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Community!
62 Plays1 year ago
Dylan and Steve talk about the value of community over commerce and also show off their Kermit The Frog impersonations.
Spoiler: neither of them are very good.
Join Nervous on Discord: https://discord.gg/tz5ZAykxfa
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Transcript
Icebreaker Fun: Kermit the Frog Impressions
00:00:00
Speaker
So, hilariously, one of my favorite icebreakers to do with a new group of people is to have everyone do their best Kermit the Frog voice because 99% of people in the world know who Kermit the Frog is and you get a lot of really amazing attempts and there's usually one or two people who you're just like, Jim Henson, are you back?
00:00:22
Speaker
Wow. That's fantastic. I, I always thought I had a decent Kermit the frog, but I don't know what it sounds like out to somebody else. Got to do it. Let me hear it. Hi, cool. Kermit the frog here reporting to you live from the nervous podcast. That's pretty good. It's Kermit the frog here.
00:00:42
Speaker
I put a little more in that here. Yeah. I mean, I can hear that mine's not great because I'm sick right now and my voice is all shot, but, uh, yeah. Yeah. I think that's, that is a good icebreaker. I like that. Yeah. It's better than the like two truths and a lie or, you know, any of those other stupid things, because it puts everybody in an awkward position of doing a voice that they don't, no one does Kermit the frog all the time. Right. Right. Except for all the people who professionally do it.
00:01:10
Speaker
I did sing Rainbow Connection at Karaoke once in full Kermit voice the whole song. How'd that go? Not as well as I'd hoped. No, there were no Lovers and Dreamers, just you? Well, that was the thing is I thought I sounded pretty decent and a lot of people were just staring. And I think there was people there who just didn't recognize the song and didn't understand what was happening. Yeah, that's probably a good point. Yeah. So anyway, I'm Dylan. And I'm Steve. And we are nervous.
Engaging Communities on Discord
00:02:06
Speaker
So today on the Nervous podcast, we're going to discuss some of the big deals that happen in a Discord server. I'm not talking about making your community huge. I'm not talking about when you have to deal with trolls or banning people. I'm talking about what you do to actively engage the members of your server in your community.
00:02:29
Speaker
And I think it's important to note that you have to remember that you need to engage your community aside from selling to them. If everything that you have to say to them is commerce related, you are going to lose that community. Exactly. And one of the hardest parts about that is it breaks from traditional advertising. It's not a typical thing for people to do in marketing where they say,
00:02:58
Speaker
Hey, how was everybody's day? And don't say anything about, oh, and we have a sale going on or come buy our product. It's always like, hey, how are you doing? You'd be doing better if you had this widget.
00:03:11
Speaker
Yeah.
Discord vs. Social Media: Community vs. Attention
00:03:12
Speaker
So on broadcast social, right? Like Twitter and Facebook and whatnot, people are just on the platform and you're trying to like get their attention. So it's almost like busking in a way, right? People are on the street and you're trying to get them to stop what they're doing and look at you in discord. That is not the case. They're already here because they want to be here. They're here because they want to hear what you have to say. And they're here because they want to be part of the community that you are building and maintaining.
00:03:38
Speaker
So you already have their attention. You don't need to give them the hard sell. But what you do need to do is keep their attention. And that means that you need to provide value that keeps them there. And that value may or may not always be related to your actual products. It's kind of like Disneyland. So Disney does an amazing job of making everything about selling you stuff without coming out and asking you to buy things.
00:04:07
Speaker
You wander around Disneyland and you go on the rides and all of the products are placed in a way that it's easy to get and easy to buy.
Disney's Subtle Selling Tactics
00:04:14
Speaker
But you don't have someone when you get off, you know, the Matterhorn being like, do you want to buy some mountain goat testicles? It's much more like, oh, they're just another gift store. I can wander. And if I want to have a few minutes, someone else is in the bathroom. I'll go check it out. But it's not just about selling you stuff because they know if you enjoy yourself, you're going to buy stuff. And that's what they focus on is the enjoyment.
00:04:34
Speaker
Yeah, because we're all running businesses that are at least 50% online, if not 80 to 90%. At any given moment, no one is more than a mouse click away from buying something from you. Okay. What you don't need to be constantly trying to shove them into that funnel. What you need to do is you need to make sure that they feel so great about your brand, that what they want to do is support it because they don't want it to go away.
00:04:59
Speaker
when you get your community into that mentality, then you're really fostering a sense of community because then they feel like what you're doing is something that needs to be supported and protected instead of just something that needs to be purchased and forgotten.
Engagement Through Non-Product Content
00:05:14
Speaker
Exactly. So this is definitely a tricky thing to do. Okay. And one of the ways that you can do that is you can kind of address like peripheral interests. Okay. You can talk about the details of a thing without necessarily talking about the thing. So I'll give you,
00:05:29
Speaker
I'll give you a sort of half fantasy example here, right? So recently, the hundreds, which is a streetwear brand that Dylan and I have worked with in the past, did a couple of collaboration items with Flat Spot Records, which is a, I think DC, it's either DC or Baltimore based hardcore record label.
