Tribe Building

Your big idea is a gift to your tribe

July 14, 2015 by Thomas Z Lukoma Leave a Comment

I often tell people that my mission is to ‘help regular people do great things‘. I am very clear on what this mission means to me, but recently I have begun to think about the components of doing great things that are universal.

My working hypotheses is that:

Regular people do great things when they have a big idea and build a tribe around it.

You need a big idea to inspire your tribe.

You need your tribe to spread the idea.

The two are symbiotic.

Sometimes you are not exactly sure what your big idea is – but you can clearly see a tribe forming around your contributions.

Other times, you have a burning idea but don’t know how to spread that idea – your tribe hasn’t formed yet.

In both instances, it is important to have a ‘homebase’ that is easily accessible to your tribe even when you are not physically present.

It is also important for you to provide different levels of engagement with your idea – most people will not be able to digest the vastness of your idea on first blush – but after slowly consuming your contributions over time, the idea will grow on them and they will become a member of your tribe.

So the first thing to discover if you want to spread your big idea is the vehicle or vehicles through which you will consistently give free gifts to your future tribe members.

It all starts with your generosity.

Joining the ‘Toastmasters’ tribe

December 11, 2014 by Thomas Z Lukoma Leave a Comment

One of my future goals is to become a public speaker who inspires, motivates and uplifts people from all walks of life while giving them practical ideas they can implement easily. Throughout my childhood I was involved in theater and have never lost my reverence for the power of the stage and the ability it gives me to move people.

In a theatrical performance, my goal as an actor was to move my audience into the imaginary world of the play so that they suspended disbelief and became immersed in my story. Once immersed, I could entertain, teach, infuriate, amuse and challenge them just by the words I said and the actions I took on that limited space on stage.

I no longer have access to the stage in that way, but I believe the podium is just as powerful when used in the right way. It can be an even stronger agent of change than drama because the world I am taking my audience into is not imaginary – a speech is usually speaking to very real issues and experiences that are immediately present to the audience.

You can challenge people about very real experiences and ideas without the need for them to ‘get the metaphor’.

Therefore, if I want to fulfill the tenants of my personal manifesto, I need to significantly improve my abilities as a speaker.

A Tribe for Those Who Want to Become Better Speakers (and Leaders)

Last week, I took the first step towards my goal by attending the introductory session of a ‘Toastmasters‘ chapter that is starting up at my job. Not only did I learn a lot in that initial session, I was able to sit back as an observer and enjoy the many elements of tribe building that are so masterfully used by this organization.

There are three that really stood out for me – you can keep these in mind when thinking about your tribe:

A shared set of values
A shared vocabulary
A shared system

Shared Values: Unity in the Midst of Diversity

This first Toastmasters session was referred to as a ‘demo’ meeting and it was a mix of people from my company and volunteers from a few other chapters in our area who came to help us run the first meeting.

Just from the sample of volunteers who showed up, I was impressed by the diversity of backgrounds, speaking styles and personalities. Despite this diversity, there was something about all of them that made them similar – they all had a warmth, friendliness and generosity that was contagious.

And it was clear that they all took Toastmasters seriously.

When I asked one of the volunteers how far he had come in the middle of the day for this meeting, I was surprised by his answer – he came from at least 45 minutes to an hour away. As I expressed my surprise at this he explained that there are four values that all Toastmasters follow:

Integrity
Respect
Service
Excellence

And of these, they take ‘Service’ very seriously and so whenever there is an opportunity to help another chapter, they do their best to participate.

In absence of attending that meeting, the four values could sound a little ‘pie in the sky’, but when I reflected on how they had run the meeting, I saw elements of all four.

As a tribe, they embodied the values they espoused.

Shared Vocabulary: Of DTMs and Other Acronyms

As I was speaking with a collegue this week about our experience in that first Toastmasters meeting, she humorously commented that this was a very ‘nerdy’ bunch of people. I think one of the things that built that impression in her mind (and probably those of other attendees) was the wide variety of specific jargon and acronyms that they used as part of the meeting.

