How the happiness moment of the year started with an online community
I hang out with small business owners like myself and their goal is to get others to attend their self hosted events. I often help them with a pre/post strategy to increase attendance using social media. But what if instead of inviting others to these random events, we build a tribe or a community where people naturally want to attend and participate?
Happy Moment
I just attended an event last week and my heart and soul felt so much happiness afterwards. I actually needed a day after to recover from it. We were part of a community for months online through Discord, a Web3 platform that is a closed group through invitation only. We all had an eagerness to see each other IRL. Many came from far like Australia, Ireland, Canada and all over the United States to Knoxville (TN) for a book party. The book is called The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever, it launched in May 2023 and its been #1 in many categories such as Advertising and Self Employment! Guess what? We all wrote this book together!
Tell me more
This book party was the conclusion of months of promoting of a community led project where we had 35 authors from 10 countries which included 750 years of experience. We all shared 10 tips about our chapter, mine included Instagram strategies and tools. We were all due to submit our chapters last fall and early this year we had to record (yes with our own voices), our chapter for Audible. That was a struggle for many, we had to re-record our chapters. We even bonded about that experience where we dreaded the process and shared selfies in our closets (the quietest place in our homes) to record our chapters.
Discord, a back story….
Our communications in our community, are consistently flowing in Discord. Its built into my day to check-in onto Discord like I would for social media. I think of this online platform as an AOL Chatroom from the 90s. There are various threads (chat rooms) related the various aspects of marketing, web3, AI, etc. We have Zoom meetings with throughout the month from the leader and main author, Mark Schaefer where he interview experts for our own private events just for us to see.
He also invites his podcast co-hosts to record their episodes and we tune in as audience members over zoom and stay after the record button stops to ask our own questions to this co-hosts. We also host events over the Metaverse in Spatial and sometimes put my Oculus VR headset and join in. I actually led a panel discussion this year to discuss the other Metaverses. I even did a “mini-meta” talk and presented once about how to recess proof your marketing, that really pushed me out of my comfort zone. Imagine, speaking to experts in your field and in an environment you are not familiar in with a headset on? We are learning in this community and there has been a lot of “hand holding” in the process. We want to help each other!
Food for thought
Can you replicate this experience with your business? It might be a co-working hour online or a coffee mingle where there’s no strict agenda just meeting new people at the same location? Maybe it is a Facebook group that meets once or twice a month IRL. It helps if there’s good food or coffee.
Interested in spicing up your next event or growing a community? I’ll be glad to share my experiences with you.
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