Hello, and welcome to bad community advice.
This is the show that's all about terrible tips and toxic takeaways.
I'm your host.
My name is Seth Resler.
I am the founder of Community Marketing Revolution.
And today, we are going to talk about the relationship between a community and an audience because this is a thing that a lot of people, especially when they are first engaging with the community space, they often they're not quite on the right page when it comes to this.
So I'm really excited that we're going to dive into this topic.
My guest today is the head of community and content at Pinwheel by Audily, Uh, she is also the founder of the earbuds podcast collective and a member of the board of governors at the podcast academy, somebody who is incredibly well respected in the podcasting space, and she organizes and facilitates pod cast meetups and networking events, and I know her because she's a frequent speaker at podcasting conferences all over the nation and even all over the world.
Outside of audio, she's a licensed New York City tour guide and runs mystery a walking tour company in New York City.
I wanna welcome Arielle Nissenblatt.
Hi, Ariel.
How are you? Hey, I'm great, and I feel welcome.
Oh, thank you so much for being here.
I really appreciate you taking the time.
Uh, look, and and and you are one of the luminaries in the podcasting space.
I mean, I know I That's very nice of you.
For a long time and, uh, just somebody that I think a lot of people follow and really look up to.
So I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about this.
Gonna get into some bad advice, and I think you've got excellent bad advice because it's the kind of thing that I hear all the time.
And it's one of those things that's easy to believe is good advice.
So we're gonna dig into why it may might not be.
But before we get to that, let's talk a little bit about the communities that you are involved with.
So let's start with, uh, the, um, with with pinwheel by Audali.
What is that? And What's the community all about? Yeah.
Uh, Pinwheel is a production company under Audolly, which is a larger production studio that does a lot in the podcast space.
Um, Pinwheel is the Chat Show division, but there's also Ricocco Punch, which is more of the long form investigative narrative series.
Then there's also event liftoff, which facilitates live event tours for bigger shows that kind of can go on the road to meet their fans.
And then there's also pop up kids, which is a kids' content studio.
So my job within pinwheel, but also sort of within Audolly is to figure out how all of those work together.
So I would say the community members for now are the people that actually are involved in all of all four of our, um, different arms of the company.
So I'm thinking about when a show enters our ecosystem, how can it use all of our four branches, if that makes sense.
So that's that's my background or that's what I'm doing now within within pinwheel, but my background in community started in 2020 when I took a job as the community manager at squadcast, which is a remote recording platform that eventually got bought by Descript, which is a text based editing platform, as well as so much more at this point.
So I have worked in community all over the place, sometimes with, users directly, sometimes with, um, you know, peep maybe we would consider the community members' customers.
Maybe the community members wouldn't necessarily consider themselves community members.
So I think I have a really nuanced view of what a community is and can be.
And more importantly, do do we as the people who are calling the community, are we the ones who should say that this is the community or should the community be identifying itself? I think that's a big thing that I like to think about.
Yeah.
And one of the things that I think is really helpful when we are talking about community, especially for people who are new to community building, is to draw a distinction between the shared mission of the members.
Why are the people who are in the community in it, and then the organizational value or the business purpose of the community.
Like, why does audley have a community? Right.
Can you, you know, use your own, um, your own community as an example? What are those two? And do they overlap and where are they different? Well, I think actually a better example is this squadcast community, if that's okay for me to to go back in time.
Yeah.
Go right ahead, please.
Lovely.
Well, the first thing I realized when I took this job as community manager was I technically had never had the word community as a job title before in in any in any of my job titles.
So I was a little bit intimidated, you know, what what is it to be a community manager.
And then I realized, I facilitate dinners all the time for for professional networks, and this was even back in 2020 before the pandemic, obviously.
I, um, love gathering people for learning events, and I also love gathering people on the internet in order to talk about shared interests.
So I was effectively a community manager before I was technically a community manager.
And the first thing that I did when I started at squadcast was I thought about who the existing community was that considered themselves part of a an existing community, and then who was the larger addressable community that I could figure out who they were, what they wanted, and how they wanted to be involved.
So I thought about it in terms of this much larger space of who is at any point touching this product, squadcast, and then I thought about it in terms of who actually wants to be involved in something that might resemble a structured community.
I sent out a survey via a weekly newsletter that we were doing trying to get a sense of who wanted to essentially raise their hand and say, I wanna be part of this community.
