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Full Episode Transcript

Hey, hey, Erin Kelly, CEO and co-founder of MemberVault out here. So I am really excited to share today, the tool that I've been playing with behind the scenes that I think is going to be super helpful to a lot of our users. And that is Circle. So I have been playing around with pairing up Circle and MemberVault together, just to test to see if we even like how it works. And it's awesome. I mean, I think it's awesome. And, and I will be very, very clear that this is early, early days.

So the thing that I am saying is awesome, is just how it looks in testing the possibilities of the pairing circle and MemberVault together. And I haven't, we haven't actually seen long term, you know, how it works to actually have people engaging in there, and the problems that will inevitably come up, and the optimization needs and all that good stuff.

This is just like the early days, the honeymoon period. But it's, it's exciting. If you've ever used a tool that you thought was gonna be good. And then you realize, even in the testing phase, that it doesn't work, the way that you want it to work doesn't look good, or whatever, you know that the honeymoon phase can still be really exciting.

So let me start by explaining what Circle is because I know you may never have heard of it, and why we're using it. So one of the biggest requests that we get for feature with features with member vault is from people that are wanting to take their communities off of Facebook, either because they don't like Facebook, or because their audience members don't like Facebook, or because you know, there's usually some underlying reasons like I want better organization, I don't like how groups work.

You know, there's lots of reasons, right? But the core, the core request is we don't want to have to use Facebook, what can we use instead, so can member vault, add a community feature. And sometimes people say forum feature, but I think for the most part people what they really mean, even if they say the forum is community away for wait for your users to engage with each other, and for you to engage with your users. And really bring your content to life. Right.

So at some point in the future, we probably will continue to add community-driven and feedback-driven type features, but it's gonna be a while if ever, that we have such a robust feature that can compete against something like Circle, which that's all they do, right. So that's been one of our things from the very beginning is that we don't want to be an all-in-one. That's why we don't provide email because email is very complicated, you have to worry about deliverability there's a lot of things that go into building an email feature.

And so what we prefer to do is to integrate with other tools that specifically do email. So you know, Active Campaign and Drip and ConvertKit, MailChimp etc. And so that has really been from the very beginning, when we built remember what we wanted it to be a tool that you can easily integrate with tools that you're already using, or that you want to use that is purpose-made. And so it's the same thing with the community because a community is there's a lot of little layers to it. It's a pretty complicated feature.

It goes beyond being able to have like nested comments and stuff. And even when you start talking about nested comments, and, you know, comment threads and being able to like and be able to put GIFs in there and emojis and then Oh, can you interact with other members? And like, can you direct message them like that's, that's a huge tool. So we're not going to have an in-house feature for that, anytime in the near future. Like at least, we're talking I think at least two years, if ever, right.

So we have been looking at other options to recommend to our users and one of the ones that have been coming up a lot a lot is Circle. So Circle is a relatively new community tool. But they are very slick I and I am using slick in a positive way. I know sometimes people use it in a negative way. But it's very clean, it's very pretty. And one of the things I really like about it is that they have made it very external tool friendly. So they want to make it so that you can embed your community onto your WordPress website or onto another tool. And so it is purpose made to play well with MemberVault. And so I have been testing that over the last few weeks and really, really, really like it.

So I'm going to share a little bit about what you can do currently. And then some of the strategy behind how we're setting up our Circle community to give you some inspiration and then I'm going to give you an early invite link because we haven't actually opened it up yet so you are getting me you were the first to know on how to join our new Circle community, so you can go poke around, you can interact. And one of the things that we have, in our Circle community, I talk a little bit more about this in the strategy section is, we're going to, we have like different spaces.

And that's how Circle breaks it down, we have different spaces, and one of them is a feedback zone. And so this will, once our community grows there, this will be something where it's community-driven. But for now, since it's pretty small, I think we have like 16 people between team MV and our Certified Partners that are in there. Because it's such a small little bubble, I'm going to be going in there and giving personal feedback to people that post on that, and I'm going to be interacting a lot.

So if you want to get my eyes on your MemberVault, if you want to get my eyes on your strategy and get my opinions, and just be a part of like, our early shaping of the community. Definitely listen on. And I will be sharing, both at the end of the podcast and in the show notes. The private link to join our Circle community. And like I said, you are getting the very first exclusive exciting invite so. So yeah, so a little bit about what Circle is and what you can do with it now.

