246: Breaking the Paywall: A Free Membership Offering in the Cancel Culture Era

Hey there everyone. Welcome to the Indestructible PR Podcast. I'm your host, Molly McPherson. This episode is going to be kind of a short episode. I want to let you know that there is a new offering in the works for my listeners and followers online as well. I'm going to tie it into a tiny little nugget of a lesson. I don't want to have any episode without providing some indestructible PR P tip. The episode is a little short this week because I was traveling last week and I have some travel this upcoming week and we're getting into summer and I want to take it easy this summer. This is the first summer where I can sit back just a little. I graduated my last two kids a week ago and I am heading into the new Molly phase of my life. But before I get to that full phase, I have to rest up a bit. But I wanted to let you all know about a new offering that I have for the listeners and also for my followers. Many of you know that I have been on the Patreon website. It's a membership that a lot of people have podcasts or any type of social media following. Patreon offered places where a place where I could, you know, post information, send videos, just connect with a membership on a deeper level. And I had three tiers and my first tier was really more or less like a TikTok plus I called it off the record and it was where I started to where I would start the conversation maybe on Tik Tok or social media, but I would finish it under the protection of Patreon with people within my community. Because you can imagine speaking about topics on social media, some may come across as opinion or not, but people are going to give you theirs regardless. So Patreon offered a. A safer space for, but also a place where community can engage. And then I had a middle tier for people who wanted to find out more about the industry. So once a week I would, I would put a lesson out there. And then the final tier I tied into my indestructible online membership, my indestructible PR membership where I was doing monthly webinars and you know the nature of communication in this industry. I have certainly followed the changes over the past decade plus that I've been doing this business. The needs and wants of people change. New social media networks come out and also people tend to get their information just slightly differently. So on Patreon, which I really enjoyed and I loved, loved the membership, it occurred to me one day, ding That I had two memberships going at once, and even though I was trying to merge them, it made it a little complicated sometimes. And not to mention a lot of work for me because I have a full client base platform, plus, you know, my kids. I'm busy and I travel, and my travel is going to be, you know, picking up. And I wanted to put everyone in the same place. It didn't make sense to me to have these, you know, so, like, this bifurcation of my membership of, you know, I had my, I guess, professional client base and then on Patreon was more of my social media Persona. I wanted to merge the two together, but I did not know how to do it. Enter five now. Five is a platform that they're calling. It's like the ultimate conversation platform. And it's a way to get even closer to subject matter experts out there. And the timing of this was perfect because I was really trying to figure out, like, where is the best place? Do I just ditch one membership and put it just everything on my Kajabi or do I put everything on Patreon? It was driving me nutty. But thankfully, you know, five reached out to me. They launched in January. It's an amazing startup. It's backed by know names you may have heard of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, you know, what's his face. Oh, my goodness. You can tell I'm not reading from notes. I just saw a photo of him with his fiance, Lauren Sanchez. Oh, my goodness. Owner of the Washington Post and Amazon. Why? Jeff Bezos. Oh, my goodness, my brain. I think I was so caught up in what Lauren Sanchez looked like nowadays, the fiance. But, you know, but it's backed by, you know, big people. They got some. They got some people behind it. But why? I really like the platform outside of them reaching out to me, it flips the platform upside down in a way. So instead of me constantly pushing out content and having people pay for that, I didn't like that. That didn't feel good because my podcast is free, social media is free. So much of what I do, my. My emails are free, is free. And I didn't like the feeling of all of a sudden charging for a part of my content. And I. And with that pressure, I felt like I needed to give people more and it was just becoming a lot. So what 5 does is it removes. It removes the. The paywall, if you will. It has a free membership, so you can sign on to five right now and you can do it for free. And what it does is this app is more designed to help connect. Yes. Directly with the audience and. And share my expertise on a whole new level. And it. It's driven by the one thing that I get more than anything else in my business, and that's questions. Because when I open up my social media apps, Instagram, Twitter. I'm not a fan of Twitter right now, but TikTok, oh, my goodness. The. The amount of direct messages I get are, like, literally overwhelming. I cannot answer them all. And you couple that with all of the replies that I get, we're talking thousands. Like, I get thousands of. I can't get to all of them. And I want to. It bothers me when I can't. And in a lot of these replies, there'll be requests and questions, and I don't see them