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00:00:01
Trust Your Community!
59 Plays1 year ago
Dylan and Steve talk about vampire squid and the sometimes difficult task of trusting that your community wants to help you instead of trying to do everything yourself.
Join the Nervous Discord! http://discord.gg/uwFfB5387v
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Transcript
Admiration for Vampire Squid
00:00:00
Speaker
So vampire squid. Do you know about vampire squid? What? Do you know about vampire squid? I mean, like just in general vampire squid. Do you know that they exist? Yeah. Yeah. They're the coolest animal.
Exploration: Deep Ocean vs Near Earth
00:00:12
Speaker
Okay. I wasn't sure if there was like a new development or they're just awesome. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of stuff in the bottom of the ocean that, uh, it kind of, um, it's a lot. It's one of those fascinating parts of the earth. And I think, I don't know what the the stat is now, but when I was younger, it was like, we've spent more time exploring the near earth atmosphere than we have exploring the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, for sure. And it's harder to get to, honestly.
Childhood Dreams and Math Struggles
00:00:46
Speaker
It's funny, somebody, you know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a marine biologist. Who didn't? Yeah, everybody did. And I i recently saw somebody who was just like, as an adult, I'm very disappointed to find out how little marine biology impacts my daily life. Yeah. But yeah, I, uh, my, my math was always not strong enough to hold up all of my interest in science. So I never, I never got further into, I mean, I was really interested in a lot of the sciences. My math was garbage, so it kind of prevented me there. So then I switched over to, you know, the humanities and, um, and went from, uh, from literature to theater.
College Life and Student Interactions
00:01:30
Speaker
Do you actually have a bachelor's degree?
00:01:32
Speaker
no neith pure i was like shit yeah No. I lived near a college and I did in fact have adult relations with college women while they were enrolled there when I was ah at the same age as them. That is literally the closest, like having sex in ah somebody else's dorm room is the closest I came to a bachelor's degree. Not that we need to get into your past life as a deviant, but, um, did you lie to them and tell them that you also went to college there or were you like the townie that they were you dating to piss off their dad? No, I was definitely the, the townie. Yeah. Yeah. I worked at the cool coffee shop in Tallahassee. Yeah. Yeah. They'd come there to hang out and study and I'd, you know, wink and be charming. And, you know, sometimes we'd bake out. I was, uh, I was just a straight up townie.
00:02:28
Speaker
Nice. Somebody's gotta be a townie. Yeah. Might as well be you. Yeah. It's very true. Well, I'm Dylan.
Podcast Introduction and Banter
00:02:37
Speaker
And I'm apparently a Lothario. And this is Nervous.
00:03:08
Speaker
I'm really pleased that I got to use the word lothario in casual conversation. I'm actually disappointed earlier when we were doing our lugubrious things. We didn't use lothario in there at all. Yeah. yeah Today's podcast is brought to you by the letter L because apparently it's our favorite letter today. Yep, yep. The he is lugubrious thing is something that an old friend of mine used to always say during sound checks. and So every time it was like time to sound check, he'd be like, he is lugubrious, lugubrious. And I always really liked it. So I stole it. When people do sound checks, how they always get closer to the mic and speak in a deeper voice. They're like, Mickey Mouse, do a soundtrack. Oh, okay.
00:03:53
Speaker
He was like, Uber, yes. You know, like it's, it's never, it's never actually how they're going to talk. It's always like, I'm going to talk different than I do. And I'm going to enunciate more clearly than I ever will on the actual podcast. Oh yeah. For sure. For sure. They're like, Oh, sound check. I'm going to have to use my ASMR podcast voice. Let's not get back into ASMR. No, please. Let's not. So the people that are still listening, you're probably wondering, why the hell aren't they talking about stuff that actually matters to me and not just about being weirdos? And the answer to that is that we have very short attention
Trust and Community on Discord
00:04:30
Speaker
spans. Very short attention, which is why this podcast is like 20 minutes max. Because by the end of it, we start talking about weird shit. And we already recorded one podcast today. So that means we're already talking about weird shit and we're at the beginning. Oh no. All right, Steve, pull up the notes. So we focus up.
00:04:46
Speaker
All right. Uh, focusing, focusing. So last episode we talked about listening to and trusting your community and how broadcast social versus community social are very, very different things. You know, a lot of companies are kind of having a hard time wrapping their head around that. But once you learn to do that, one of the things that you'll find is that there's a lot to be gained from trusting your community and listening to them. And there's a lot that you can get from that relationship that it's just not available when you're talking about broadcast social.