I then gathered those people onto a Zoom call.
It was like, a couple 100 people who joined this first Zoom call where I laid out the idea for what I wanted to do with this community.
I asked questions.
And then afterwards, I had them reply to me via email and say, how often they wanted to meet, if they wanted to meet at all, where they wanted to meet, what they wanted to discuss what types of events they wanted and what kind of perks they wanted.
And from there, I started to build the community.
And my goal with that was to build a pretty focused, engaged online community that sometimes had IRL events but then also eventually to find breakout groups within or even outside of that focused group.
Um, and I think yeah.
When when to go back to your original question, I think community is often dictated by the organization when it really should be dictated by the people that will make up that community, and it just kind of takes having focused individualized conversation with community members to figure out what that means.
You know, I love that because it reiterates something that actually the very first, uh, episode we did of this podcast, the bad advice was if you build it, they will come.
And it was that you don't go out and start and build something without talking to anybody first.
I love that the first thing you did was sit there and go, what do you guys need? What do you think that this should look like? It's very much an iterative process that you involve.
And frankly, that's one of the differences between building a community and building an audience where Right.
You know, when you have a podcast, you you do your podcast and it's completely under control until the moment you hit publish, and then you sort of relinquish it and let everybody get involved with it, this is very different.
Hopefully.
Yeah.
I mean yeah.
I mean, a lot of people have trouble actually getting people to be in touch with them after they release a podcast episode or a YouTube video or even an Instagram post or even an Instagram live or whatever it is.
And I think that is often the problem when that advice, if if you build it, they will come.
I come across a lot of people.
I work with a lot of individual podcastors, um, on a sometimes one off basis where I'm doing an audit of their show and then telling them what I think could be improved both from a content perspective and from a marketing perspective.
And often they tell me, you know, I started a Facebook group, but, like, nobody wants to join it and even the people that have joined it, it felt like pulling teeth to get them there.
And every Friday, I post a discussion question and nobody wants to have a discussion.
And to me, that's so obvious what's wrong there is that they didn't ask this.
And then you essentially begged them to join this community that they don't wanna be a part of.
More importantly, for them, they are part of so many other communities already, whether it's podcasts that they already listen to or like school pickup groups or, uh, I don't know, religious organizations.
Like, it could be so many different things that they already are committed to.
Why is your podcast? Why is your YouTube channel? Why is whatever it is that you're building audio cance wise, why is that something that they must be a part of? And then I I like to peel it back a little bit and say, like, do you want them to be a part of this community so that you can say you have a community for the vanity metric of it all to say, like, oh, community x y z, or are there genuine things that you want to get done in this community? Are you gonna hopefully be in conversation with them to figure out what your next season looks like? Are you going to do live events and you need to figure out who your, uh, speakers should be for those live events? There's a number of reasons that you should have a community, but one of them is not to say that you have a community, just for the sake of it.
Well, that leads right into your bad advice.
So let's take a look.
Here's your bad advice.
Everybody should build a community.
To grow their audience.
Uh, and I'm sure you that you see this come up all the time in the podcasting world.
Talk to me about where you are seeing this pod this bad advice and what that looks like.
This was really big a few years ago, and I'm sure it's big in lots of different social communities still.
I'm not seeing it as much because I feel like I did a pretty good job being like, hey, if you build it, they won't come to go back to that that bad advice.
Um, and you need to have a reason for building a community.
Uh, like I said, I I worked in community for a software, for a remote recording software, but I also work with people all the time who have podcasts and they have heard advice I need to build a community in order to grow my show in or in order to engage my audience.
And my question to them is usually, what do you want that community to do for you, or what do you wanna do for that community? And really often the answer is I was told that I should build a community and so I'm trying to build a community.
There are some communities that are jumping at the seams in order to be started.
And what I mean by that is, like, there's a podcast that I listen to called, crimewriters on.
It's great.
It's crime writers on dot dot dot.
So each episode, they do a review of a different crime related podcast or movie or series or TV show or whatever.
And the hosts are so dynamic and they're well known in their communities of being crime writers.
So when they started the show having these discussions and they're really good at segmenting the show so that the people that are listening have things that they wanna raise their hand and respond to.
When they started this, they had a lot of people reaching out to them on social media.