None of it was used in an exclusionary way – they were happy to explain all the different terms they used – but it was clear that there was a very specific ‘lingo’ that went along with Toastmasters.

I didn’t experience it as ‘nerdy’ but rather found myself identifying and wanting to be a part. As I found out what each thing meant, I appreciated the thought and order that it represented.

This is an important point to keep in mind as you study your audience and think about how to solidify your tribe. Look out for recurring themes and ‘coin’ specific terms that capture those ideas. Over time, these ‘nerdy’ words will be part of how people self-identify with your tribe and will help to build community.

Shared System: The Competent Communicator

My final observation in my first encounter with Toastmasters is that they have clear a system and structure that helps protect the integrity of their tribe.

A good example of this is their ‘Competant Communicator’ award. This is the first level of recognition that every Toastmaster member works on when they first join. It is a series of different types of speeches that you make to your group over time so that you can master some basic techniques of public speaking.

Because it requires a certain level of commitemnt to complete the Competent Communicator track, it is a clear way to dilenate somebody’s level of engagement with the tribe – whether they are just ‘shopping’, or whether they are truly sold on what the community represents.

As you work on the different steps of the track, you become more confident as a speaker while integrating into the values, vocabulary and system of the tribe.

You gain personal value, while contributing to the tribe just by plugging into their system.

I guess I’m the same kind of ‘nerdy’ as the Toastmasters that hosted our demo session because I am looking forward to working towards my Competent Commmunicator designation.

I’m not so sure about my collegue – maybe by the time she takes part in enough meetings, she won’t realize how ‘nerdy’ she is becoming too.

10 online tribes I am proud to be a member of

November 22, 2014 by Thomas Z Lukoma Leave a Comment

Over the years, I have become interested in the concept of building a platform to amplify a message, service, product or movement. After sitting on the fence and soaking in content but not doing anything with it, I decided to create MoreThanAHut Solutions to force myself to DO. I needed a real life vehicle through which I could implement the ideas that I was reading about and see how they worked in the ‘real world’.

As I tried out my ideas on my early set of clients, I realized that one of the most important things to identify upfront before embarking on platform building is the tribe that you are going to engage. Find a group of people that buy into your vision and have voluntarily decided to follow you.

Without a tribe, your platform is merely a soapbox and probably will not gain much traction.

Today I thought I would pay homage to ten online platform builders that have or continue to inspire me about what is possible. There is a diversity of methods used to build and engage their tribes, but the key component that is a unifying thread across all of them is that they consistently create compelling content.

Their content has certainly compelled me.

So in no particular order, here they are:

#1 Steve Dotto of DottoTech

I never thought there were other people in the world that got as excited as I do when I discover a new to-do list app – until I discovered Steve Dotto. He has a YouTube channel that has become my go-to resource for finding out about all the wide variety of apps and techy tools that get me excited to explore.

Its not only his content that I find compelling, but the way in which he delivers it; he really loves this stuff and I find a kinship with him each time I watch one of his videos.

Yes, I know … I’m weird.

#2 Ramit Sethi

When I originally read Ramit’s blog, I was turned off by the very thing that eventually enamored me to him – his ‘in-your-face’ brashness. I mean, who calls their blog ‘I Will Teach You to Be Rich’? But thankfully, behind the initial image, there is a significant depth and resonance with his ideas about personal finance.

Perhaps the thing that I admire the most about Ramit though is his masterful use of email marketing – I have never experienced anybody else who has such a deep understanding of segmentation and building a funnel of marketing through email. What I like about him is that everything he does is based on experimentation and analysis, so its not just fluff but ideas that have empirical data behind them.

#3 Tim Ferris

My introduction to Tim’s platform was actually offline. His bestselling book The 4-Hour Workweek was an encyclopedia of ideas that challenged my status quo and what I thought was the way things had to be. I read the book at the same time as a colleague of mine who is an even bigger tribe member than me (she refers to him as ‘Timmie’) and we still reference ideas from his book today.

