And in all of the messaging for this, Munko became the word smurf, right? It was used like a noun, it was used as a verb, it was used as an adjective, it was used for everything. So, you know, it was come here, be Munko. And when you joined the server, there was a single channel No explanation anywhere. No, I don't even think there was any branding in the server. I don't think there was a welcome message. It was just a text channel and people just came in. It was a single text channel named Speculation. Which was perfect. And that was it. Yeah. That was, and that was me. I'm taking full credit for that. Thank you very much. It was one of my one of those rare good ideas that I have.
00:11:07
Speaker
So they came in to a server that only had one channel called Speculation, and everybody piled into that one channel. And as you can imagine, if you've been on a very busy Discord server, we had 10,000 people join in like the first hour or so. So you had 10,000 people who are fans of a very wild, loud, raucous artist dog pile into this Discord server into one single channel and everybody trying to figure out what the fuck was going on.
00:11:36
Speaker
It was great. And it was, it was wild because not only was there no guidance from David Cho and his team, there was no moderators there hanging out. There was no community management. We just let the community do community things and they spent days. did it Was it a full week?
00:11:58
Speaker
It was a, yeah, it was a full week before, uh, before any changes started to pop up. So during this time, basically what it is, the team was in there. Everybody could see that there were people with like Munko related names in there, but they weren't sure who they were. They had no idea who the team was, what the team was. They had no expectations, no ideas about what this was going to be.
00:12:25
Speaker
So basically we invited 10,000 plus people to a blank canvas, which as you can imagine, it was completely unhinged, but it was amazing. And I got to tell you, convincing the team in charge of something to watch that kind of influx of chaos and then not do anything.
00:12:46
Speaker
Even when that's the plan, that is really hard to do. Yeah. And it, it was amazing to watch and the Munko team did a fantastic job of sitting on their hands, hiding their keyboards from themselves. I don't know what they did to keep from doing it because so many brands, I think probably part of it was, it was David Cho and he's been known to do a little bit crazy things, but being able to be willing to let your community just exist without any interference from the team. It's an amazing thing to do. yeah and Now, obviously this approach is not going to work for everybody in every situation, but like it's a really strong example, in my opinion, of understanding what kind of community you have and what kind of community you want to build.
00:13:35
Speaker
And it allowed the community to come together to try and figure out what the server was about, which then led to phase two. Yeah. One of the coolest things about it is that letting the community come in and do this and, and just speculate and run wild was like one of the best community building exercises I've ever seen. People immediately started latching onto other people. People started forming little units, people made friends.
00:14:03
Speaker
people started just like kind of attaching to each other. who And then people started
Creative Moderation Techniques on Discord
00:14:10
Speaker
really working together to try and figure out exactly what was going on. Now, while all this was happening, even though the team wasn't doing anything in the server, the team was watching and logging everything that was happening. We had multiple spreadsheets going,
00:14:29
Speaker
And we had probably a dozen people who were in the server watching the conversation and just logging quotes from people, grabbing ideas, jotting down notes, and and basically taking stock of everything that was happening in the server so that then they could start crafting a full narrative story based off of the speculation of the users.
00:14:54
Speaker
So literally everything that these people were were making up to try and figure out and explain this emptiness in front of them, it was the most choose your own adventure, choose your own adventure imaginable. They literally wrote the story and then everything that happened in the server after that was a self fulfilled prophecy.
00:15:14
Speaker
and One of the things that I think puts this in perspective to why this would be beneficial for a brand is it's the co-creation that you want with your community. Because if they're like, I bet they're going to do this, and then you do that, those those people who agreed or thought that was a good idea immediately feel like either you're listening or that they're a genius. And both of those things are a good thing for your community.
00:15:45
Speaker
Now, Steve, quick question. What happens when you have a community that grew in the Wild West like this, where there was no rules, no direction, anything like that, and then you start running it like a normal server, quote unquote, and you have bad actors coming in or continuing to do things that are not necessarily what you want with your community?
00:16:10
Speaker
So this is one of my favorite things that this server did. And honestly, this is not a new strategy. This is something that I've seen a handful of different servers do. Our friend Garth, who you know we do a fair bit of work on Discord with, was telling me a story just recently about ah a similar strategy that they had. But on the Munko server, you basically would get put in Munko jail, which meant that there was only one channel available to you.
00:16:39
Speaker
in that channel was just you and other people who had been thrown in Munko jail. And there was no explanation of where you were, what was going to happen. There was a copy pasta note that would get dropped in there that basically said, the judge will see you when the judge sees you. And that was it. There was no, there was no timeframe on that. There was no explanation of what the fuck that actually meant.
00:17:06
Speaker
There was like zero chance for you to appeal this. Like you were just sequestered. You were basically thrown into solitary and then a handful of other people were thrown in there with you. And what they ended up doing is they literally hired a dude to act like an insane judge.
