Largest Club on Clubhouse

Another valuable Serial Entrepreneur Club session in the books! Moderated by Jeff Sass, we invited Branding experts Gary Henderson and Ish Milly to share tips on bringing value to your brand using Clubhouse. Listen to the recorded conversation, here!

Spoiler alert, the word of the week is Authenticity!  Here’s the gist of it: 

Use your authentic voice – literally and figuratively, there is no hiding! Its you, speaking in your voice to a room of listeners. What you say and how you participate is going to influence your brand. So, find your tribe and then be as authentic as possible. Find people you dig listening to, check out who they are following, check out who nominated them and make connections based on those authentic interests, using your authentic voice. 

Meticulous Profile and Bio – First and foremost, make sure your profile is on brand, that it is consistent with what you are about. If it is not aligned, you lose credibility.  You want to attract a certain type of people, most likely. Think: synergy, searchable terms, hyper focus on the first two lines of your profile (the short hand that appears in the scroll list), be sure to include clickable links. How you engage with people outside of the platform matters, especially to your brand. Link your social media handles, your websites, get a domain that speaks to your brand and on that website, share what you’re about, share your clickable content, newsletters, events or schedules. Your profile and bio should be attractive, captivating, accurate to brand and most of all, authentic.

Use .club extension – this is a new trend that gained speed nearly overnight, where companies and people, like you and me, are locking in their .coms and .clubs. If clients are visiting your .com for your digital products, then they are visiting your .club for You, those are your followers. Even further, a .club extension is intriguing, eye-catching, its a neatly tied bow to place on top of your enterprise, where you can offer benefits, perks, set it up as a hub to re-direct traffic to other parts of your company, brand or social media. It is yours, do with it as you want.

Offer your services – If you have a course or consultant service, Clubhouse is a unique platform and opportunity to identify your customers and monetize. Check out who is following you, figure out the demand and offer the supply, if it is on brand. 

Use a personal, super recognizable profile picture. If you are really pushing for and standing behind your company and want your logo to have huge recognition, use your logo. But, most likely, listeners want to connect with YOU, the heart of your company, and so we really want to see and recognize YOU as your brand. 

Migrate to social media – Another shameless plug to bring your social media and Clubhouse together. Here’s the hack: Post stories about yourself, your brand, your company – show yourself authentically, because people are watching, and now you’ve pixelated those viewers who follow your story, for present and future engagement. That is going to go a long way, especially in the world of word-of-mouth, Likes, Shares and Follows. 

Gary offered a sound ideation that he’s coined as ‘R3Mad’, that if you have the “right message to the right audience at the right time with the right expectation, you’ll deliver the right results.” 

At the end of the day, think about everything you’re doing, any new initiatives or goals, and consider if this is aligned with how you want to spend your days, if it is bringing you closer to where you want to be or what you want to be doing. Our day to day actions should be aligned with our philosophies, lifestyles, brands and services; this is what builds integrity, your reputation and credibility and that is what is going to get noticed and set you apart from a competitor who may not be in alignment with his branding. 

Be yourself, everyone else is taken.  We’ll see you again on Friday at 2:00. 

This week we focused on Starting a Club, led by our Michele Van Tilborg who delivered a most excellent session, craft fully moderated. We’re super grateful to Paul Baron, Ish Milly,  Brandon Lumpkins, Tevin Jackson, Jeff Sass, and Norm Farrar for all dropping in to share their incredible insights and bringing value to our session. Get ready, because we covered a TON of content! 

How do we get our Clubs approved?

@paulbarron says to first grow a following and find a niche. What are you good at and what do you know about? Whether you like cigars, scotch, or learning Spanish, there is a club for you. There are a variety of conversations happening all the time. Find one that appeals to you and get in there! Remember, it’s not about the quantity, but the quality.

What are your Top 3 Tips in Starting a Club?

@ishmilly advises that you identify a topic that people are interested in, add value to that topic, and then curate a room of experts around that topic. It pays to have a club of like-minded individuals. In addition, he suggests that you get everyone’s contact info so that you can connect outside of the club and without algorithm interference. 

What’s your advice to people new at Clubhouse? 

@colin.club, referencing last week’s podcast with @normfarrar he reiterates, “It’s all about content, stupid.” No matter what platform or medium, it all starts with great quality content.    Then when you add a good domain, brand, and website outside of Clubhouse, you’re able to connect with people on a more broad basis. He further explains that it’s important to have a website on your Clubhouse profile bio because you can list your schedule, features, event links, store recordings of shows or host a weekly blog. Your website reinforces the club which reinforces your website and ultimately connecting you to the outside world.. think about title tags, for google indexing. 

What Are Your Tips When Moderating a Room?

@jeffsass offers the Dos to Moderating a Room. He advises that these points apply to being on a live stage as well as moderating a digital space.  When hosting or moderating a room, have a backup. Moderators are in control of the room, opening the floor, bringing in speakers, stacking the topic, queuing relevant questions, and keeping the room on topic. Like air traffic control, this can become a large task for one person, so it is a wise idea to bring in one to two other moderators to help out in a session. Consider keeping notes to stay organized, keep on task and stay informed about your listeners, but also, remember that this is a live conversation so it’s more like improv, not a presentation! A key function to improv is the “Yes and…” concept. Listen carefully and then… What can you add to that to bring us on to the next speaker, a comment or two on your experience, and another point as a segue to bring another speaker on. The listeners and the moderators have the power to contribute, so you’ll need to manage the room. You can choose to be active or passive, you can choose to start with the ‘hand raise’ feature turned off to allow mods to say what needs to be said. Moderators can leverage the audience to see who can contribute to a particular topic, and then switch the ‘hand raise’ feature back on to allow more input and contribution from those listeners and speakers. Finally, a key element to remember is that people enter rooms based on topics, so you want to keep to that topic otherwise someone comes in because your room is talking about Serial Entrepreneur, and they hear ‘baseball’, they’re going to leave…consistently reset the room and steer the topic back to what the room is about.

How do you build out your club presence?

We asked growth hacker @casuallyb who, since Nov 28 has seen a lot of transition in Clubhouse. At first, it was QA style relaxed convo happening, now it’s marketing and entrepreneurship. One big tip in building out your club presence is to allow people to engage with you on Instagram. Another quality tip is to get yourself a .club extension, Brandon cites that the early days of Clubhouse may offer a lot of growth in an unforeseen direction, having a .club extension will bring you a ton of value, similar to having a general club and a club that is more subset and as Colin mentioned, that website can generate a lot of foot traffic and broaden the channel to promote your club and brand. 

More key tips from @casuallyb include moderating a room at least 3x a week, which will push your handle to the top of the list for engagement, interactions, and time spent at Clubhouse. Keep in mind that who follows you matters, how you curate your experience matters a lot, so be sure to moderate every day with quality content. Finally, use Clubhouse creatively, think sponsorship, membership, and partnership within clubs. If you do invest in a .club extension, offer exclusive benefits there, promoted through your Club. These platforms can work seamlessly together, through your genius. 

What’s the difference between a podcast and coming into Clubhouse? 

@normfarrar loves that you can take a one-way conversation (an interview on a podcast, for example), reintroduce people at another time on another platform (Clubhouse), and then open the invitation to have that conversation. It’s not so much comparing a podcast to a drop-in audio platform, but about supplementing the two, creating synergy between them.  It’s additional content. Take @paulbarron for example, he takes the info discussed in a session, takes notes, and provides value by allowing people to grab those notes for free.  And that is tons of content. 

Extras from Our Listeners

@lilroberts: Pick the right domain name, make the investment in the right domain name and then get on Clubhouse.  

Kristin: I did hear a tip from another room: make sure you submit with a graphic logo when applying for your new club.  

Samir: There are a lot of coaches on here coaching how to coach. I’d love to see actual experts talk about the industry and give the real tools to use in that industry, rather than coaching how to coach.  Get industry-specific.  Discuss tools and marketing to build whatever business rather than hype people up. 

Fernando:  You need to sharpen your speaking skills and your moderating skills.  Practice practice practice.  Find a mentor and invest in yourself.  

One final tip from @paulbaron in this respect is to BE AUTHENTIC. If you are looking to grow a following, be that person of value and let the value you give, be the example. Find places where you can add value, and just add value. People will see through the sales pitch and it won’t go very far. We’re all here to learn, we are here to Give to Get. 

As always, take care of yourselves and each other out there! We’ll see you again every Friday at 2:00 PM Eastern on Clubhouse!