The Future of Online Interaction: Our Next Discussion on Community Building #04

Deborah
00:01:08

Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Studio Fusion. And today we have Gail Gardner with us. And welcome, Gail.

Gail Gardner
00:01:17

Hi, Deborah.

Deborah
00:01:19

And I'm so glad you're here, Gail. And I view you as an expert in community.

Gail Gardner
00:01:24

I want to talk to people about community. For some reason, people like to make me admin of Facebook groups. Maybe because they can't figure out how to do something, and I'll.

And I'll give them instructions on how to do something, and the next thing I know, the admin has made me an admin.

Deborah
00:01:41

Oh, wow. You mean like even without asking you, has that happened?

Gail Gardner
00:01:44

Yeah, sometimes. I'm the admin of a group in Salem, Oregon. I've never been to Salem, Oregon.

Deborah
00:01:52

Wow.

Gail Gardner
00:01:54

But the thing is, the group was dying, right? And so we kind of revived it. So the original group requirement was you had to post an image, a photograph of something in Salem.

Well, people don't want to do that even though they're carrying a camera. I don't know why that's hard for them if they're carrying their smartphone, and I'm sure they are. But people don't want to share pictures.

But what people want to do is try to find work, offer their services. The problem is if the community is only people offering services, then people will stop participating in that community. Right.

And people can't seem to understand if your community. Like I'm the admin of a blogger group too, and I actually posted early on and pinned the post to the top. What is it people think this group is for?

Right, because it's not clear to me.

What it turns into is people sharing links to videos or a bunch of stuff that's not in English, even though it clearly says in the rules you have to post in English. And even in countries where English isn't the first language, most people do use English, right? And they never answer.

So here's this community with tens of thousands of members, but all people want to do is throw a link to their latest whatever that nobody looks at, nobody cares about. It's not on topic to me.

If it's a blogging group, it's usually about how to blog, how to get more traffic to your blog, how to communicate with some kind of skill related thing of value, not just a whole bunch of random links.

Deborah
00:03:52

Right. What if you did it like per day? Like this day we're gonna focus on different ways to blog or blogging specific as far as topics.

Maybe this day it's how to grow your blog.

Gail Gardner
00:04:04

Maybe this day that's a good idea. And now we have to talk about where your community is. And this is the problem. So everyone wants to use Facebook.

No matter how much we try to get them to use something else, they always revert back to their habit of going to Facebook. But the problem is that Facebook is only going to show your post to 3% of your page. People follow you.

Like, people ran ads to get followers on Facebook, and now when they post, Facebook chooses to only show their whatever they post to 3% of their followers. So they're quietly dying. Right? Their page dies. Communities, I think, have the same problem.

Because if I'm in a community and there are tens of thousands of people in this community, and I, as an admin, can see the statistics, and 36 people saw a post, or maybe it's a good post, and 100 people saw it, that tells me Facebook's not sharing it with the people in that group. And people don't realize on LinkedIn and on Facebook, you can go and tell it you want to see all posts.

They don't know that, like, if you follow someone, you'll see next to nothing. If you really want to see stuff, you need to follow them. And then you need to go into notifications and tell them you want to see everything. Right.

But you still won't see everything. And the reason I know that is so I search often for certain things that I want to support.

And even though I have notifications set to everything, when I search the there's new stuff that I never got notified about.

Deborah
00:06:04

I have that with Michael. He'll post something and there'll be like 50 people that say they love something and it's some photograph.

And he's like, well, I just assumed you saw it. It's like, honey, I live with you. You should have told me you took this wonderful picture of the Grand Canyon. Because I didn't see it.

I didn't know you posted it.

Gail Gardner
00:06:19

He needs to tag you, and then I think you'll see it. Yeah, but this is the problem. So we've got all these communities, Facebook, but they only show you what you've been active in recently.

So if you're in a lot of communities like I am, unless I search, if I have to remember I'm in a community, there's a bunch of communities with the same name.

I have to remember how to find the one I'm looking for, Then I have to remember to go there because Facebook is not giving me the notifications unless I search. If I search on that group, it'll say nine new. But in notifications is A big fat nothing.

So Facebook is not a great place for community, except that everyone is on Facebook and that's where they want to go. And so Facebook is killing communities.

Deborah
00:07:16

That's why I moved away. That's what this, this episode was supposed to be, where I give a demo of like the new place I've gone, which is Communi. And I was able to buy in...

Martin
00:07:27

So I was thinking how you could apply this on the community. And I heard you, Gail, talking about how communities, they could demand things.

And that also in an online community you have some rules, ground rules. You want to create some value, add value, have an exchange of ideas, services, whatnot, and create as we call.

We like this service called TrueFans.fm, that the real true fans are coming to the community, adding their two cents that I like that expression. And you have an exchange, but then you also have to have some kind of moderation, administration, have a good atmosphere. So it will be nice.

Deborah
00:08:08

You reminded me of something, Martin, because our call to action for today. And Gail, we always have a call to action so that people can. We're going to gamify it where people can actually do this every week and track them.

And we always have a call to action. So our call to action last week was to join a community. Didn't matter what community.

I mean, we'd love it if you join our community at StudioFusion Club, but you could also join another one, like Trufans for instance, or any community. But I was thinking for this week, how about post something at a community?

And ideally it's at our community because then we can see it, but post something.

And by the way, I'll let you contact us if you know how to, you know, you can reach out to Martin or me, dm, email something, somewhere, let someone know your idea, but come up with either a podcast idea or a community idea.

It doesn't have to be something that say, hey, I'm gonna go start this podcast about, but just something, an idea that maybe somebody else would do or an idea that you'd like to see implemented somewhere. It doesn't have to be a great idea, even just an idea, and you can come post it. I'll create a spot on our community where you can post it.

And otherwise, like I said, post it somewhere or even send us a DM or an email and we will mark that off that you did that action.

Martin
00:09:25

Yeah. And I think it's coming again all full circle.

So if you listen to like podcasting 2.0 and Adam Curry is talking about this hyperlocal communities, radio station, podcasts and so on. So that's how it was back in the day. And then the Internet came and then it was often that.

And then the big tech and the big, big social media platforms came along. And now I think it's something new coming and we are trying to do it for our part, so to speak. So that's interesting. Yeah.

Deborah
00:09:59

Well, guys, this has been a wonderful chat and thank you so much, Gail, for joining us. I love those tips. I can't wait to highlight them in the show notes so that people can go back and listen to your tips. This is great.

And so we've talked about Community during this session and we will follow up either in the next episode or I'll attach it to this one. As far as the promised how to in setting up your community on Communi, we're going to let you watch us set up the Studio Fusion Community.

But we will still get that to you, whether it's an addendum or it's the next episode. And you guys know how to find us.

You can find us the same time next week live streaming and please join us on TrueFans.fm and we like to communicate there on that community. And you can follow us on our website too and catch all the new stuff there at StudioFusion.co.

Otherwise, we'll see you same time, same place next week.