A conversational interview (Ricardo Molina with a second speaker) about how event organisers can (or struggle to) transition into building and monetising online communities. Key points: communities rely on enduring human psychology rather than channel novelty; events have a different operational rhythm and personality-fit than ongoing communities; successful monetisation often follows community-first sequencing (free community → paid membership/content → events → training); and leadership involvement (the business owner actively participating) is a critical success factor.
Chapters
What you, what you already know, Bill, over the last 10 years on instead of how not to do things, what would be your learnings and in terms of the monetization and how that in the mind of an event organizer, the skills and what's missing. What is the missing link between an event organizer and shifting into online community, how that can be what can be learned? Because seems that you've done that kind of transition and then you are, man, you're seeing companies that are managing this transition pretty efficiently. I don't know if that made any sense at all.
Well, I don't. Yeah. I mean, I'm not. The broad principles haven't changed in. Only in as far as human psychology and brains haven't changed. You know, we're not any different than we were hundreds of thousands of years ago. You know, the fight and flight and trust mechanisms are to starting. So I don't, you know, community itself is not, not any different. I mean there's obviously new channels like digital and mobile and things and social media have come up, but they still operate based on human emotions. If you've seen, you know, the social dilemma, they engineer and play on human psychology very cleverly. But so I think the interesting thing with. But even if you have a parallel with print, so, you know, I remember when we were acquired, when E Consulting was acquired by Centaur Econsulting had always been sort of always on digital social 247 and we didn't do print and then whereas Marketing Week, which is a sister brand of ours, then had a weekly magazine and the whole operating rhythm of the business and it was sort of, you know, going towards press day and that this thing had to physically be printed and had to be sent out. There's no plan B really. It's. It has to happen that way. And events are a bit like that where there's, there's a point in time, even if it's whether it's virtual or physical, where this thing is happening. I mean, unless it actually kind of gets canceled. And so the gearing around that, the operational kind of rhythms around this big surge of activity and then on to the next thing. And so they, it's just not. And even I, you know, it's a generalization. But the kind of people, I suspect, who are really good at events and thrive on events, love maybe that buzz and excitement to bringing together and then they want to move on to the next thing. Whereas, you know, the, the community people often actually, I would say are more likely to be more introverted, you know, more it's a bit more in the same way. You got a difference between, in editorial people, between an analyst and a newshound journalist. You know, they're both editorial but they're very different in the way that they, you know, one wants to get, you know, write a great in depth report and not be disturbed in their ivory tower. One's out there, you know, hustling for the news story. It's both content but they're different kinds of people. So I think the challenge with events is that, you know, we worked a lot with UBM now part of Informa obviously and they were an amazing event, still are amazing events machine. But they always, they always talked and I remember talking to them a lot about, well, we want to do content, a community, but they just really struggle to do it. And I think in the end they sort of seem to have said apart from some parts of the business actually, no, we're just going to do events. And that's fine, they do events well. But if you're going to do community or content in that form, it does, it's just, it's a slightly different way of being and a different kind of mindset and things. And so if it's not in your. And you kind of need that in the leadership's DNA, I think so I think that the danger here is if you, if you're a brilliant events person, you think I should be doing community, you've got to kind of care about it probably or somehow get this mindset or not do it, you know, just saying that's fine, you know, just stick to events. That's what you're good at. So yeah, it's a sort of mindset or a skill set or a way of being and certainly for me, and I think for a lot of the sort of community things they are, they feel that community bit and events. You know, with E consultancy we started with the community and then we went to paid content, membership and subscription. So some free, some paid, then we went into events and then into training. So it was. And all of those things were just an extension of the community. Whereas if you're doing it the other way around, it's different, isn't it? I mean you're coming at it from a events point of view and then you've got to kind of create the community that's already kind of there but you don't necessarily sort of own it or you know, touch it year round as it were. So yeah, it's just, I, yeah, I suppose it's what people are passionate and good at, good at. And I don't actually think that's really changed in the last 20, 30 years or possibly ever really. Yeah.
And then just to close that thought is that because for some entrepreneurs it feels like a step back. If you notice you started a community earlier, organically, it grew then membership than events. So someone that is a pure play event, big, large scale events, doing a community of smaller scale or something like that, it feels like a step back. And that's kind of why it's a bit difficult to I guess articulate or to see how does this whole thing fit. You're telling me about smaller devoting time, spending time, money, resource in it and everything. So more so than that is a shift in mindset. And finally the final thought to close on that is that for me personally, where I've seen the most successful online communities have always had its leader, the business owner behind them. So is the business owner moderating the sessions? Is the business owner talking to fostering conversation? Is the business owner talking to the customer services? Kind of the person that is not happy. That is kind of where I've seen where that belonging and that success kind of happens.