00:17:28
Speaker
full-on like the white wig and the robes and everything. And he was impatient and aggravated. And every once in a while someone would be allowed to petition the judge to to return to the rest of the server. The judge would do like a live Zoom call with them. And the judge was mostly just spending the entire time like mocking them and yelling at them. But the person was allowed to make their case. They were allowed to have another member of the server come in and act as their impromptu lawyer and like argue on their behalf as a character witness. And then the judge may or may not let you back into the rest of the server. It was one of the most overly involved, unhinged things I've ever seen, but
00:18:16
Speaker
it worked. It absolutely worked because once people were removed from the chaos that they had signed up for, they realized like, ah, shit. Like I fucked up. I don't think we had a single person ever other than Dave Chang. There was nobody who got thrown in Munko jail who didn't realize that they had screwed up and, and do their absolute best to get back into the rest of the server.
00:18:44
Speaker
And the fun thing about this is that you don't have to do unhinged judge stuff. Having a ah channel where you put bad actors without kicking them out so bad actors can hang out with bad actors is a great way to A, possibly have them look at their behavior and be like, boy, why am I here with all the assholes? Maybe I'm the asshole. It also gives you a place to put people without kicking them out of the server without that sort of thing. And if they start to learn their lesson, you need to put them in timeout in that channel for a week and you can let them back in to gen pop. And if they are successful, they stay. If they're bad again, put them back in jail. Like it's, it's a really good way to help teach people how to act in communities, which is hard for a lot of people. Yeah. And essentially what you're doing, I mean, you named the channel second chance.
00:19:38
Speaker
You know what I mean? like you're you're You're giving people the option to get better. You're giving people the option and the ability and the room to improve and to to be a better version of themselves and to become like a better member of your community. It has to align with with your values and it has to align with your vibe and it has to be something that you're willing to manage.
00:20:01
Speaker
but doing that instead of just banning people is a really beautiful way to kind of build even, I would argue that like if done correctly, you can build stronger bonds and these people can rejoin your community once they've had their little time out and and potentially come back as like much better, much more
Evolving Community Management
00:20:20
Speaker
helpful and constructive community members.
00:20:23
Speaker
And it's also hilarious on the back end to watch that channel ah because people at first don't understand why they're there or once they do, there's usually they almost go through the the stages of grief. Like they have denial, they have anger, you know and they have acceptance. And when they hit acceptance is when you can be like, maybe you can come back. Maybe you can come back.
00:20:45
Speaker
So yeah, it's pretty great. um There's a lot of ways to start a server. There's a lot of ways to bring people into your server. The important thing is that you're enjoying it and it fits within your like brand story.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, have fun with it. like Really, really enjoy it. We say this a lot in the entrepreneur community, right? like A business plan is meant to be a living document. Nothing is ever set in stone. You need to stop and like reconsider what you're doing like pretty regularly and make sure that the decisions that you're making are are still valid you know and still working for all the right reasons. It's it's no different with a community.
00:21:26
Speaker
Just because you started the community with one thing in mind doesn't mean that that's the way it's going to end up going. And at any given moment, you need to be willing to look at your community, look at the direction it's heading, look at the tone, the tenor, the vibe of the whole thing, and be willing to like really allow the community to fit the needs of the members. Yeah. So go out and do that.
00:21:51
Speaker
I mean, shit, do it twice on Sundays. Woo. The other thing that's great about this is let's say you have your, your bad kid jail. yeah Um, you can also give them a role for when they get out of jail. That's like, I mean, you wouldn't call it this, but it's like the parolee role where you know that they've been in jail once. So you want to make sure they don't continue to act up and give them less chances before they go back into jail. Yeah.
00:22:16
Speaker
I would also just purely for the entertainment value, whatever the auto mod settings and all the, you know, the self-censorship and the filters and things you have to keep the rest of your server nice and squeaky clean. Turn all of that off in the jail cell. who Give people the opportunity to be the worst possible version of themselves so that when they aren't, it actually means something. hey Yeah. Well, that's all we have for you today on the Nervous Podcast.
00:22:44
Speaker
Yeah. Also in the unlikely event that you ever get the opportunity to juggle a living baby. I'm just going to go ahead and recommend that you don't. Yeah, that's probably smart. Same with kittens. Juggling kittens seems like a good idea, but they're all points. So just watch out. Yeah. It seems like it's going to be funny and you might want to do it for the gram, but i'm I'm telling you those razor sharp little claws, not worth it. Legitimately, I'd rather juggle chainsaws with the blades on than cats.
00:23:16
Speaker
I did that once because I was an idiot and nobody told me that everybody else who was juggling chainsaws took the chains off. With the blades on, if it hits you, it's going to tear big chunks out of you. With the blades off, it's going to tear slightly smaller bits off of you. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of the difference between murder and maiming. Yeah. It's a manslaughter versus murder. yeah Basically. All right, cool. Good talk.