So What? Discord 101

Well, happy Thursday, everyone. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. This week we are talking about Discord, Discord 101. So what is it?

Why should you care? How to find communities, how to set one up, and some general definitions around Discord and uh these community-based systems as well. Um, I I'm personally not excited for this episode. I'm not gonna lie. Um, I would be lying if I said, Yeah, Discord.

I've tried it, I've signed up for a couple of communities, and I personally find it to be very overwhelming in terms of the amount of information. So Chris and John are more enthusiastic than I am. So I'm excited, I am excited to see the advice that you both give in order to set it up so that it's not overwhelming, because it is, you know, it's a lot of information coming at you at once. So I guess let's just start first with what the heck is Discord, Chris. The shortest explanation is it is an application that runs either on your desktop, your browser, or your phone that allows you to join uh individual communities, uh private social media communities, and chat with people.

I mean, that it it is for those folks who have a lot more gray hair like I do, um, it is essentially a graphical interface on what used to be called IRC, Internet Relay Chat. Back to the old commands, if you remember from back in the 90s, the commands it used to use to work with IRC actually work within the Discord interface. But that's what it is. If you're familiar with a service like Slack, or you've joined a group on LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever, it's you've joined you've you've participated in in private social community communities. The the difference with Discord is that it's just a a different service.

It began in 2013, 2013, 2014, um, as essentially uh, you know, chats and servers and communities, mainly around the gaming community. The gaming community really is has powered, you know, the first five or six years of Discord's life. And then in the last two to three years, three years really, um, it has branched out considerably. In fact, um, in the most recent edition of um the Trust Insights newsletter and in um our our new paper, we have looked at the how quickly Discord servers are being created. Um, last month, 83,000 new Discord servers were were created that were publicly linked that were you know that were visible in SEO data.

Uh, I ran this this morning. Uh it's September 1st. Um, so just today there have been an additional 909 new servers detected. So I that's it's pretty incredible how how big this ecosystem is. I last I saw in um a public report, I want to say it was on marketing land.

Uh Discord supports something like 500 million uh monthly users. So it's it's definitely one of the large networks. It's larger than Twitter by a substantial margin, it's larger by Snapchat than a substantial margin. And that's that's essentially what the purpose of the service is. It's it's chat.

John, did you ever uh hop into AOL chat rooms? Yeah, way back in the day. I actually did uh take part. I'm trying to think if there was anything worthwhile that I got any out of the I think I did talk to some guys that ran DC Comics at some point, so it was not totally worthless. I think I was a teenager uh when AOL chat rooms were a thing.

So I can I can absolutely tell you that I didn't join any useful ones. Um, Chris, you mentioned a Discord server. And so this is something that I've asked you before because when I think about setting up a server, to me, that feels very daunting and intimidating. So can you define in this context what a server is? A Discord server is that's their word for community.

Right. So it's it's like a group. So if you've if you join a Facebook group, the equivalent of a Facebook group is a Discord server. Discord itself runs the infrastructure, so you know you're not dealing with actual boxes and wires or you know, paying some vendor for that. Um, there are chat programs like that.

Um, there's one called Mattermost that has a similar interface to Slack, but it's you host it yourself. Uh, the intended use for something like that is within a highly regulated environment where you're you like you could not use Discord, for example, in uh a national security environment, which it would not fly, right? Um, you probably should not use it in healthcare as an example. Um, but that's what a Discord server is, it's a community of people. Okay.

I mean, so that's helpful because, you know, in previous conversations, you referred to it as a Discord server, and that was exactly where my brain went, having set up servers before. I'm imagining, you know, a temperature regulated room with boxes and wires and servers. And I was like, why on earth would anyone want to set up a Discord server? Um, so in my world, I I was sort of think of it as an instance. And so like we've set up a Slack instance for our free Slack group.

And so essentially that's what the server is. Exactly. And it's it's funny, it's that's one of those things where um you can actually tell uh the the different language people use with stuff like that. So uh for example, with Slack, again, this is from um uh the the Trust Insights newsletter. Slack, you know, people refer to them things as Slack channels or Slack workspaces or Slack communities.

We use Slack community. Um with Discord, it Discord server is that is that is the nomenclature that people use far uh above pretty much anything else. So just from a name perspective, that's what they mean. What do you say, John? What's your terminology of choice?

Yeah, well, I like I said, Discord server is totally the way to go. But how about as far as the actual infrastructure then? So when you're setting up uh an instance, you know, as we say in Slack, but when you set up a server, like you're that's not even virtual Docker container. You're it's still all entirely hosted by Discord, right? You just set up the name for your server and then basically start paying your monthly fee, and they still take care of all the infrastructure, right?