So Circle, like I said, is a community tool like that's what they do. And so you can have different spaces, you can group your spaces, it can be you can have stuff for your free people for free access, you can have stuff for your paid clients, they've done a really, really good job of making it easy to use very clear, you can send people to your Circle subdomain. Or you can embed your entire circle space or Circle community into your website or into your MemberVault. And so we're probably going to be playing around with that as well. We haven't done that yet. Because like I said, this is still very early days.

So I will continue sharing all the things that we're trying. Right now what we have done is I've built out our Circle community. So you can go to the Circle subdomain or to our subdomain on Circle and see the entire community. And so we'll be driving traffic there by sharing links in our Facebook group sharing links in our emails, sharing links in our podcasts, etc. And then we also are embedding comment threads inside of our MemberVault content.

So I've done that both for podcast transcripts. And I've done that for a podcast resource that we've created, which you can get. And it's like, all the information about how we podcast and how we're doing transcripts and how we're adding the circle embed comments on our transcripts, you can get that by going to membervault.co forward slash podcast central. And so I've been playing around with those two different methods. And I really like it, I think it's really great. And so you can do it both of those ways, I would recommend doing both, right. So you have, you have an actual community space that you built out inside of Circle. But then you also are embedding post threads, comment threads inside of your member block content. So you are giving people multiple ways to engage with your content, and multiple ways to engage with each other.

And then it's a really cool interface in terms of being able to message other users, they can have tags. So like we have our admins tagged. And I'm trying to think about some other as they give you stats about like engagement, and all kinds of things. And so there's a lot of stuff that I'm still learning. Because like I said, I've just been in the setup phase, I have not actually gotten to see a ton of people actually using it yet, one of the things I know that I'm not going to have is they have an automatic that you can turn off weekly digest for your community, I don't like that I like having a little bit more control over what I'm linking out. And what I'm emailing our people and so I turned that off. But you can have browser notifications.

So that's obviously this has been my argument, I guess, outside community tools, aside from Facebook for a long time, in the sense that Facebook spends a lot of energy and time, and money to get you back into Facebook, and to create a dynamic and a relationship where you compulsively check Facebook multiple times a day, right? Most of us do. And so you're not going to be able to match that with your outside tool. It's just not gonna happen.

And so you have to, and I'm going to go into this more on the strategy, but this is you have to think about like, okay, like, how am I gonna? How am I going to get people back into the community? How am I going to get them interacting with each other? Because if there's, I'm sure you've been in communities before, where it's just crickets and you know, like, there's like one or two replies or something and that doesn't, that actually makes other people not want to interact, right?

Like we want to be in a thriving engaged community. And so when we see that there's not a lot of interaction that makes us less likely to participate, especially if like, like a whole week has gone by since someone has commented right because it feels like why bother. So that's always been my argument against outside tools.

But what I really like about Circle is that you can actually embed it into your membership content. So you can make it a little bit more actionable. And like topic-specific, like outcome specific, like, here, I'm giving you a community space while you work on this content, rather than, like, keep coming to this community space just to talk to other people. Because if they're, they're doing the work, they're going to be talking, we're just going to keep engagement up.

And the whole goal with MemberVault is always to get people coming back to your MemberVault so that they can see your other offers, they can consume what they have access to, they can get results, which will make them more likely to buy more things, etc, etc. So this is really great, like a symbiotic relationship, to make it even more likely that people will see your member vault as kind of like a home point for whatever it is that they're working on.

So that is basically Circle in a nutshell. And you can just google Circle community, and it'll pull up their website. And it's obviously a really, really nice website, and it tells you all the cool things that they can do. And like I said, you can, you can embed it, you can embed a space, you can embed comments, you can embed your entire community, onto your website, or to your MemberVault. So lots of fun, and you can already do that. So it has already available to you, and they will walk you through it. So that's really cool.

And then in the future, we'd love to become a direct integration partner so that when your people sign in to your MemberVault, they don't also have to sign into a Circle. Because it'll automatically give them access to whatever it is that and I don't know all the details here, because we're not a direct inner integration partner yet. But that is something that is very much on our radar, because like I said, I'm really liking it. And that would make it even better for your users.

