Community Strategy Insights

The latest insights on community strategy, technology, and value by FeverBee’s founder, Richard Millington

What Do Community Professionals Spend 90% Of Their Time Doing?

Richard Millington
Richard Millington

Founder of FeverBee

We’re now just 42 days away from this year’s SPRINT.

We have precisely 37 tickets remaining.

Once the tickets are sold out, they’re gone.

If you want to learn specific techniques to grow your community from 14 world-class speakers, sign up here.

If you want to see the full agenda, click here.

The 90% Skill We Never Try To Improve

If you want to get great at poker, you need to master probability and expected value. Learning how to bluff comes much later. You can win a world series on probability alone.

To make world-class sushi, you first need to learn how to make rice. This takes sushi chefs months, if not years, to master. If you don’t get the rice right, not much else matters.

The secret to writing better blog posts, books, or content isn’t in the craft of writing – but in doing great research to have new information to present in the first place.

You can spot the problem. It’s so much more fun to talk about cutting the fish, becoming a human lie detector, and SEO hacks compared to making rice, calculating probability, and undertaking research.

This is true for community professionals too. We spend far too much time talking about the exciting, shiny, 10% of activities at the expense of mastering the single key skill we spend 90% of our time doing.

What Do Community Professionals Spend 90% of Their Time Doing?

It’s not a trick question. I’m doing it right now.

You’re going to do it before and after reading this post.

We spend 90% of our time writing to persuade.

Right now, I’m trying to persuade you that this skill is important.

Later you’re going to try and persuade your members to join, participate, or otherwise take action in your community.

The biggest scope for improvement in our sector today is to excel at writing persuasive messages.

Imagine if you could make every one of the following activities 25% more effective.

  • Replying to e-mails.
  • Creating eBooks/Guides.
  • Writing news content.
  • Welcoming members.
  • Publishing Tweets/FB updates.
  • Sending private messages.
  • Creating website copy.
  • Initiating and replying to discussions.

The majority of your members in your community spend a lot of time reading your words.

Imagine what happens when every one of those words is optimized to persuade?

Every single person that reads every message is more likely to take action. Your level of growth and activity rise considerably. You would be a superstar!

The Science of Great Rhetoric

For SPRINT, we’ve invited Felicity Barber of ThoughtFul Speech to reveal the secrets of the world’s top speakers.

Felicity is going to equip you with the advanced skills to:

  • Open messages that capture your audience’s attention.
  • Use the staple techniques of contrasts, 3-point lists, and imagery more effectively.
  • Embrace the in-group referential.
  • Decide the best metaphors to take action.
  • Tell effective, emotive, stories that move people to action.
  • Clearly define a message that hits the target.
  • Adapt your language to your audience.
  • Deploy anaphora to add impact to your messages.

Each one of these is a key skill for persuasive communications, yet we’ve never once tried to get better at any of these.

We’ve never had an expert at our events before who can explain how we can be better at this.

Everything we try to get others to do begins with understanding how to make our messages far more persuasive than they are today.

She’s going to be terrific and I hope you can join us.

Here are a few useful links for rhetoric you can get started on today:

New Skills and Bigger and Better Communities

You have 42 days (or until we sell 37 remaining tickets) to sign up to FeverBee SPRINT.

This is our biggest event of the year. Our entire team is flying in for it and we’re going to equip every one of you with the ability to scientifically grow your community and increase the level of activity.

Workshop tickets have been sold out for weeks. Conference tickets may sell out early. Book your tickets soon.

p.s. we also have 2 bring a team tickets remaining.

 

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