Full Episode Transcript

Hey, hey, Erin Kelly here, happy new week to you. I am feeling very motivated this week. We'll see. We'll see what happens with that. But there's a lot a lot of exciting things that I'm working on, which always gets me fired up.

So the thing I wanted to talk about today, is something exciting that I have been noodling on for a little bit, and sort of dabbling in. And this weekend, I had a little bit of time on my laptop, and I actually, I was like, You know what, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go for it and test this out and see what it looks like. And I fell in love.

So what am I talking about? I'm talking about adding community to MemberVault. So this is like probably one of our top three most requested things, in terms of people and has been for a while, in terms of people wanting to get off of Facebook, and wanting to have some sort of forum or, you know, there's, I think part of the problem with the requests in the past was, it was very vague.

And it was sort of just like this kind of amorphous, like, I don't want to be on Facebook anymore. I need a better solution. And I want it inside of MemberVault. And we were like, yeah, cool. At some point? Probably, yes, definitely, you know, community building types of feedback loops, where your people can, can interact with you, and give you, you know, thumbs up on on content and like, stars, and, you know, that kind of very easy communication style. But it was never really fully our intent to add, like a full fledged forum type thing.

And early on, it was because, in, in my opinion, having been went back when I was an OBM, an online business manager, working with clients that we know, tried out things like Mighty Networks, and there was a couple other kind of like, proprietary type form solutions back then, that I don't know if they're still around, so I won't even name them. And it was always with the best intentions, and yet it never worked.

And my marketing brain is like, Well, yeah, because Facebook has spent years and untold amounts of money, huge teams, to make Facebook part of our daily lives, you know, they to the point where as much as they annoy me, like, for a long time, I was like, Well, you know, I don't love Facebook, either. And yet, it works. And it's a free tool. And they've spent a bunch of money making optimizing it for engagement, because the more people use it, the more they go back to it, the more they go back to it, the more money that Facebook can make with ad revenue.

And so while you might not fully agree with Facebook, you know, it is unfortunately one of the best Community Solutions for your business, because you've already there and so they see your notifications, you don't have to worry about sending them emails, or spending a lot of energy to get them back into your app or into your platform. And any community that I have been a part of personally that wasn't on Facebook has pretty much been crickets, to be completely honest, or, you know, maybe like 10% of the engagement that you would have seen if it had been a Facebook group.

And so for a long time, I was just like, you know, I get, I get that people don't want to be on Facebook. And yet, that is where everyone else is. And that's where most audiences are hanging out already. And so why spend any of your precious energy on trying to get them back in to engage with your content, when you could just have, you could get rid of that entire layer by having in Facebook.

And so that was my argument for a really long time. And then if you listen to my episode earlier in the season on my, my dilemma and struggle with social media, you'll see that that tone is kind of changing. And part of that is just it's complicated, right?

There's a lot of layers to it, I don't I truly, truly am very unhappy with how Facebook is making people. Um, I don't know if that's the best way to say it, but that they're making them addicted to their phones, right like into their devices, by sending them and even when you try to get off of Facebook, and you're like I'm going to be good and then they send you those emails that are like so and so just commented but they don't tell you anything in the email because the point of the email is to get you back in Facebook, right?

So those types of behaviour all things while I know in a lot of ways actually is what created the argument for staying on Facebook for a long time like that is what gets people back on Facebook and that is why Facebook has historically been such a great place for you to have community groups because they are spending so much energy and time getting people to check Facebook multiple times a day right. It this point, it has kind of crossed the, the point for me where I, I'm really kind of grossed out by it.

So that's part of it. And you know, it's just, I don't, if you have ever been in a bubble and you've tried to try and expand your bubble, whether it's a bubble of race or a bubble of interest values, or, you know, whatever it is, right? Like you, you're surrounded by like minded people on Facebook, and that's all you see, you will know that when you start actively trying to change that bubble, that you realize how much the algorithm has shaped your worldview and your view of everything, right? Everyone's talking about this, everyone agrees with us. It's like, actually, no, that's just what Facebook is serving you with.