And over time, they they decided to start a Facebook group and that Facebook group is very lively both on discussions of the episode of the week and then also about true crime in general.
And that's a community that was essentially corralled.
But there are other situations in which you might have a podcast that's like a daily morning commute podcast that is five minutes and people tend to listen to it right when it comes out because you put it out at 6AM and right when they wake up, they press play on it.
And then they've moved on with their day.
If you are expecting people to then also join you in a Facebook group to discuss the day's news.
I think that that is gonna be a really hard thing to do because there are so many other places for them to discuss the news and one of those places is in person.
And they just might not need to log on to a Facebook group or to a Slack channel to be like, here's what I thought about your analysis of, I don't know, the latest cuts to bills in Congress.
Yeah.
You know, one of the things that is implied by you calling out this is bad advice, but it's something that people often don't get right is that a community and an audience are not the same thing.
And I hear those words used interchangeably quite often.
Can you talk a little bit about how you see, uh, the difference between the two of them? Yeah.
I mean, I think to go back to my original, um, explanation of the squadcast community, there was the audience essentially of people that have ever touched squadcasts at all.
People who have, you know, googled the phrase how to record your podcast remotely.
And maybe they enter their email address into, um, you know, some sort of form box in order to receive a white paper to to learn more about squadcast or the remote recording landscape.
Um, it could be somebody that comes across an interview that one of the founders did, and now they are part of this potential audience that might purchase a subscription to squadcast.
That's the audience.
The community I believe are people that want to be engaged and either want to give something or want to I don't I'm not gonna say take something, want to learn something from this software or the people that around it that that make this software.
And so obviously for me at in my role there, it matters fested as, um, you know, I wanted to capture the audience to figure out who within the audience wanted to be part of the community.
And I think that that is also the case for podcasts as well.
I'm trying to think of a a nice broad example, but I'll I'll make one up.
So say you have a podcast about coffee.
And if you listen to me on other podcasts, you'll find that I often default to coffee.
Um, so apologies.
And if you have any other ideas, please feel free to improv, send me a a a word or two.
But I'm with coffee.
I've I just finished my two cups this morning, so good.
Nice.
Me too.
Um, so say you have a podcast about coffee, um, and you you wanna reach as many people as possible.
Your podcast is about, uh, like, the business of coffee around the world.
And you have advertisers that are, like, mid sized chains, and you've got partnerships where you, uh, you have a code and people can get percentages off of bags of coffee monthly or you have a coffee subscription or something like that.
I think your potential audience is anybody who is interested in the business of coffee, but your community is people that are actively engaging with your podcast that are interested in learning from you or using your promo codes or giving you answers to some of your questions about coffee production or coffee business.
Um, maybe they wanna be a guest on your show.
Maybe they they in some way want to be involved with either the making of your show or the consumption of your show.
But your audience is potentially huge.
It's your total addressable market.
And that's a lot of people who either like coffee or depending on how niche your niche your show is.
It's people that are interested in the business of it.
But again, it's the people that are raising their hands to say I wanna be involved in this that I think are your community.
Yeah.
And so I think one one of the things that we're saying here is that communities are smaller than audiences and often subsets of audiences because it is the people who wanna get together.
Um Yeah.
And and and just to clarify, your audience could be people that listen to the show, but have zero desire to be a part of this active community that you've created for them.
But it also could be, like, again, just because the word community is so in this context is so, um, hard to define.
You could consider your community anybody who has ever listened to your podcast and, oh, you know, my community this, my community that.
Um, but I think that for the purposes of building a community that will serve you and help you serve them in turn, I think it's worth considering that community, the people that are actively jumping out of their seats to be a part of this or to contribute to your mission or to give you ideas for episodes or to leave your reviews or coming to your live shows or things like that.
Yeah.
Having spent a lot of time around podcasters.
I know that the two big challenges that they have, and I think this is probably true for content creators.
In general, is one, they think about how can I grow my audience And then two, they they think about how do I monetize? How do I make money from my audience? And they usually assume that they have to make the money from the audience, uh, and that's one way to do it.
And so I think that's why they get into this trap thinking, oh, I need to have a community to grow the audience.
But because communities are smaller than the audience, they're not particularly good at growing audiences.
I mean, it's an audience can help you launch a community, but a community is not a great way to grow a bigger audience? I mean, I think it can be.