00:05:48
Speaker
And they did like a couple of t-shirts and some accessories and stuff. And they put together a showcase in whatever the hometown was with a handful of the bands on the records and did the release party for the clothing. And that's all well and good. But the thing is, is that on their Discord server, what they could have done
00:06:06
Speaker
to help market and promote that release. They could have spent a whole month interviewing some of the top bands on that label, like Zulu, one of the bands on that label. Absolutely amazing. I would have loved to have those folks like jump into the server and do a Q&A, do like an interview with Bobby or something.
00:06:25
Speaker
And by doing that, you're exposing the meat of the thing, right? Basically, you're talking about the music, you're talking about the band, you're talking about the people who make the music, you're getting everybody together to like rally around this interest. And yeah, at the end of the day, you're hoping to sell some more t-shirts as a result of it, but you don't have to talk about the t-shirts. You have to get people excited about what's behind the t-shirts. So talking about like kind of the peripheral value and the peripheral interest of these things,
00:06:53
Speaker
I don't need to jump into like my yo-yo discord server and talk all about this yo-yo to sell the yo-yo. No, what I need to do is I need to talk to the player whose signature model it is about what yo-yo players inspired them when they were coming up. That's interesting to listen to. Will it sell yo-yos eventually kind of on the backend? Sure.
00:07:12
Speaker
But you don't need to make everything about just talking about the product. Talk about circles around it. Talk about everything but the actual product and just let that interest naturally grow so that people gravitate towards the product when they're ready.
Maximizing Event Engagement
00:07:28
Speaker
An important part of that too is listening to the community to figure out what events they want and what they're interested in. So if you have an event like this where your company's partnering with a record label and there's a new album being released, figure out if your community would be interested in doing a listening party or if the artists could come onto the server and do a presentation or answer questions or just interact with the community.
00:07:55
Speaker
And once you figure out what kind of events your community likes, you just gotta keep iterating and trying them to see which ones are more popular and which ones aren't, and then keep doing more and more until you figure out what it is your community wants from events and activities and just keep building on that.
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's very important, especially at the beginning of your community, right? When you're first sort of figuring all of this stuff out, try something different constantly. Don't stick to the same old, same old every single time. Experiment wildly. Because honestly, at the very beginning of community, you don't know what's actually going to hit.
00:08:34
Speaker
And what you don't want to do is like immediately get into this awful cycle of, of depending entirely on vanity metrics. Having more people in your event is not necessarily success. How did people talk about it afterwards? How do people feel about it? If you only had 10 people come to an event, but those 10 people spent the entire next week talking about it and would not shut up about it.
00:08:59
Speaker
to the point where everybody else in the server is like, did you guys record it? Is there anywhere else that I can listen to it? That is more successful than having 500 people show up for an event and almost no conversation about it after the fact.
Authentic Community Engagement by Teams
00:09:12
Speaker
Yeah. And a big part of that, avoiding that vanity metric, listening to your community is letting your team be the stars.
00:09:24
Speaker
We've touched on this, I think, briefly in another episode, but we don't want to see your marketing people running these events because people know they're marketing people and it will come off as some sort of a sales tactic. If instead it's the artist who designed the sleeve for the CD that you're releasing, if they're the ones that are in there talking about their process or why they did something a certain way, that's going to create more interest from your community
00:09:53
Speaker
and allow that member of the team to shine, which then provides them with more buy in. So maybe they'll do more events. Like reach out to your entire team. It may turn out that one of the main people who's packing orders for you that week
00:10:06
Speaker
is like a huge fan of Flat Spot Records and loves every single band on that label and can just sit and recite lyrics all day long. Drag your box packing guy out, let him hang out, let him be one of the people who interviews the bands and let people give your entire team an opportunity to shine at any given moment. Like don't just depend on your marketing folks, which I know it's really, really easy to do, but in the same way that like a community is made up of lots and lots of different people, so is your company.
00:10:36
Speaker
And give every single member of your company an opportunity to step forward and be an ambassador for your brand, an ambassador for your company, and let them have a voice. And I know this will be hard for a lot of the PR people that are involved in Discord communities and that sort of thing.
00:10:56
Speaker
But Discord is not the same as other media type outlets. It's a much more of a low-key, low-stakes conversation or presentation.
00:11:10
Speaker
If you need to get the box guy who packs all your orders, some training to be able to participate, trust them not to say what you don't want them to say. If you give them those guidelines, don't necessarily think that you need to take your shippers and send them all through media training for three days, just so they can interview a band member. If you want to make sure that you make it accessible for your team to participate, otherwise they won't want to participate.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah, nobody needs media training to talk to a band that they love. That's not going to come across great for anybody. If you really need to tell somebody like, Hey, by the way, don't mention this because we haven't announced it yet. Great. No problem. But don't try to apply like this layer of polish to each and every single thing that you do on discord. It's just going to look weird. It's going to make everything look flat.
