Mind Readings: Communities Need Publications

In today's episode, let's talk about anchoring, specifically anchoring a community. Now we've talked a lot about communities in the last few months, about the importance of communities, particularly private social media communities, uh so-called velvet rope communities on platforms like Slack or Telegram or Discord. But one of the things that these communities are particularly bad about, and it's not the fault of any community manager, it's simply because these platforms are not designed for it, is that there is no opportunity for publication within that community. When we think about the important tasks that you have as a community manager, one of them is getting people on the same page, right? Getting people updated quite literally.

And that's one of the reasons why your community, whether it's your customers, whether it's your brand, whether it's just your advocates and evangelists, need some kind of unifying force to get everyone on the same page, quite literally. What is the best force for that? No surprise, it's a publication of some kind. And probably for most organizations, that publication is going to be an email newsletter. If you want your community to move and focus or stay current, you need a publication.

Part of the what I've observed in the last uh couple of months, uh, volunteering on the uh Save Warrior and Uncampaign, is there's a lot of activity. There's a lot of things going on. And one of the first things I did uh in volunteering was set up a newsletter on Substack. Why? Because there was no publicly visible centralized repository of just what was going on at any given time.

And by putting together an email newsletter, it helps keep people engaged, it helps keep people current. Um, it helps share critical information in a channel that is less noisy. So, for example, a lot of the campaign, the work is done on social media, and there are literally millions of social media posts to wade through. No one is going to be able to do that. And the search algorithms that are uh out there within these social networks, they're not great at highlighting stuff uh like that because you know they have their own priorities, and their priorities typically don't involve uh helping helping us uh stay more in touch.

Um the power of a good publication like a newsletter or a magazine or something, anything allows us to communicate to our communities in an easy, simple, understandable fashion. How often should you publish? As often as you can, as long as as often as you've got something valuable to say to your community. But if you want to use a publication as sort of a glue for a community and as a motivator, you should opt for greater frequency rather than lesser frequency. For example, with Trust Insights, we publish uh a weekly newsletter, it goes out on Wednesdays, and we have a Slack group that goes with it, and they're very symbiotic.

The Slack group publ uh promotes the newsletter, the newsletter promotes the Slack group, and so we get people engaged uh in the community itself, but then we get them sort of unified or focused around a specific topic within the newsletter, which of course, again, has that virtuous circle. Uh, if there's a major topic being discussed in the newsletter, it can spill over into the Slack group, and vice versa. They can get uh stuff started in the Slack group that becomes part of the newsletter. Um my partner and CEO, Katie Robert does that a ton. She will write up a an idea and post it in the Slack and see how people react to it, and that goes in the newsletter, or vice versa.

But you need to have that publication platform as sort of your think of it almost as sort of a middle of your funnel tactic, right? So you have your community, which is the bottom of the funnel, the the post-purchase, uh the post-conversion audience, the people who've opted in and said, Yeah, I want to be part of your group, a part of your community. And then you have sort of the top of the funnel, all your advertising, marketing, PR, all the stuff that you do to draw attention to your community. But that middle part, that nurturing part that that helps people stay in touch with you, that's where your publication, if you do it right, can really shine. So if you are running a community or trying to run a community and you are finding that it is very hard to keep people engaged, make a publication of some kind that distills down and summarizes everything that's happening in your space, in your industry, in your movement, so that people see your publication as a catch-up mechanism, a way to catch up on all the news that they've missed throughout the week.

They will be uh thankful for it, and most important, you will direct additional engagement in the areas where you and you know your marketing efforts need it most. So, go build that publication platform. That's the show for this time. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you soon.

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