Improve your slack community

Welcome to the Community Coach newsletter, a value packed read
for community builders who are connecting people during a time when true connection between humans has never felt more important.

In this tightly knitted newsletter…

• 📚 Community 101: Using tools to “fix” a community platform (feat Tightknit.ai for Slack)
  

• 🤖 Console - a growing community platform that supports web3 
  

• 🎱 Change the usual “How are you?” question & turn autopilot off
  

• 🔥 Inspiring community builder: Lenny’s newsletter community

• 👋 Follow up discussion: How will AI change the community platform landscape? Some additional thoughts…
  

• Free mentoring sessions available: reply to this email and tell me what you need help with (available to 5 of my readers)

Community 101: Using tools to improve community experience: Tightknit for Slack

No community platform is perfect. All platforms have their pros and cons, and most community managers end up finding tools to enhance the member experience.

It’s better to get up and running with a community platform that isn’t “perfect” instead of building something from scratch to begin with.

You can use tools to fix the limitations of the platform - and focus on more important things like continuing to bring maximum value to your members.

If you run a Slack community, you’ll know there are some limitations for using the tool to build a community.

If you’re using the free version of Slack, you lose messages after 90 days and it is completely closed off from Google searches (unlike Reddit for instance).

One of those tools to help “fix” those Slack issues is called Tightknit.ai.

Tightknit converts Slack conversations into posts and comments to your own companion website. All posts & comments in Slack are updated over time on the website, and each conversation feed on the website has a permalink back to your Slack community. It’s “opening” your community up to the online search world.

And even more importantly, you can keep your community posts alive beyond the 90 day message limit on Slack.

This tool not only preserves all of your community’s valuable discussions but by making your posts searchable online (SEO boosts for the win), it will improve your community's visibility and helping your memberships grow through organic search.

You can also create and manage events in Slack along with building leaderboards and community member directories using this tool.

Some other things to note about Tightknit:

• Using a tool like Tightknit means that your “closed” community discussions will become “open” as they become searchable. Make sure you are only using Tightknit for channels that your members are comfortable with having the information broadcasted publicly (i.e. like Reddit).

• Similarly, your Slack members full names will be used on the public companion website. Make sure your members are comfortable with this, otherwise you can change this manually currently by contacting Tightknit support to request whatever privacy setting is suitable.

• You need to have decent slack etiquette in your community for this tool to work well: Your members need to make sure to always use message threads to respond to comments. Otherwise, consecutive top-level messages will each create distinct posts in the Tightknit companion site without context of each other.

• This tool will also require additional duties from the community manager (who needs to manually “tag” appropriate posts with an emoji reaction to add the posts to the public companion site). This is a pro and con - it’s good that not all posts are automatically “public” but it does mean more work for the CM.

Console community platform: Web3 communities are still around

For those who think that Web3 has well and truly died because the hype train has left the station…

You should know there are still people in the web3 space who are very much active and continuing to build.

Web3 gaming in particular is definitely growing and is an area I’m paying attention to.

I am still asked to this day which community platforms are out there for Web3 communities - besides Discord and Telegram.

Console is one of the community platforms out there that is worth a look.

It offers both a browser based and app based platform with:

• group chat

• audio & video spaces

• ability to host events

• offers web3 wallet features to distribute loyalty perks, airdrops etc.

Check out how Console lines up against the two other platforms:

There are plenty of Web3 users and communities on Console already with 6000+ users and 500 communities and continuing to grow.

It doesn’t have the high barrier to entry that other newer platforms would have.

The platform is also constantly shipping new features - check out their new video live spaces now available:

What I like about the Console team:
a) They pay attention to what their users want, and
b) They pay attention to the other popular platforms weaknesses/frustrations (e.g. Twitter Spaces glitches) and aiming to execute better for the benefit of their users

There’s still a way for this platform to go - they are still working on improvements - analytics, an integrated CRM system and the ability to monetize communities - but this may just be the alternative platform Web3 communities need.