00:12:00
Speaker
It's going to remove all of the glorious texture of the nuance of your people and your brand and your community. And it's just going to make it look too slick and creepy. Let your team members personalities come out because their personality is what helps make your brand what it is.
Scheduling Regular Community Events
00:12:21
Speaker
And then the last thing, and this is the hardest thing to do, especially when you're working as a big company with a lot of marketing initiatives and a lot going on is start a cadence of events and then stick to that schedule as much as humanly possible. People love a routine. And if they know that every Thursday at 4 PM mountain time, you know, Steven Dillon are going to put on a juggling show in our discord.
00:12:46
Speaker
they're going to show up for that and they're going to tell their friends about it because they can plan on it being at that specific time. Yeah. One, don't be discouraged if it takes a while to like build up some steam and momentum on that. And two, like don't be afraid to change it up. If you go through like two full months of your event being on a Friday night and you're just not getting the kind of turnout you want,
00:13:09
Speaker
Put it to your community. Hey, is there a better night of the week that would be easier for everyone to show up for? And if they're like, yeah, actually Thursday nights would be better for us.
00:13:19
Speaker
Great. Move it to Thursday nights. Thank the community for their feedback. Don't beat yourself up for it. Don't beat them up for not showing up. Don't get a chip on your shoulder about it. Just understand that everything with it, with any kind of community anywhere, everything needs to be fluid and you need to really be getting that feedback on a regular basis because everything's going to have to change at some point. Yeah. And being able to adjust when changes need to happen is perfect.
00:13:49
Speaker
I think that about wraps up everything to talk about when it comes to planning events and taking care of your community. I don't know, man. I feel like I could go on and on about this all day long, but honestly, I would probably just be repeating myself. Repeating yourself. I think it's really important to give people a space where commerce is not expected of them.
Non-Commercial Community Spaces
00:14:14
Speaker
I had this conversation recently with somebody about libraries, like libraries are like one of the last great spaces in America where commerce is not required or expected of you. You can just go to a library, sit down, crack open a book.
00:14:28
Speaker
Nobody's going to give you shit. Nobody's going to bug you. Librarian's not going to come over and tap you on the shoulder and be like, are you going to check that out? You're just not going to get any of that. And I really feel like the more that we can build spaces, you know, even if it's a small space, even if it's just like a little discord server for your, you know, small enamel pin brand or whatever.
00:14:49
Speaker
The more that we can build spaces where people can come and hang out and meet like-minded people with similar interests, let's not forget. That's why everybody's there. Everyone's there because they all had this one same interest in your brand. And now as the person in charge of the community, your job is to figure out what other interests do they have in common? You know, what are the other ties that bind to this group of people? But man, don't make everything about just trying to extract value from them.
00:15:17
Speaker
let their presence be the value. Let your presence be the value. Let people just fucking be allowed to just hang out and be people sometimes. I mean, I really cannot stress that enough. This life that we have, especially in America, where like you can't even pump gas without ads blaring at you from a speaker on the fucking gas pump. It's really, really hard to go
00:15:45
Speaker
five minutes, anywhere, anyhow, without being marketed at. So like, if you can create sort of a haven for people where they can just come and hang out and be together, I mean, man, what a champion move that is for you. And also, on a final note, go to the library, support your local library. Oh, God, yes, please. Librarians are the absolute best of us. Even reference librarians.
00:16:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, they may be a little awkward, but man, do they know some shit about some shit. They know some shit about, and they know how to find shit. That's my favorite thing about librarians, which is a topic for another time. Otherwise, we'll talk about librarians for another 20 minutes. I mean, is there really anything wrong with us talking about librarians for like a solid 20 minutes? Probably not. I don't know if anybody would be interested in listening to it. I mean, I think everybody should, because once again, I will say this again. I will say it every day until the day I die. Librarians truly are the best of us.
00:16:44
Speaker
Today's episode is brought to you by librarians because that's where we learned stuff. By the letter L and the letters I B R and A and R and Y. Yes. Yes. I assume that's how you spell library. Or as I like to say it to make my friends mad that are librarians, the library.
Podcast Wrap-up: Libraries and Laughter
00:17:03
Speaker
Oh, that's terrible. Why would you go and do that? Why would we end on that note? Because I'm horrible. I'm a horrible human being. You prick.
00:17:14
Speaker
All right. Everyone have a great day. Tune in next time to learn more about stuff and things. Yay. Things also join our discord slash check out our website slash follow us on Instagram slash subscribe to the podcast. Yeah. Do all the stuff and the things. And, uh, we'll see you next time.
00:17:56
Speaker
the the