That's right. And and you can set up servers for free. There's limited features you get, um, but they are free of financial cost up front. Uh and that's actually a really important point because uh unlike Facebook or LinkedIn um and their groups, those companies are uh they make their money through advertising. Um so you are constantly competing with everything else they're trying to make revenue off of.

Uh services like Discord uh make money in two ways. One, uh, you can buy a personal upgrade to your account uh called Nitro that allows you more chat icons, animated icons that you can use in chats, things like that. Um an animated character background on your profile, et cetera. Um that's $99 a year. Uh and then servers, uh the groups, the instances, um, have these things called boosts, and boosts are essentially a $35 charge um to, and you need uh there's three levels of them to add features.

So, for example, you can live stream in a free Discord server, but it's I think it's set to like 480p resolution. As you boost to level one, which costs $70 for the year, um, you can go up to 720p. If you boost to level two, it goes up to 1080p. And you go to, you know, and so on and so forth. So you add more features, you can add more animations and and cute images and stuff to your server, the the higher you boost.

The maximum level is 14 boosts, which I believe is what what's 14 times? So that is $490 a year to have your server be at the top level. And then you get uh a custom URL and all these things that that you know they're they're nice vanity things, but critically there's no advertising, right? So when you are interacting with people on Discord and stuff, you're not seeing ads and you're not competing with uh essentially advertisers just to be heard. Okay.

So let's get into it because I know we want to talk about you know what this means for marketers and how to find groups, but I'm interested in you know, setting one up and how you organize it and how you think about it. So um in our latest newsletter, we talked about running communities and sort of the lessons in terms of what you can do, setting intent. But what we want to focus on here is really the actual software itself. Right. So the after you sign up for a free account, um, this is what you start with.

You start with nothing, right? There is it is just your account. Uh and there's a couple things to pay attention to. Um, first off, uh, is in your account settings itself, as a user, as a person, you will probably want to do um some customization of your profile. Now, this is this is the area where you are allowed to uh to to talk about yourself and promote yourself, right?

So in this case, you know, I would say uh funny, I'll find out more you know, trust insights and stuff. I have uh I might want to have a profile banner. If I upgrade with Nitro, I could put, for example, our company's logo here on my profile. Uh I can change my profile avatar to um uh something you know amusing. Uh let's see if I can find I can use this, you know, just as an example as as my profile avatar.

So um again, if you for nitro, you're for animated stuff you have to upgrade to Nitro. So this is your profile. This is what you have that when you join a server, when you join a community, and someone clicks on your name, this is what they'll see. So if there are very few places in Discord in communities you're allowed to be promotional. This is one of them.

So make sure that you spend some time putting uh putting a little bit of effort into it. Of course, the usual things, like make sure that you've turned on two-factor authentication, choose the level of um uh tolerance you have for not safe for work things. You know, people can direct message you stuff uh if you choose to engage with them. Um, you know, choose what kind of data you want. Uh do you want to allow uh content that's 18 plus uh for you to be able to see it?

Um, those would be useful things to do. You can connect different apps, you know, manage the different devices and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of um different things. You can connect certain uh social accounts to your Discord account. So, for example, your Twitter account, YouTube, Facebook, GitHub.

Uh again, for marketers, you'll probably recognize a fair number of these, Twitch and things like that. If you are uh we are streaming this this show right now, this live stream on Twitch. So I could put I could uh attach my Twitch account to this year and say I allow you to show when I'm using uh Twitch and maybe even show what stream I'm using. So that's the personal stuff. You know, how do you want I obviously how do you want Discord to look?

But I would say that's those are the basics, just getting uh your profile set up. That's part one. Okay. So now you're given this blank canvas. And so uh one of the one of the Discord servers that I joined, the communities had channels upon channels and subchannels upon those channels with the threat, and it just for me it was too much.

And so, like, where would you recommend if I'm a marketer or if I'm a community manager wanting to start uh my own Discord community, you know, what do I do first? I mean, do I create the channel then invite people in? Like I invite people that create a channel, like is it a chicken and egg thing? I would I before go going and starting a Discord server, I would recommend you spend some time in some existing ones and get a sense of how people who are using the service are accustomed to using it, uh, you know, how different servers are set up because you'll see a bunch of different styles. So one of the things you can do to find servers that might be appropriate, yeah, in the beginning, uh obviously Discord says here's some public servers.

It brings you to a nice search page, and then you will obviously see there's a number of different uh you know servers and topics, but there's a nice little search bar here. So let's type in marketing. See, there's 15 uh business communities for marketing, 12 collaboration ones, and you can see like people here. This one, 445 people in this community, 3,800 members, the marketing collective, 228 folks, 20 uh 2100 members, and so on and so forth. And there's a lot of uh different communities.

