- Something like 80% of startups today are leading with community as their marketing strategy. And when the young people are starting businesses, and leading with community, that says "That's where we're going here. " (rock music) (elephant trumpeting) - Today I'm very excited to be joined by Mark Schaefer.
If you don't know who Mark is, you gotta know Mark. He is a futurist and marketing strategist. He is the author of multiple books, including "Marketing Rebellion," and known he's also host of the "Marketing Companion Podcast.
" His brand new book is called "Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy. " Mark, welcome back to the show for the 10th time. How you doing today?
- Has it been 10 times? - Yes. - Oh, that's awesome.
That's really special. I'm truly honored. - Yep, you're up there on the list.
Today, Mark and I are gonna explore the benefits of community, and why it can be a strategy for marketing. Mark, let's start with a why question, which is, why are communities, as we're recording this in the very tail end of 2022, entering into 2023, why are communities so important for business? - Well, the way I look at it, Mike, is that there's three mega trends coming together right now that point to community as a profound solution, and really an overlooked opportunity for many businesses.
Number one is, as you and I know well, and we've talked about this before, a lot of our traditional marketing just doesn't work like it used to. We're in this world of overwhelming information density, we're in a world of streaming content where people, you know, advertising doesn't work like it used to, branded content doesn't necessarily work like it used to, the competition is greater than ever. So we need another solution to create that emotional connection to our customers.
That's number one. Number two. Something you've been pioneering is this idea of Web three, and new technologies that are enabling amazing new ways to connect.
You know, when people hear about tokenized economies and NFTs and metaverse, it can be really confusing, and there's a lot of strange language. But when you cut through all of that, it really presents a new way to belong. There are amazing new communities based on NFTs.
So this is part of our future. The third big trend that's happening is mental health. People are longing to belong.
I saw something that really cut to my heart. There was a headline in the New York Times that said "The Loneliest Generation. " They're talking about Gen Z.
And- - Gen Z is how old? Just for those of us that are challenged with the letters. - You know, I'd say like maybe 24 to 15, something like that.
- Okay. Okay. - And maybe a little older, maybe 26.
'Cause I know the first member of Gen Z just got elected to Congress, so- - Okay. - So they're coming, right? They're on their way.
And McKinsey, just a week ago, Michael, had this report that said 51% of Americans aged 24 to 18 have had medical treatment for a mental health problem. 51%. The average for all the other generations is 24.
Now, the pandemic is a big part of this. Spending a lot of time online, you know, just never being offline, is part of it. There's a lot of trends in society that are amplifying this problem.
It was happening before the pandemic, and the pandemic just made it worse. So the third trend is that people are more alone, isolated, and depressed than ever. They're longing to belong.
They need community. You put all those things together, those three things, I believe using community as part of a brand marketing strategy is the most overlooked opportunity in the history of marketing opportunities. You know, you've got a community associated with your business, you're like the poster child for this.
You can see the brand benefits it brings you, but most businesses are not approaching it that way. - Okay. So the three trends that you talk about were this information density and streaming content where there's not as many ads, said another way, it's really hard for marketers to get their message out there, right?
- Yeah. - And you talked about Web three, and for those that don't know what Mark was alluding to, I have another show called "Web three Business" where we explore this whole new frontier. And it's true that communities are at the core of so many of these projects, right?
These NFT projects, these decentralized autonomous organizations. It's completely all about the community enablement that happens in a decentralized manner. And then when you layer in this mental health concept, right?
Which is really impacting the younger generation, you're saying that all three of these kind of are overlapping to create this need for more community, and businesses that understand this can thrive, and that those that do not may be in trouble. Is that kind of what I'm hearing you say? - Yeah, and I wanna emphasize that this isn't just, you know, Mark Schaefer's ideas of the world.
(Mark laughing) That this is backed up with a lot of data and a lot of research. And one of the things, actually, two data points that I'll point to that sort of validate where I'm going here is the day I finished the book, I wrote the last words of the book, that day, McKinsey came out with a major research report that said, "Community is the next big thing in marketing. " So that was like a little mic drop moment for me.
The second thing is that this is already happening. Something like 80% of startups today are leading with community as their marketing strategy. So I think that's important.
