Communities: Why You Aren't the Ring Leader

UX Marketing

Hey there, and welcome to the micro-influencer podcast on this beautiful Friday. Once again, if you are new to the show, this started out with just interviews every single Tuesday, which has kind of been my day for sending out the newsletter, putting out the podcast, doing all that good stuff, and then I decided.

With the longer form interviews, which are still pretty short, they're usually 20 to 30 minutes, not, not too long, easily digestible, but I wanted to give something that was a little bit more digestible so that if you had like a five minute drive, you could listen to something, learn something new. So every Friday, I'm just doing this alone.

Five, 10 minutes snippets max of. Just advice. Okay. My week to week, as you know, I report on the podcast stats every single Tuesday on a LinkedIn live. So feel free to join that. You can see exactly how many people are downloading this podcast and how it's growing. And this can help you with your own endeavor.

And today I want to talk about building a community. This is something that whether you are building a personal brand, obviously that's directly related to this, or even if you're building a product, if you want to see any modicum of success, you have to have some kind of community behind it. But I think that the idea of a community is flawed because typically that suggests that there's a community leader and then the rest of the people are followers in that community.

Aye. Don't think that, yeah. Should be the reality for any successful community. And that is not the goal for this. So I, I put out a post recently on LinkedIn and I want to just go through the points of this. I don't want a massive community for this. If it happened, then you know, whatever. But I really don't want that because I want everybody to be able to lead in their own way within this community.

I don't view myself as the leader of the community. I just see somebody that. Organized it and had the idea to start getting other leaders together. I don't think that I'm the ringleader by any means. I'm still learning alongside every single other person listening to this. So that may sound unambitious to some, but for me, I think it's a great way two grow.

And the reason for that, it's because it's based on building real relationships. And the reason that I came to this conclusion it is because I've gone the complete opposite direction in the past. I used to care a whole lot about follower counts and I thought that that was something that really mattered.

I also cared about the perception of being the leader of the community. I wanted people to see me as the captain and I wanted the glory for that community and guess where that got me pretty much nowhere. The, none of those podcasts, communities, videos that I tried to build around that concept ever produced results for me.

They never worked and I never really got any meaningful relationships out of them. So this time around as I've matured and started to grow from my experience and learned that that doesn't, no, not only does that not work, but it's not enjoyable. I started realizing it's way cooler if I could be a part of my own community that's actually led by every single person in it.

I don't want to be selfish or illogical or pointless anymore with with trying to be the ringleader and the sole leader of a community. I really want to adjust to this new reality that I'm going to put in hard work, consistency and meet great people, and that's what's going to lead to success. And everybody in the community is doing that together.

So I don't want followers, I want peers, I want friendships, I want relationships. And I know that sounds a little bit corny, but. I really think that if I can take this a little bit more, one to one over time, this is going to be much more impactful for people and have greater success than if I just try to reach everybody, which I've definitely been guilty of.

That's advice that you're going to get from every single marketer that will come on the podcast. They'll say, determine your audience. Be specific. Don't try to reach everyone, but it's a lot easier said than done because everybody's tempted to try to reach everyone. I'm here to tell you that it doesn't work.

And it doesn't really bring any fulfillment. So instead what I'd like to do is establish empowerment elements, I guess four, every leader that wants to be part of this community. Everybody that comes in is going to be leading in some way. I want us to take that mindset. So there is a Facebook group now, a Slack group.

there's obviously my newsletter. There's this podcast. You're listening to videos and blogs that are coming and you to ramp that up more and more. And then just across all social media, whether it's Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, even TechTalk, all those places, we're going to try to have a group of people that are working together to lead each other.

In improving their marketing efforts, their sales efforts. If you're building a product, this is probably going to be a really useful and impactful group for you to be a part of because it's not just the about like there's, there's no money being made off of this. This is all just strictly trying to help out people.

Be a thought leader for others, not for your own benefit, but for benefiting others and that that's the goal of this. So just to be transparent about where we're at with this, I really encourage you, if you're on Facebook a lot, join the Facebook group. If you're on Slack, constantly joined the Slack group.

If you just want to have one email every week and that's all the communication you want to have, there's an option for that too. If you want to be more on demand and watch videos or listen to podcasts on your own time, totally up to you. The central location for all of this is micro influential.com I encourage you to go in and check that out, but that said that, that's my thought for the day.

Just. Don't seek out her followers. Seek out peers, seek out relationships. I hope you have a great weekend and stay safe out there. Thank you once again for listening. If you would like my personal growth marketing tips delivered to your inbox Tuesdaily, get it every Tuesday, visit Bitly slash micro gross, so bit dot leap slash micro growth.

Also, just feel free to DM me anywhere on social, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, even take talk. I'm on it all. I'd love to help you out till next time. Influencers. Thank you very much.