I think it's really, really hard to speak in in terms that I I just think there's so many different types of podcasts that it's hard for us to make any blanket statement like that.
Like, for example, if your podcast is a about coffee and you are really able to hone this community of people who are part of maybe you have maybe the community that you've chosen, the place that you've chosen to be in touch with your community is over a daily text message where you are, uh, uh, no, because then they can't really come back to you.
So let's just use let's just use Facebook as an example.
Say you have a Facebook group for your podcast about coffee And and let's not even say podcast.
Let's say your your show about coffee.
So, yes, it's distributed via RSS, but you also put it out on YouTube and you are also making videos on TikTok and and Instagram and YouTube shorts.
And so you have people who are covering you in all sorts of different ways.
And they're drawn to the idea of a monthly coffee club where they get a subscription.
And in order to be part of that club, they need to purchase the subscription.
Right? So maybe they love coffee so much.
You've done such a great job selling the most recent, um, strain from Columbia that people really want to take part in in this offer that you have and they join the community way and they stick around.
Right? In that case, they have made a purchase in order to be part of this community, and those are the people that are gonna keep coming back if they have a good experience with that bag of coffee for the next round.
Um, I also think this is even more applicable in, um, like, let's say a mental health setting, maybe you have a podcast about a very specific mental health, um, issue.
And you've got people who are listening to the show who are affected by that mental health issue.
Um, I think if you have the right advertiser who is talking about the right kind of therapy for that type of mental health issue, you have a really good chance of giving them the right product at the right time that makes them that makes them spend some money and you get a cut of that money.
Um, so I do think sometimes the very focused community is the are the people who are going to the product that helps you make some money on this thing.
Um, but I think for a lot of shows that are especially broader shows, like, let's say a show about, like, two best friends getting together and having conversations about movies, you're gonna talk about movies, but you're also probably gonna talk about, like, everything related to that movie.
So sometimes you'll discuss sleeping and sleep habits.
And so, uh, a mattress company is gonna be a good potential sponsor for you.
In which case, it doesn't really matter week to week who is listening.
And if they love, um, you the specific thing that you talk about or everybody needs to sleep, you know, so a mattress in that case is gonna be good for your overall audience, not just the specific community who loves your movie podcast week after week.
To your point, um, I I think community can actually help with that second issue that a lot of podcasters, which is the revenue piece, almost more than the audience piece, because it does open up new streams of revenue.
I was struck last year when I was at podcast movement.
There was a session by, uh, a woman named Jillian Teets.
Who hosts the sober powered podcast.
And her session was all about, uh, how she generates revenue and how her podcast enabled her to leave her day job.
And I was struck by this graph that she put up.
I took a photo of it, and I asked her if I could use it my presentation the next day.
Where she shows a pie graph of where her revenue was coming from.
And what struck me is that about a third of her revenue was coming from advertising, but almost half was coming from a community that she had built on circle.
And it makes a lot of sense, particularly for that.
That's an interest specific podcast.
Yeah.
Yes.
So she, uh, you know, her community is about helping people who are, uh, you know, getting sober and and staying sober, and it makes sense.
That's absolutely something there would make you would wanna build a community.
Uh Yeah.
I mean, that's the type of show that is really pulling at the heartstrings of people.
That is like the definition of a community is people who are becoming sober or are on their sobriety journey.
In some way.
And I think that a community there is really important both for the purposes of, um, helping you stay on track.
But then also, um, yeah, for Jillian herself, like, making sure that she's got people who are bought into this message, and she can offer them genuinely great products and services that will help specifically them at their stage.
Yeah.
And compare that to a show like Joe rogan, where the audience obviously is matched.
Anything.
Yeah.
Right? But the question then becomes, are the people who will listen to the Joe rogan show, do they have enough in common? Are they working towards a common mission or goal in the same way that when you start getting into those niche audiences are, you know, I don't know that a community makes sense for Joe rogan.
I think the audience path is what makes sense.
Well, I think with Joe rogan, he has carved out his I mean, with Joe rogan, the fans have carved out their own community and it's more of a fan community than anything else.
It's not.
Maybe it's like a We love Joe rogan community.
Who knows? Uh, I'm sure that those exist.
But the point is that the audience is so big that there are probably so many niche communities.