I think that's profound. I mean, I always look to, the young people starting businesses today are really reflecting the needs of society. And when the young people are starting businesses and leading with community, that says "That's where we're going here.
" - You know what's interesting is this feels a little bit like the early days of social media- - Absolutely. - Because community was so important. - Yeah.
- It seems like the pendulum shifted. Like I remember back when I started Social Media Examiner in 2009, it was all about community. Everybody's job was community managers, right?
- Yeah. Yep. - And they were nurturing communities and comments on blogs.
They were nurturing communities on Facebook. And it was really all about the community. But somewhere along the line, things turned into broadcast, right?
And we went this other direction where it was not about the community, it was about, "Look at me," and have this mass audience. Would you agree? And now it's switching back.
- I mean, you and I were both there in those early days, and it was like, it was meaningful. It, you know, we, it is like, I thought "This is the great equalizer. Now we're we're gonna meet these friends from all over the world.
" (Mark laughing) And- - Which happened. Which happened. - Well, you know, it happened.
Sort of social media became weaponized, and it became less fun, more corporate, less human, more automated, algorithms instead of people. And, you know, just week by week and month by month and year by year, it just lost that specialness. And so in the book, I actually addressed this.
I connect the dots between social media, content and an audience, and community. And I wanna emphasize. I mean, social media is still important.
You know, even though it doesn't have that, in many places, at least, it doesn't have that same community feel, it still gives us that opportunity to connect with people we never could have met before. I mean, I just got off a call before I'm having this discussion with you, with a guy from India. I never would've known this guy if it hadn't been through social media.
So that's important. But normally, those social media connections are weak relational links. We're posting content, we don't really know who sees it, we don't really know if it creates any action.
And the next step really is content and an audience. That's what you and I are doing now. You've built this wonderful content asset, social media marketing podcast, it's powerful, you have this loyal audience, you know, they binge your shows, and this is a really powerful emotional connection.
And I talk about this in the book as sort of the next step, the next evolution. But, in a way, it's still a cult of personality. They love this show partially because they love you and they trust you.
And if you go away, you know, will the show go away? Will the audience go away? The next step is community.
- So let's talk about, before we get into- - Yeah. - Like your strategy, why do communities fail? Let's address that.
Because obviously, you've got thoughts on that. - Well, there's one big reason. And that's because a company's purpose for the community is not aligned with the customer's purpose for the community.
70% of communities fail, and the main reason is 'cause they're trying to sell stuff. (Mark laughing) And nobody's gonna go into a community because, you know, they want someone to pick their wallet apart, right? They wanna go to a community because it's something fun, it's a destination for them every day.
One of the biggest communities, and I mean this is a case study most people know about, at least most people in America, you know, it's Harley Davidson. And Harley Davidson has this big, hundreds of thousands of people in this community called H. O.
G. , Harley Owners Group. And they ride together, they have festivals, and 700,000 of them go to Sturgis, South Dakota every year.
Now, the purpose of Harley Davidson, this is their stated community purpose, to help people fulfill their dreams through the motorcycle lifestyle. It's not to sell more, it's not to make a quarterly profit, it's to fulfill their dreams. It's a nice way of saying, "We're Harley Davidson, we wanna help you be a badass.
" 'Cause it's all about leather and powerful, the sound of the motorcycle. - Yeah. - And everything they do from the top of the company to the bottom of the company, it is about that purpose.
It's about the customer's purpose. "We wanna be a badass! " "We're gonna help you do it.
" Now, they're selling transportation just like your car dealership down the street. Can you imagine Hartley Davidson saying, "It's a President's Day sale! We're going crazy!
$2,000 off today! " No. (Michael laughing) They would never do that.
Even though they're in kind of the same business. - Right. - 'Cause they have a community.
And Mike, when you have that community, you don't have to have crazy sales. You don't need SEO. Right?
People are in this community because they believe in this purpose, because they believe in you. You know, one of our mutual friends, we talked about before the show, Mathew Sweezey, he told me he only buys Patagonia because he belongs to this community, because he believes in their mission, their purpose of responsible stewardship of the earth so much. When you have that emotion, when you belong to the brand like that, your marketing is over.
And that's why community is so powerful. Marketing, as we traditionally think of it. - Yeah, that's great.
