In this video, we're going to talk about product and business communities. I'm going to talk to you about actually assembling a community, a congregation of people, fans, a tribe (essentially) under the umbrella of your product or of your company. It's a very, very powerful thing. Tribes are powerful, people in great numbers, especially when they're your fans, when they're people that know you, like you, trust you, or the very least are interested in you. It's very, very powerful when you have these people assembled in a group. 
One of the reasons it's powerful is because they all have a common interest. They're all assembled there because they are interested in your product or they purchased your product, they're interested in your company or in you, they're your fan, maybe you're a public figure, but for whatever reason, they have joined this community that you assembled for the purpose of congregating all your followers or all your customers, and they all share this common interest which is you, your product, or your company.
This is very, very powerful because you communicate with all these people and speak to them all in one place at one time. There's power in numbers; you know that amongst many things. We've been doing this in our business for many, many years. There are a lot of reasons that ever since my very first big product launch I've always wanted to assemble a community around the product.
The main reason for that is that there are power numbers and members can see other members within the actual community. It's not just you saying that 1000 people have bought your product. It's actual visual proof when the customers can see the other customers. When you have a subscriber on your list they don't know how many other subscribers are on that list with them, but when they're all in a group, a forum, or in some sort of community, and they all bought your product or they all liked your website or they're all your fans, they all see one another. They can see, wow, look at how many other fans this guy has. Wow, look at how many other people have bought this product.
There's power in those numbers. There's credibility, there's trust, there's a business posture that you're emanating when you create this big group of people because they can see one another and they know that they're not the only one. They feel better, more comfortable, more satisfied that they've made a good decision because they know they're not alone.
The cool thing about being the leader of the tribe is that you're revered. The leader is always heard and revered because it's your tribe. When you stand on the podium and you speak they listen. You gain their attention just simply because you're the creator of the group, you're the leader by default. The other thing that happens in a tribe, in a community that you've assembled is the Jones Effect, greed factor. You can call it whatever you want, social proof, Jones Effect, greed factor.
What happens is people love to have what the other guy has. No one likes to be the first one on the dance floor, and when they see other people taking action they tend to want to take action. They will tend to want to have those same results. You go down a block. You don't just see one basketball hoop. You see three, or four, or five because the Jones always has to keep up with the Joneses.
This serves very, very well for the purpose of you growing the group, and basically, results become contagious when they're seeing them, when they're communicating with one another. Strong relationships can be forged. Not just strong relationships between the community themselves because again, they can see each other, they can shoot messages to one another, they can comment on each other's threads and posts, and they can talk to each other just like on a social network.
This is the thing about building a community. We'll talk about different places to build your communities. You can actually build them inside of social networks or something that we've done for many, many years. You can create these relationships not just amongst the actual members of the community but between you as the product owner, the community, and the individuals because now you can see people, the problems that they're having, the things that are talking about, and you can personally message them as a result, where you wouldn't be interacting with people that way on your email list.
There’s a lot more engagement that happens when there is a community that's assembled in some sort of a digital stadium like a forum or what have you. We’re going to talk about digital stadiums in a minute. Let's just jump right into digital stadiums. There are different ways that you can house or you can contain your community. You can basically create a forum.
If you don't know what a forum is, you can actually install a forum for free on most hosting accounts. Forum scripts come built-in with your hosting. You can go to your cPanel. With your hosting account, whenever you bought your hosting, you usually go to your domain.com/cpanel and there are scripts that you can install right on there. One of them is forum scripts; there are a few of them in there.
We've used the phpBB forum. That's a type of forum. There are a lot of different ones in there. One of the reasons we stopped doing this many, many years ago is because they were hack magnets. For whatever reason, forums just get constantly, constantly hacked. Not unlike WordPress, WordPress is a hack magnet, but the difference between the fact that WordPress because there are so many security plugins and methods of protecting your WordPress site, and that didn't used to be the case for forum scripts.
Forums were like the social networks of 20 years ago, before Facebook, before MySpace or actually around MySpace times. Forums were really the place where it would be a website where you can create an account, you can log in, and there were threads. There were these tabs that you can click on, see what people are talking about, and you can join in on the conversation. If you'd like what somebody said you could shoot them a direct message and they were very social. They were very interactive and that was what a forum was.
Forums are still around to this day. I don't use forums anymore because of several reasons about when the tribe became a mob and different things that we had issues with the actual forums, but there are a lot of different ways to build that digital stadium. It's not just a forum. You can create a membership website. There are a lot of plugins for WordPress. As you know, I use WordPress in my business and I use OptimizePress as my page builder.