I mean, there's a a podcast called, um, there was a podcast years ago called The Morning Toast.
I think it still exists to a certain extent, but it was millennial women have every morning.
It was essentially a a radio show where these two sisters kind of like went through pop culture news and whatever else was going on in their lives, and people loved them so much that they started first a morning toast Facebook group.
But then within that, democrat morning toasters, um, yoga morning toasters, um, like any sort of niche you can think of, New York City morning toasters, and then those were communities in and of themselves that no longer discussed the podcast cast, but used the podcast as a way to meet people to talk about whatever it was that their interest was.
And I thought that that is just such a good example of how, first of all, how podcasts can create such close knit friends or or even just people interested in the same things.
Yeah.
Uh, this speaks to a point that, you know, the way we think about size is different when it comes to audience and community.
With audience, you just want as big as possible.
And you want everybody in and you're not necessarily doing ID checks at the door to make sure that they're all the right people with communities.
The value comes not from the size, but from the, uh, the quality of the relationship.
Yeah.
And and right.
The interaction, what's happening between the people who are members of the community.
And so there's a couple of things there.
Um, one smaller is sometimes quite a lot better because people get more interaction out of there.
But it also means that you want the right people in the room who are going to be able to offer quality interactions and quality relationships with other people.
And part of that is keeping the the wrong people out of the room in order to make a safe space when people can connect with each other.
And that's one of the things that I find when dealing with people who've worked in content creation their whole lives.
They there's just like bigger is always better.
I always want more people.
Um, to your point, at a certain point, when it gets bigger, uh, you start to see subgroups pop up.
Yeah.
I mean, we've seen this in podcast movement, which is a podcasting conference.
Uh, you know, get around 3,000 people every year.
So even then, we're not talking millions.
And you have started to see subgroups popping.
Oh, the the podcast editors wanna hang out here or the the, you know, women who are podcasting wanna hang out here or podcasters of color or various things.
And that's because the quality of the relationships get gets better when it niches down like that.
Right? Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And everybody I mean, I I I wish I knew more of the sociology behind, um, community building and humans flock together and things like that.
And maybe that's like a next step for me.
And maybe you know a little bit about this.
But, yeah, people love to connect with people that they have things in common with.
And it's essentially the job of a community manager to figure out what those things are, and then not to be super capitalistic about it, to figure out how to serve those people and maybe exploit is not the right word, but to figure out what they need in order to serve them those things and sometimes those things are products and services.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tough comment.
Well, you know, it can be that, but it can also be the community itself.
Could be a it could be the product.
Of course.
I mean, you can charge people for, you know, gotta come back to podcast movement.
You know, they they charge Are you going by the way? Uh, I this is gonna be the first year I'm gonna miss it.
I'm I'm we're recording this right before it comes out.
This, uh, we'll probably publish to this episode afterwards, but this is gonna be the first year.
It was really fun.
Yeah.
You tell me about all the things that I missed.
So Yeah.
Should make some predictions.
But, yeah, um, so one of the other things that I think you you bring up here is that when we are looking to build an audience, essentially we're creating content, and that content creates an audience.
Um, when you build a community, you're creating a space and allowing people to gather in that space.
Can you talk about some of the things that, you have found in building the spaces that you built over the years? Uh, yeah.
Um, so I think and maybe I've already made this point, but I just wanna be super clear.
That there are there's communities that you actively build, and then there's communities that identify themselves.
And some sometimes those communities might gather on their own, but I think in this situation, and correct me if I'm wrong, we're talking about the ones that I am actively building, that I as the community manager am saying, this is the sanctioned.
Yeah.
So I it's it's funny because I think of, um, you know, communities around content.
For example, I remember when loss was a big television show.
You saw all these online forums pop up that the Yeah.
The producers of loss had nothing to do.
It was just people who wanted to trade theories about what was going on on the island.
I don't know that Taylor Swift actually is setting up all of the swift degrees.
Actually think that she well, she just guessed it on her first podcast ever this week.
And have you listened to it? I have not.
Have you? So I was not going to.
I don't listen to new heights with Travis Kelsey and Jason Kelsey, but the number of people that posted on Instagram screenshot thoughts or or just like their TV because they live streamed the conversation between where Taylor was a guest on her first podcast, New Heights.
I mean, I was like, I feel like as a student of this three, the podcast space, and now the emerging video podcast universe, I feel like I must take this in.