Let's pick this one, and this is a public community. So certain Discord servers, once you are above a certain member number, you can choose to be listed publicly. I believe this is uh a thousand members. Uh, you could be you can choose to be listed publicly. Um, and then people can find you with the the built-in um system.

If, however, you're a smaller server and you're trying to get notice, you're trying to get to that number. Um, there are third-party services, uh, many of them free that will allow you to list your server. Um, one of a company called Discord, and you can uh you know, list your server here. But uh again, this is a place to look for if you wanted to look for servers to join. Um, there's 280 ones here.

So we saw in the official community, there were 15 servers that had marketing in the name somewhere or in the description here on this service because there's no minimum requirement. Um, you've got a bunch of different servers that you could join, uh, e-commerce advertising. Every person in the world who's marketing an NFT, there's all that stuff in here. Um, entrepreneur communities. So though those would be the the two ways that I would initially say you should you would be good to get started in terms of just finding places so we joined this server uh and you're prop you're you're prompted with the welcome screen uh the first things you do is you know these are the first two things you can either just look around or you can uh choose what role you want and you can choose what channels you want to join and you'll see more and more of these things pop up as you choose channels so I'm gonna say I want to join general marketing I like that as a role uh let's see and so you're clicking on uh emojis to choose your channels that's correct so I guess I'm I'm you've already lost me basically so by selecting your role it's you are choosing your role in marketing or your channels that you want to join in this Discord community you're choosing the channels you would want to join and get notifications for okay so like when somebody posts to the analytics channel if you want to get notified uh a notification for that you would uh you would choose that uh let's see let's hit there you go okay so I would I would choose I want the general marketing channel okay that's interesting what happened there oh this is you know it's completely a few more steps John have you joined any Discord communities yeah yeah I'm in a number of communities and the the the interesting thing with this is this is part of the rules and setup for the community so these can be set up different ways.

This is pretty advanced where they have this where you can click the emojis to subscribe to the sub channels. Like that's not every channel does that. Um, but yeah, I this is it's a huge gamer community, and that's one thing. Um, when you talk about the history of it and why it's so huge. I mean, there's a real value to this because let's say you're on four or five different gaming platforms, you can sign on with your accounts and all those platforms, and you can see where your friends are playing uh, you know, games on multiple platforms, cross-platform visibility as to where people are and what they're doing.

So it's you know, it's so good that it's attracted the attention of the rest of the world, but it was you know, this kind of gaming value and ability to discuss beyond individual games that that ramped it up. Yep. So here you can see as as part of this this setup, I have to look at the rules, right? Uh, this is a professional community, set your role, be respectful. This is the only channel you're allowed to promote your stuff in, the shameless plug.

Do not spam, um, do not copy content or share it outside of the community, no off topic content, and so on and so forth. And in order to proceed, you have to say, Yes, I agree to the rules. So now I've gone ahead and I should now be able to, yep. I can now choose. Okay, I'm I've I want to see stuff, I want to be notified about marketing channel.

I want to be notified about analytics. You can see the channels along the left-hand side here, but uh in in the way this particular server is set up, um, those will be the ones where you'll get a notification if a new post occurs in it. So, in most servers, you're gonna see um your channels, right? Which what channels you are available, what content essentially, what discussions are happening, and you'll also see a list of the different users. There's depending on how a server set, because there's a gazillion different ways to set up a server, you can control like people's ranks and things, give them you know, people who are very active who have been in the server a long time, give them higher ranks and give them more privileges.

They can help you to moderate your server, um, for example. But let's take a look at what's happening in the analytics channel since we like analytics. Um and again, this is one of those it is if you're familiar, if you've ever used any kind of chat room, that's essentially what you're looking at here. So you see all these different uh people asking questions. Anyone have the issue where GF4 Google exact management are not visible in GA4?

Yes, I had that issue. Um I can look down through here. So you have career opportunities, uh spam reports and things, Super Bowl ads, there's some voice channels for people who want to have voice conversations with each other. There's an introduction one. So yeah, if I wanted to, I could type a short introduction, talk about who I am, etc.

Um, that's generally a good thing to do when you're joining communities, let people know who you are. And it looks like they've got some special activities of some kind, some kind of showcase, uh like a little contest and stuff. But for the most part, they can see um what's happening with the conversations. And if I wanted to, um I could start participating in the conversations. If there's one that was relatively recent, um here, like this one.