I love this. So marketers who are listening to this show, if you're thinking, "Ooh, let's build a community so we can sell more stuff. " Well, that's true that you could sell more stuff, but it's not like the main motive.
You don't build a community and then just sell to them, right? And- - Right. - We're gonna break down this a little bit, and you might have hinted at some of it, you know?
As far as your strategy goes, you've got this continuum. Why don't you explain what that is? - Yeah, well, we start talking about what's the purpose, the foundational purpose of brand marketing?
Is to create this emotional connection between what you do and your fans, your customers, your audience. Now, you know, the example probably everybody can understand is like Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is brown, sugar water.
But that's not what you think of when you think of Coca-Cola. There's another emotion. It could be polar bears, it could be Santa Claus, it could be happiness.
Now, how have they done that? They've spent millions and millions of dollars over decades on advertising. But that's going away.
We just don't see ads like we used to because of the streaming economy. We've gotta create that emotion another way. Social media plays some part, content, having people subscribe to your content plays a bigger part.
The biggest part of all is community. Because that's where not only do people build a sustainable relationship with you, they build a relationship with each other. The friendships, the love, the support that happens in community, that emotion, the research shows that psychology extends to the brand.
It's extraordinary and so powerful. It almost suggests, Mike, that when you create a brand community, the most important thing isn't the relationship with you, it's creating new friendships. That's what's gonna keep them there.
And if they stay there, that adds a layer of switching costs for your brand. 'Cause to leave your brand means leaving your community, and leaving all those people. It's really, it turns marketing, management, and leadership sort of on its head about what the purpose of what creates success in a community rather than the way we've thought about things in the past.
- So Mark calls this concept the emotional continuum, right? Which is social media, content, and community. - Yeah.
- Now, there are some people listening that are like me, I'm very analytical. I'm somewhat creative. I know how to write, I'm a good copywriter.
And there are other people that have, are more like some of the other people on my team, like Phil Mershon, my director of events who, who are very relational, very emotionally focused about creating great experiences. It seems to me, Mark, that you kind of need a little bit of both, right? You need the people who are good at doing things, but you also need someone who understands that this person to person relational thing is something that's hard to measure, but super valuable, right?
So you wanna talk about that a little bit? Because depending on who's leading this charge, they may or may not be successful because this emotional side is hard for some people who are not emotional to grapple with, right? - Yeah.
I'd like to talk about one of my favorite stories from the book. It's the first time, you know, I've written 10 books, this is the first time I devoted an entire chapter to one person. That person is a mutual friend of ours, Dana Malstaff.
Dana is an entrepreneur in the San Diego area, and she became pregnant, and she was torn about, you know, "Do I devote all my energy to being an entrepreneur? Do I devote all my energy to be a mother? " She said, "I want to do both.
" She didn't really have a good support group for that, so she created, I'm making a long story short- - Yeah Boss Mom is what I think it's called, right? - She created Boss Mom. All right.
Dana now has 70,000 people in her group. In her first eight months, she had a six-figure income. Her business, I think she started at around 2016, it's about doubled every year.
It's almost a million-dollar business. Now, here's what will get your attention. She has no sales department, she has nobody working on sales, she has no marketing department, she has no marketing budget.
Here is her strategy, which gets to your point around relations. She said "My primary goal is to create safety. It's about culture.
" It's like when people come there, they expect to be in a place where they're nurtured and they're safe. And if you do that, combined with a unifying purpose, you're gonna create this community that will buy anything you have. Dana was very careful to say in the book, "I know how to sell.
If I need to sell, I can do it. " But she doesn't have to, because if she comes out with a new video series, a coaching program, an event, people buy it right away, a new book, they buy it right away because they love her and they wanna support her. So it's marketing without marketing as we think about it.
But it's the most powerful idea ever because it's the only kind of marketing people love. They wanna be there every day. Why wouldn't we be thinking about that in the portfolio of any of our businesses?
- Okay, so getting to starting points for those of us that wanna build a community, let's talk about purpose. I heard you say that a lot. And then, you know, how do we, any guidance on how to come up with a good purpose, and then how do we get some of those early fans started into the community?
- Yeah. I've got one whole chapter of the book talking about this idea of purpose. And really thinking about this intersection about what your company stands for, and what means something to your customers that would make them want to belong.
Some of the questions I ask in this chapter prompt you to think about what's your North star? Why did you start the business? And why is that relevant to people today?