His online tribe is where the real magic happens though – he was engaging with his tribe through his blog even before he wrote the book.

#4 Daymon Peterson @ Daym Drops

Daymon Peterson is a regular guy who’s funny that decided to make his own ‘gourmet reviews’ of fast food. He took what started out as a way to quell his boredom by shooting ‘home reporter’ videos and grew it into a major platform that now includes hosting a show on the travel channel doing what he loves on a larger stage. It all started by his own unique way of describing a french fry in this review he did of Five Guys Burgers.

“You bite the fry and the fry bites back! That’s when you know you have an OFFICIAL french fry.

#5 Fake Grimlock

At the time of publishing, I think it is still true that only a handful of people know Fake Grimlock’s real identity. He has successfully built a following on Twitter with an alter ego because he has a unique delivery of content that actually has a lot of weight and wisdom with it. He is also an illustrator, so providing visual complements to his ideas helps. I was so fascinated by his work that I signed up for his Kickstarter campaign – and he did not disappoint.

Here is one of the goodies he sent to me during the campaign that I still have up on my wall:

#6 Joe Penna a.k.a Mystery Guitar Man

I don’t need to say much about this guy – just watch this:

#7 Michael Hyatt

Michael Hyatt literally wrote the book on Platform Building. His book, along with Seth Godin’s Linchpin, were the starting framework for my ideas around platforms and impact.

#8 Rhett & Link

If these guys don’t make you laugh, I don’t think much can. I was introduced to their platform by an appearance they had on the George Lopez night-time talk show where he showed the video below that was made by them. At the time, their claim to fame was that they made high quality local video ads for small businesses.

They have since grown their tribe to millions of viewers on their YouTube channel, which includes a daily show called ‘Good Mythical Morning‘. If you haven’t seen some of their epic rap battles like here and here – then you are in for a treat.

#9 Sacha Chua @ Living An Awesome Life

I love Sacha’s blog. It is an eclectic mix of creativity, art, geeky topics and most important of all – sincerity. I was honored to have a Google Hangout with Sacha almost two years ago and can say with complete confidence that she is the same person in person as she is in the blog – she truly values learning and sharing above all else. We spoke about platforms (this was around the time I was really trying to figure out what platforms meant to me) and I pointed her towards Mike Hyatt’s book. Since then, I have seen her expand into doing more with Google Hangounts and continue to engage her tribe in interesting and novel ways.

#10 John Stepper

Final contribution to #wolweek from @JonHSAUK it is from @johnstepper excellent book pic.twitter.com/xnfm21IV1B

— Helen Sanderson (@HelenHSAUK) November 21, 2014

For the past three years, I have recieved an email in my inbox every Saturday morning from John’s blog that I look forward to reading. His consistency of publishing a post once a week to that blog is what has cemented his presence in the mind of his platform. I just recently helped him launch a separate website to build out a movement that came as an offshoot of his blog and with the momentum he has behind his book, I am excited to see his tribe explode in growth and impact.

#11 to …

Though I listed ten platforms here, there are numerous others that come to mind, so this is not a definitive list, but just the ten that have had the most significant impact on me in the recent past. My goal is to dig a little deeper into them and study the ways in which each of these platform builders charted their course – with the hope of distilling more ‘nuggets’ for you on how best to build your own platform and thrive.

The most important asset for your online presence does not cost a fortune

November 12, 2014 by Thomas Z Lukoma Leave a Comment

The first impression you make with your online presence is not the design of your website, how elegant your logo looks or how much content you have on your website.

The first interaction anybody will have of your online brand is your domain name – the online address that you give your website.

Your Domain Name is The Most Important Asset for Your Online Branding

The name you give yourself or your business online is therefore critical to how successfully you help people to identify with your service, product or cause.

