It’s a really great time to be a Liverpool F.C. fan. Not only are exciting things happening, but those exciting things mean the club is playing lots of games, all of which present an opportunity for a newer fan like myself to learn something. The only problem is that I’m watching at home and bothering my friends who know more about the sport than me via WhatsApp and Twitter. Nearly all of them support some other club, too, so they’re usually not watching the game and therefore don’t have the context for the questions I’m asking. Sure, I could drive an hour each way and sit in a bar in the city to watch it amongst strangers who could potentially become friends, but I don’t have a great track record with making friends in bars during Liverpool matches. So, what’s a Lady J to do? How do you manifest a community out of thin air?
When I decided to bring back my podcast about career paths, I started reading up on audience growth and community building. There is a LOT of information out there about how to grow listeners and eventually turn them into customers, blah blah blah. I seek these things out because I owe it to myself and my production partner, Jeremy, to do everything I can to put what we’ve created together into the ears of actual listeners. But I have to be honest with you - it’s starting to seem like a dating app. My mission to actually connect with someone has become quite gamified and is turning something I really enjoy into something that feels kind of unnatural and a bit torturous.
Now, the advice I’ve come across is perfectly sound and comes with a huge caveat - you have to do the work. People don’t actually become huge overnight successes because someone stumbled upon their tiny podcast and suddenly poured millions of dollars into it. I get that, and anyone getting into podcasting should get that, too. The other piece of advice I see a lot is to have something to offer your audience; be an expert on a topic. But the only thing I’m an expert at is being me (and even that is a day-to-day thing.) My experience with finding an online sense of community is actually based on the opposite principal - instead of being the expert with solutions to other people’s problems, I’m usually the one with all the questions who suddenly finds herself in a community of people who want to help.
The first time this happened, it was genuinely life-saving. When I was taking care of my Mom, the fellow caregivers who populated the Alzheimer’s Association’s message boards taught me everything I needed to know and then some. I never met any of them in person, but they changed my life, and the lives of my parents, for the better. They offered really amazing advice, and reminded me often to put my own oxygen mask on first - an idiom I’ve taken with me wherever I go in life. A lot of them were much older - even older than my folks - and worried about how young both my mother and I were. They offered me something friends my own age just couldn’t at that time - they had been where I was, and they knew where we were heading. I could never repay them for what they did for me.
The second time was totally by accident. I mentioned in my last post about wrestling that my friend Courtney and I both were feeling under the weather one night and ended up watching a Progress Wrestling show online to pass the time. We adored it and decided to watch the company’s entire back catalogue from the beginning, and that meant we had a lot of questions about cultural things we didn’t understand, like what a deep fried Mars Bar has to do with being Scottish or why the audience sings so much. We were basically adopted by fans from all over the U.K. and Ireland, and they helped us to better enjoy the product.
Have I ever built a community? Sort of, maybe. When I was taking care of my Mom I was also running an online literary magazine with some friends and we used to get a lot of submissions even though our social media didn’t get much interaction. We got to know the writers pretty well and I enjoyed working with them all. Then there was the PWGrrrlGang, which I think is best summed up as a good idea poorly executed - I was not at all equipped for what that became, and that is 100% on me. So I guess there’s an argument to be made that I don’t really have any business trying to build any kind of community, and I’m not entirely sure I have an argument against that.
The more that I consider all of these different things - caregiver, podcast, football, wrestling - what I’m starting to see is that I didn’t build a community at all. The skill I brought to the table was the asking. I wasn’t afraid to raise my hand and go “hold up, what the hell is going on?” It doesn’t seem like much when I type it out that way, I but I know all too well how easy it is for an an individual - or worse, a group of people - to not speak up when they’re unsure of something, and how detrimental that can be to accomplishing anything. And maybe that’s how I’ll find a community for myself out there somewhere, by asking the questions, sharing what I learn from the responses, and being grateful to the people who offer their knowledge along the way.
And if you can explain what XG is, that’d be great, too.