00:05:21
Speaker
One of my favorite parts of Once a Community has been engaged and feels appreciated is it starts in almost informal neighborhood watch in your server yeah where people aren't afraid if someone is being ridiculous or posting a whole bunch or posting walls of text, someone will say, hey, why don't you slow down or give people a chance to respond, or you're posting this in this channel, you should post it on off topic, whatever it is, but they handle it for you so your moderators and community management team can focus more on the important parts of their job, not just trying to redirect people to the correct part of the server.
Broadcast vs Community Platforms
00:05:58
Speaker
And because the server is a slightly insular, you know, even if it is like a fully public server, it's still like kind of ah a closed contained space. One of the things that you'll find is on broadcast social, you know, Facebook, Twitter, what have you, somebody will post something awful, let's say, in response to your post. And you'll see a whole bunch of users dogpile that person and just absolutely annihilate them. This is one of those things that's very, very easy to do when you have broadcast social because of drive by engagement, right? But when it comes to Discord, you're talking about a community and the community naturally is going to want to take care of its own space. So more often than not, what you're going to find is that the reaction that comes from your community is going to be more helpful. It is going to tend towards being more positive and it's going to tend towards solving the problem.
00:06:52
Speaker
rather than just annihilating the person who is the cause of the problem. If somebody gets to the point in your community where they really truly do need to be removed from the server for the health of the community, you're going to see that coming a mile away and your community is going to help you see that. I mean, obviously you still need a moderation team, but the moderation team can then kind of be freed up to handle larger, higher level issues and help in executing strategy.
Benefits of a Trusted Community
00:07:21
Speaker
instead of having to be the ones that are constantly nitpicking through every single sentence in the server and having to like look for weird problems or anything. Having a healthy community is a great way to also ensure a safe one.
00:07:36
Speaker
The other benefit or one of the other benefits that you can get from having a community that trusts you and knows that you trust them is they'll hype up your company without you having to ask. So instead of it being like on the broadcast socials where you're like, our street teams out there doing cool shit, like help promote our stuff. If you have a good Discord and the community feels appreciated and you have something new happening, they're going to hype it up on their other socials because they're excited about it and they're excited about your brand. Yeah, it feels awkward, right, to ask your community to go out and like hype you up. I don't know any social media managers that don't feel weird about asking people for Google reviews or asking people for Facebook reviews. It's a part of the job that just always sort of feels awkward. But you can take a lot of the weirdness out when you have a community
00:08:29
Speaker
on Discord that is just constantly looking for ways to support you. When you really get that strong emotional buy-in from a Discord community, you're going to find that they're going to offer to be a lot more helpful than what you would normally get on broadcast social. They're going to feel invested in the wellbeing of the company and of the brand, and they're going to be looking for ways to help you so that you don't end up in a position where you're constantly having to beg for that help. and you'll find that they're
Filtering Community Feedback
00:09:01
Speaker
possibly almost too excited to help. So you ask for feedback from members of your Discord. You're going to get a lot of very honest feedback because they feel connected to your company and the team that's building what they love. yeah And so sometimes they're gonna give you feedback that while it's not maybe too honest, it's not gonna feel like it's coming from a place of love, but that's where it's coming from. They're thinking, oh my God, they're asking me what I think. Here's my honest opinion.
00:09:28
Speaker
And you just have to be aware that they're doing that because they love your product. Yeah. And it's like with any feedback, right? You're not necessarily always meant to take it literally. Sometimes what you need to do is you just need to hear the feedback and be able to kind of take that holistically as an indication of their intent rather than trying to implement their actual idea. Hey, Hey everybody on discord, what do you think would be a good idea for us to make next? And you're going to get the most bat shit crazy ideas from something like that.
00:10:04
Speaker
But what you can do is you can filter those responses. Instead of taking each one literally, you can kind of look at it from the perspective, okay, people are asking for this, this, this, this and this. Are they really asking for those things or are they just trying to solve for why? You know, you can look and and and you can get a really clear picture of your customer's intent, even if they don't necessarily have the vision or the product development knowledge that you have to implement the best possible solution there. So being able to kind of get that sort of feedback and then being able to filter it correctly are are huge for any brand that's building community on Discord.