I love that combination. We've built all of our sites that way. We've been doing it for many, many years for over a decade now, and it works really, really well. There are social community plugins for WordPress. They’re all different, it’s hundreds, probably even thousands of them. I gamble to say there are thousands of them. 
I'll give you an example of one of them, a very popular one it's called BuddyPress. BuddyPress allows you to actually create that social media site environment where your users can message one another, your users can create threads, and it uses that WordPress comment system to create threads and essentially, to create an environment that your customers can interact with.
Picture this scenario. You sell a product, whether it's an online course or some digital product, maybe a software, maybe a plugin itself. Maybe you're a software developer, whatever niche you're in. Maybe you're a dog trainer, maybe you're a gardener, whatever it is, and you create your online course. Not only do you sell this online course in a membership site, but now when your user logs in, when your customer logs in, they have a little button that says hey, join our site, join our forum, or join our community, and interact with other members.
That becomes a very valuable selling feature of the product. Letting them know that there's peer-to-peer support that you're going to meet the other people that have bought this product. A lot of people actually put a monetary value on that and they advertise it on their sales page. Imagine being able to create a parallel community to every site or every product that you launch, and now these members can be in there interacting with each other and seeing one another.
Members literally see each other and interact with each other. They can actually pull up a list of other members. They could sort through them and depending on the type of plugin or script that you're using, whether it's a forum. Just like on Facebook, on Twitter, or on any social media site, you can actually look people up. They can do that now. Members would be able to do that and try to find other members.
The process of joining the community is something that you're going to make optional because sometimes people don't want to be added to a social setting like that. They get freaked out when other people can see who they are, other people can message them. I always did it where it's like, hey, you're on your website now. Here are your videos, here's the stuff you bought, and if you want to be part of our community click here, and then there would be another form for them to fill out and sign up. That would be the only way that they can get in. It's a private community.
I found that there were a lot of issues with forums. Not just the fact that they were hacked magnets but running a forum script and even using plugins inside of a membership site. It was something that was really exciting as the first couple of weeks after your product launch and that died down. It was more hassle to manage it and just constantly be there engaging it. You would get tagged and pulled in.
What I found was that it's a lot easier to create a Facebook group for every product. Facebook groups are great in many ways, but the biggest, biggest problem with a Facebook group is that when you're using it for the purpose of building a community around your product under the umbrella of your company, you're doing that on somebody else's platform. It's easy because everybody has Facebook. You can say join our Facebook group. Everybody is like, okay, and everybody knows what that is.
There's no form to fill out and everything, they click a button, boom, they're in your Facebook group. What happens now is you can't message them all at one time within Facebook. Facebook changed that ability. Believe it or not, it used to be able to email everybody in your Facebook group, right from Facebook itself. They got rid of that feature right away obviously, as marketers overused it.
What happens is it's such a highly distractive environment for you to actually be doing business in and be growing a community in. They're constantly being pitched, they're constantly seeing ads, and they're constantly being tagged in other things from other groups and other pages. It's really difficult to build that intimate relationship and to monetize them in a group in comparison to in a private forum.
They each have their pros and their cons. One of the pros of having your own forum, your own community is that it's yours. You own it, you own all the content, you control it, and you are the person to be revered in there. That isn't the case on Facebook. On Facebook, you are the leader of that group but you don't own it. Facebook owns it. They make the rules. They say what can be talked about, what can't be talked about. They say what features this group is going to have and not going to have, and they can change anything at any time, just like any other social network can. The pro part of it is everybody has an account, it's easy to sign up, and they all understand what it is. The negatives are, well, it's not your forum. You don't own it. Facebook owns it. There are pros and cons to both of those things.
Let's talk about how tribes can become mobs. There's a negative side to building a community when it's under the umbrella of a product or of your company. First and foremost, when you're going to run a community if this is something that you choose to do, regardless of where you're going to run it in or what stadium you choose to build your community in, and assemble your congregation of people tribes can become mobs. It's got to be a dictatorship.
You have to run it with an iron fist because if not, it's just regular Facebook, where anybody can do whatever they want. It's not geared towards one specific interest or one topic. You've got to make the rules for your group or for your forum, and then you got to hold people to them. And you've got to be seen as that authority figure, that leader, that person that makes the rules and controls the group. You have to always have your finger on the pulse of what's going on within that group, that forum, that community.