Change the usual “How are you?” question and turn autopilot off

I read this tweet recently and it has now changed the way I think of approaching my random interactions. This could also be a great icebreaker question for your community members to get to know each other.

Instead of asking:
“How are you today”
Ask:
“What’s one thing you’re looking forward to this summer?”.

Genius. I encourage you to try this out and let me know how it goes.

Inspiring community builder: Lenny’s newsletter community

You may have heard about Lenny’s newsletter community…

It all started with Lenny’s Newsletter - a weekly advice column about product, growth and career. There is TONS of value delivered to subscribers:

Lenny has built a community of people who are interested in all things related to product building & business growth, and it all started from writing a newsletter.

Here’s Lenny’s “community value stack” that has evolved over time:

• Newsletter

• Podcast

• Slack community (with over 15k members globally)

• Job Board “Talent collective”

• Angel invests

• In person meetups

He creates community “roundup” newsletters (a concept I have mentioned for years is important for community builders!) - sharing weekly wisdom that has been shared within the paid Slack community. These insights are only available to paid members.

Check out Lenny’s community recap for 2023 which also included organising a ton of local meetups and shipping even more value to his community.

P.S. - I LOVE community recaps and have also been advising community builders to do these for years! They’re such a special way to celebrate your community highlights (and trust me - your members can easily forget a lot of highlights so it’s great to remind them!).

Also thought this was an interesting insight into most popular IRL meetup locations for his community (if you’re building for a similar community base then take note!):

Lenny scales up the community meetups by having meetup hosts in each location.

A genius community building move is to thank your most loyal community members - publicly - and show them that you not only appreciate but you’re taking notice.

Look how Lenny thanks the most frequent meetup hosts and includes the number of meetups hosted:

In one of my last newsletters, I mentioned the magic of matching your members on-to-one. Lenny does this through his mentorship matching program. Note again how he constantly calls out people who are helping him behind the sce

He monetizes the community directly by offering Slack membership to paid newsletter subscribers and accepts sponsorships to local meetup events.

Key learnings to apply to your own community

• You can start a community from doing something that isn’t strictly “community building” - like writing a newsletter

• Ask yourself: what is your “community value stack”?

• Community weekly roundups and yearly recaps - you should consider doing these

• Celebrate and recognise key contributors to your community

• Match members one-to-one if it will deliver them value

Follow up: AI & Community platforms

In my newsletter last week I covered how potentially dangerous AI could be for the online community industry.

I wanted to highlight one of the interesting responses I received from one of my readers and share my follow up thoughts.

This comment is directly responding to my comments on the new AI tool that “Generate human like replies using AI with a single click.” - on LinkedIn and Twitter.

I had similar thoughts when Midjourney, DALL-E and other tools started creating photo realistic images (and now video too).

Since then I'm seeing additional rollouts where platforms like Youtube require creators to declare if they are using AI and "using AI to fight AI" - i.e. Youtube are also using AI (along with additional human moderation) to detect AI videos.

They also have added the ability for viewers to report AI generated content that has not been declared appropriately.

It may be fair to expect similar rollouts with more community platforms over time.

I've always been a fan of communities being more "closed" and requiring application forms for people to join a community. I’ve had great success with doing so myself when building communities. The quality of those communities with application forms tend to be much higher than similar/ competitor communities that were more open.

With the rise in AI I can see a world where all communities would at least require "human verification" application forms at a minimum.

Got a question for me? DM me on Twitter or reply to this email and ask away. Your question may be answered in a future newsletter (and I’ll reply to everyone who asks).

Until next time,

Carmen
Community Coach

P.S - Free mentoring sessions available

As I’ve reached over 100 subscribers, I’ll be selecting 5 community builders to have a free mentoring session with me.

If you’re interested, reply and let me know what you are stuck on with your community!

No strings attached, I’ll be selecting 5 winners soon 🙂 

Enjoy reading this newsletter?

I’d really appreciate if you could spread the word about my newsletter to support me!

Connect with me on Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn.