Secrets to Building the Most Engaging Community Ever

casual to audience so let's move up this pyramid we're gonna now go from active audience subscribers followers etc now to a connected community and remember this is where magic happens it's not just you talking to them them talking to you but it's them talking to each other people actually have an identity as a fan of something right like what do they call like they even have names for their groups right like fans of taylor swift are called swifties fans of lady gaga or little monsters beyonce's beehive uh fans of justin bieber just weird right just

weird no i'm just kidding he's got a little bit better uh believers yes that's right are you a belieber no you said no i'm not a believer so this idea of community is really important i'm gonna give you some strategies to help make people feel like they belong because that's really what we want we want people to okay they've activated but now we need proof we need to show that there's other people like them there and we need to be relatable in some way shape or form so i'm going to take you back in time

again to high school and remember how i was an 11 pound 12 ounce baby well i at some point when i was eight or nine just stopped growing like i just stopped i was like the i like i was ready to play football i was ready to play all these things and all of a sudden all my friends started growing and i didn't and then i was like okay i'll just play soccer because i'm fast well i stopped growing i didn't even grow in high school just to give you some perspective here's my senior photo

in high school yes young pat flynn to give you some perspective trumpet is 18 inches tall yeah now the band was nice because i found people who were like me who were different who were weird and in the band the cool thing is you dress the same as everybody else so that you can blend in so this was like my refuge right unfortunately a lot of my friends were also really tall i had the weird tall friends and we liked they liked to play basketball and they were nice so they asked me to play basketball

with them but you know what to me this is just was my view the entire time so of course because i wasn't great at basketball they were never passing me the ball i was always last to get picked so i never had a chance to shoot so even though i was on the court with them even though i was invited to play basketball was i actually getting any value there no i was actually feeling worse about myself how many of us just answered this in your head are inviting people to the court and never passing

on the ball we're never giving them a chance to shoot we're just kind of dictating everything to them and kind of sharing things without getting them involved we want to number one give people attention right this is what people crave today attention that's the new currency online and then make them feel like they belong so how might we do that let's start small let's actually start simple let's start by you know this is an easy way to engage your audience if you have a community or facebook group linkedin twitter whatever ask questions but i think

we can take that one step further don't just ask questions ask for the answer what do i what do i mean by that well there's a guy named steve spangler awesome scientist he's very like kid friendly my kids and i watch him all the time he does he's really cool experiments he was one of the first people to upload content to youtube after it transitioned from a dating app i don't know if you knew that but it was actually launched on valentine's day i think 2004 2005 as a dating app and they're like this isn't

working but we have this video capability anyway he was one of the first to create content and when he created content on youtube it was scientific it was educational and he'd position his videos like this he would share the experiment for example he would suck in air from a balloon and then his voice would be really low and he'd be like okay this is what happened it's a sulfur hexafluoride which is much denser than air so the voice sounds like darth vader hi cool leave a comment below tell me what you think and you would

get the comments that you would expect from a video like that cool or first right there's always a first cool where do i get that gas awesome amazing that's it but then he was like i want to engage my audience more i want this to be like a community on youtube how do i do that so he changed his positioning now and you can even see this today he does an experiment and then he doesn't tell you how it happened he actually asks why do you think this happened this way and just that one little

change asking for the answer i mean he knows the answer i mean obviously but he's asking to see if anybody in the audience knows it and you know what happened there's like fights breaking out in the comments sections people are pulling out their physics books from college and they're trying to become the best comment and of course he'll pin the best one those people feel special and then everybody fights even harder the next time this became so popular that he was the first if not maybe the first person to get asked to do a youtube

original series by youtube because he was just getting so much engagement from his videos simply because he was asking for people's input and then rewarding those or sharing those who had the best answers so ask for the answer every once in a while this is a great way to teach and get people involved and allow people to make them like they're being heard because they are now we'll go from that company a more personal brand to a big corporate brand this is lego any lego fans in the house yes lego is awesome lego i don't

know if you knew this but back in 2003 they were 800 million dollars in debt we almost lost lego that might have helped my feet but not not a lot of the experiences that i've had with my kids since then so fast forward they are now worth over 150 billion that's more than mattel and hasbro combined um only second to i think like pokemon or something like that which is crazy so what did they do well the reason they got bankrupt or almost bankrupt was because they were just turning out product after product after product

they were just soaring off the manufacturing line and they were trying to get them in front of everybody but they weren't listening to their fans so a new ceo came on board and they started to change up what products to create based on fans and what they thought right so they slowed down to production but they increased their level of engagement with their audience and that flipped the script so there's a few things that they did specifically co-creation was something that they did co-creation meaning they're not just creating these things and sending them out like

a lot of us do i'm going to create this thing and then i'm going to sell it to you it's like hey let's create this thing together this is how i create my online courses now we usually do a beta group we run people through but they're also creating the course with me at the same time they feel that a little bit extra special and then at the end we have this beautiful course that was created with the actual people who the course was built for and we have testimonials at the end which is really

cool their ceo said you know we actively encourage our fans to interact and suggest product ideas while we have 120 staff designers we potentially have 120 000 volunteer designers we can access outside the community that's such a huge asset your community is an asset that you can use to better create the experience in your brand and the products that you create so what's an example of this from lego lego created ideas.lego.com where any of us you can build something with the legos that you have access to pop it onto this community and the community will

vote for their favorites and the ones who get over 10 000 supporters will go through a process to actually get manufactured by lego as a real lego limited edition product that's pretty sick like that's legit right so how might we do that in our businesses we'll show you some examples but as you might have noticed here number four here was the delorean i did not design that uh i i wish i did but i had to support the designer because that was so cool so back to the future and lego i bought two one to