Another thing to think about, is there something you can do for the world or for your business that can be done better with the help of customers in a community than on your own? The people who work for you, what do they stand for? Why do they work for you?
Why do they love to be there? Is there something in common that your employees share that also could be a signal for why customers want to be part on what you're doing? So I've got, you know, probably 25 different ideas to help people think through what is that, you know, what's that initial purpose?
Now, what I've found in terms of like getting your first members, boy, you know, researching this book, I spent a lot of time studying communities. And I'd be interested to hear your take on this, and your experience. Almost every community started with people who were already kind of there.
So for you, you started publishing content, and maybe it was people who were your early subscribers, early podcast listeners, maybe friends who supported what you were doing and were interested. Almost every community just started with five or 10 people that were kind of already there. They already shared your passion and your idea.
And then it's just a matter of fanning the flames. Let's codify this, let's get together in a community. And those early- - Let me share.
Let me share a little bit about what we did in the early days. - I'd love to hear it. - Let's take for example, Social Media Marketing World, right?
Which we're coming upon our 10th anniversary, and you're gonna be speaking there. We've always recruited volunteers. And in the beginning, the very first year, the volunteers were friends and family, but in the second year, they were customers who had attended the prior year, but couldn't afford to come back.
So we asked them to volunteer. And then we built this culture of volunteers, and people absolutely loved volunteering. And sometimes we would have hundreds of what we call white shirts, which were volunteers.
Some of them were customers inside of our Social Media Marketing Society, other ones were just those who have attended. And then we got to the point where it became kind of a big deal if you got chosen to be a volunteer, you know? And even in the very beginning when I started Social Media Examiner, I needed a director of editorial, and Cindy King who has passed away since, but she was in the community, she was a consumer of the content, she raised her hand and said, "I'll do it for free.
" And then eventually, I hired her full-time, right? And I know, Mark, this is probably how it's worked for you as well, right? Like you're creating content to draw an audience to you.
And all you have to do sometimes is say, "Hey, I'm looking for some people to help out. " Maybe it's moderating- - That's exactly it. - On Discord, right?
Is that- - Exactly it. Yep. - Right?
- Yeah, in my community, it's just people who followed me on social media, who read my books, and now they're running the community. - Right. - We're doing experiments, you know, we're actually, you know, my community is like, we're writing a book together.
People in the community, they're writing, they're editing, they're doing the cover, they're doing the promotion. I'm just sort of, you know, kind of like helping. So- - For those that don't have a community with content, you can also do it with customers.
- Oh, absolutely. - For example, when we started the Social Media Marketing Society, everybody was paying to be in there. And we asked some of our customers if they wanted to be moderators inside of our group, which was, their job was mostly just to answer questions, and keep the dialogue going.
And we rewarded them with special perks and stuff like that. But they were actual customers who just wanted to have a slightly elevated exposure inside of this group. And they happily volunteered.
- Well, you know, I wanna build on this comment 'cause it's a very keen insight, what you were doing with perks, rewards- - Right. - Acknowledgement. It's special to become a volunteer.
What you're doing, Mike, is bestowing status. - Okay. - And this, so you talked about strategy, we talked about purpose.
One of the things I learned as I was researching this book is the critical importance of status. Status really drives the community. People wanna show up every day in the hope of being acknowledged, in the hope of being present and making a new friend.
What I've learned, and you know, I don't know, I'd be interested to know if you've actually thought about this as part of your strategy, but for me, the two most important parts of nurturing a community is making sure, it's just like Dana said, it's a safe culture. Number two, bestowing status and acknowledging people, rewarding people. That's what keeps the community going.
So, you know, you mentioned that sort of offhand. - Well, and you know, I will tell you, I will tell you we did employ game theory in the very beginning when we launched the Social Media Marketing Society, where we were using a rewards plugin because back in the day, we were building it inside of bbPress or something like that, I can't remember what the technology was, but it allowed you to earn points, and there was a leaderboard. So the points were earned by commenting on other people's stuff, by making friend requests.
And the more points you got, you would get up on the leaderboard, and the leaderboard was literally right there on the website, you know? And people were active, super active 'cause they wanted to be on site on that leaderboard, right? And this is exactly what now has worked in the social media.