Has anyone else noticed a decrease in impressions on LinkedIn in the past few days? Could probably answer that. Um the answer is yes. There was a peak in LinkedIn activity about four weeks ago. Um, but that's so we've now joined this server.

We can now start participating in it, um, at the very least, reading it and seeing who the people are. So I see, you know, as you're hovering over someone's message, you have on the right-hand side a series of little buttons similar to what you get in Slack. Um right hand side. Yep. Um, so you okay.

So similar to Slack, you can add a reaction to someone's comment. Um, what are the other controls that you're given? So I can reply, I can create a thread to start a sub-discussion, and then of course I can uh uh leave it mark it on red and things like that, or do the the text to speech. So I guess when so when you reply, it basically just it's you're not starting a whole thread, but it basically just like pulls that message down into your reply so it doesn't get lost, but a thread is like nested within the comment. Yes, exactly.

So in this case here, um if I click on that, I can go back to the original comment. Um I don't think there's it doesn't look like there's any active threads on the server right now. Threads are relatively new to Discord, they're I think maybe four or five months old, and the implementation of threads is not great, it's not nearly as nice as the way Slack does it. So most people don't use them. I see.

Okay. I mean, so again, sort of I'm an N of one, but when I look at this, it's a it's very overwhelming. And obviously, it's you know, you get used to it after a while, but I think this particular Discord community is actually set up really well. Um the Discord community that I joined was kind of a free-for-all, and the notifications were overwhelming. The conversations themselves, like there was no real structure to how people were talking.

Everybody was just kind of like talking at all at once, and I think that that was my that that being my first experience with Discord. I was like, uh, this isn't for me, it's too much. Yeah. And every server, it's like any group, you know, there's the culture will vary wildly from group to group. Um, one thing that is useful to do though is if you're going to set up uh a server, make sure that you tell people about it.

So, like our friends over towards data science, um they have themselves a Discord server now. And if you click on through that link, I'll just jump right in here. And in this case, they've even got a welcome bot that immediately greets you and says hey thanks for joining this thing here um here's some of the rules right they they hit you up immediately and say these are the rules of our server and you go in you have the welcome you have your guidelines of course the usual rules uh and stuff like that. And then this one doesn't have any of the the sort of the gatekeeping stuff at the beginning they just have a bot and then you can immediately start to to jump in and see what people are talking about. Interesting.

Yeah so it the culture is wildly different the setup is wildly different from from server to server. Whereas I feel like with a platform like Slack, it's fairly consistent. Like you can welcome people with an with a bot or you can do it yourself. But in general the experience from community community is fairly consistent. Right.

And that's one of the things that I think makes Discord interesting is you have such wide variation that you could by going from server to server for a little while you can pick up some best practices and things that when you when it is time for you to start your own server you can say okay well how how much control do we want to have how much what are the different entertainment options that we want to offer um what are the different uh bots? Uh, you know, like this server here, the data share server, there they didn't set up any voice channels whatsoever. So they don't they're not interested in having people you know be able to join a voice chat room, you know, essentially get on a a a conference call or or live stream. Um this server does. Then they've got a few different rooms that have different purposes based on what's going on.

So again, it varies wildly based on who the community managers are and how much they know about Discord and how much time they're willing to put into it. Um the the most sophisticated servers have tons of you know what it must be overwhelming. They have so many options. There's like you know, uh rooms where you can play poker and blackjack, there's uh rooms where people are sharing Spotify playlists, and there's a bot uh that'll actually play music live uh and stuff so you can have people DJing. So it it's uh there are many, many, many more customization options.

I would say if you're going to start a Discord, spend some time doing some requirements gathering. Spend some time, you know, obviously first learn what's possible, then make a list of all the things you've learned are possible with all the different bots and add-ons, and then say, well, how much how much of this do we want to offer? And do we want to roll it out in stages? Um, you know, do we want to have live streams? Do we want to have watch parties?

Um, one of the things that that I've seen be very successful are watch parties where people um choose a TED talk to watch or a session from a conference, whatever, and then there's a live chat as people are watching it, then they're able to discuss it and and interact as though they were um you know watching it in person. What do you think, John? Would you join a live watch party in a Discord server? Um yeah, you know, for gamer stuff, it it's a great way to just kind of watch what somebody else is doing. You know, people want to show off strategies or hey, here's some people you know that are playing and what's going on with that.