build and the other one you know to keep safe um cause that's what we collectors do so i bought two and i was so happy to support that and it made me feel closer to the brand because they got a fan like me to create something and reward them too so here's some specific examples that i've used in the past back when facebook pages were a thing this is a very simple framework that you could use hey guys i'm creating a logo for my next business or a cover for it for my next book here

are two options which one do you like better a or b this was the most engaged post back then that i've ever had because people are like oh you're giving me the option to share what i like okay well then i'll tell you and you get some good data behind it too here's amy porterfield amazing marketer one of the smartest people i know asking her audience hey i need some font help do we think that amy porterfield really needs help with selecting the font for who her newsletter cover no but what is she doing here

she's getting people involved and she's letting people know that a newsletter is coming that's pretty cool that's that's really smart all right so how else might we convert people who are within our brands to community well one of my favorite ways to do this is to offer them a factory tour have you ever been on a brewery tour or factory tour or chocolate tour of sorts they're so fun right it's just like krispy kreme you go into krispy kreme and then your face is glued to that glass wall because you see all the glaze going

over it's like wow that's how they make those that's awesome and then they give it to you and then yeah things happen after that well there are many ways that we could do this online because the cool thing is when you do this people feel like it's a special moment moments that many other people might not get and then what happens when you have some experience that other people don't what do we do in this world today when we have an experience like that we share it we share the crap out of it right and

so you can do this with your business i did this for over 10 years i revealed my income reports on my business sharing how much money i made how much money i lost and where it all came from what we were doing for the future this was my version of opening up the factory doors right and people gravitated toward that garyvee hired a guy named drock to follow him all around to just film garyvee's life his crazy life in new york with vaynermedia and of course that was his version of opening up the factory doors

and bringing more people and of course now there's like there's like super fans of gary all over the place so open up the factory doors connection opportunities creating little events online offline moments that your people can come together to find each other let's go back to lego if you actually go to meetup.com and you type in a full a-f-o-l does anybody know what that means a-f-o-l that stands for adult fan of lego jeff was talking about um or john was talking about riches are in the niches right i mean it's true people like to gravitate

toward each other there's thousands of meetings every year where adult fans they're like we don't want kids here these are just for adults and we're going to hang out and talk about the next sets and sometimes they have tournaments and all this stuff don't ask me how i know that then there's bigger events like t and c which is great for building community right how many connections have happened since then brick fair in virginia there's brit khan there is brick world by the way these aren't put on by lego these are put on by fans

of lego and what does lego do do they slam them down and say hey you can't do that no they support them much like how you know tesla right they're not like they don't they don't hate on the people who are on youtube using all their photos and images they're like here's more because you guys will pro that's why they don't spend money on advertising because everybody's advertising for tesla anyway right you can create little meetups if a coffee shop like here in minnesota i just invited people over we had coffee or maybe you have

more smaller but strategic events that you can bring people to little mastermind communities and things like that or you can go online and stream this is let go day in 2013 let go day is june 17th i celebrate the day i was let go from my architecture position i celebrated every year literally the best thing that's ever happened i didn't know it at the time but i celebrate it now i bring people in i've also done bigger events this was in san diego a couple years ago before covid flynn con and the community of people

who follow and are fans of myself and my brand come together and we created a really nice space for them now we just launched last year spi pro this is our premium membership community using a platform called circle full disclosure i'm an advisor for that company so if you have any questions about it let me know it's like a facebook and slack together that you can control and it's awesome and now there are 600 plus members in here who are paying monthly or annually to have access to not content there's no there's not any additional

content or courses in here it's access to each other and little events where they get access to myself and my team and once we start to open up a little bit more we're going to have local events where people in certain areas can meet up with each other and again as spi being the ones who facilitate that and act as a filter for people who can connect when they meet each other man it really helps the brand and we're creating lifelong fans as a result here's another way to convert people into a community put a

spotlight on some of your community members it's one of the best strategies that you can do if you have content anywhere put a spotlight on your community this was episode 275 of our podcast and this was published during the same week as a launch for our podcasting product right so just keep that in mind this is all timed your content should be timed with your launches they shouldn't be separate they should work together right they should support each other so 275 i invited three of my beta students for my course because this was the first

launch that was happening but i wanted to invite people on so i invited these three people dr b dr shannon irvin and then rob from disney travel secrets these were three of my students who've gone just literally have just gone through the process of starting their podcast and getting some success with it so i invited them on and i didn't ask them to talk about the course i asked them questions like well why did you want to start a podcast in the first place why didn't you before what was so hard about it what were

your challenges and struggles what's life like now that you have a podcast and dr b for example who helps people who have and live with hd adhd said you know what pat this has changed my life i have a map behind me on my computer and every time i find that i have a new listener a new country i'm putting a pin up there to show that i'm reaching that part of the world and really helping people and i was like wow that's that's amazing and she was talking about her like technological struggles she was

so afraid this is basically the best sales pitch for my product you could ever ask for right and she's in 33 different countries actually and that was only a couple weeks after she launched her show it's probably over 100 now and she's changing lives which is so awesome so then we sold this course and we made over 150 thousand dollars as a direct result of the podcast it was tracked and i know this for sure because people emailed me and said pat uh you better thank dr b because she sold your course for me wow

so although we might have a podcast or a video channel we want to invite all these big names on it what about your students highlight their customer journey that hero story that is from a place of struggle to now a place of success and the common factor in all this is you are the guy that made it happen right you're not the hero of the story we've all heard of donald miller storybrand right you're not the hero you create the heroes and then other people who want to be heroes go to the same guide right

you're obi-wan you're not luke skywalker or princess leia