People wanna have lots of shares and likes. There's something to that, isn't there? - Yeah.
And we give people inside my own community chances to like amplify other people's content. But you know, what I find as sort of like, you know, I don't consider myself the leader of the community, but I'm kind of the papa bear. (Mark laughing) And I pay attention to what people are doing.
And it might just be a little emoji with applause or something like that. But I wanna know, I want people to know that I care, I'm paying attention, that they're acknowledged, that they're valuable, that they're worthy. And I think that's a big part of why people are there in the first place.
- Okay, so we've talked about some fun, little strategies and techniques to kind of get started. Let's just talk about how to cultivate and grow that community, you know, in particular growing it, right? Because, obviously, a community is only as good as the people who feel like there's others like them inside of it, right?
Inside of there, interacting inside of it, right? So what can we do to kind of make the community essentially more vibrant, and ultimately grow to a point where everybody who's in there feels like they can connect with someone who's like them. - You know, it's interesting.
It really goes back to basic social media strategy. And, you know, the most powerful thing you can do on social media is not tell your story, but have someone else tell your story. (Mark laughing) Right?
If you get people sharing your content, that's gold. So one of the things that's sort of an engine to growth is creating opportunities in the community for people to participate in a way that's so fun and so cool, they wanna talk about it outside the community. Something we did last week is, I'm still having trouble explaining this to my wife, Mike, but I bought a penthouse in the metaverse.
So I mean, "Mark, why did you buy a made up digital thing that doesn't really exist? You actually put this on our credit card? " Yes, I did.
Now, what we're doing is we're having experiments, we're learning how to give presentations in the metaverse, and people are there from all over the world. And now people have screenshots of themselves giving presentations in the metaverse. - Or in the jacuzzi.
- And the jacuzzi. See? Even, you know about the jacuzzi.
So our last. . .
We had a holiday party, and we had an art contest where people created artificial intelligence generated art. We had a contest, we had a celebration, we danced, and then we went into the jacuzzi where we learned we could immerse ourself in water with our clothes on. Now, in that jacuzzi, which was overlooking a sunset on a ski slope, we had someone from Belgium, Australia, Ireland, the UK, France, Canada.
It was wonderful. It was so much fun. And people took pictures of that, and they told people outside of the community, posted it on social media, and guess what?
People are saying, "Mark, how do I become part of this? That looks like so much fun. I feel like I'm missing out.
" Same idea as social media strategy, right? You gotta create something so interesting, so unmissable, that people can't wait to talk about it outside the community. And that's how the community grows.
- Well let's, first of all, I love that. Let's talk about when we were prepping for this interview, you mentioned mindset and social contract. I don't know if that's spurs anything that we should talk about.
- Well, there's I think, a really important part of the book that talks about why marketing strategy in a community sort of flips what we learned in college upside down in terms of your mindset about giving up control, even like thinking about measurement in a different way. And one of the big changes is when, you know, marketing is ephemeral, you see a tweet or you don't, you see an ad or you don't, when the budget runs out, you stop your program, you start something else. A community, there's an understanding that this isn't gonna go away.
(Mark laughing) It's like a social contract. We don't really think about marketing like that. But you're creating something where you're building this community, you're building this bond, and those people are not, they're not gonna wanna make it, you know, they don't want it to go away.
There's a story in the book, and this is what sort of like triggered the idea in me. This guy was lamenting about the decline of Google+. He said, "This company, these were my friends, this was my community!
When they pulled the plug on Google+, that was evil! How will I ever trust them? They broke the social contract.
" I thought, "Oh my gosh, that's a really powerful concept. " It's not marketing, it's a social contract. Are you ready to think about your community that way?
Because your customers are gonna think about it that way. It's a new mindset. - It's interesting.
And those of us that hang out in the world of Web three are beginning to understand this a lot because you have people that are launching NFT projects and they figure they can just launch it and be done with it. - Yeah. - But no, those people that purchased that NFT, which usually gives them access to a community, they have high expectations that it's gonna be forever.
(Michael laughing) And this is the future, right? This is one of these mega trends is that people expect there's going to be something there, especially if they're paying for it. But even if they're not paying for it, you know, I come back to like, all right, there's a million communities out there, Mark, you've got Facebook groups, you've got Telegram groups, you've got Discord groups.