So I have been listening, and it's very interesting to figure out how she relates to her community because we don't often hear her speak in long form like this.
So you hear her talk about her relationship with the fans.
You hear her making allusions to her, um, things that she's done for the fans.
And you do hear that she's aware of a lot of different groups that have formed in support part of her or in, you know, in response to her just being a pop culture icon.
Um, she I I would not be surprised if there are like almost sanctioned fan groups or communities, uh, meaning like that have some sort of association with her her, I don't know, management, but I don't think she herself, of course, is like in charge in any real capacity of like the Taylor Swift community.
Um, that being said, I highly recommend you watch slash listen to this interview just because it is it's a master class in promoting something because of course, she also announced the promotion or she announced the drop of her latest album and I am not even somebody who, I'm not a swiftie.
I I barely know any of her discography, but you have to reckon with the fact that she's a a cultural phenomenon.
She really is.
I mean, it is really impressive.
I mean, I'm, you know, I like some of her songs.
I'm not swifty either.
But Me too.
Me too.
From a marketing standpoint and organizational standpoint, what she has built and put together is amazing.
Yeah.
But let's let's talk to content creators who are not Taylor Swift and do not have people who are forming their own communities around their content, but are thinking about building a space.
Um, what advice would you give to them? Yeah.
I mean, the first thing is I'm very proud of myself from 2020 for doing this, and I still, um, I still think that this is what should be done first is asking the community what they want and trying to figure out how they group themselves.
And then from there determining what you can do to further facilitate those connections.
Like I did for squadcast, where I used our existing resources.
We had a, you know, list of however many hundreds of thousands of people that had ever touched squadcast and given us their email address Uh, we had a a weekly or, uh, I think at that point, it was like a monthly email correspondence with them.
So I segmented that into people that were active users.
And I sent an email and that was still a 100,000 people.
And I within that email, you know, gave, uh, a bunch of really great resources about the podcast industry, about interview prep, about, um, like news in the podcast space, events that were going on.
And then somewhere in the middle of that, I put I am the commune the new community manager here at squadcast, and I would love to learn about how you use the product.
And if you'd like to be part of this community that we're building, if you're interested, come to this event that doing.
And, um, it's gonna be a town hall where I ask questions, you answer.
Sometimes, uh, if you'd like to pop on stage and really give your perspective testimonial, I would love that, um, or you can just feel free to listen and learn.
And so I then had a couple 100 people who jumped into that.
And from there, I was able to determine that most people wanted to be on a Slack channel.
Most people wanted monthly um, online events and quarterly ish meetups in different cities throughout The US.
Of course, we couldn't be everywhere at once, but we had presence in New York and in San Francisco, and that's where a lot of podcasters happen to be.
Um, and then they also wanted, um, I created a system in which they, if they gave feedback consistently over, uh, months and months, we could give them, um, different swag items, merchant that that showed off their commitment to the community.
So this is all stuff that I was able to determine by first asking what they wanted, how they used the product, and ultimately, what was in it for them? Yeah.
That's so important getting those feedback loops set up right from the beginning and getting that input.
I'm curious.
What surprised you most? What do you think if you had built it, you know, without asking those questions first? What would you have done wrong and and what are you glad Yeah.
Got input on? That's that's a fun question.
I mean, I did actually, in addition to doing the Slack channel, which happened to be the place where most things happen, I did make two Facebook groups.
I made one that was called remote recording, like, remote recorders I forget the actual name of it, but it I think it was like this remote life.
Actually, I don't forget the name of it.
This remote life, a take on this American life.
This remote life was supposed to be a community for people that their podcast remotely.
And this was 2020.
Like I said, so everyone was recording their podcast remotely, but only some people knew to, like, search remote recording community groups.
So I wanted to capture people there who were just remote recording in general, whether they use squadcast or not.
So even if they were using iris.
fm or boomcaster or Riverside or Google Meets or whatever, they were welcome to join this in order to have discussions generally about what they were experiencing best practices, things like that.
And then I also made a Facebook group called squadcasters, podcasters, something like that, which was specific to people who were using squadcast.
So theoretically, when they applied to join, I checked their email address alongside our community of users.
And that was meant to be, uh, look, I I had this issue, uh, not necessarily a support channel, but like, hey, I have this issue.