unless I sit and really drill down and start answering questions. And there's two huge problems with answering questions on TikTok. One I have to navigate and a minefield of assault. You know, people are just going to tell you in any way possible that you're an idiot or that you're stupid or you're racist or you're a liberal or you're a conservative. They'll tell you everything. And they're wrong. Wrong. But there's that piece of it. And then also. But I found a way, like, I can scan now. I've learned how to scan text to look for incendiary texts and friendly texts. And then there's a friendly fire, too. You know, people will say, I love you, but those sometimes are the worst. But what people bring to me, though, are questions. And I want to answer these questions. And that's what five is. It is a platform that's built around questions. So you can bring your burning questions to me and I will offer in return advice and discussions, all within, you know, my area of public relations. Crisis management. Yeah. Popular culture, news, breaking news, current event, career, public relations, crisis management, all of it. So if you join the community, the 5 community, and I'll tell you, it's five.me backslash, Molly McPherson. That's where you'll be able to find me. It's also searchable on SEO, so you can just put in five and put my name and it will hopefully come up. But it is a place, and this is the reason why I like it. It's. It's giving people access to a community, like an exclusive community, but it's creating these engaging discussions. And that's what I was looking for, what I found. You know what, you can hear my jacket in the background. I just got in and I never even took my coat off. Here, hold on a moment. Will I get comfortable? But what 5 is, it's just, it's part expert, part creators, and we all have subscriptions and every creator that's on there is wickedly different. I'm the only communication person you know on, on the platform right now. But this was the answer to my problem because I can provide value, but I can do it on different levels. And the, the value that I'm providing is answering questions because that is my favorite source of content. That is my favorite content to put out there. Just ask me a question and I'll answer it. The struggle with Patreon is, is coming up with the content like in and trying to guess what people want. I look at this platform as a win win. It's a way to connect with you, my audience, and also, you know, a way for you all to get valuable insights not only from me, but also from you as well. And five does have. If you look at the different topics on there, the different subject matter experts, there's a lot of interesting ones. They're in personal development, photography, cooking. There's a lot of different areas out there. So you can usually find an expert creator and they're. And they're growing every day. So there is a variety of topics. But naturally I want you to come to my topic, the topic of Molly. Public relations, crisis management, communication, breaking news, all of it, like I said. So head on over to five and if you're on my email list, you're going to get an email or you've already received an email about this as well. So five me, Molly McPherson, that will bring you up to my page, PR Confidential, the Insider's Guide to PR and Crisis Communication. So I, I'm going to share information about how you can master crisis communication. We're doing it by following the latest PR crisis in the news. And I will do it from breaking news, from the news you might see on a front page or in your local news, but also news that you will see, yes, on TikTok. But the perspective that I give, I feel is somewhat unique. Um, I'm always gonna offer actionable advice. I'm gonna try and be as entertaining as possible, but I want to give that type of insight now. In every podcast, I always wanna leave one indestructible PR tip and it's about the definition of a crisis. I know, boring. But stay with me for a moment. What I'm noticing how it is that everything literally is a crisis for brands Organizations, celebrities, movie stars, recording artists, athletes. Conor McGregor, which is so funny. Conor McGregor is caught up in a, I don't want to call a sex scandal, but he's being accused of sexual assault. Of course there's footage, there's always footage claiming that the woman was with him after the alleged assault. So we don't know. But what's funny about it is as I love tying into news, My son had to deliver a commencement address last week for the high school graduation. He needed to write a speech and he wanted to bring in people who he likes or, you know, some cultural person or icon that he likes. Well, the first one he wanted to quote was Kanye west. And that wasn't going to work because he knows a lot of people do not like Kanye west anymore. They are offended by his, his rhetoric, his hate speech, his anti Semitic speech. He is not in favor or in like favor with people anymore. He's not the flavor of the month. That's what I wanted to say, by any means. But a lot of people still like his work. And as a matter of fact, there was a review on my podcast. Someone gave me a one star review because on a podcast I said, I listen to Kanye West. I got to take the hit on that one. I'll, I'll take your one star review. I'll take that. I mean, I deserve that. And that's what makes the whole idea of a crisis sticky. Right? And that's what, and that's my cancel ratio that I talk about as well. What makes a person like truly, truly canceled. And when can they come back? You know, on TikTok recently when I was out, I was speaking