I mean, you name your favorite technological platform, right? They're all out there. But the key to, I think the group, is either to have enough people that are vibrant interaction.
I mean, there's two angles, right? Do we grow the group, or do we just grow the interactions inside the group? Like, let's talk about that a little bit.
Like, is it more important to have a massive group, or is it more important to have a smaller group that is super activated? What's your thoughts on this? - Yeah, I don't know.
It could be both. And what's coming to mind here for me is perhaps the largest brand community in the world, I think might be Sephora. It's the cosmetic and skincare brand.
They have a community with 6 million members. I went on there to kind of see what they're doing and learn about what they're doing. There were 110,000 active people at one time in this community.
Now, here's the interesting part. This is a massive community. They're spending like a billion dollars a year as a brand on this marketing strategy, this amazing community.
The person who runs this community, she said, "We've kind of given up trying to attribute how much sales we're getting. Here's our main goal, engagement. " Now, in the social media context, that's important, but in a way, it's like a vanity metric.
You can go broke with engagement. You can engage so much that you're not doing anything else. - Well, and the only reason people really want engagement is because the algorithms reward engagement.
Let's be honest, right? - Yeah. And that's what you're trying to drive.
- Right. - And in her, you know, walled community, she said, "If we have engagement, that shows people are interested, the things we're doing in the community are relevant. So it's a sign that we're heading in the right direction.
" So to answer your question, in that case, size is important, and engagement is important, but I think it would have to get down to the strategy for, you know, for every community. I mean, my community, I'm a little afraid of it growing too big, because it's just so cool right now. We've got people who really know each other.
- Well, you know, and this is where some of the stuff I've been doing over on my Web three business podcast comes in really interesting. I've been interviewing some of these smaller communities, the leaders of some of these smaller communities in the Web three world. For example, I interviewed a guy that heads this one called Safary, spelled with a Y at the end, with a, you know, with a Y instead of an RE, and he's got a very small community of Web three growth marketers.
And he's only got a couple hundred people in there, and he's super careful about who he lets into the community. But these are powerful people at some of the biggest brands that are doing growth marketing in the world of Web three. So if you can develop, and by the way, you don't have to be a big business, everybody who's thinking about this, you could be a consultant, you could be a.
. . He's developing software.
So, but he's bringing all these growth marketers from these Web three people together, and every week he's having live audio rooms inside of Discord. They have their own live audio technology. And the people in the community get recruited to be up there and to be interviewed every week.
And they're sharing live in there, and it's not recorded. So if you miss it, you miss it, right? And they show up every week to kind of learn from each other in this special gated community.
Now, that could be very powerful depending on what kind of niche you're in, right? You recruit the right people in there, and they feel like they're surrounded by people that are like them. You don't need a lot of people.
You just need the right people. Because if you're ultimately building something, like maybe you have a consultancy, you don't need a lot of those people to turn into clients. And we've seen this happen with our friends who've done events like Tyler Anderson, who used to do Social Media Day San Diego, right?
He had a small agency in San Diego. He didn't have thousands of people at his event, but he had the right people at his event, including a lot of the local businesses that he ultimately ended up helping with their social marketing. What's your thoughts on that?
- Yeah, I think that's a fantastic example. I also wanna build on your idea about you don't have to be a big business. I mean, one of the things I try to do in this book is create new case studies for everybody.
There's, you know, there's something for everybody. There's B2B, B2C, nonprofit, small businesses, solo entrepreneurs that have built communities. And it's like you said, there's a guy in Tampa that has built a community with 30 people that have become just this passionate group of friends that drove 14 million dollars worth of new business for his company.
I think that's about the smallest community I feature in the book. So you're exactly right. It kind of gets to your purpose.
Like my purpose in my community is to learn about the future of marketing. Do I need a million people to do that? No.
You know, so it's gonna be a learning process for me about, you know, what is the right size? And I love the example about your friend in San Diego. Just has to be the right people to help your dreams come true.
- Okay. So as far as nurturing this community, we talked about status already. Let's talk a little bit about culture.
If there is a cultural side of this, how can we establish standards, and expectations, and anything else that we can do to kind of like build that community to be a really vibrant community regardless of the size? - Yeah. I think there's three things.