That's the only time I've ever seen uh, you know, done any streaming stuff with that. I really don't uh don't have the free time to just go hang out and have a rando chat with you know gaming or other communities. But it it is interesting to notice that it's far more along the line, um far far further progressed than Slack as far as being able to share video and do audio calls and group into different uh um you know side groups and have discussions like that there's a whole kind of level of online conferencing that Slack doesn't come near, that these guys are way ahead in. Well, and I feel like Chris, that goes back to your comment about requirements, but before you even get into the what's possible, um, you really need to know why you're building the community in the first place and what is the community member going to get out of it? What do you as the community host want to get out of it?

You know, a lot I was talking with someone this morning who was sharing with me that their company wants to build some kind of a community, but the intention of the community isn't really clear. So there's hesitation to bring people in when there's really no clear value for if I join this community, what am I gonna get out of it? And I feel like from there, once you have that, then you can say, does you know a voice channel align with the goal of the community? Does a watch party is that something that would align with the goal of the community? So I feel like there's a lot of, and this is where people skip over, there's a lot of upfront work that needs to be done first before you even start messing around with you know the features and the look and feel.

Yeah, very much so. There's there's a lot of groundwork. Uh a well-run community, you don't see how much happens on the back end, right? Um in one of the communities that I'm a moderator in uh the moderator, the moderator's server, because they have they set up a separate server just for the moderators. The moderator server is probably just as busy as the the community itself because people are saying, What about this change to this rule?

When do we want to do this event? Um, you know, what are we going to do for this thing? Who's got some content for this? Can anybody do this? And so there, you know, it's a server of about 700.

There's eight moderators. Um, and the they're do somebody's doing something at any given time of the day because the moderators are located around the world in different time zones. So there's there's around the clock coverage. Um that's the more moderation and the more administration you have, the better a server tends to run because there's a you know, there's more features, there's more events. Uh, you can see here, for example, the this server already even just has uh a channel getting ready for inbound next week.

So they're they're apparently going to have a back channel. You know, that's one of those things where and you'll see this in the new dark social paper that we just published. Um there's no way for HubSpot to monitor what's being said except for someone like us to just join the server and stuff. And yet there may be a lot of back channel um at events, but now it's not on Twitter anymore. Now it's in private spaces.

And so uh someone who is a community manager for a company like HubSpot would have to get teams looking at all these popular marketing servers and seeing who's talking about inbound in each of those places. Well, and I feel like that goes back into your the purpose. And so, you know, Chris, you mentioned that uh you moderate for uh a Discord community that's around the clock. It's available all the time. For our slot community, analytics for marketers, we're just too small to be able to offer that.

We know that we have people in different time zones, but until we grow, we can't be a 247 community. That doesn't stop people from posting, but they may not necessarily get some kind of a response from us or from other members. Now what's interesting about a lot of the communities too is that they're they're mostly all volunteer. There are some where they're they're paid staff. Joe Pulitzi's uh tilt community for example um folks who work for um Joe's company obviously are some some of the moderators with uh analytics for marketers we could you know ask if anyone wanted to volunteer to to join the administration team our server is actually substantially larger than most Discord servers.

Our servers what 20 almost 2700 people generally speaking you need about you need one moderator per 200 people is or you know about per per 150 200 people. So our server really could accommodate 10 or 11 of them pretty easily in terms of people responding to things people starting conversations running events is the big thing. These communities do a lot of different events and something actually that uh I wouldn't mean to talk about with our community is doing stuff like a monthly makeover where you know you throw out a data set and see who can it who who can make the most interesting analysis. We do question of the day uh which uh is just asking our community a question every day just something to stimulate activity because the the biggest challenge that any marketer runs into is a community where nobody's talking right we just joined this server half an hour ago and there literally nothing has happened there's not been a single post in this community um that that's relatively quiet you know same for for the data share even though there are how many people are in this quite a few so this are just the folks who are online and you're it's not particularly active discord servers tend to be fairly active they tend to be you know again around the clock conversations of some kind so for our community for analytics for marketers um we don't really have um I'd say the pace at which we would need a team of 10 to moderate because there's just not that much activity but we certainly have the num the raw numbers. Yeah you know how about for moderation that was I just wanted to ask you about that though the because I've never been involved with that side of it how often do moderators have to get involved because the the most common case we see is users that are getting out of hand and being crude or causing problems.

Is that a big part of moderation or is there other stuff that goes on in there? Yeah uh it's it's helping corral users adhere to the terms of service adhere to the rules of the server itself uh in marketing communities this is making sure people post in the right channels like hey stop posting your blog uh or your company services in in general and please you know post it somewhere else um it you do have uh server raids which is where just a bunch of Yahoos all show up and spam all the chats. Um this happens a lot on Discord. Um less so on Slack, but happens a lot on Discord. Uh it's almost always either someone hawking a cryptocurrency or an NFT.