I'm just going to call it a community whether you're using a group, a forum, a plugin like BuddyPress, or a platform. There are other ones out there. BuddyBoss was one that Theresa shared with me earlier. What you got to keep in mind is that you have to be seen as the leader of the community in whatever platform it is, and you've got to run it with an iron fist. You make the rules and that's it. If anybody doesn't like it, they need to go.
What will happen is, some people will try to use your group for their own purposes. If you don't lead, someone else will. That's the other thing. If you become very passive and you just let it go, what's going to happen is somebody else is going to be in there. They're going to build that relationship with your people. They're going to be the ones posting that content, engaging with everybody, messaging everybody, liking everybody's posts, replying to their comments, and really growing that relationship with them.
Essentially, you created a place for that person to brand themselves instead of you brand yourself. This is good in some ways to a certain extent, meaning you can have moderators. It's perfectly fine to have an admin staff and usually, you take the most active people in the group and then you promote them to moderators. You just say, hey listen, would you like to help me moderate this group? Meaning these are the rules, you're just going to make sure on my behalf that the rules are being followed, and if I'm not available and somebody is trying to join the group, you can approve it. This is the policy. Just have some basic...
Usually, if you're selecting someone that's really active in the community, they're going to love that. They're going to love that privilege and then what happens is usually, the forum, whatever stadium, whatever platform you're using, puts a little star next to this person's name, and everybody knows that they're an admin. 
This is really important. It's important to always have a leadership presence in the group. I used to do this with people in different parts of the world so that I know that whenever I'm asleep, someone is awake that's available in the group. This is important because negativity loves the company, and posts are visible 24/7 all across the world until they're moderated. What can happen is—this happens a lot; don't underestimate this—if you're building a group or a community because you launched a product, and it's a parallel community to the product, the conversation in there should generally be about the product, the niche, and the goals that you're trying to achieve by using this product. That's generally what the conversation is going to be about.
What's going to happen is people are inevitably going to go in there with complaints as well if they're unhappy with something about your product, if they're unhappy with something about your company. For whatever reason, we see this behavior all the time. They'll go and they'll run into a roadblock. Ninety-nine percent of the problems that people go to your help desk are with their user issues. They're not a problem with your product. They're not a problem with your system, your website. In the very high 90 percentile, it's usually that the user is doing something wrong.
They didn't follow the instructions. They didn't read the getting started. They're trying to skip ahead and they've created the problem that they're experiencing because they didn't pay attention or they didn't do what they were told. What ends up happening is they jump the gun. These people are trigger happy with putting posts in the community. I'm generalizing—they and them—because it's a common thing that we found. These people have these character traits where they'll go to your help desk, put up a post, they're frustrated because something isn't working for them, and they'll go over to the forum or the community the moment they remember that exists.
They'll go in there, put a post, and instantly say, I've got a ticket on the help desk. I haven't gotten anybody to answer me yet. You literally put it in a minute or two ago, but now all of a sudden there's this negativity brewing in the group. Negativity loves company. God forbid, there was 1 other person or 2 other people out of that 1000 people or that 2000 people that are members of your group that also had a negative experience with something, and now they're both bitching about it on the same thread.
What happens is this can spiral out of control and your brand new members and people that just joined can be affected by this negativity. It might even spark refunds. Who knows what it gets. Sometimes arguments start on these threads, you go in there, and it's been going on all night. By morning, you sit down at your desk, and you log in there are 50 comments and people have been going back and forth fighting about something.
Negativity loves the company, and these posts are always visible while you're sleeping. You can actually hinder relationships and your brand can be tarnished while these posts go unmoderated, these comments go unmoderated. It's important that you have an admin staff and that you're in there. Another thing that you'll find that sometimes they'll skip the support desk altogether and they'll go right into the community to get support.
This is good. I used to adamantly disapprove of doing support through Facebook. It can be very, very useful if it's done right. I've seen a lot of companies that do this. They actually create support groups on Facebook. They actually have their support team in there and they have an around-the-clock support person on their staff that's always in there commenting on things and replying to people. These administrators of your forum, of your group, of your community determine when something can be handled right here in public or when they need to direct someone to go and create a ticket.
They'll post. They'll say, hey, look, I can help you up to this point, but at this point now, you're going to need to go and create a ticket because we're going to need to get your login information. You'd be shocked how many people go in to say, hey, this is my site. Here's the URL. Here are my login details. Can somebody please help me? They do crazy stuff like that in a group with thousands of people. They'll go and they'll put their user details and stuff. What happens is, when you're running these communities, especially when they revolve around your products and your company, you've got to be mindful of this. You got to have somebody in there that's keeping an eye on these things. 