So there's a lot of reasons why I am becoming less and less fond of Facebook, I still recognize that all of the things that I used to argue about pro Facebook, there's they're still true, like, people are so very much invested in their Facebook accounts, they show up on them multiple times a day. And, you know, even I do, and I don't like Facebook, right?

So for people that aren't as bothered by it, or haven't really, like checked in with their feelings, or whatever. For most audiences, that's where they're hanging out. And I think that that's, that's gonna change, obviously, because nothing ever stays the same. And so like, I'm sure that there are perhaps other social media platforms that, you know, arcades are going to use, right, and they're going to grow up and Facebook is going to be like for the old people.

But for right now, if you have an online business, you're probably serving an audience that hangs out on Facebook. And so I've really, you know, I have been really exploring my feelings on this and looking at alternatives and recognizing what I've seen in the past in terms of these, you know, off site tools that just don't have a lot of engagement on them, because there's nothing really bringing people back unless you're doing like a weekly email. And that is not as if a post has to wait for a week for people to see it, you know, because they got that email.

And they remember to check in on this platform. Like, that's not good engagement. Like that's not going to make other people want to comment when they see that there's like dust on these posts, which is why Facebook is so powerful, because it's like instantaneous gratification. And so, so yeah, I've been very resistant to it.

But again, like it's very, very common requests that Facebook or I'm sorry, I've been saying Facebook so much that I can't stop saying that MemberVault has some sort of community element to it. And right now we don't have the bandwidth, we have a lot of other core features that we are wanting to add. And so you know, that's not something that we're going to be adding anytime in the like next year ish future. And last thing while the change, which is why I'm really excited, because I've had quite a few people that I trust, say that they've been using circle, and that they've been embedding Circle into their MemberVault.

So you're not asking people to go you're memorable and to an outside tool, you're just directing traffic to remember about which is what we tell you to do, right? Because the more traffic you get on your MemberVault, the more eyeballs you get on content that people own and content that they don't own, so that they're more likely to buy or sign up for it. So it becomes like that hub for your business.

That's your home point that you're sending people to over and over again. And so by having community in there, like that becomes even easier for you. And so people have been saying that they several of these trusted people have been saying that they've used it and then MemberVault in a Circle inside of their MemberVault accounts and that it has been really good. So I was like, Okay, I need to check this out. And so I signed up for Circle, actually, to be completely honest, I signed up, I think, like two months ago, for their free plan. And, and I totally never even took a look at it before my trial expired, which is why I don't like trials.

But, um, but I ended up you know, I was like, okay, like, what, two weeks ago, like, I really want to actually see this in practice, because so many of our users want to have this community element. And I want to even though we know that it's not going to be a core feature for MemberVault yet, I want to be able to advise them on what's going to work well.

And so I actually signed up for a paid account, which now could have created another email address and everything. I was like, You know what, no, I'm, I'm going to just go ahead and bite the bullet here and sign up for a paid account. And, you know, that will give me incentive to actually to do it, right, which is why people like trials, because that's what a lot of people will do, although a lot of people well this is this is a tangent, right? We can talk about this at a different time.

So, so sign up for it. And then I started playing around in there and I was like, oh, like I don't know, all my resistance around outside tools was coming back up again. In terms of even their Circle community, while has has engagement and people helping each other. They're still not as much as you would see in a Facebook group like certainly nothing like what you see in our user community and Circle's bigger than we are.

So I was like, ah, but here's what I did that got me really excited about it. One of the things that you can do a Circle is you can embed comment threads on your MemberVault content. So you could do it on a module or a lesson. And so we have been putting our podcast transcripts over into teaser public modules for a podcast resource that we're putting together, which I talked about in my last episode.

And so I tested that because I was like, you know, we're already going to be sending public traffic to this public module or to this public lesson that's in a public teaser module. And wouldn't it be cool if people could comment and engage like, at the very beginning of this season I talked about, that's my one thing that I don't like about podcasts is there's not a good feedback loop where you can talk to your people that are listening.

And so I was like, Oh, this would this would fix so many things. And so I did it, and it looked really good. And I was like, Okay, if I start looking at Circle, as not another tool that people need to check into, but it's integrated into our MemberVault, so we're sending people, like I said, to MemberVault, and then there's just community elements in there embedded from Circle. That's pretty cool.

And one of the things I don't like about Facebook groups, for very structured action taking is that we've done this in the past, we've done Action Labs inside of a Facebook group. And it works really great for the live week. But there's always people that will go and they will scroll back through all the posts, and they go all the way down to maybe the last Action Lab, and they'll comment, and it'll bring it back up. And it'll look like it's part of the current Action Lab, it's a little confusing, and it's overwhelming.

And the other thing I don't like about the actionable stuff being on Facebook is that and this is a common argument is that you do get distracted, right? Like, the whole reason why you keep going to Facebook is for distraction. And so if you're trying to actually get worked on, especially if it's work that is triggering, or tiring in any way, or has a little bit of friction to it, you're gonna immediately pop off of that and think I'll do this later, let me go check out when my friend was posted, or someone just commented on my post or whatever. And so you get distracted. And an hour later, you're out of work time, and you haven't done the work, right?

So that's one of my big reasons why I don't like putting actionable stuff on Facebook as that it becomes very disorganized, and it is very, in a very distracting environment. So that's the other thing that I really like about Circle is that you can create on the surface, right, we'll see how it works in practice. But on the surface, I really like that you can create these really organized containers of spaces, where people can go to get feedback, or they can go to do a challenge, or they can go to see what events we have coming up. And then we can have users be able to supply their own events, so they can show off their expertise, right.

So there's lots of really cool things. And in theory, I'm very excited cuz I think it looks really good. The embed, the comment, embed looks really good inside of MemberVault. I shared a screenshot of it in the collaborative on Facebook, and people are like, Oh, my gosh, this looks so good. Like, when can I do this and like, well, you can already do this.

So this is our first step into it. And then in the future, I would love to become a direct integration partner with Circle so that if someone signs into your MemberVault, and they have, you've granted them access to a certain space on Circle, that they which I'm not going to go into like the specifics there. Just because that would become a whole nother podcast episode. And I'm not really a professional on that. Yeah, but the kind of core concept is, if we were a direct integration partner, and you had a MemberVault plan and a Circle plan, people would only need to sign up sign into your MemberVault, and they would be automatically logged in to Circle as well.

So they wouldn't have to also log in to the embed, you know, and I don't know what they're, this is stuff that I'm gonna see like as we are using it, I don't know how long their cookie is for when how long you stay logged in to Circles so that when you're going to MemberVault like, does it remember that you're logged in? Does it log you out? Like some of these kind of like in practice questions, we'll see. And I'll be sharing all of this. And I'll be sharing how we set it up. And I'm going to share how we did the embed comment embed in our podcast resource, which you can get by going to membervault.co forward slash podcast Central. So but in on the surface, I am very tentatively excited and fired up about it because I think that it's going to be really cool. We're not getting rid of our Facebook group.

So our free Collaborative Facebook group is still gonna stay there. And my intention right now is to drive engagement because we have a lot of people that are tire kickers that join that group. So we'll have a lot of engagement like share your share your account, like what's your best tip, like What's your favorite thing? What did you switch from, you know those types of questions for that audience and then which is also a great way for people to get exposure to their accounts, and then also driving traffic back to circle or back to our MemberVault, so that we're creating that, like, we're using Facebook to help give us engagement, that doesn't have to be connected to sending emails.

So this is all very much a work in progress, like everything I do, and I'm sharing it hot off the press. But I'm excited by how it looks, and the possibilities. And it is changing and evolving my stance on community groups outside of Facebook, if done with intention, so we will see how it goes, how it works. And again, I'll be sharing everything along the way, both on this podcast.

And then of course, like, as we're creating resources, like we'll show how we did stuff and all that good, good stuff, so that if you're also interested in using circle, and adding a community element to your member vault, you'll be able to very easily do it and not have to figure things out like I did. So pretty excited.

So that is the start of my week. And it is still very much relevant to my most important mission, which is increasing our conversion rate from free to paid. So that's all getting people excited and using their accounts and how to optimize their accounts and how to how to do all that stuff. So yeah, so that's what I'm working on. I hope you are feeling equally energized about your week and I will talk to you tomorrow.

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• [Transcript] Want to add a community element to your MV_.pdf