I've rarely ever seen a raid that had anything you know other than you know shilling their their dancing ape or whatever. So it to see the administration side let's actually let's actually create a server because I think that would be a good pla uh way to to dig into this. Let's do a club or community. We'll call this we'll just call this test uh okay and so and so immediately you've got a brand new server there's there's two channels right um this is probably the this would be the the least anxiety your your generating server ever this one channel that's it um but in terms of mod of moderation now you can start jumping into all the different options and this is just what's built in this is not adding on all the different bots but to your question John uh you can choose like what level of safety um like you need to need to be a you know a joined Discord uh for longer than five minutes to prevent bots uh you can choose I want to scan media content to make sure people are not uploading stuff that they shouldn't be um you can do you know you can look at the audit log you can ban people um there's there's all sorts of different ways to to improve the safety of a server and the the bigger a server gets the more uh features unlock after I believe it's 500 users uh auto mod unlocks and you can uh it's it basically uses natural language processing to say hey we think this content's suspicious do you want to take a look at it interesting all right so let's say you know we're just gonna start with a general channel we what set the meaning of the channel like the what is the purpose of using this channel which we haven't slacked so the general topic being uh this is where you talk about all your stuff like whatever the thing is right now what is that slow slow mode slow mode throttles how quickly someone can post in a channel so um why would you need that so there are certain channels where you may want to put announcements or like in a lot of creative communities if someone posts a uh a creative work you don't want to just scroll off the screen immediately as people are talking about it so you might set slow mode on that channel to 30 minutes you're only allowed to post once every 30 minutes to that channel so that it encourages people to have discussions in in a different channel. Okay.

And then of course you like yeah all of your integrations things so you have you have general and then you can anytime you add a channel you can in the beginning you can add text or voice and then as you again as your server gets larger you can start adding um different types of channels there's like a forum uh type of channel which is essentially like a mini Reddit built in but your server has to be above a certain size to get to unlock some of those features. I mean you just said the magic word it's like Reddit so I'm out Reddit was another one of those community based platforms, which still exists, obviously, that I could never really wrap my head around, not only because it has its own culture, um, but just I found it to be the user interface very hard for someone like me to follow uh and make sense of. Yeah. The biggest thing that with with a server is um you know, once you've decided what kinds of um things you want to do, like you can create channels, categories, and events. So an event is a time limit, essentially as a time limited uh thing.

A category is just uh folders along the hot sides here. So we could put like an analytics category. And then we want to make it underneath it. Exactly. So you can make one for Google Tag Manager.

I see. Tag that into analytics. You could make a channel for GA4. Um we could make a channel for Data Studio, so on and so forth. So you get the general idea.

You can you can create uh as many of these things as you want. Again, very similar to Slack, except that the there's actually you know folders and organization, which is kind of nice. Well, and we've used naming conventions in Slack in order to organize our channels uh in such a way. Now, I know that this probably comes down to personal preference, the level of granularity of the conversation. So, you know, you just created three different channels that you could talk about all in the same place.

But so that really comes down to the discretion of the community owners, right? To have that, you know, you only talk about data studio. If you have a GA4 question, you go into the GA4 channel. Now, as a moderator, Chris, what happens when someone has a question related to Data Studio and Tag Manager and GA4? Um, you know, do you start to get like picky about where they're posting it?

That's that's honestly up to your how you want to run your server, right? There's there's no inherent built-in limits. It's just like, yeah, like put this here, or uh you could have a general, you know, analytics panic uh channel, right? Um, and then people can self-select for for additional places, or you don't have to get that granular. If you just want to have a you know, talk all things analytics in this channel, you can.

And then um people could start threads maybe on specific things. Okay. Um so why should a marketer care about a community like Discord? So, you know, there's one it's one thing to run your own community and sort of have your intentions, but let's say I'm not running a community, I'm just looking to join. Like, why would I, as a marketer, join knowing that you know I have all these rules and I can't mine the data and I can't sell to people?

So more than anything, it's about understanding the voice of the customer, right? So in this case, this is a market, this is a channel of marketers. This is a server of marketers. Yeah, I can't go and just you know rip all the data out of here, but I can go read through it and maybe I'm doing uh you know putting together my weekly content about uh marketing or analytics. Maybe I'm doing something for my US guy answer series and someone saying, Hey, you know, has anyone else notice a decrease in impressions in LinkedIn?

There's a blog post, right? Um, this person asked this question. I can anonymize it, I can blind it. Um, and then answer that question. Here's one.

Does anyone have a standard KPI they track around? Brandon SEO marketing? Yes, you know, branded organic search. And we spend a whole uh amount of time creating content to answer questions that real people are asking. And most importantly, real people are asking behind closed doors where they're not necessarily concerned that you know their boss is gonna see it, whatever.