Here’s another thing. If you're somebody that's very dogmatic, if you take it very personally when somebody gives some criticism to your product, to your brand, to your site, it's going to hinder you. It's going to make it hard for you to be in here.
There's a big difference between being someone that censors people and being someone that runs it. When I said to run your group with an iron fist, it's a dictatorship. It is not a democracy. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be open to listening to people, that you should stifle opinions. You should control the conversation. You should control the narrative because it is your group. You control the conversation, you control what's talking about, you decide what topics are good, what topics are not good, what you will have spoken about. It's like your house.
If you don't want something being talked about at your dinner table, then you're the one that makes that rule. What happens, though, is because it's about your product and because people go in there and they're communicating with one another, they don't necessarily think they're talking to the owner of the company or the developer of the product, and they might be sharing some negative opinions. If you take this personally and you become very dogmatic about your brand, this could really, really hurt your public appearance.
I've seen this go really, really bad. I've seen forums and communities where someone in the group discovered a bug with the program, with the software, and they were having an issue. They mentioned it and they asked, has anybody else had this issue? A couple of other people said, oh, that's not happening to me, and then one guy is like, yeah, I hate it when that happens, and it got really, really ugly because the owner of the software went in there and just wanted to deny that anything was wrong.
I learned this the hard way about three years ago when Google Chrome made a big change to their browser. They deprecated Flash but they didn't do it all at once. They did it little by little. What this means is that videos weren't playing properly on the Chrome browser because Chrome had deactivated the Flash capability of their browser to play certain types of videos in certain ways.
Unfortunately, they didn't do this all at once, so Chrome has millions and millions of users. In order to throttle the number of support requests and tickets, when they roll things out, they roll it out in chunks. They don't just change everything on Chrome for everyone. They change it just for some people, so not everyone is seeing the change at once. What happened is they rolled out this change but they did a rolling change literally rolled it out little by little, and I wasn't seeing the problem when I logged in but the customer was.
I got into this debate with the customer. I was like, listen, you're wrong. That's not what's happening. I'm on Chrome. I'm on that version and I'm not seeing that problem, so you're clearly doing something wrong. He's like, well, no, look, I'm not doing anything wrong. I learned my lesson there. I learned that you can't be too dogmatic because sometimes the customer is actually telling you the truth. The majority of the time it’s user error, but there is that time where it might not be user error, it might be something else.
If you're in a public forum and you decide to get into a battle of the wits with a customer, that can hinder your brand. Yet another reason why having administrators, having moderators, having other people in there can really, really be helpful. Remember, tribes can become mobs. They can become angry mobs. If you're going to let your community go dormant, it really is better to just close it down.
We made the decision a while ago that instead of having a Facebook group for every single one of our products, we're going to recommend to every buyer that they just go join one group, and regardless of what product they have, that's the group that they're in. We found that it keeps the group more active because what ends up happening when you create these Facebook groups for the product right after the launch, it's exciting, it's buzzing in there, there are people talking, and then what happens a week, two weeks, three weeks after your launch it just dies out. It just dies out. People just aren't there and it's just a ghost town. This hurts you because now when somebody does buy your product and they go in there, they see that the last post was made three weeks ago. It's a negative experience for your customer that you promised a community to.
Let's talk about the longevity of your community. Let's talk about product groups versus company groups. Let’s touch on that a little bit. Creating a product group was great for us. In the beginning, it was very active and it was optional. I've got some product groups that had thousands of members. What ends up happening now is you're not actively in there every single day and you're not getting notified all the time every time somebody posts. There could be a question sitting in there for a week, and if it's not a group that somebody's going in there and posting to every single day, the group will die.
People won't receive notifications about new content in the group. People will literally forget that they're a member of that group—we're talking about Facebook groups—and they'll just not go in there anymore. The same goes for your company group if you have a group. It's a little bit different because now every single person from every product that you launch is going into that one company group. It's going to tend to be a little bit more active and lasts a little longer than those other ones, but I would recommend that you create one community for everyone that's associated with your company and your brand, regardless of which product they bought from your company.
The energy dies if you don't have constant fresh meat. You have to constantly be putting in new people. I used to be very adamant about, hey, this group is only for people that buy our products. You might create a group that's not only for people that buy your products but maybe for people that are interested in buying your products and then have bought your products. You can experiment with which one of these you want to do. What happens is if you have a mix of people that are customers and people that are not customers, now your people that are not customers are seeing those negative threads, those support issues, or those things that might affect their purchase decision.