If you get it right, you gain an immediate advantage in differentiating yourself from your competition.

If you get it wrong, its an uphill battle to drive traffic to your site and continuously grow your tribe.

3 Tests for a Great Domain Name

A great domain name may take you a while to come up with, or it may come to you in an instant. I have three tests that I put to any domain name I come up with to determine whether I should run with it.

Unique

The best way to determine this is to check what happens when you go to any of the domain name registrars (e.g. GoDaddy) and enter the domain name you are looking for.

If its already registered, its not unique.
If there are other names similar to the name you are considering that are already registered, its not unique.

Memorable

My test for whether or not a domain is memorable is to try and imagine sharing your domain name with somebody verbally.

Would you have to spell it out for them?
Are there words in the domain name that sound like other words and could easily be confused.
Does the name have any hyphens in it (avoid at all cost)?
Is it easy to make a typo – and does that typo lead them to another page that has nothing to do with you?

All these questions are things you should consider when thinking about the “memorableness” of your domain name.

Meaningful

Finally, your domain name should have meaning – even if that meaning is not immediately obvious. Most of the time, the immediately obvious domain name for your service or product is unavailable, so being creative on this point could go a long way.

For example, one of my websites is a place for me to document my journey of learning about WordPress. I originally wanted to get a domain name like ‘WordPressMastery’, or ‘LearningWordpress’ but names like that are all taken at this point (and they were not as fun for me to use). So I remembered a term I had read about in the ‘computer geek’ world that was the concept of understanding something so thoroughly that it became a part of you – grok.

That word expressed how well I eventually want to understand WordPress, so I named the site www.igrokwordpress.com (which was available and didn’t overlap with any other names).

And just in case you are thinking that grok is an uncommon word and would violate my second test, consider that my target market for that blog is not just anybody – its “techno-nerdy” people like myself and so the likelihood of them knowing that word is quite high.

If you want to grow your tribe, free yourself from WordPress.com

June 29, 2014 by Thomas Z Lukoma 4 Comments

If you want to grow your tribe, migrate your WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted version of WordPress

Hosting a blog with WordPress.com and using the software from WordPress.org to host the blog yourself are not the same thing. This distinction is often confusing.

I am working with a client who is preparing for the launch of his first book and a critical component of his marketing and launch strategy is the community he has built on his blog. The blog was hosted on WordPress.com for over 3 years and had a healthy following of several hundred that received his weekly blog posts and engaged with him on his content.

In our initial meeting, he explained that he had received feedback from several advisors that he needed to move off WordPress.com and get a self-hosted version of his blog prior to launching the book and significantly growing his tribe. He understood conceptually that this was important to do, but he wanted me to both outline the benefits clearly and help him to actually implement the migration since this is not an area of expertise for him.

Since setting up an account is free, WordPress.com is a good testing ground if you are trying to determine whether or not you want to publish content on a consistent basis. But once you get the hang of blogging and know that you want to do it consistently, I am a big advocate of switching over to a self-hosted version. The WordPress.com platform provides a rich set of functionality, but there are some significant limitations which don’t lend themselves well to building a brand and extending your reach with your tribe.

Customization is limited on WordPress.com

Your blog will look like other bloggers hosted on the platform because you are not permitted to install custom themes with the free service. There are hundreds of themes to choose from on WordPress.com but since the platform has millions of users, there is a good chance that the styling of your blog will look like several other blogs.

With a self-hosted blog, the ‘look and feel’ of your blog is only limited by the capabilities of the person designing the website since you can build a theme from scratch or modify one of the millions of WordPress themes available online.

Functionality is limited too

The open-source version of WordPress has evolved from its initial roots as a blogging software to a full-blown content management system (CMS) that can power major websites for well established brands across a wide variety of industries. The wide range of capabilities for WordPress as a content management system is primarily provided through the use of plugins. When you are using the self-hosted version of WordPress, you have access to such a large variety of functionality through these plugins that most of the time if you can think of something you want to accomplish on your website, you can find a plugin that does it.