Recognition in Community Contributions
00:10:46
Speaker
Another side to that is if someone comes up with an idea and it is like spot on and you are going to use it. Let's say someone is like, what color t-shirt should we release next? And someone is like, you should do periwinkle for reasons that apply to your band brand or whatever. And you're like, you know what? This guy's good. It's like he has a copy of our brand book. We should do periwinkle. Give that dude credit. Yeah. say, Hey, we're releasing this new shirt at Uncle Steve recommended periwinkle. We agreed that such a good idea. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Uncle Steve. And your community will love that. And it'll mean people are going to be more willing to help provide feedback or ideas because they might get that shout out where it matters. But with all things, like obviously, just remember that everything that you do in that server, you're setting a precedent.
Setting Community Behavior Precedents
00:11:36
Speaker
Mm hmm. you know, whether it's a good one or a bad one, you're setting a precedent. So every behavior that you exhibit, you need to be willing to either exhibit it twice or you need to be willing to answer questions about why you're not doing that anymore.
00:11:52
Speaker
It's a very good point. Another thing that I love when a community comes together, and this tends to be more around if your Discord is focused on a product versus an entire company, but having members of a community willing to help new users troubleshoot whatever it is they're working on. If it's a new cell phone or a new widget and someone's having a hard time with it, they come on the Discord and say, oh man, I can't get my widget to spin to the left. Having members of your community that'll step and be like, oh, here's what you need to do saves your team time and also fosters this belief that it's a community owned widget. People, they they have say in it, they know how to make it work, they know how to help people make it work. And that really will help your community shine as they feel like they're given that opportunity. Yeah.
00:12:40
Speaker
Yeah, smart. So as we wrap this up, since Steve has nothing to add to that one, because he didn't like that one on the list anyway, what are some ways that you wish you could get feedback from your community? Think about that. Send it to us on Instagram at nervous underscore net, or hit us up on our discord, because we'd love to come up with some ideas on how we can help people solve these problems for real. I want to remind people that the whole point of social media is to connect.
True Connection vs Algorithms
00:13:13
Speaker
I think we've all gotten a little too wrapped up in recent years about figuring out how to either game the algorithm or or directly fight it or bend it to our will. And the whole point of being able to build a community like this is to like really connect to your customers. Let them in.
00:13:31
Speaker
Let them become part of this journey that you're on because building a brand, running a company, this is a journey. Don't ever forget you are not going to end up the same person that you were at the end of this journey. So like really just don't be afraid to let the community kind of help guide you. Don't let, don't be afraid to let the community carry you at points. Don't be afraid to let the community kind of direct where all of this is going. Just fucking listen to them. Let them in. and enjoy the ride. Discord, more than any other social media, is a wild ride of learning about your community, learning from your community. And if you let it happen and don't expect it to fall into the comfortable box that you're trying to put all your social media in, you'll learn more about your community, you'll have more fun, and your community will be stronger for it. Yeah, 100%.
00:14:29
Speaker
Well, thanks for listening to this episode of The Nervous Podcast. Once again, we're sponsored by Nervous. Nobody. We're not sponsored by anybody. Not even our spouses. they won't They won't even sponsor us anymore. We have to make our own food if you can believe it. I would i wonder if we could get a sponsorship from like Kala Ukuleles or something. We
Ukulele Sponsorship Humor
00:14:48
Speaker
should. we We need to hit up the Ukulele site and be like, hey, we talk about Ukuleles almost every show. Yeah. Please sponsor us. It'd be great if they just sponsored us with a couple of new ukuleles. Oh, you know what? Let's see. Let's do that. We'll see if we can get a couple new ukuleles and then we'll write a theme song for the show on the ukuleles. And then, then it kind of almost makes sense to them. Or if they want, they can send us a ukulele. We could do a giveaway.
00:15:19
Speaker
We can give it out to one of our six listeners, three of which I think are family members. Yeah. And at least two of the other ones we've given ukuleles to his client gifts. They shouldn't be greedy. Get to ukuleles. Who did they think they are? Steven Dillon. Um, anyway,
Encouragement to Interact
00:15:35
Speaker
thanks for listening. Like subscribe, do all those things that we want you to do. Check out our website, call us, text us, email us, whatever. If you have discord questions or need help with a discord. Yep. Drink more coffee, have fun, hug your kids.
00:16:05
Speaker
Have a great day.