Community Signal

by Patrick O'Keefe

Community Signal is a podcast for experienced online community professionals, including those working in audience engagement, association management, developer relations, moderation, trust and safety, and more. It's released every two weeks and hosted by industry veteran Patrick O’Keefe. This is a very community-focused program. There are plenty of social media and marketing podcasts out there. That’s not what this is. Social media is a set of tools. Community is a strategy you apply to those tools. Marketing brings new customers. Community helps you keep them.

Episodes

Snapchat Story-Sized Humanity

40m · Published 23 Apr 09:30

What brings you to your favorite social networks? Is it the people that you know you’ll find there or the topics and content that you know you’ll be able to discover? In this episode of Community Signal, we dive deep into what Chris Brogan, a digital marketing expert and New York Times bestselling author, thinks he wants from social networks and conversely, how he observes his children using Twitter, SoundCloud, and more.

The gaming industry is at the forefront of this conversation. Chris and Patrick discuss the unique social engineering behind the Nintendo Switch and how other hardware items, like digital photo frames, really need to catch up.

All this, plus:

Teens forecasting the future of content and internet platforms
Fortnite and the Queen’s gaming preferences
The reckoning coming to the way we work

Our Podcast is Made Possible By…

If you enjoy our show, please know that it’s only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Higher Logic and Structure3C.

Big Quotes

“Kids are faster than we ever were. They’re using smaller bites. The right word might be a symbol or package or something where they’re making a reference to something where the word no longer actually is the direct literal translation, but now has a whole different set of meanings.” -@chrisbrogan

“We’re going to get down to Snapchat story-sized humanity. When a lot of people hear me say that, they scoff and go, ‘Kids these days.’ I’m thinking, ‘What if they’re right? What if stories are too bloated?’ Spider-Man: Homecoming is the best Spider-Man movie ever made because they didn’t bother telling us the origin story because guess what? We’ve all known it since like 1964.” -@chrisbrogan

“I think that there is such an absolute disservice being done to educating entrepreneurship in this country right now for the digital space. We still have a tough time explaining to small towns that you actually don’t need jobs that reside in the town where your house is. That you could actually work on the internet anywhere on the Earth and just happen to get your WiFi from that town. There’s a schism and I don’t know what’s going to really change it, but I know that there’s a huge reckoning coming where a lot of people are going to suddenly realize, ‘Oh, I need a new way of doing work.'” -@chrisbrogan

About Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan is a digital marketing expert advisor and the CEO of Owner Media Group. He’s worked with brands like Google, Pepsi, Disney, Sony Electronics USA, Comcast, and Microsoft. He is a professional keynote speaker and the New York Times bestselling author of nine books, the latest of which is Find Your Writing Voice. He is engaged to Jacqueline Carly, and between the two of them, have three wonderful kids. Chris lives in northern Massachusetts.

Transcript

View transcript on our website

Your Thoughts

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Building a Community That Won’t Cash Out

40m · Published 09 Apr 12:11

RPG (RolePlayGateway), a community of game designers, world builders, and storytellers scripting entire universes, is entering its 14th year of existence. And while RPG founder Eric Martindaleknows that some members of the community might move on, he’s in it for the long haul. He’s energized by the relationships that he’s seen members of the RPG community build and the excitement behind INK, a Bitcoin-backed digital currency that people within the community are using to tip one another for their creative work, and purchase digital goods.

In this episode, Eric gives a crash course on blockchain, which he chalks up to being a “highly inefficient database.” If you haven’t done your homework on this subject yet, his definitions and suggestions on things to look out for will help get you up to speed. We discuss:

The ups and downs of managing one community for 14 years
How the RPG community deals with wordiness
Three things that every community manager should know about blockchain

Our Podcast is Made Possible By…

If you enjoy our show, please know that it’s only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Open Social and Structure3C.

Big Quotes

“Tipping is extremely popular [with my community’s currency]. Users are in some cases donating 5% or 10% of their total holdings to other users because of forum posts and that’s really exciting to me. It shows that people are really appreciating one another and willing to show that appreciation through some form of monetary exchange.” -@martindale

“One of the most valuable things that a blockchain can provide is the ability to verify published information without having to trust any particular party. … A blockchain can provide the ability for any participant in a community to know that something is true based on when it was published and all of the other people that have verified that information.” -@martindale

“I would really recommend enabling user-to-user tipping. That has been extremely successful for us because it allows individual users to show their gratitude and appreciation for one another. That’s something that, up until now, has really been difficult. You have to use these official karma points or various tools and mechanisms, whereas, with digital currency, you have the ability to actually transfer real value to show your gratitude and appreciation.” -@martindale

“Any time you hear the phrase, ‘What do you think of blockchain?’ and you don’t put a definite article in front of it, chances are it’s going to be one of the people that are excited about the hype and the excitement of the phrase. But really, just replace that word. Replace the word “blockchain” with the word “database” and see if it makes any sense. If it doesn’t make any sense, then it probably isn’t a very good use case because what a blockchain is, is a highly inefficient database.” -@martindale

About Eric Martindale

Eric is the founder of RPG, an online community of game designers, world builders, and storytellers entering its 14th year of independent operation. RPG recently announced “INK,” a Bitcoin-backed digital currency given in exchange for community-focused work and used for pricing of player-owned virtual assets within their custom “Universe Simulator” game engine.

Eric has been a software engineer, entrepreneur, and community manager for over 15 years, building software for startup companies in a wide number of industries. More recently, he worked as a developer evangelist and open source strategist in the Bitcoin industry, helping several well-known companies in the space with technical communication and community growth. He’s now focused on launching Fabric, a decentralized operating system and communication protocol for building peer-to-peer applications that operate without any central server or authority — a tool he hopes will be most useful in helping communities self-organize without the threat of censorship, abuse, and privacy violations present in existing centralized providers of community platforms.

Transcript

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Your Thoughts

Thank you for listening to Community Signal.

Community Signal has 112 episodes in total of non- explicit content. Total playtime is 76:05:29. The language of the podcast is English. This podcast has been added on August 21st 2022. It might contain more episodes than the ones shown here. It was last updated on May 31st, 2024 16:10.