So our strategy, like I said, for a long time, and I'm so sorry, I feel like I'm like super breathless in my second trimester, but a third kid like, I don't know, I just, I feel like I'm feeling it like way faster. So anyone that has been pregnant understands the breathlessness. So yeah, so our strategy is that we don't necessarily it's an I don't really want to try and replicate a Facebook group, like, I don't want to just be like this open forum where people are just like, posting a bunch of stuff, and it gets really confusing. And again, like, if people don't have a lot of notifications turned on, then there's not going to be a lot of engagement on those posts. And it just starts to look really cluttered and overwhelming.

And so my intention here is that we are using it basically like 50% of what we're taking advantage of is that we're embedding comments and like community ness into our MemberVault content. So like, the podcast resource, our podcast transcripts, we're going to be adding it into all of our other stuff. But it's, you know, takes time to add this into our strategy and into the actual implementation of like embedding these comments and everything. So that's gonna be like 50% is like, you can engage with our Circle without ever even actually going to the Circle community, the MemberVault Circle community, I should say, you can just engage inside of our content, right.

And then we have my goal here is to have a very actionable specific zone, I'd want to call them zones, but they're spaces for hiring people for asking for feedback for your own MemberVault site for asking for help, like, if you have like an SOS, like, I set this up in MailChimp and is not working, we're going to have weekly q&a s that are led by a guest expert. So they're going to teach you something very, like do this, then this and then be available throughout that week to answer questions. And so that's gonna be something that we're going to be doing.

So I really, I'm very excited about having exposing all of the like amazing, genius brains that are in our community, and like bringing that even more to the forefront, so that we can all help each other. And so there's also going to be there's also an event space where we will have our community, you can and I already have a setup. So there's an embedded type forms in both of these spaces, where you can submit an event idea so either as training, or like if you want to like do a happy hour or co-working session, you can submit your idea, and then you'll be able to lead that and so we really, really want to encourage our community members to help each other and share their genius and get more exposure on their MemberVaults and like all that good, like cyclical stuff, so it's gonna be much more actionable and organized than our Facebook group.

We are not getting rid of our collaborative Facebook group because we have so many tire kickers that are considering MemberVault that join that and like I said before, Facebook does such a thing. Passing job of getting people on that I'm going to use Facebook and Facebook getting people on as a way to get more exposure on our Circle.

So we'll be sharing more like links to Circle and like surfacing it more in the Collaborative, which, you know, again, like, I know people don't like having doing having to do multiple clicks. But it'll be a great way to like, stay front of mind that yes, we have this more actionable space, where you can get on Facebook and not be distracted, and you can get your work done. And you can get support. And you can share, share your expertise with others. And there's a community space in there. So like, you can ask random things or share with random wins or whatever.

But the focus, and even the focus is more on like, keeping things in very clear compartments, so that you know what you're getting when you go in there. And you can stay really organized. And I even also, and again, this is the beginning. So we'll see if people don't adopt it, then I'll probably get rid of it. But right now, I created business group spaces. So there's one for brick and mortars, there's one for coaches, and there's one for service providers.

So you can connect with other people that are using MemberVault in the same type of business model. And you can talk about MemberVault or you can talk about other things that come up as a coach or as a service writer, or as a brick and mortar. And so like I think that's kind of the name of the game here is that I want to enable our community to be able to help each other even more, connect, get worked on, support each other, all that good stuff.

So I'm really excited about it. And I said I was going to I was going to share a link. So you can join by going to membervault.co forward slash, vault, and right and that's vault, like the show and then invite. And you'll be one of the first people to join our Circle and see what it looks like. And then I'll be sharing this episode with the transcript and the Circle comments and everything. And so that's going to be a cool way for people to see what it looks like as well.

So I will, once I have the transcript created, I'll circle back and add it to the show notes. But it won't be there immediately. Yeah, so very excited about using Circle and MemberVault. Together, I think it's very promising, I think it's going to help a lot of people, I think a lot of people are going to want to do it for their own businesses. It's a very reasonable, reasonably priced tool.

If you keep your spaces to a minimum, I forget what the first tier I think is like 30 something a month. And then I, of course, went a little overboard with my spaces. So I had to upgrade to the next level, which is I think 79 But still, I mean, it's under $100. So, depending on where you are in your business running, you might be like 30, 30 is still a lot. But it's you're getting a lot for that price.

So yeah, I think between MemberVault through email tool and Circle, you don't really need anything else to run your business. 

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• [Transcript] Circle + MV = match made in heaven.pdf