The previous article was about the audio-first community tech stacks. Today, let's explore what are the workflows unique to the audio-first community.
Let's take a look at 3 main community processes and how they will work in the case of audio-first community. The workflows we will be talking about are:
I already talked about onboarding is a process often overlooked inside a community. In audio-first communities, it's still rather an open question. Members are used to Slack channels it can be hard to adapt to the audio-only environment. The question to answer in this case is: what is the best way to make new members understand the dynamics of an audio community? As a manager you have a couple of options here:
Of course, don't forget to enclose the community guidelines in the process.
A tool that is overlooked for onboarding, is Loom. Loom makes it easy not only to record video but also to distribute it where necessary.
As a solution to the onboarding problem, you can record a video or screen grab from your desktop/phone. This will make the member familiar with the community environment from the get go.
While in the text-based online communities the ritual must be created or set up by the community manager. In the audio-first community, the rituals are always ongoing. There's a constant discourse, discussion, review, or hangout of some sort. Audio-first communities are perfect places to give back power to your members. Help them create their separate spaces, small groups, and rituals of their own. In general, here are a few ideas that you can implement as a community manager:
Each community is creating a piece of knowledge in one way or another. Audio-first communities are no exception. However, the format is quite different in this case, which makes the process easier and harder at the same time.
Easier - because you might be working with podcasting tools which are already.
Harder - because you need to create the text-based content from scratch.
Let's sketch out a typical workflow of an audio community.
In audio-first communities, your source of information is the recording of your discussions. Of course, you might have text-based channels as well however the main discourse most likely is going on inside the audio channels. In this case, your first task is to work with the audio files.
There are two ways you can work with audio files:
Both of these tasks are helping you to create an online presence and also are enriching your internal knowledge hub. For both cases, you need some tools that do quite a heavy lifting. As the podcasting industry, today is mature you can borrow quite a lot of tools from pod casters. From my personal experience here are some of them you can check out:
One other way to enrich your community can be creating community-only podcast episodes or shows based on the recordings of your existing sessions. This will make the experience in the community richer. Also, it's a great way to sort the content into categories.
After this step, you will have audio promotional material and text for your promotional material as well.
For audio communities, in this case, they need to make clear if any session or meeting is recorded (with the means of community guidelines).
As you already have the text version of your content, from here on it gets more familiar.
The rest is repurposing your text into content pieces. Examples of such pieces:
The tools that will help for this kind of weightlifting are:
With all the content (audio + text) you already have the time has come to assemble or enrich your community knowledge hub. Depending on your niche the knowledge hub can look quite different. I suggest you to build with the flow, and in future articles, I'll dive deeper into how you can create your community-only library.
The tools that can help you in the process are:
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