So you're gonna get real questions from people. And I think that's there's a lot of value to that. Um to seeing what people want to know. And if I'm in this space, um, I would want I would want this information. What about you, John?

Why do you why do you join communities like marketing communities, for example? Yeah, well, there's a we've talked about like the big three of these things. One is that it's there's no advertising, you know, you're paying to get in there, so you're not competing with anybody else, and nobody just gets to the top of the list because they've spent enough money. You've got a chronological feed, you know, whatever's latest and greatest is gonna be right there. It's not, you know, you're not gonna see these weird posts from five days ago surfacing again.

Um, and just the fact that you have it, you know, fully moderated and controlled. You know, you have a um full ability to uh kick users out, see what comes to the time. Yes, squishies. We were talking about squishies this week. Um, you know, the squish community exists only here, right?

There's no other place where you can find these people. And yeah, as far as if you want to figure out when target's gonna have their latest shipment of squishies coming in this week, like this is the place you want to go. Um, and so yeah, it it just seems like this is a better way to do a lot of the stuff you get on social, and it's it uh more of a private community. You know, Google doesn't come in here and index any of this, so you need to know to go here, and you need to be let in to get the info, but uh there's a lot of great pockets of data here to get into and just kind of figure out what's going on and what's on people's minds. Yeah, like for example, this person is announcing that Molly, clips, mystery bags, squish fill, and uh stuff uh just came in at Target.

This is uh 10 days ago. If I was Target's retail manager for for the toy section, I would spend some time in this server to figure out okay, it was a pretty big deal. Um, you know, there's there's 1,500 people in here. They're taking photos in my store uh stuff. Um all the different names stores, Walmart and stuff like that.

Now, this is obviously a Discord server that's very different. It's not a server about marketing, it's definitely not B2B. Um, but it is uh you know a community of people who are very passionate about something and are clearly going to be spending some money. All right, I might give Discord another shot. I might.

We'll see. Um, definitely not gonna do it today, maybe next week. Well, the big key is to find a community that has what you want. A good one is you know, pick a couple of your favorite bands, you know, see what's in there. Um the entertainment stuff.

Uh I don't know. I haven't dug in too much as far as um like sports and stuff like that. I don't know what the the thing is there, but it it is insane how many communities are out there right now. Yeah, there's there's literally something for everybody. There is um, you know, there's dogs, you know, dog owner servers, there's horse owner servers, there's yeah, like John said, you there you name it, there's something out there that is filled with people who want to be talking about the thing that that you care about.

Let's take a look at um the dogs of Discord server. 20 28,000 members, 5,000 of whom are online. Uh now, if you want to serve it, it's probably going to be overwhelming. This is going to be one of them. Um again, same rules, right?

Here comes the read the rules of the community and stuff. Um getting a bot notice saying here's some uh other places to to go look. Um I have to verify um accept uh the rules before I can participate. Now I have been admitted to the main part of the server, and you can see there's probably close to a hundred channels. I mean, I I love dogs.

I don't know if I love them that much. Right. It's a lot of dog going on. I mean, well, and that you know, and so that you know, it that's something that I do find to be overwhelming, is that you are automatically thrown into every single channel they have versus well, I I mean, I guess it really depends. I'm guessing it depends on how you set up your community where put people can either pick the channels they want to join or you automatically join them into the channels that you have available.

Yeah, so you can have private channels which are invitation only. Um, and so you can put people in them. Well, you're saying private channels, but like in our Slack instance, we have public channels that people aren't automatically uh brought into, but they can join them. They don't have to be invited into them. Right.

Uh in Discord, I believe uh you you just get everything all at once. Well, yeah, see, that's that's the problem for me. Yeah. Um you, however, can choose um what level of notification you want, uh, both server-wide as well as you can choose individual channels. Like, hey, if if if you're in a channel, you're like, I just don't I've had it with this channel, I'm I'm good.

Um you can choose your notifications or just mute a channel entirely. Say, I just don't want to see anything in this channel because I'm I'm not ready to handle that much conversation. So I feel like I had done that. Like, and this isn't about my inability to use technology, but it is a little bit. Uh, because you always got to have one of those people on the team.

Um, you know, even when I joined, I think the problem with the slack um, sorry, the Discord community that I had joined is there wasn't really any, like I said, no real organization to it. And even when I disabled notifications, uh going into see what was new, there was just too much information, and there was like sub-channels of channels and sub-sub channels of channels. And, you know, it was like, oh, you have five new notifications where someone tagged you, but then I would go to click on it and see it, and it wouldn't bring me to it. I still had to search for the thing. And so for me, it just wasn't an easy learning curve.