WordPress.com on the other hand, for security reasons, limits the number of plugins that can be used with their blogs which means that you would not be able to extend the functionality of your site past the handful of plugins that are currently available (for example, you are limited to their site statistics plugin and cannot use Google Analytics).

Your interactions with your tribe are dictated by the WordPress.com platform

The final reason I recommend migrating your site if you are taking the next step and want to grow your tribe is to gain better control over the interactions with that community. In WordPress.com, you grow your community by getting people to subscribe to your blog (if they are not signed up with WordPress) and to ‘follow’ you (if they are a part of the WordPress.com community). They then become your ‘subscribers’ and receive a notification every time you publish new content.

You also have the WordPress comments function connected to each article or page that you publish and you can interact directly with your tribe there through discussion threads below your posts.

This set-up works well if the comments and email-each-post functionality is all you need.

But what happens when you want to interact with your tribe via email in a more personal way with content that is not published on your public website or blog?

What if you want to reward people who have shown their commitment to your message by signing up on your site? Maybe you would like to give them sneak previews of an upcoming book or special offers for an event that is not available to casual visitors of your site.

You can’t with WordPress.com.

But you can with a self-hosted version of WordPress.

And that’s just scratching the surface. Depending on where else you interact with your subscribers outside of your site, you can integrate with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter in several cool and interesting ways. You can get as creative as you want – because you have the flexibility.

I hope that helps to give you a good understanding of the benefits you can get from migrating to a self-hosted version of WordPress. My next couple of posts will go into the actual process of migrating from WordPress.com and some of my recent experiences transferring my client’s site this past weekend.

How Jesus developed His platform: definitive declaration

January 14, 2013 by Thomas Z Lukoma Leave a Comment

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

(Luke 4:18-19)

In my last post I wrote about the importance of private reflection and how you can use this to prepare yourself for the launch of your platform. The themes that you clarify through this process are the basis for the next step that Jesus used in developing His platform.

In the middle of a regular gathering for worship on the Sabbath, Jesus stood up and read a scripture from the book of Isaiah. This was not unusual for Him to do because the text mentions how this was “His custom”. What was extraodinary in this particular instance was the effect that His reading of the scripture had on the other people there.

When he sat down after reading “…The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on Him.”

He captured their attention with what he read because there was an authority with which He read this particular passage. And to make sure that it was clear to the people why they were feeling the way they were, He made a definitive declaration that “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

After His time of fasting and reflection in the wilderness, it was time to let the world know definitively about His purpose – that He was the fulfillment of the prophecy that He had read about.

The components of your declaration

In the same way, once you have spent time in reflection and are clear about your themes, you need to find a way to make a definitive declaration of your purpose with authority. Your declaration does not have to be anything flashy, and you can choose a smaller audience than a room full of people.

But it does need to be two things:

Focused – Clearly outline your vision and ‘why’ you are embarking on your journey
Remarkable – Enchant your future tribe members with the themes that you have reflected on and start the process of drawing them in

The vehicle for your declaration

There are many different ways that you can make your declaration. Doing it is more important than how you do it.

In my case, I decided a blog would be the best place for me to ‘go public’. I actually have two public declarations – one that is very specific about my focus in 2013 and one in the form of a personal manifesto that I used to derive the themes for this year.

The personal manifesto is something I wrote 2 years ago and filed away for reflection to make sure that it wasn’t just something that I made up on a whim. I wanted to make sure that it truly reflected who I am and why I do what I do.

In your case, it could be in the form of a tweet, a Facebook post, an email, an announcement at an event, a YouTube video, a podcast or even a few phone calls to people that you know fall into your tribe.

Just put yourself ‘out there’ and you will be amazed how energized you will feel.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you might approach making your definitive declaration. Post in the comments below to let me know.

This post was originally posted on my personal blog @ komasworld.com