You might want to consider having a general group for just people that are interested in your niche and that could serve as a traffic source for you to then sell products to, but then once they buy a product from you, they now have the ability to be part of your actual community for your company. This is completely up to you how you do it, we've experimented it both ways, but the one thing that I want to make sure that you understand is that the community needs constant engagement, daily engagement multiple times a day, they need to be stimulated. It will just die, and it will become a ghost town.
Nowadays, there are all kinds of tools to help you combat this problem. You can actually schedule posts. I'm not going to name all the different ones out there, but whether you're using a forum, a community, or Facebook. You can actually schedule content to be dropped into your post way in advance. If you're wondering what kind of content,  anything that people in that niche or with that common interest might find useful. It could be a YouTube video, it could be an article, it could be a blog post, it could be anything that you find interesting because you share those same interests with the people in that group.
You can actually go and spend an afternoon finding resources and cool things. Find 25 articles, videos, things that are cool, and then just set up little posts to go out and drip out on a daily basis or every single day your group has some new content in it. This is also something that you could assign to your virtual assistant or to even one of the moderators to do, but you've got to keep in mind that a community needs constant engagement in order to stay connected.
You also have to be prepared to constantly be pulled into stuff, especially if it's your group and you don't have a staff yet. You are the arbiter of truth in your group because it's about the questions and the topics are about your products and they're about your company. Ultimately, you're the arbitrator. You're the person that's going to determine who's right, who's wrong, what's the correct answer, if this is okay to do, if this is not okay. You have to be in there and you have to be willing to get pulled in because if you're not, (again) then now you're going to fall. It's going to go dormant. The crazies are going to run the asylum essentially.
Something that happens is eventually you create that camaraderie because, remember, the fish stinks from the head down. So, you can be a good leader and then you're going to create camaraderie or you're going to be a crappy leader and the fish is going to stink from the head down. When you're a good leader and you've made the rules very clear, the group, the community, the forum will self-police. They will call out people that are harming the community and they will flag posts.
Your administrator or your moderators can come in with the banhammer and look at that post that was flagged by a self-policing community and then determine this is okay or this is not okay. Decide whether the post just needs to be deleted and maybe somebody's wrist needs to get slapped, or it's intolerable and they need to get out.
Another thing that you need to look out for in these groups and you have to police is self-promotion and spammers. This is one that just gets under my skin. When your group starts growing and it becomes very active, I have groups with thousands and thousands of members in them. I have 1 group with 8000 members in it. I know people that have groups with hundreds of thousands of members in them.
What starts to happen is when your group gets really big like that, people look at it as a source of traffic for their business, and they'll go in there and start promoting their own stuff. They'll go and spam, you'll start seeing ads and stuff, and that hurts the community. That hurts the community because people see it and they just don't want to be bombarded with stuff that's not related to what they're in there for.
People want to enjoy themselves. It's like inviting people to a party at your house or a barbecue or whatever, and then when they get there, you had a bunch of salespeople waiting for them to pitch them Amway and try to sell them soap or something, Tupperware, or something like that. They're not going to feel happy about coming to your house anymore if you do something like that. You have to quell that self-promotion and you have to make sure that your rules are clear.
Any spammer gets deleted right away. It doesn't matter. If you break my rules in my community, you're out. There are no second chances, you're out. I don't want you in the group. The rules are really clear. They're in a pinned post and that's just the way that it is. I run it with an iron fist. Some are going to see your stadium as a place for them to make money and it's not. It's a place for you to make money. It's a place for you to build a relationship with people. It's a way for you to build camaraderie between people that are buying that share those common interests of your products and your company.
It becomes a place where these people will become your tribe. They're going to become your fans, they're going to become your followers, they're going to be your most dedicated customers. Whenever you go in there and drop a link to something, they're going to be all over it, because you cultivate that community. You're not in there spamming it, you're in there actually nurturing it, and providing value consistently on a daily basis.
When you do offer them something, they're going to have that trust. You don't want that trust to be broken by spammers going in your group and ruining the experience of your customers. This is the thing that's going to create a community that's going to last the test of time. We've done this with quite a bit of success, and I like the premise of building a community around the product, but as you can see I've brought up a lot of different points in this video where you have to be mindful of what you're doing and how you're doing it because your group can grow out of control, the crazies can run the asylum, or it can go completely dormant, it just dies, and then you end up having to delete it.
I hope you take these points into account. I definitely, definitely hope that you consider creating or building a community around your products and your company. I hope you enjoyed this and we'll see you in the next video. Take care.