Is that, number one, every person that comes in the community, they have to read the rules. (Mark laughing) And the number one rule in my group is treat people in this group like you would treat your mother. And there's zero tolerance for anything other than that.
Now, the second item is that I enforced that. There was a situation in my group where someone was very disrespectful to someone else in the community. I deleted the comment, I addressed the person directly, and said, "That's just not the way it's gonna be.
" And the person appreciated it, and we moved on. The third thing is to be open. And this is another issue around mindset.
That you've got these enthusiastic people who wanna be there. They're gonna move things in another direction. You've gotta be open to that.
You've gotta allow that to happen as long as it stays in the boundaries of the rules. So, you know, right now my community is going in unexpected ways, but it's cool. People are creating, they're collaborating, they're doing new things together, they're partnering, (Mark clearing his throat) they're creating new business ideas together.
That's awesome. So it can't be like my mandate of "This is what it's gonna be. " You've gotta allow that flexibility.
As long as it stays within the boundaries of the culture and the behavior, you gotta kind of let things flow. And, you know, if you're a controlling kind of personality, that's kind of weird. (Mark laughing) - Yeah.
Because you know, and by the way, again, another nod to Web three, I'm part of Kevin Rose's Proof community and Moon Birds and all these other great things he's doing, and they decided to do something really interesting. They decided to open license the Moon Bird's graphics for anything. But the Moon Bird name it is copyrighted.
So- - That's scary. - What they did though, was they allowed people to go out and design tequila brands and put their Moon Bird on it, and anybody can do it. So what it did was it shockingly opened up this vibrant creativity.
- Yeah. - Inside the community where everybody was out there doing stuff that was ultimately purpose, ultimately benefiting the community because they were embracing, you know, they were essentially evangelizing by doing this, the bigger brand. Now, I know this is not gonna fly for big business because they've got attorneys, and there's no chance those IP rights are gonna get released.
But I do think there's lessons we can learn from this, which is allowing people in the community to have a little bit more leeway with their ability to do stuff together under the umbrella of the community, right? Thoughts on that? - This is one of the best things that's happened to me this year.
One of my proudest moments. One of the things we're doing in our community is we're co-creating a new book. And it's a Web-three-based book.
And people are putting in their money, and we're gonna share in profits. And here was an amazing moment. So, you know, my heart in this, what I love, Michael, is I know so many people who have a dream of writing a book, but, you know, look, they've got a job, and they've got a family, and they're taking care of a sick mom, and they can't write a book, but you know what?
They could write a chapter. And together we could learn how to write a book. One of the people who wrote a chapter for this new book said, "Now that I'm learning how to do this, I'm gonna turn my chapter into a whole book.
" I was like, "Oh my gosh. This is great! This is just great!
" We're seeing this power, this creativity just explode in this community. We've unleashed this person. It's gonna do, it could do so much for her personal brand, her business, her family.
And it started in this little seed of an idea. Someone in the community said, "We should, we have so many smart people here, we should write a book together. " And now it's gonna have.
. . .
It's like a pebble in the pond. The ripples are going out, affecting the world, affecting individuals in so many cool ways. - "Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy" is the title of your brand new book.
I would imagine. . .
Do you have an audio book coming out as well? - Audio, Kindle, paperback, and hardback. - Mark, if people wanna connect with you on the socials, which platform is the best one to get you on?
And then also if they wanna check out your website or your podcast, where do you wanna send them? - You can find all my socials on businessesgrow. com.
You can also find, I blog, my podcast there, all my books. - Businessesgrow. com, just to- - Businesses grow.
com. - Okay. - And you can find everything about me there.
And I really love LinkedIn these days. I'm having great conversations there. I follow everybody back.
You know, I just figure it's an honor that somebody would wanna connect with me, and I'd connect with them. Unless they spam me, then I don't. (Mark laughing) - Well, and for those listening, Schaefer is spelled S C H A E F E R.
- Yep. - Mark Schaefer, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom and insights on your brand new book. Congratulations on, what is this?
Your- - 10th. - 10th book? Wow, 10th time on the show and 10th book.
How cool is that? - Yeah. (Michael laughing) Yeah, well, thank you.
It's always an honor. And thank you for the care and preparation you put into these shows. It means a lot, and it shows in the quality of your content.
So congratulations and thank you.