out in Arizona on a hike. I, just before I started my hike, I just happened to look on Instagram and I had noticed that someone who was most definitely canceled all of a sudden wasn't cancelled. And I did a tik tok about that. And it was about, and it was about Jessica Mulroney. And Jessica Mulroney is Megan Marle's bff former, allegedly. She's also politically connected in Canada. Her father in law was Trudeau. No, not Trudeau. Mulroney. That's dumb. Justin Trudeau is the current Prime Minister. Jessica Mulroney is, you know, she's, she's pr. She's. So she's also had programs on the air in Canada. I mean, she's known in Toronto. So she's married to the son of Brian Mulroney. So he was the former Prime Minister of Canada. But what she's really known for is Being tied in with Meghan Markle. And she was there during her suits years. She was there for the tig years. She was also prominent in Meghan Markle's wedding to Prince Harry, and her kids were as well. And I mentioned that I had seen on Instagram and I saw it nowhere else, just on Instagram, that Jessica Mulroney is coming back to GMA Good Morning America, which I found utterly fascinating. And this is why I love the job that I do. Good Morning America. Gma, owned by abc, owned by Disney, I should say. It's part of ABC News. And they have determined that Jessica Mulroney can come back. Now, I happened. I think she's very pretty. I love her style, I love her fashion. Her voice on gma, she talks about weddings. So it's a little hypey for me. Are you gonna say yes? I don't know if we want that in the morning. But she must have been popular because they're having her back. She's coming back. Apparently she's gonna be with Michael Strahan. And whether it's gonna be fashion or weddings, she's coming back. And I find that interesting in the cancel culture, who determined that it's time for someone to come back after being cancelled over racial dialogue? You know, it was during 2020, I probably the summer of 2020, when she had words with a black female influencer who was questioning her white entitlement. And instead of, you know, just taking it and explaining it, she pushed back and people pushed back hard on her. She lost all endorsements, including gma, but now she. She is back. So determining what a crisis is, I guess how I got here is they happen every day. They happen all the time. You know, it's just essentially when something happens within your business or your brand or whoever you are. And what are those somethings? I mean, it could be that's just a surprise. You know, some unexpected surprise could happen that's going to impact, you know, your business. It could be something that's somewhat predictable. You know, this is going to happen, but you don't know to the extent or how big it's going to happen. It could be something that you weren't expecting. It could be like a sudden death. It could be a sudden arrest of someone you know who you know or someone affiliated by you. There's also a crisis can happen when there's insufficient information out there. I was talking to a friend of mine today. He has, you know, his. He's on a board and he's dealing with a massive misinformation problem. And I was telling him, because he was telling me all the information he was backing up. He said, A, B, C, D, E, F. And I said, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if that information is true or not, because it's insufficient to the people who matter. The public. The public doesn't know this information. Information you have, insufficient information that could cause a crisis when you have, like, events that happen one after one. And I can say this with my friend, too, when they're escalating in nature, one thing happens, and that's, you know, my friend, when we were talking about this issue, he said, well, we cleared it. It's done. And I said, well, maybe that part's done. But these things have a way of escalating. Another issue that he's dealing with is he has a reporter that's really, really hitting the scrutiny button on them. And I said, that's what escalates and escalates quickly. So maybe you might move from this issue and people may move on from it, but this reporter, dog without a bone reporter, I guarantee you this reporter is digging around for other stories. They're looking for past decisions. They're looking for any type of gosh, malfeasance, mistakes, anything that could make it a bigger deal. Because eventually what they want is they want someone gone. So that's intense scrutiny. And it could be from the press, it could be from your community. It could be, like, your membership, your constituents, whatever it is. It could be intense scrutiny from the outside. It could just be people online, people you don't even know. They decide that they want to go in and they're going to hit you hard. And once that happens, you lose control. Like, you lose control of your narrative. You lose control of the plot. Like, you've lost the plot. And when that happens, panic usually sets in. And that's a crisis like, so you don't like. If you think back to the 90s and the 80s, when people talk about a crisis and Tylenol, it was always like a big deal. But now any type of interruption to your business creates this crisis where you need a crisis response. And as I say often, as I said it three times last week, in three keynotes, your next crisis will be a social media crisis. May not originate there, but it sure as heck is gonna land. So that's all this week for the Indestructible PR podcast. Remember, you can join me, my new community, on the platform five. It's five. Me backslash, Molly McPherson. Bye for now.