And so, you know, admittedly, maybe incorrectly, I gave up and said this isn't for me. Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, it it all comes down to you know the level of uh comfort you have um and how much interaction you want, right? Because if you wanted to, like you could literally spend your entire life in Discord, you know, with with enough servers, you could you could literally do nothing else with your with your time. But uh if you're looking to create a community for marketing specifically, uh-huh, it it really comes down to defining those requirements.

Um, so you're you know, in terms of of things to do. Number one, you should get some experience in other people's communities first. Join a handful, you know, through the ways that we showed uh early on in the in the show. Get a sense of the culture, look at how people run their servers. Then two, build out your requirements, like this is what we want our community to do.

This is the level of interaction we're hoping for. These are the features that we think people would enjoy. You know, if you've got a specific kind of crowd, they might enjoy having like you know, the blackjack bot in one of the channels so people can just amuse themselves, you know, take a two-minute break from work and just uh you know play a game within a channel. And then three, start rolling the thing out, decide what bots you'll need, um, learn how to configure them and things like that. That requires a bit more technical experience.

There's um, because some of the bots do have some technical measures, but that all is defined by your requirements. So those would be like sort of the three-step process for making this thing work for your business. And the fourth part, I guess, which is sort of unspoken, but it's true of any private community, is you have to be willing to invest a decent amount of time, you know, a couple hours a day at least, um, certainly in the beginning, to attract people to your community, to engage with them, to get them to engage with each other and to provide value that um that encourages them to stick around. So one of the things that we do um fairly often in in Analytics for Marketers, I'll show you an example here, is I'll post exclusives. I'll say this is this content is exclusive to our community.

You you know, don't share it outside the community. You're not going to find it posted someplace else. And that is one of those subtle reinforcements to people like, yeah, stick around because you're going to get stuff here that you can't get anywhere else. Mm-hmm. Well, and if you want to join our free slot community, you can do so at TrustInsights.ai/slash analytics marketers, where you can join us at almost 27,700, not thousand, hundred other marketers who are talking about marketing and analytics and everything in between.

And you'll find me and Chris and John there every day with running color commentary. You know, we did ask our community about Slack versus Discord. That was one of our questions of the day. And we didn't really get a strong response that we needed to move from Slack to Discord, but I do think it's a question that's worth asking at least once a year, if not more frequently, as the technology evolves. I I would agree.

I think the other thing is that Discord in the paper we just published, which um I believe it's the trustinsights.ai slash members only study, I believe is the URL I set up for it. Um for people under 35, Discord is where you see very heavy usage, right? It is 9% of the uh US population, 18 and up already uses uh Discord, but when we broke it down by age, that was the group that used it the most. And as the folks who are very young now in the you know the 13 to 21 crowd, in the next five years, they move into the workforce. And as they become more and more, you know, part of the workforce, they're gonna bring today's habits like TikTok and Discord into the workforce with them.

And so if you are thinking about engaging with those folks, you might have to to you might have to move to a platform like that because it's what people are used to. Makes sense. What do you think, John? Yeah, the thing is though, that as far as network network effect, there's huge momentum behind Slack. You know, Slack just did a better job of getting to the B2B space.

And so there's a ton of people on there. And then, you know, you have the eight million pound gorilla that is Salesforce.com that is also affiliated with Slack. So it's kind of you know, it's the new IBM. But yeah, over time, and especially if they don't close the feature gap, that's the thing I'm gonna be you know, continuing to watch. Can Slack up their game and become, you know, have parody as far as features, or is it going to be one of those things where yeah, Discord's just always calling to the more tech savvy users?

Yep. And to the entertainment users, the folks who who want to to be using it. One of the things that we see a lot of uh influencers doing is they have a Discord community. So if you go to to their their Twitch community, uh the Twitch channel, you'll see their Discord server linked very prominently. And say they said they'll say, you know, when I'm not streaming, go join our Discord.

So if you're doing any kind of influencer marketing and those influencers are particularly in the entertainment space or the music space or the or the gaming space, you're gonna spend a lot of time on Discord. I feel like we'll be covering Twitch at some point because that is yet another platform that this person right here is unfamiliar with. Can you tell that I am just not the tech guru of the team? I don't know how many different ways to say it. If you're spending a lot of time on Twitch, I'd be worried.

I mean that's fair. Okay. I'll take it. The only thing worse is Reddit. All right.

I think that's gonna do it for this week's folks. Thanks for tuning in. Bye. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it.

For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast and our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.