Has anybody solved it and then the community would chime in or people reaching out and saying, uh, or or even saying, like, I have this person coming up on my podcast.
They're a a vet of of large animals.
What questions do you have for large animal vets? So that that could be something that happened within this Facebook group.
And it it took off a bit, but it never really became self sustaining and I went on a vacation and didn't schedule posts, it nothing happened.
So I I essentially then pivoted and focused on my attention on the Slack community where people really, like, double triple opted in to be part of that because it takes a lot of effort to get on Slack.
Yeah.
Uh, can we point out something too just to make it clear that it's okay to try things and have them not work? Oh, I love a failure.
Well, good.
I'm I'm very good at it.
I am so good at it.
And, uh, I mean, it that manifests in so many different ways.
First of all, yeah, try a community, shut it down.
If no one cares, you can probably shut it down without telling anyone.
But that also goes down to, like, sometimes I'll post something on LinkedIn and it doesn't get a lot of likes.
So I delete it and retry it with, like, different keywords or different call to action, and it does better.
And I don't care who sees that.
Yeah.
And I think that that's a big part of it is, like, you you have to not care because the internet is the internet, whatever.
Her.
Alright.
Last question.
Uh, I want you to make a prediction.
Five years from now, what do you think we're gonna be talking about when it comes to community? This is already starting, but five years from now, I think this is gonna be the case where people are discovering content by way of many different entry points.
There's podcasts, of course.
There's YouTube videos.
There's, um, you know, TikTok short form.
There's YouTube shorts short form.
There's, you know, Instagram lives.
There's Instagram posts.
There's infographics that you can post on LinkedIn, whatever.
Um, so say you discover my podcast by way of by Sorry.
Say you discover my community by way of my podcast, which is an hour long about coffee, and say you discover my community, um, about coffee by way of thirty second sound bites on TikTok.
I think that those two people are very different people.
The people who are discovering me by way of TikTok and the people who are discovering me by way of long form interview.
You have different habits when it comes to media consumption.
So I think in five years, communities are going to be better at honing who those people are and what they need specifically from communities.
I don't think that's happening now days.
I don't think that once people get into the funnel, we're really thinking about what their individual needs are, but I think we need to if we wanna keep them and if we want to continue serving them.
Yeah.
And I don't know exactly what that looks like.
Maybe it means, like, community platforms have better segmentation maybe it means community platforms are gonna give us AI suggestions for what to post to this group of people and to this group of people, but I think that it's gonna be become more, uh, segmented even within our communities.
Yeah.
In other words, have more than one front door that people can kinda come in and and knowing and understanding where people are coming from and personalizing their onboarding and even what they're looking for.
The front door.
The front door, but then also the experience within within the door? Yeah.
Yeah.
So what happens in? Really segmenting and personalizing that.
Yeah.
I can see it even even beyond just the form that the content takes, you know, whether it's TikTok or a podcast, but even, uh, I don't know.
I'm still in buffy the vampire slayer Facebook groups for some reason.
And and I could see some people who are coming into that group there's gonna be a reboot of the show versus people who were in there because they're old people like me who watched it on television show the first time around.
So, well, Ariel, thank you so much.
I I really appreciate coming on and sharing your bad advice, uh, you will welcome back anytime.
Uh, look, the earbuds podcast collective, uh, people can find at earbuds.
audio.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Who is that for? That's for people who love listening to podcasts as well as people who, um, who wanna get their own podcast promoted.
It's a podcast recommendation newsletter that I started in 2017.
It goes out every Sunday.
I've never missed, uh, a week.
And And it has, at this point, hundreds and hundreds of lists on topics of all sorts of different every every topic you can imagine, I have lists of five podcast episodes on a theme, and each week is curated by a different person, and anyone can curate a So if you have a podcast yourself, you're welcome to reach out and submit a curation.
Anyone can do it.
The the form to to curate is right on my website.
You don't have to, like, get special permission to do so.
And if you just are looking for podcasts to listen to.
If you subscribe, you'll get an email every Sunday, or you can check out the back catalog of hundreds and hundreds of lists.
Alright.
Well, Arielle Nissenblatt.
Uh, please say hello to everybody at podcast movement for me this year.
I'm so sorry that I'm not seeing that.
But thank you for joining us, uh, and sharing your bad advice.
Uh,
