Episode 43 : Leverage, Create and Maintain Community

Her Career Ladder

What is up Periscope? Yes. Okay, I'm coming on earlier than usual because well, I want to do other things in my nighttime. Hey misbehaving. So I want to talk about creating community and relationships, because oftentimes we just have them. But we don't talk about what they really are, how to create them, how to leverage them, how to maintain them. So I wanted to just talk about some things that I've learned, I've seen that have worked for me, hey, Squirrel Girl, what's going on? And thought we could truly, truly figure out and really have some dialogue about it. So first, let's talk about creating community. So in creating community, hey. And creating community is one reason why I liked Periscope so much is because of the community is because people show up, they do support you. And it can be complete strangers. And the dialogue and community that builds on Periscope doesn't necessarily just stem the the broadcast, or like I'm doing right now brings people in, but the people within that broadcast are communicating, right? They're exchanging dialogue, and they're laughing, having a good time. And I remember being in a broadcast a year or so ago, in the Bronx, and myself and another person watching, right, we were watching, we're having a dialogue, we just were having jokes in the person who was broadcast and got to add it to it. I was like, I don't appreciate y'all coming in here having jokes. It's a very serious broadcast. So you don't want people to have community within your broadcast, it's truly we may bring you together, we may initiate bringing building community, but the people are what make it last. Let me just say, after that person went off on myself and another viewer, and he was like, Ooh, marry me, I was like, how much money you have, we were doing a dot dialogue like that. And the broadcaster got very upset. So guess what happened? I unfollowed her and never went back into another one for broadcasts, ever, ever. Because if you understand community, you understand that people will not always pay attention to what you're talking about. within that community, people are building relationships among each other. And it may stem from you, right, you can be the hub, right? And then you have different spokes going around that hub, be the hub and shut the hell up. So or be the connector, a lot of times that hub is the connector, and you're connecting people to each other. And understanding that role doesn't mean you always have to be the center of attention. What it means is, understand that building community can come from you. But it does not focus on you 100% of the time. Let me just say that, okay, let's get that out of the way. But when it does come to community, it is absolutely a beautiful thing. And I say this, because people whom you just dialogue with every now and again can truly start sharing your content, sharing your message, having given feedback and suggestions to you, really being a support system, virtually, and in real life that you never anticipated. Because you show up. You add value, and you're connecting and building genuine relationships with people. And and it's truly truly in important to do that. All right. So if you are like so many others, you are like, You know what, I cannot go out and talk to these people. I have to stay in the house. And I prefer social media or it's wintertime and you're in the Northeast or the Midwest or the Northwest. It's just cold. And you're like I'm not going out. That is quiet. Okay. You can still build community and relationships being online. Hey, Natalie. So Natalie is my troll. She's my friendly neighborhood troll, which is why she's a moderator in my live streams. But what happens is we built community, I guess in 2015 I met Natalie online, probably 2015. And that's how we met and continued to build community. And what is so interesting is when you tell people what you do, and you're adding value, you're supporting them as well as others in the community. You are seen in a different way. So what what often happens on Periscope is people go, Hey, my, hey, my, um, they got an engineer. I know, everybody calls me the engineer. Because that's what I tell people I do. Hello on top. Yeah, it's been it's been a few years. It's coming up on four. I think no, I think we just hit three. We just hit three. And we met three years ago. We met in 2016. In San Francisco. Yes, it was Periscope Summit then. And now it's switched to Summit Live and does some other stuff. But yeah, we met in 2016 in person in San Francisco. But we initially met here. And so that's part of building community, sometimes even online, people want to meet you in person. So I have an online community. We're in I flown into the bay, some of oh, I'll just pick you up from the airport. I'll just pick you up from the airport. They picked me up from the airport took me to lunch, we looked at what planes doing or special whatever air maneuvers or whatever, we looked at that. And then they dropped me off my Airbnb. Yes, that is rebuilding relationship, genuine relationship. And this person and I we truly would be in our Facebook, DMS, we jump on zooms, brainstorming and helping each other build our businesses and just really having a good time. Right and cracking up on different things, whether it's here on Periscope or on Facebook, we just built a genuine relationship. So when I flew to tell them, Oh, no, I'll pick you up. I was like, Are you sure? Like yeah, no problem. So you can truly truly have that when it comes to building relationships, even on social. But what happens is now that relationship is like, two, three years old, like myself, and that young lady Natalie down there. And guess what, I spent over three hours yesterday with this person brainstorming and really pushing through some things I needed to work through in my business. And she did the same with her business. And I told her something that she hadn't thought of before. She hadn't thought of before. Um, as far as what her true strengths and gifts are. And I said, No, this is what you do. And she was like, can you explain it to me? And I explained it to her. She said, Oh my gosh, that's exactly what I do. She's like, how many people can do that? I said, not a lot of people. So what I told her her gift was she understands end to end processes. And yeah, I don't Yeah, like Michelle was the end to end process. You'll want to know, because what you got until you do sales, you do marketing, you do business development, you do design, right, this person can see what you need from beginning of your business or application to the end, like after, even after you've made the selling and have the customers the things you need to continue to do. Most people can't see that. And she understands and and processes. So now she's at a point where she has to figure out what does that mean for her next business. So I'm so excited because we spent over three hours on the phone to get to a point where she has to think about that. So that was so much fun. Then tonight, I'm at a happy hour local to my area is the tech Happy Hour people who either had tech startups working tech startups work in the tech field for a corporation or local company. We all meet up once a month. What was two guys standing there one was like, I want to sell this one business and another guy like you know, I should sell my other business. But how do we sell it? And who do we sell it to? Why isn't there a platform to sell this on? This is and so we're literally going back and forth the bills I'm just listing because I'm tired at this point. Literally going back and forth helping each other how to figure out how to sell one of their businesses. And one of them goes wow things I had thought about this time I wanted to do it but I didn't know how to do it. Right. So now he has a strategy or some tools to go out and actually do it and guess what that happens? That happens?